Timeline is Facebook’s attempt to narrate users’ life stories through photos, status updates, major events, and new friends. Like the old profiles, Timelines are arranged in reverse chronological order, but it’s now much easier to go back in time, with an index of years on the right side of the screen. Users can fill in information at any point in their Timelines, including “life before Facebook.”

Users can also plug in Facebook apps, showing summaries of the music they’re listening to, the articles they’re reading, and the movies they’re watching. Facebook recently expanded the scope of this feature to include apps for food, shopping, concerts, and more.

As with any major change on Facebook, some backlash is expected once users are forced to switch. On Facebook’s blog post announcing Timeline, some of the most popular comments are from users complaining about it. (Although, to be fair, many of the responses to those comments are from users defending Timeline.)

Facebook users have a history of being irritated by design changes and getting used to them just as Facebook rolls out a new design.

In time, I think Facebook users will come to like Timeline. It includes lots of controls for what information appears, along with who can see that information, and the end result is a profile that’s truer to the user’s background and interests. The only major downside is that users must do some cultivating to bring their most relevant life details to the surface.

Also, I’ve said this before, I wish Facebook apps didn’t automatically publish information about users’ activities. A little bit more control over what gets published would make Facebook less noisy, while giving users more way to curate what goes into their Timelines.

If you haven’t switched to Timelines yet, and don’t want to fight it anymore, go to Facebook’s “Introducing Timeline” page, and click “Get Timeline.” You’ll have a week to edit it before it goes live.

The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are getting more negative attention, as major websites such as Wikipedia plan to protest the bills with blackouts on Wednesday. Even Google will join the action, with a link on its homepage explaining why the company opposes the legislation.

But what are SOPA and PIPA, exactly, and why are tech luminaries lambasting legislation aimed at stamping out copyright infringement? Read on for a full explanation.

SOPA and PIPA: The Basics
Media companies are always looking for new ways to fight piracy. They’ve tried suing individual users, getting Internet service providers to take action against subscribers, and working with the U.S. government to shut down domains based in the United States. But none of those actions can stop overseas websites such as The Pirate Bay and MegaUpload from infringing copyrights, or prevent Internet users from accessing those sites.

Enter SOPA, in the U.S. House of Representatives, and PIPA, in the U.S. Senate. Both bills are aimed at foreign websites that infringe copyrighted material. The bills are commonly associated with media piracy, but may also apply to counterfeit consumer goods and medication.

Originally, both bills provided two methods for fighting copyright infringement on foreign websites. In one method, the U.S. Department of Justice could seek court orders requiring Internet service providers to block the domain names of infringing sites. For example, Comcast could prevent its customers from accessing thepiratebay.org, although the underlying IP address would still be reachable. This ISP-blocking provision was a major concern among Internet security experts, and both SOPA and PIPA have dropped it.

The other tool would allow rights holders to seek court orders requiring payment providers, advertisers, and search engines to stop doing business with an infringing site. In other words, rights holders would be able to request that funding be cut off from an infringing site, and that search links to that site be removed. The site in question would have five days to appeal any action taken.

Although the House and Senate bills are similar, SOPA is the more extreme of the two. It defines a “foreign infringing site” as any site that is “committing or facilitating” copyright infringement, whereas PIPA is limited to sites with “no significant use other than” copyright infringement. More details on SOPA and PIPA are available through the Library of Congress website.

Arguments for and Against SOPA and PIPA

Opponents of SOPA and PIPA believe that neither piece of legislation does enough to protect against false accusations. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues, provisions in the bill grant immunity to payment processors and ad networks that cut off sites based on a reasonable belief of infringement, so even if claims turn out to be false, only the site suffers. “The standard for immunity is incredibly low and the potential for abuse is off the charts,” says the EFF.

Meanwhile, sites that host user-generated content will be under pressure to closely monitor users’ behavior. That monitoring already happens on larger sites such as YouTube, but it could be a huge liability for startups, the EFF argues.

Some progressive pundits have argued that media companies are trying to legislate their way out of what’s really a business-model problem. “As we’ve seen over and over again, the most successful (by far) ‘attack’ against piracy is awesome new platforms that give customers what they want, such as Spotify and Netflix,” TechDirt’s Mike Masnick writes.

SOPA and PIPA supporters argue that prophecies of a broken Internet are overblown. Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, writes that SOPA clearly defines infringing sites based on Supreme Court holdings and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and requires rights holders to follow a strict set of rules when trying to get payment cut off to an infringing site. False claims, Sherman argues, “can result in damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees.”

Sherman also points out that previous actions against infringing sites, such as the MGM vs. Grokster case in 2005, triggered similar doomsday predictions from the tech industry, yet digital music innovation has flourished since then.

Who’s for SOPA and PIPA, and Who’s Against?

Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas) is the author of SOPA, which is backed by 31 cosponsors in the House. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) wrote PIPA, which has 40 cosponsors in the Senate. ProPublica has a visualized list of supporters in both the House and Senate.

The White House has expressed concerns about the bills in their current state, writing in a statement that “any effective legislation should reflect a wide range of stakeholders, including everyone from content creators to the engineers that build and maintain the infrastructure of the Internet.”

