At its core, this is a basic follow-the-path third-person action game, where your character (Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, if that’s important) walks down corridors, finds an open area full of enemies and has to wipe them all out before moving on. Despite the somewhat repetitive set-ups, the game’s all-too-brief opening level where you play as Darth Vader himself, is a total kick.

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Some Force powers being…um…unleashed.

The Star Wars movie series is over, but the brand name lives on, thanks to spin-offs like toys, novels, and, of course, video games. The dozens of Star Wars video games released over the past 20 years have gotten something of a bum rap–after all, the source material inspires such loyalty that a video game made with minimal involvement from George Lucas can’t possibly live up to fans’ expectations (and yes, a lot of those Star Wars games were pretty mediocre, too).

A note for trivia junkies–Darth’s familiar guttural tone comes not from James Earl Jones but an amazing soundalike named Matt Sloan, who was discovered playing the voice of Darth’s cousin, Chad Vader, in a series of popular Internet shorts.

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Will it hurt Nintendo’s business? Will there be mass protests? Of course not; there are a lot worse things a company could do than put out a Pepto Bismol-hued marketing blitz geared toward teenage girls who like “video games.” But come on. I don’t need to see this sort of thing when I’ve just eaten.

Let’s see what’s on the cover, underneath that ghastly pink masthead: Cooking Mama, Imagine Babies, and a pink DS Lite. Ick. It sure makes a gal want to go wild with the Manhunt 2 machete.

Not to mention the fact that I haven’t seen eyeliner that atrocious since Congresswoman Katherine Harris.

“I thought I was being threatened at that point,” Chui said. “They did contact the host. They contacted the host (again today) to say everything’s cool now.”

But after a firestorm of protest arose online, with Internet users saying that MobiTV should add greater security rather than dispatching their lawyers, the company backed down on Friday afternoon.

Scanlan’s public relations department hasn’t responded to my e-mail queries for the last few hours, and a phone call this afternoon to their offices rang continuously without being answered.

The contraband link in question is qtv.mobitv.com/sprintTVlive.mcd–it was apparently an XML file that lists the URLs for specific television channels. That file was disabled by Friday morning. But the individual television channels, such as rtsp://live.mobitv.com:554/1-CDMA.sdp (for MSNBC), could still be viewed at no charge by applications such as Apple’s QuickTime utility on Friday.

Paul Scanlan, president and co-founder of MobiTV, says his lawyers' intent was never to "censor the Internet"

MobiTV, a company that streams television channels to mobile devices, has backed away from its threats to censor a mobile forum Web site and pull the plug on its domain name.

Howard Chui, 30, the founder of Howard Forums, sent me this statement from MobiTV co-founder and president Paul Scanlan, which we left unedited:

His advice for anyone else in a similar situation: “It’s a community, right? So go ask around for help if you need it.”

For his part, Chui says he’s received legal threats before. But what made this unique (and led him to publicize the correspondence) was MobiTV’s promise to complain to his hosting service and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and then yank his domain name, which actually did happen recently in the Wikileaks case.

Lawyers for the Emeryville, Calif., company had threatened the owner of HowardForums.com on March 4, saying that users of the Web site had posted an illegal link that allows anyone to watch television channels such as MSNBC or the Discovery Channel over the Internet for free without registering.

Howard, great catching up today. Again, we’re big fans of the sight and our intention was never to bring your entire sight down or to “censor the Internet” like we’re being accused. The irony is that is quite the opposite type of company we are and as one of the leaders in new media, we couldn’t be more supportive of the rights of sights like yours. Please know that our first priority is always to fix any security issues with our system and we’re doing that. Additionally, we also have a responsibility to our content and carrier partners to reduce the impact of any breaches to the system once they occur and that was really the basis for the correspondence you had with our legal team.

As for AM/FM terrestrial radio music stations, the audience for non-oldies music is too small to support commercial stations anymore. Matt’s observation, “But apart from college radio, nobody’s playing cutting-edge rock and roll with potentially broad appeal,” rings true to me. Too bad.

Do you listen to music over AM, FM, Sirius, or Internet radio?

