Will Wright gave the keynote address at the Texas SXSW event, showing off Spore to a packed crowd and offering up hopes that 'Toys' will change the world. His hope is that offerings like Spore might force kids to rethink their understandings of nature. Likewise, non-linear storytelling via 'branching' gaming is what he sees as the future of the medium. He cites the movie Groundhog Day as an example, a movie which told the same story over and over again but never did it the same way twice. "'I think if we can teach the computer to listen to the story that players are telling,' Wright said, a game could detect patterns of what the player wants, and adjust music, lighting, and other immersive elements to reflect the story that a player wants to play. He thinks this modeling would best be accomplished by networks that constantly mine and refine player information." Alice, of the Wonderland blog, helpfully provides extensive notes, and Kotaku has a video of the demo the attendees saw.

wiredog writes "From The Washington Post, yet another story about phishers, keyloggers, and viruses. The story is nothing new, but the author has a blog where he describes how he gathered the information that went into the story. Information including the locations of the victims, and the ISPs likeliest to be hit. Some of the victims included "an engineer for the Architect of the Capitol" and a man who "works in computer security for IBM." One victim "was fresh out of college, where he'd just earned a degree in information security. (He was actively looking for a job in the field; I suggested he may want to go back to the classroom.)" A compromised machine was also found in "the new accounts department at Bank of America" (Score!)"

An anonymous reader writes to let us know that after two years Seagate is finally shipping its full-disk encryption product, and you can get your hands on it in a laptop from system vendor ASI.