As for outside parties, the list of SOPA supporters consists mostly of media companies, including record labels, TV networks, movie studios, and book publishers. Some companies with an interest in fighting sales of other counterfeit goods, such as beauty-product maker Revlon and pharmaceutical company Pfizer, also appear on the list.

Opposition to SOPA and PIPA is strong in the tech sector. An open letter to Washington speaking out against the legislation was signed by founders of Craigslist, eBay, Google, Mozilla, Twitter, and Wikipedia, among others.

In the middle are companies at the intersection of media and technology. Many video game publishers have stayed silent on the matter while their trade group, the Entertainment Software Association, supports the bills. The Business Software Alliance originally supported the bill, but withdrew its support after deciding that the legislation went too far. As for Apple and Microsoft, which are both BSA members, the former has not come out publicly for or against SOPA or PIPA, while the latter now says that it opposes SOPA “as currently drafted.”

Where Are SOPA and PIPA Now?
Both bills have taken a hit in the last week, as their authors have decided to remove the provisions that require Internet service providers to block the domain names of infringing sites. SOPA, which has yet to pass out of the House Judiciary Committee, is reportedly stalled, as lawmakers continue to work on the bill. Representative Darrell Issa (R-California) has proposed an alternative bill that is far more narrow in its focus.

Voting on PIPA, however, is scheduled to begin in the Senate on January 24.

UPDATE: (2pm ET 1/18) Now two U.S. Senators are withdrawing their sponsorships of PIPA. Sen. Marco Rubio, of Florida, wrote on Facebook that although he has a strong interest in stopping piracy, “we must do this while simultaneously promoting an open, dynamic Internet environment that is ripe for innovation and promotes new technologies.” Senator Roy Blunt, of Missouri, also bailed on the bill, writing on Facebook that “the Protect IP Act is flawed as it stands today, and I cannot support it moving forward.”

New spam on Facebook, which displays pornographic and violent imagery, is not the work of Anonymous. That’s the word in a new posting from the political hacktivist group.
There has been speculation by security researchers that the spam was result of something called the Fawkes Virus, a reference to the Guy Fawkes masks that Anonymous members wear in their video communiqués. Fawkes was famous for his role in the Gunpowder Plot that targeted England’s King James I in the 17th century, and the Guy Fawkes masks figured prominently in a popular, anti-totalitarian movie set in an alternative modern England, called V for Vendetta.

‘Highly Untrue’

But, in a posting on the Pastebin site where Anonymous members have been known to issue communications, AnonymousWiki reports that Anonymous involvement in this attack is “highly untrue.”

Facebook has confirmed the spam attack over the last few days, but said it limited the damage. The highly offensive imagery was reported as part of various users’ Facebook news feeds. The giant social networking site said that the spam attack exploited a browser vulnerability.

Security analyst Razvan Livintz had reported late last week that there were indications Anonymous intended to invade Facebook accounts with a sophisticated piece of malware, called the Fawkes Virus. Livintz said that the virus was written by Anonymous programmers, and pointed to a video posting on the Anonymous Central Web site that asserted these claims.

‘Is This for Real?’

The voice on the video, a computer -generated voice as is the custom with Anonymous communications, noted that the virus can simulate “basic actions on Facebook accounts, such as sending a friend request or a message.” A remote administrator could then control those accounts, and code could be executed, or data removed, from infected computers.

The worm automatically sends out infected links with little or no action by the user. But Livintz, and the Pastebin posting, also noted that Operation Facebook was supposed to have taken down Facebook on Nov. 5, which, not incidentally, is Guy Fawkes Day in the U.K. Since Facebook did not fold on that day, the Pastebin posting cites this as evidence that the alleged operation was a fake, and Livintz asks, “Is this for real?”

Observers have noted that the porn-and-violent imagery attack at Facebook serves no obvious political purpose, which Anonymous actions usually do, and that it resembles similar porn-and-violent images spam attacks which have appeared elsewhere. It’s also been noted that some Web addresses used to spread the Facebook worm relate to shopping, which is not a typical topic for the group.

“You must take all notices and information claiming to be ‘Anonymous’ with a grain of salt,” a posting on Pastebin from Anonymous noted earlier this year, as it disavowed a coming attack on the New York Stock Exchange that was initially attributed to the group.

Even as WikiLeaks remains silenced by a lack of funds, another wiki is getting support from high-tech places. Wikimedia, the parent company of Wikipedia, just raked in $500,000 from two heavy hitters.
The Brin Wojcicki Foundation, started by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, awarded the half-million-dollar grant to the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and its sister sites. The Wikimedia Foundation kicked off its eighth annual fundraiser on Wednesday.

“This grant is an important endorsement of the Wikimedia Foundation and its work, and I hope it will send a signal as we kick off our annual fundraising campaign this week,” said Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “This is how Wikipedia works: people use it, they like it, and so they help pay for it, to keep it freely available for themselves and for everyone around the world. I am very grateful to Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki for supporting what we do.”