(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)

Hey, MTV gave up on music long ago, let’s face it, when the youth market isn’t all that interested in music, music’s future looks pretty dim. And it’s not the big, bad record labels fault, no, music’s appeal is fading. Then again, when you’re not paying for music, it proves it’s not worth anything. No wonder even “free” music on the radio can’t hold its own anymore. It’s worth less than zero…

I read Matt Rosoff’s Digital Noise blog all the time, and his recent lamenting radio’s irrelevance hit me hard.

Of course, now that the hoopla over the Siriius/XM merger has died down and the stock price hovers around fifty cents, it seems like the stockholders don’t have that strong a belief in the future of satellite radio. Or maybe they finally realized there are not enough people willing to pay $12.95 a month for commercial-free radio to make Sirius, er, profitable? Gee, I wonder if Howard Stern is the only one to score big bucks in the satellite radio biz? Did he cash out his Sirius stock long ago?

Standout Jobs’ Reception is a hosted recruiting service for companies. It replaces the lame jobs pages that many companies run with a more developed service, including application forms, applicant tracking, support for videos, discussions, and so on. I like the idea, but I like JobScore’s (review) model even more: With permission, it puts applicants that aren’t hired into a general pool that hiring managers at other companies can pay to see.

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Seen at: Demo 2008

In June, TorrentSpy was ordered by a federal judge to provide the film studios with user information found in the company’s computer RAM. TorrentSpy filed an appeal and argued that data in a computer’s RAM was too temporary to be considered “stored information,” and that it was impractical for companies to produce such material as part of a civil suit.

TorrentSpy, once one of the most popular indexes of BitTorrent files, shut down on Monday following a two-year copyright battle with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). TorrentSpy, accused in a lawsuit of encouraging copyright infringement, finally crumpled under the legal costs.

“IsoHunt is located in Canada and has a slightly different set of circumstances than TorrentSpy,” said IsoHunt’s attorney, Ira Rothken, who also represented TorrentSpy. “IsoHunt is waiting for the (judge’s decision) on a motion for summary judgment. The company is looking forward to defending itself and being the first to go to trial in a search-engine case.”

In August, the judge denied TorrentSpy’s appeal. The decision will conceivably enable the MPAA to gain access to users’ personal information in similar cases, say legal experts.

The courts have not yet ruled on whether search tools can be held liable for copyright infringement. Most relevant cases have been settled before going to trial, copyright experts said. It’s important to note that IsoHunt and TorrentSpy don’t store any unauthorized movie files on their sites but the search engines are often used to find pirated copies.

The MPAA’s case against IsoHunt is in the U.S. District Court of Central California in Los Angeles, which is perceived by many to be extremely friendly to copyright holders.

But Fung is up against an MPAA legal juggernaut that is playing on its home turf, is fresh off a series of court victories, and has plenty of money. The lobbying group for the six largest movie studios said in a statement on Thursday that it took issue with TorrentSpy’s suggestion earlier this week that it lost on a technicality.

“The demise of TorrentSpy is a clear victory for the content industries and sends a clear message to operators of other illegal BitTorrent portals that they will not be allowed to operate in the United States without facing relentless litigation by copyright holders.” –statement from MPAA

“The demise of TorrentSpy is a clear victory for the content industries,” the MPAA said in its statement, “and sends a clear message to operators of other illegal BitTorrent portals that they will not be allowed to operate in the United States without facing relentless litigation by copyright holders.”

This can’t come as good news to Gary Fung, chief executive of IsoHunt. His company was among a group of torrent-file search engines, which also included TorrentSpy, accused of copyright infringement in a 2006 lawsuit filed by the MPAA. With TorrentSpy gone, the MPAA can now set its sights on IsoHunt.

But the 25-year-old CEO acknowledges that the U.S. and Canadian governments have agreed to honor court decisions in each other’s countries.

Fung said he’s been fighting the MPAA’s attempts to require him to turn over user logs on the grounds that his company is based in Canada, which has stricter privacy laws than the United States.

But Fung points out that TorrentSpy was never able to argue the main copyright issues in court. The presiding judge found in favor of the film studios after ruling that TorrentSpy destroyed evidence. Fung says he is determined to take up the copyright issue to the end. Unlike TorrentSpy, he doesn’t care what it costs.

“There is no reason for us not to see this through. We’ve come this far,” Fung told CNET News.com on Thursday. “TorrentSpy shutting down doesn’t mean a victory for the MPAA. The judge declared that TorrentSpy didn’t adhere to court procedures. That’s different than a judge deciding against the company after hearing their arguments.”