Wikimedia Woos Donations

The Wikimedia projects reach more than 477 million unique visitors around the world every month, according to comScore, making Wikipedia the fifth most-popular Web site in the world. Wikipedia is available in more than 280 languages and offers more than 20 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people. The San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, is pleased to see the support for WikiMedia Foundation. In fact, he said, he donated money to the cause.

“It’s a great thing to do. It has become one of the places where students and most of the rest of us now are getting much of our core information . It is a crowdsourced kind of effort and it is not advertiser-supported,” Enderle said. “The only way it survives, much like any public effort, is through public support.”

WikiLeaks Silenced

By contrast, WikiLeaks, another wiki, has stopped publishing, at least temporarily. The controversial whistleblower Web site run by Julian Assange is having financial challenges. A video on the home page of the site features Assange explaining the dire situation of the site he founded. During the past five years, he said, WikiLeaks has revealed millions of secrets that governments and corporations wanted to hide from people.

Banks started squeezing WikiLeaks in December 2010 after the site released 250,000 confidential cables to the public, a move that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called an attack on America and the international community. She said the leaks were a “tear in the fabric ” of responsible government, and the Obama administration was taking “aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information.”

“WikiLeaks was branded a terrorist organization and it was locked down from anybody being able to use credit cards to make donations to the site,” Enderle said. “I question the free-speech aspects of that. I don’t think people should have been disallowed to donate to WikiLeaks. It’s very difficult to donate to WikiLeaks now.”

If ever there was an announcement to get tongues wagging in the Linux blogosphere and beyond, it was the news that Adobe will stop developing Flash for mobile devices.

That, of course, is just what was announced last week, and the wagging hasn’t stopped ever since.

Dubbed “Story of the Week” on the Financial Times Tech Hub blog, the topic has been the focus of conversation on forums far and wide, not to mention the dominant topic of discussion in the Linux blogosphere’s own Mealy Apple cafe.

Linux Girl was there, Quick Quotes Quill at the ready.

A ‘Closed Source Tumor’

“Flash has been on the way out for a while now,” offered Thoughts on Technology blogger and Bodhi Linux lead developer Jeff Hoogland.

Not only that, but “the end of this closed source tumor is fantastic news,” Hoogland opined. “The fact that HTML5 is taking over this department is a clear sign that when given a fair chance, open standards will always proliferate over closed and locked-down ones.

“Shoot — even Microsoft is saying HTML5 is the future!” Hoogland added.

‘No Way to Make Friends’

“Yes, its days are numbered, but HTML5 is looking good,” agreed blogger Robert Pogson.

“Flash was potentially great technology, but Adobe messed it up by keeping it as a moving target and never getting it right,” Pogson asserted. “What’s with having defective versions out for 64bit and GNU/Linux for the longest time? That was no way to make friends.”

Indeed, “Adobe fired the wrong people,” opined consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack, referring to the 750 staff members Adobe announced it would be laying off. “It isn’t the programmer’s fault things are a mess — it’s the fault of management who can’t decide on a direction and stick with it.”

In any case, “now we have to figure out a way to clear up the mess of sites on the Web using Flash,” Pogson said. “At one point, nearly 90 percent of the sites I visited used Flash. It was a pain. Now, Flash will be the IE6-like legacy of websites for years to come.”

‘A Bad Way to Handle the Transition’

In fact, “a good portion of the legacy Web is, and will always be, on Flash,” agreed Roberto Lim, a lawyer and blogger on Mobile Raptor.

“Many websites will not convert their content to newer standards,” he explained. “With the death of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in for mobile browsers, mobile devices will never be fully backward-compatible.

“I do not see anything good about this,” he added. “Having a device compatible with all content is a good thing.”

In short, “I do not lament the death of Flash,” Lim concluded. “The transition from Flash to HTML5 was inevitable, but this was really a bad way to handle the transition.”

‘A Blight on the Web’

Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza is “slightly surprised to see this happen now, but ultimately not shocked or amazed to see it happen at all,” he told LinuxInsider.

“Flash has been a blight on the Web in many ways all along, but it’s not clear that the competition won’t suffer the same fate of a thousand security holes,” Espinoza pointed out. “WebGL, in particular, has been fingered as a likely path for exploits of your graphics drivers.

“It will also be particularly telling when we discover which solution for DRM major studios turn to now that Flash is in full recession,” he added. “I fear that it will be Microsoft’s.”

‘Adobe Is Just Using This Opportunity’

Adobe is “probably the first major software producer to realize that we’re heading into the ‘desktop on a tablet’ wars, and that HTML5 doesn’t endanger Flash,” suggested Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot who goes by “Tom” on the site.

“HTML5 applications are much slower, and if you’re a game publisher or other for-profit developer, HTML5 exposes much more of your source to the competition,” Hudson pointed out. “Adobe is just using this opportunity to create a new line of developer tools while pushing current developers towards Adobe Air and Flash3D, and cutting costs.”

The desktop is dying, Hudson added, “but it’s going to come back in the most unexpected place,” she predicted. “With cheap Amazon tablets already eating into their market share, other tablets will need to continue to add more capabilities.

“This will culminate in tablets providing the whole desktop experience on any device with a large enough screen,” she predicted. “The current ‘app-centric’ implementations will no longer be enough to move hardware at anything but bargain basement prices.”

‘Microsoft Is the First to Get It’

Strange as it may seem, in fact, “Microsoft is the first to ‘get it’ by providing both environments in their next OS,” Hudson asserted. “While a certain Linux distro fiddles with the user interface to ‘go after the tablet market,’ Microsoft will give people the best of both worlds, just like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.”

Android tablets, meanwhile, are “going to have to go the same route or bleed market share,” she predicted. “Fortunately for Android, Linux can already run an assortment of desktop software such as LibreOffice, multiple browsers with Flash, and Flash games without a browser using Flash Player for Linux.”

As for the iPad, “all this exposes what many of us originally said was the biggest weakness of the iPad: it doesn’t run atop OS X,” she added. “Getting a desktop-like experience on the iPad is going to be tough; having to add a compatibility layer for old iOS apps is going to suck battery life, and one key Apple advantage is the long battery life of iOS-based tablets.”

So, in the end, “anyone who wants to develop or run Flash on the desktop or in the browser will still be able to — unless they’re running an iPad — but I think both Adobe and the Flash development community will be able to console themselves with ‘only’ an eventual 80 to 90 percent market share on tablets,” Hudson predicted.

‘Like a Drunk at a Free Bar’

In fact, the day will come when the FOSS community looks back on Flash with fondness, Slashdot blogger hairyfeet told LinuxInsider.

“While flash would play SD video nicely without hardware acceleration even on a 1.8 Ghz Sempron, the new HTML V5 is a pig that frankly sucks resources like a drunk at a free bar and will get worse not better,” hairyfeet explained.

Meanwhile, “your old pals at Apple, since they rule the buzzworld thanks to iShiny, will make sure that it will NEVER be Theora NOR WebM, so they will get together with MSFT and force the ‘standard’ to be H.264, which of course unless you are ready to break out your checkbooks won’t be legally available to Linux or FOSS users,” he added. “And of course your old pals at the MPAA certainly aren’t going to allow their precious content to run on an unsecured player.”

‘Not So Good for the Four Freedoms’

So, “working with Apple, Google — whom I predict will lock up Android ‘for security reasons’ — and MSFT, they will come up with the ‘HTML V5 Secure Content spec,’ which will work on OS X, iOS, and anything by MSFT, because both OSes allow kernel level DRM,” hairyfeet said.

“Guess who doesn’t have and doesn’t allow kernel level DRM? That would be YOU!” he pointed out. “Google will just sign the NDA and get the kernel DRM put into Android and lock it down with code signing. This will be great for Google as it will give them more control of the Android ecosystem, not so good for the four freedoms.”

In the end, then, Flash will be replaced by “something that sucks more power, will mean more machines have to be tossed because they won’t run it, will equal less battery life, will use a codec that has so much more patents it isn’t even funny, will allow the big three to lock you even further out of the loop, and you call THIS progress?” hairyfeet concluded. “It’s a shame that sometimes folks just don’t see the train heading their way until it runs them down.”

‘I Am Underwhelmed’

Chris Travers, a Slashdot blogger who works on the LedgerSMB project, isn’t losing any sleep over the situation, however.

“I am rather underwhelmed,” Travers told Linux Girl.

“Flash is dying because you can do a lot in HTML5 and CSS that you used to need Flash to do,” he explained. “The market has eroded underneath it. This means that HTML has substantially replaced Flash as a good side. On the other hand, HTML has substantially replaced Flash.

“Really the only thing it will mean is that no plugin will be required for much content that used to be done in Flash,” Travers predicted.

The strongest – thankfully – lie in the racing itself. These cars and roads are exciting, sexy and fun. Turns out that’s a good way to make a racing game. Who knew?

The concept is that you, Slick McDouche – he must have a name, but we don’t care – are in an exclusive, high-stakes, coast-to-coast race across America. What’s more, you’ve only just escaped the mob, who drop you into a car crusher during the game’s opener.

They must really hate you, as you were in a rather nice Porsche at the time, so along with the other racers, the weather and the cops, you must occasionally contend with machine-gunning nutters in black cars. The Run is admirably varied and actually – creatively – uses the structure of an FPS instead of a racing game. To great effect, too. More on that in a moment.
In many ways we sympathise with the mob, because your character, along with all the others, is a self-regarding arsehole. Everybody speaks in movie poster quotes. Everybody is street tough. Everybody is smug. You can’t blame EA so much as Hollywood, because the inspiration is obvious: the adolescent posturing, macho fantasy and cowboy-made-of-testosterone looks of The Fast & The Furious.

That said, Slick looks for all the world like Tom Cruise in The War of the Worlds – all no-nonsense leather, hardwearing jeans and audibly brutal Frankenstein boots. In fact, no driver in the history of the world has worn less suitable footwear.

So much for empathy, then, especially as the excitingly-shot cutscenes are actually dulled by the annoying ‘Simon Says’ button-hammering. Happily, they’re actually pretty rare, despite the advertising – mostly you’re just driving flat out on often fantastic roads.