“TorrentSpy’s characterization of the site’s closure as a voluntary decision conveniently
ignores the fact that after two years of intense litigation by the major Hollywood studios, a
federal court found TorrentSpy liable for copyright infringement,” the MPAA said in the statement. “Late last year the court imposed the harshest sanction against the TorrentSpy defendants and ruled in favor of the studios because of TorrentSpy’s brazen, continuous, and systematic destruction of evidence and subversion of the judicial process. In short, the ruling meant that TorrentSpy would have to shut down their site sooner or later.”

Whether that is true, the film industry has racked up plenty of file-sharing victories. Besides TorrentSpy, the MPAA was blamed for driving LokiTorrent and SuprNova.org out of business. And more recently, the MPAA won important legal precedents in the TorrentSpy case.

Why is that? One obvious answer is that Homeland Security officials like Stewart Baker are political appointees chosen by President Bush. They’re not likely to have their current jobs by December 2009; even if the next president is John McCain, he’ll pick his own loyalists early next year. (These positions are valuable because they can lead to lucrative lobbying and law firm jobs; a New York Times
article from 2006 counted at least 90 Homeland Security officials who have cashed in with unseemly haste, with some making around $1 million a year.)

This U.S. map prepared by the Department of Homeland Security shows states that have asked for an extension to comply with the controversial Real ID Act. What it doesn’t show, however, is the roughly one-third of states that have asked for an extension while having no clear intention of ever complying.

Capt. Chris West, an Oklahoma Department of Public Safety spokesman, told us this week:

A seemingly odd phenomenon is occurring among some U.S. states that have flatly rejected the Real ID Act.

The latest example is Oklahoma. In our special report published last month, we listed five states that–at the time we wrote the articles–indicated that they would not comply with Real ID. Those were Maine, South Carolina, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma; residents of states that don’t comply will likely face hassles traveling on commercial flights or entering federal buildings starting May 11.

I’m not a member of nor do I represent the Oklahoma state legislature; those are the individuals who will have to pursue whatever will be done, and the Department of Public Safety can’t second guess what they’re doing.

Oklahoma’s legislature had approved legislation saying that Real ID “is inimical to the security and well-being of the people of Oklahoma” and, therefore, “the state of Oklahoma shall not participate in the implementation of the Real ID Act. The Department of Public Safety is hereby directed not to implement the provisions of the Real ID Act…”

That seems pretty clear; in fact, it would be difficult to be any clearer.

But now we’ve learned that Oklahoma’s DMV has asked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for an extension anyway. An official DHS map puts the state squarely in the will-comply-if-you-give-us-more-time category.

It’s kind of disappointing that Oklahoma is choosing to squeeze through this loophole. In politics, there’s something to be said for an unambiguous position, which is what Maine, South Carolina, Montana, Delaware, and New Hampshire have taken. If a law truly is that onerous, publicly denouncing the law–and then privately asking for an extension to comply–sends mixed messages.

On the other hand, states that have asked for an extension can bow out of Real ID at any time; asking for an extension imposes no legal obligation on them. And it does allow the state’s licenses to continue to function normally (for purposes of air travel and federal building entry) for an additional 19 months.

Oregon, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania are among the states that have requested extensions while expressing strong reservations about eventual compliance. The Real ID skeptics total, roughly, a third of the states in the union.

The unsolicited extensions, the granting of extensions to states like Oklahoma that have zero intention of ever complying, the extension of the compliance deadline to December 2009 even though the text of the law specifies May 2008–all these point to one explanation. Today’s officials in senior posts at Homeland Security have postponed the real pain of complying with Real ID until they’re no longer around to be blamed.

Not speaking for the governor’s office, the extension is so that our Oklahomans can continue to travel until the legislature does something, regardless of which way they decide to move with it.

There was a request for an extension on a deadline to a rule that would have (been)
implemented in May of this year. We got an extension until the end of December 2009, so Oklahomans can still use the driver’s licenses that they have. And really that’s the extent to what I can answer.

While Oklahoma has been one of the most staunchly anti-Real ID states, other states that have criticized the law have adopted the same approach. Washington state has a law barring compliance with Real ID in its current form, but it has asked for an extension. So has Idaho, even though a spokesman for the governor tells us: “We still have serious concerns and reservations about it and its future here is to be determined.”