It’s a surprisingly common misapprehension in racing games – all the beautiful licensed cars in the world are boring if there’s nowhere fun to drive them. The quality of Polyphony Digital’s fictional tracks is what, in truth, saves Gran Turismo 5 from complete obsolescence. And here, EA has found a brilliant balance between sweeping, 200mph curves and oh-God-I-should-have-braked-sometime-last-month tight turns.

It doesn’t do this through slavish realism – the handling is a weighty, feedback-rich cavalcade of drifts and squeals – but through keenly observed fantasy.

Running in the Frostbite 2 engine, last seen powering the impressive Battlefield 3, the route snakes through every kind of environment you could wish for: cities, deserts, canyons, mountains and plains. The roads weave constantly out of sight, with crests launching you into the air, cambers sucking you down into banked corners, dusty rally-style cuts tempting you on the inside and all manner of deceptive telltales to contend with.

At its best it recalls the classic Burnout 2. There are plenty of useful shortcuts too, and even the main roads can feature, say, rock faces on one side and sheer drops or massive trees on the other. Sudden and total write-offs are just frequent enough to remain shocking.
And then there are the dust storms, the wet patches, the flying debris of destructible objects, the distractions of booming waterfalls or crashing waves, the drifting snows and the problems of darkness. It’s one of very few games where the mini-map feels truly integrated – we found it invaluable for judging speed and line, yet it’s often tough to find a second to glance at it.

When The Run is firing on all cylinders, that tension is superbly balanced. This is not about gear ratios and braking points. It’s all about streaming towards a blind crest at what frequently feels like an insane speed and wondering if you can control what happens next.

Its simple design is deceptively clever. That coast-to-coast race format has allowed a shooter-like structure that, in removing most choices, allows The Run to be varied and cleverly-paced on its own terms. It’s essentially a series of ‘levels’ – snappy sections with their own individual objectives – instead of the usual cloud of races and championships.

For one section of desert road you may be tasked with passing ten cars, for instance; the next with making up time in heavy traffic; the next with getting through a dust storm; and the next you’ll be fighting off cops. They’re not wildly original objectives, but they all help remind you why you’re doing this, and make a notable change from yet another lap and yet another championship. Fail an objective – or crash and die – and you’ll reset to a checkpoint, though resets are limited and using them costs XP. Probably.

Because while the post-race XP and unlock rewards are less frantically zap-bang-boom than in the Burnouts and recent Need For Speeds, we still found them confusing. Watching them is like being beaten up by an awards ceremony. However, race events are not the only place that choice has been removed, so it actually matters less.
The customisation with which NFS has become synonymous remains, but you won’t be choosing every rim, wing and decal this time around. Each car has four configurations – standard plus style, tuner and racer packs – and then you get to choose a colour. Limited, but again it works well, funnelling you back towards the real meat: the racing.

It helps that the car models look so good, and the tuned versions are so chunkily sexy. The overall selection is excellent, too, with much to offer beyond now-overfamiliar exotica such as Lamborghinis, Koenigseggs and Veyrons (the last two of which are, along with five other supercars, exclusive to the PS3). You can also drive some insane muscle cars such as Cameros, El Caminos, Challengers, Mustangs and Trans Ams – and yes, the last one comes in a very Smokey and the Bandit black and gold.

It doesn’t stop there. The Run also offers classic Euro stuff such as the MK1 Golf GTi, early 90s’ Audi Quattros and BMW M3s, plus Japan’s brilliant 240Z. There’s a pile of more expected but still attractive cars too, such as Skylines, MX5s and Elises, plus a host of modern hot hatches and coupes including the Ford Focus and the Nissan Cupholder. Okay, not the last one, but you get the idea.

Some cars have special Need For Speed versions too. Frankly, it’s the best selection of vehicles since Gran Turismo 3, and that’s saying something.

New cars can be unlocked in the Challenge mode, where you can select any stage – perfect fodder for the always-excellent Autolog, which pits your times against your friends’ in a constant stream of one-upmanship. It may even be the most appealing online aspect of The Run: obviously it has straight, online racing, but the cleverness of Autolog really does add to the game.

The ‘rubber banding’ of the AI racers is less obvious in the Challenges, too, as it focuses on preset stage times rather than simply entertaining you. For the most part you don’t notice it, but mess up near the end of a stage in the story mode and you find everyone kindly slowing down as you catch up, then blast past for the win. This game just can’t stand the idea of you being lonely.

The nature of the race precludes regular menu screens, of course, so now you look out for petrol stations and pull in. The different classes – muscle, sports, exotica – are supposed to be suited to different types of road, but it’s an area of rare complication. Each car is also in a Tier structure for performance, and also has a rating for handling: easy, normal, very difficult, challenging and expert. In practice we went for hottest and wildest car we dared, and it usually worked out fine.

Even the sound deserves a mention. Tyre feedback is excellent, engines are throaty and the cops on the scanner get entertainingly wound up with the hundreds of lunatic speeders cascading through their districts. Even the soundtrack is impressive, dodging the clichés of ‘punk’ acts you could play in a confession box without raising more than a tut or tinny thrash metal, via an eclectic mix that includes, somewhat amusingly, On The Road Again.

Of course, it’s not all amazing. Loading pauses are frequent and just a little too long, while truly random traffic can make for some annoyingly deadly junctions and overtakes. Collisions can be a bit rubbery too, and any long stretches of dirt tend to be uninspiring. Perhaps worst of all, some simpler stretches simply don’t challenge or excite, and at times it just feels a bit easy.

And of course, you are Slick McDouche, apparently the best driver ever to don a hoodie but clearly a failed aftershave model with a fetish for rough fabrics – a man who demands you hammer every button except the one you want to, which is the one that makes the car crusher speed up. Just so you don’t have to meet his friends. Just so you can watch him leak out. Just because.
But then, he’s not the first demographic-sucking void of an NFS character, or the first to have friends whose lips synch worse than Katie Price’s. But he is in one of the minority of the 9,146 Need For Speed games that has more to offer than a silly story, a vast empty city or nine million types of wheelnut. The Run cuts hard into the core of what it should offer – crazy-fast arcade thrills – and serves them up as it sees fit.

We didn’t miss an open world. We didn’t miss the chance to constantly pick cars and tracks. We were fully along for the ride. We blasted through this like the cars were weapons and the Tarmac was the enemy, and damn it if it isn’t exciting.

Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne, visiting the plant for this morning’s announcement, said the automaker planned to replace the Liberty with a vehicle he said would be “superior” in technology to its SUV flagship, the Jeep Grand Cherokee.

“This plant has been chosen to build the future Jeep SUV to replace the current Jeep Liberty that will be exported to markets all over the world,” Marchionne said at the plant this morning.

“Jeep is at the heart of our plans to internationalize Chrysler, a process which is being accelerated by Chrysler’s access to Fiat’s distribution capabilities in Europe and Latin America.”

Toledo North is Chrysler’s only assembly plant with only one shift of workers. Today’s announcement is expected to add an additional 1,105 hourly and salaried jobs to the plant, which builds the Jeep Liberty and Dodge Nitro SUVs.

Shouldn’t have been built

Production of the Nitro will end in December. In comments to the press, Marchionne said of the Nitro: “That car should never have been built.”

The automaker plans to add 260,0000 square feet to its body shop and quality lab at the plant, with improvements upgrades to its body-in-white, trim chassis final, paint shop and material handling facilities. In addition, the automaker will add a 26,000-square-foot metrology center, to improve fit and finish.

In total, Chrysler said it would invest $1.7 billion into development of the mid-sized SUV and related vehicles, with the remainder spent at other Chrysler facilities along with expenses for supplier tooling and other development costs.

Toledo North builds unibody vehicles, while the attached Toledo Supplier Park builds the body-on-frame Jeep Wrangler and Wrangler Unlimited. Together, the two plants, which operate under the same unified management structure, are known as Chrysler’s Toledo Assembly Complex.

In applying for new air permits for it’s the plant’s expansion, Chrysler requested and was granted an increase in its permitted capacity for Toledo North to as much as 327,000 vehicles a year. In 2010, the plant produced 91,973 Liberty and Nitro units, off 61 percent from the 10-year-old plant’s high of 237,719 Libertys in 2003.

Chrysler on Fiat

The new Jeep SUV will replace the Liberty for the 2013 model year and will be Chrysler’s first vehicle to ride on a Fiat platform, called CUSW, that will underpin as many as eight future compact- and mid-sized vehicles in North America.

Built in 2001, Toledo North is Chrysler’s newest and most flexible unibody assembly plant, capable of building multiple vehicles simultaneously on the same assembly line. It had three shifts of about 900 hourly workers until late 2007.

The current model Liberty was released for the 2008 model year by then DaimlerChrysler, with styling that sought to evoke the SUV’s ancestor, the Jeep Cherokee, which ended production in 2001 after a 17-year run.

The Dodge Nitro debuted as a slightly–modified, rebadged Liberty in 2006 for the 2007 model year.

Chrysler has not yet announced its naming plan for the Fiat-based successor to the Liberty, which retained the Cherokee name for overseas sales since Liberty was introduced in 2001.

Even as the processing power and download speeds of mobile devices surge, one component still lags behind: the screen. LCD panels use significantly more power than any other component of a phone or tablet because of their need to pump out bright light to form an image.

The only practical alternative is e-ink, the technology used in the Amazon Kindle; it consumes orders of magnitude less power but sacrifices color and the ability to change images fast enough for video playback or smooth game play.

Now, after years of waiting, alternative technology that promises the best of both approaches is finally edging closer to commercialization. During a recent visit to mobile chipmaker Qualcomm’s headquarters in San Diego, Technology Review tried out a full-color, 5.7-inch Android tablet with a display that offers rich colors under bright light, close to those of an LCD and not unlike the pages of a magazine. The prototype screen was also responsive enough for video playback and for a game of Angry Birds; it can deliver up to 30 frames per second.

Because the device’s screen uses ambient light, like a printed page or e-ink display, the power consumption is a tenth or less of that of a comparable LCD, although the display also features a built-in light for use in the dark. Known as Mirasol, the technology was created by a startup company, Iridigm, acquired by Qualcomm in 2004.