Even though officials in these states have publicly assured privacy-conscious voters that they steadfastly oppose Real ID’s requirement of nationalized driver’s licenses and ID cards, these same politicians and bureaucrats are quietly asking the Bush administration for more time to comply with the law.

Translation: Oklahoma has zero intention of complying but is nevertheless taking advantage of a loophole in DHS regulations. That loophole says that a state’s licenses will continue to be accepted at airports and federal buildings through December 31, 2009–even if the state plans to take precisely zero steps to implement Real ID by doing things like linking its databases or slapping a two-dimensional barcode on licenses and ID cards.

For instance, it factors in number of stops, duration, and on-time statistics about the flights, as well as what the security wait time may be, how much legroom you would have, and what percentage of seats are filled. It also looks at how the flights rank for lost bags, where the gate location is, and how long you have to connect to the next flight. That would have been handy for me to know as I had to run to catch my connecting flight to San Francisco across what seemed like the entire Phoenix airport.

(Credit:
InsideTrip.com)

There is another site called SeatGuru.com which lets you view the seating on specific airplanes so you can avoid being in the exit aisle or last row, but it doesn’t offer all the other features InsideTrip.com does.

InsideTrip.com helps you find flights based not only price, but also factors related to speed, comfort, and ease including leg room, plane size, and security wait time.

The site offers up a Trip Quality Rating and assigns a rating, on a 100-point scale, based on how many of the criteria are met. You can customize the criteria if you don’t care about certain things, like aircraft type or aircraft age, and those factors won’t be weighed in the results.

There’s a fun little visual itinerary bar for the flights too, that allows you to get more details on a flight, say arrival time, by hovering the mouse over it.

I’ll definitely give InsiderTrip.com a try before I fly again. But price will still be the biggest factor, unless of course, it’s a work trip.

As I sat in the back row on a cross-country US Airways flight a few nights ago, with the engine roaring outside the window, the bathroom directly behind me stinking, and unable recline my seat at all, I wondered how I could have avoided the unfortunate situation I was in.

Hand over your gun, get a camera–and photography classes.

A handgun or assault rifle is worth a $400 Nikon Coolpix S52 and a shotgun nets a $250 Nikon Coolpix P60. The deal includes free photography lessons.

(Thanks to Byron Ng)

The amnesty program will run for four weeks, according to Henry’s camera store, which is providing the cameras.

This might be a good idea for U.S. cities with a lot of street crime. Other amnesty programs offer cash ($100 assault rifles, $50 for shot guns in Washington, D.C. last year) but cameras of much greater value might be just the enhanced financial incentive, and possible artistic motivator, that some gun owners need.

(Credit:
Nikon)

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

The “Triple” in its name refers to the fact that the drive features all available connection types for compact external hard drives: USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800. I reviewed the OWC Mercury recently that offers the same flexibility in data connection, but the Mercury is noticeably larger than the G-drive. Like the Mercury, the G-Drive also offers bus-powered capability with any of those connections and still comes with an external power port for older computers, of which the USB/FireWire ports may not have enough juice to power the drive. Most of the time, you will not need that adapter and it’s only available as an accessory that you can order from G-Technology’s website.

More and more vendors have been joining the bandwagon of pocket-size portable external hard drives and it’s interesting to see how each of them manages to make their product unique in its own right. The G-Drive mini Triple from G-Technology is one example of this.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

The G-Drive mini Triple is rugged with its all-metal casing

The G-Drive supports all USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800 data connections.

The version I have in my hands on today is the first drive I’ve run into that not only operates at a fast 7,200rpm (as opposed to 5,400rpm of other drives), but also backs that up with a high 200GB capacity. Whether this translates into higher throughput remains to be seen and CNET Labs will figure this out soon. The G-Drive mini Triple also comes in other sizes ranging from 160GB to 250GB. However, the high-speed version is only available in 200GB. (While the 5,400rpm 2.5-inch hard drives hit the 500GB mark a while ago, the top space for 7,200rpm version still remains at 200GB for now).

The G-Drive mini Triple works with both
Mac and PC, though it’s preformatted for Mac. It is available now for $279 for the 7,200rpm version or $259 for the 5,400rpm version. You can also get smaller sizes for cheaper prices accordingly.