“In the market today, you have the iPad at one end and things like e-ink at the other end. This is really meant to bridge both of those worlds,” says Clarence Chui, who leads the group at Qualcomm developing the new technology. “It is extremely low power, full color, and can be looked at wherever you go.”

The Mirasol display makes color in the same way as the wings of iridescent butterflies or peacock feathers—by being an imperfect mirror that tunes the color of incoming light before reflecting it back to the viewer.

In a Mirasol display, this is done by small cavities known as interferometric modulators, tens of microns across and a few hundred nanometers deep, beneath the display’s glass surface. “It’s the air gap between the back of that glass and a mirror membrane at the bottom of the modulator that sets the color,” says Chui. Each modulator’s mirror membrane can snap upward against the glass when a small voltage is applied, closing the cavity and displaying a black color to the viewer. Mirasol modulators are made using techniques similar to those used to pattern metals and deposit materials in computer chip manufacturing.

Modulators come in three types: for red, green, and blue. Each pixel in a Mirasol display is actually made up of several modulators that display the three basic colors at different brightness levels. Switching these modulators on and off in the right combination offers full color at different brightness. In dark conditions, light is directed onto the panel’s modulators from LED lights at the edge of the panel.

A study by Pike Research published last year estimated that a 5.7-inch Mirasol display like the one seen by Technology Review would allow for at least twice as much Web browsing as an equivalent device with an LCD screen. Qualcomm plans to sell the displays to the same device makers—including HTC, LG, and Samsung—that already buy its mobile chips.

Chui says displays will be made to serve both full-size tablets and phones and that demonstration tablets and display components have already been provided to various partners.

However, Qualcomm is far behind its own previous public predictions of when the technology would appear in products. Technology Review and others were shown an e-reader last year, and were told that devices would be on shelves in 2011. Chui said that the Mirasol technology needed significant modifications before it would make economic sense to manufacture it.

The device seen by Technology Review was made in a pilot factory in Taiwan that has mostly produced sample displays distributed to potential partners and customers, although a relatively small number of commerical displays will be made there. Chui says that a second, larger factory in Taiwan, big enough for production at a very large scale, is under construction and will come online in mid-2012. With the larger factory incomplete, truly mass-market devices with Mirasol displays can only appear in the second half of next year. Qualcomm is planning to invest up to $975 million in the new factory.

Jennifer Colegrove, who follows new display technologies for the analyst company DisplaySearch, says that despite the delays to mass production, the Mirasol technology lacks much serious competition. “It’s really a very unique kind of display,” she says, citing its ability to match LCD for experience at much less power.

One possible rival is an electrowetting display technology being developed by Samsung. It uses voltage to move colored liquids. However, demonstration displays of the technology have so far been less polished than those shown by Qualcomm, says Colegrove.

Colegrove guesses that Mirasol’s debut in products has been hampered by the challenge of ensuring a near-perfect “yield” of the modulators that make up a display. Because millions are required to make each display, even a very low error rate would be problematic. “The LCD industry went through this same problem with yield, and it took years to solve,” says Colegrove.

Facebook is countering reports about scams affecting its users—and a rising user perception of insecurity—with new security tweaks and the release of statistics suggesting that most of its 800 million active users experience few problems.

The company is also announcing two new features. One generates passwords for your Facebook apps to protect your main account; another deals with a side effect of security—the lockdown of compromised accounts—by enabling your Facebook friends to help you recover an account.

While Facebook employs some of the highest-tech tools in the business, it is also one of the Web’s most attractive targets by dint of its size.

“I feel pretty strongly that Facebook is the safest place for users to have their information on the Internet, without question,” Tao Stein, Facebook’s software engineer for site integrity, said in an interview.

The first feature the social network is announcing today is app passwords, which provides a separate layer of password security for Facebook apps. In part this is meant to improve an existing login security feature called two-factor authentication, which sends a text message to your mobile phone bearing a unique code that must be entered to complete the login.

While this can effectively block hackers who’ve gotten hold of your password, it also has a downside: if you use the feature, you have to repeat the process each time you want to use an app.

The second feature, called “trusted friends,” will make it easier to recover your account if it is shut down or if you lose your password. If you can’t access your e-mail account to retrieve a new password, Facebook will send codes to a preselected group of friends so that they can pass the codes to you.

“Facebook seems to be introducing some sensible new controls; time will tell whether they are effective and strike the right balance,” says Maxim Weinstein, director of Stopbadware, a nonprofit antimalware organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that helps legitimate websites rid themselves of malware infections, among other things.

Facebook also released a detailed graphic with statistics on security problems. The company said 4 percent of links shared on Facebook are spam; only one in 200 users experience spam on any given day; and .06 percent of a billion daily logins each day are compromised. “We wanted to show the immense scale at which we operate and the immense challenge to secure three quarters of a billion users and to be smart about how we do it,” says Jake Brill, product manager for site integrity at Facebook.

However, all this comes amid a drumbeat of reports about scams on the network. And Facebook’s own data suggest that large numbers of people are exposed to some scams over time—and that the site does experience 600,000 compromised logins daily. Each compromised login can mean a hacker or criminal might be sending attacks to a user’s contacts under his or her name.

These messages could be phishing schemes that try to trick people into revealing passwords for bank accounts or other services. Others could contain links that try to defraud users by flashing phony warnings of infection and prompting them to pay for phony antivirus software. These messages may include links to malicious sites that make attempts to download viruses to steal data or hijack the computer for cyber-attacks.

In the past year or two, Facebook and other websites have seen a rising number of malicious Web addresses that lead to attacks like these. So over the past year Facebook has enlisted two outside firms—Web of Trust and Websense—to help the site block known malicious links. The targets are gathered from security companies, law enforcement, and even actual users who report suspicious links.

The problem with this method is that there’s a time lag before many such links are detected. Often, they are further hidden by link-shortening services such as Bit.ly. Earlier this year, the Web security firm Symantec reported that in 2010, malicious links made up two-thirds of all such short links on social networks. The company added that almost 90 percent of them had been clicked by users at least once.

Users are perceiving rising problems. In July, for example, the security firm Sophos reported that 81 percent of survey respondents saw Facebook as the “biggest risk” online—up from 60 percent in 2010.

In addition to the tweaks announced today, a remarkable real-time fight is escalating. Facebook actively looks for patterns of viral propagation and other behavior that seems malicious. Machine-learning algorithms update every 30 minutes to find and squelch the source of such attacks, says Stein.

“One of the most important things that Facebook can be doing is looking for new threats in real time,” Weinstein says. “You can stay ahead of that by detecting new patterns of malicious activity and stopping them before you’ve determined malware is present.”

A crucial security feature that Facebook has not yet fully implemented, Weinstein points out, is default encryption (as denoted by Web addresses starting with “https” rather than “http”). The latter, older system leaves someone logging in via Wi-Fi at a Starbucks, for example, at much greater risk of having his or her unencrypted information intercepted.

Last year Gmail moved to https as the default setting. But Facebook currently offers it only as an option. This is problematic, says Weinstein, because “the people who are most likely to need the feature are the least likely to know they need to turn it on.”

In an e-mail statement, Facebook said it is “making progress daily” toward default encryption. “We continue to work towards making this setting a default feature as soon as possible,” the statement said, but it noted that this requires ironing out site stability and speed issues. Facebook is also working with app developers so that encryption works across the site.

But Bruce Schneier, a cryptologist and security expert with BT Counterpane, points out that Facebook’s ultimate product is your data, which it uses to sell advertisements. “I think the biggest danger of putting things on Facebook is Facebook,” he says. “Facebook knows all of your stuff, and they sell it. It’s like handing your money to a thief who says ‘Nobody else will get your money.’ If you want Facebook security, don’t be on Facebook.”

Jack Dorsey, known to his 1.7 million followers at @jack, is trying to invent a new form of publishing again. The last time he did that, he helped to create Twitter.

For a few years now, Dorsey has been working on Square, a company he founded that offers a dinky card reader that makes it possible for anyone to accept credit-card payments on a phone or tablet. In conversation with David Kirkpatrick at the Techonomy conference in Tucson, Arizona, today, he explained that Square is actually a publishing company, too, and that creating a new publishing medium is a big part of where his new company’s profit potential lies.

This new publishing medium is actually a reinvention of an old one that you scorn every day: the receipt. “Typically we get a receipt and throw it away already,” said Dorsey, “[but] you can treat receipts as a publishing channel between the merchant and the payer.” He went on to make it sound as if that publishing channel was Square’s real goal, and that payments were incidental. “Square, to us, is about that communication channel. It’s about that exchange of value. Payment is what we have to do to get to that interesting communication channel between merchant and payer.”

The leading edge of Square’s publishing plans can be discerned in its Card Case app, which makes it possible to use your name and face to pay for goods in coffee shops and restaurants. The app enables you to open “tabs” with participating businesses so that those businesses will know anytime you are within a 50-meter radius. If you stroll in and say “a cappuccino for Jack, please,” they simply check your face against a list of photos of nearby Card Case users and tap on it to set the payment in motion. Crucially, the transaction triggers an electronic receipt that is sent back to you. That’s where Dorsey spies gold.

When asked about Twitter’s plans to make money, he said its business model was centered on serendipity— helping people find stuff they liked that they otherwise would never have found. “We can introduce you to content in ways you would never have found it before,” said Dorsey. Now imagine that “content” is recommendations for coffee shops, restaurants, or even individual menu items. Square’s Card Case could offer incredibly well-targeted ads, or even Groupon-style daily deals. Some users won’t be interested, but others will welcome a new way to find new things. I know I wouldn’t complain if this approach could spare me from being pushed the deals for manicures and hair removal that I often receive today.

Dorsey acknowledged that advertising is often unpopular, but apparently thinks that Square’s version can prove to be a lucrative exception. “When AdWords first came from Google, people were not sure they wanted it, but I’ve found, and Google found, that it makes search better,” said Dorsey. He’s not alone in noticing that Google’s search ads seem relatively benign, even helpful.

Dorsey seems to think that Square’s insight into spending habits in the real world could translate the same “intent+ads=profit” formula onto the high street. If that comes off, maybe disrupting and democratizing credit-card payments—what Square is usually understood to be about—will just be a nice side benefit.