Several sources following the recent school webcam spying debacle are reporting that an even stranger twist has surfaced. The student in question that was disciplined for an "improper act" was apparently accused of either drug use or drug selling. Turns out he was eating Mike & Ike candy, not popping pills. While there is probably more to this story than has made it to the general public, the officials involved have done a particularly bad job of actually managing the events.

Pickens writes: "Cory Doctorow writes that Ralph Lauren issued a DMCA takedown notice after Boing Boing republished the Photoshop disaster contained in a Ralph Lauren advertisement in which a model's proportions appear to have been altered to give her an impossibly skinny body with the model's head larger than her pelvis. Doctorow says that one of the things that makes their ISP Priority Colo so awesome is that they don't automatically act on DMCA takedowns and proceeded to dare Lauren to sue. 'This is classic fair use: a reproduction "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting," etc,' writes Doctorow. 'Copyright law doesn't give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings.' Doctorow adds that every time Lauren threatens to sue he will 'reproduce the original criticism, making damned sure that all our readers get a good, long look at it,' 'publish your spurious legal threat along with copious mockery,' and 'offer nourishing soup and sandwiches to your models.'"

Ray Muzyka, co-founder of BioWare, sat down with Gamasutra to discuss upcoming RPG Dragon Age: Origins, as well as some of the features they're working on for release alongside the game. In particular, they are interested in building a framework for players to show off their characters and share stories about the gameplay they encounter. "We're creating a community site that's going to enable the fans to get revved up about what each other is doing. They're showing their choices and consequences to friends. Even though it's single-player, you can still reveal those choices to each other and have fun doing it. It enables some of that stuff that occurs anecdotally amongst friends at the water cooler: 'Hey, did you play this yet? Did you go this way?' 'No, I didn't run into that. I did it this way.' 'Really? I didn't run into that at all!' You can meet people who are across the world and enable them to see those kinds of things, too, which I think will lead to a lot of fun discussion and collaboration in the community."

Citing the sheer potential of the title, EA executives John Riccitiello and Frank Gibeau stated in a conference call yesterday that Spore will not ship until it is finished. Next Generation reports: "'It's one of those breakthrough products that might come across the industry every three, five, seven years ... We could not be more bullish for the potential of the franchise as we are right now,' said Riccitiello. He said that he still expects the game to ship in the 'March, April, May' 2008 timeframe. However, Riccitiello said, 'We will make the choice of shipping a better game than an on-time game given the high potential for this franchise.'"

There were several pieces up this past weekend, and a resulting lively dialogue, about the role that race plays in videogames. Game|Life talks very cogently on the subject, which got kick-started by a post on the microscopiq site highlighting important black game characters. The article asks "Jade Is Black?", highlighting the role that racial ambiguity can have in making a player empathize with a title's protagonist. Writes Kohler: "Video games put the control of the main character into the player's hands. They ask us to become the character. It's easier for anybody to identify with Jade because Jade can stand in for anything. Ellis wants more black characters in video games, and Jade, if we go by the layout of his article, is his number-one favorite. It is quite possible that he felt a stronger connection with Jade than with other game characters who are definitely black. What does that say about the power of racial ambiguity? " So, do you care about race in videogames? If so, how so?

Bruce Schneier has a commentary in Wired titled An American Idol for Crypto Geeks on the US government's competition for a new cryptographic hash function to become the national standard, covered here recently. He talks about how much the competition, slated to wrap up by 2011, will advance the cryptographic state of the art. And how much fun he expects to have.

Rockgod writes to mention a Google Blogoscoped article about an internal company paper. The paper details Google's big goals and directions for 2006. From the article: "The list included several items, for example: Google wants to have an improved infrastructure to make their engineers more productive. This includes allowing employees to have a universal search tool "containing all public Google information searched on all Google searches." Google also wants to build 10MW of green power to be on track to be carbon neutral. (They also want to reduce "Borg disk waste" by 50%... hmmm, Borg?)

greenechidna writes "The Register is reporting that the U.S. is relinquishing control of ICANN. The story states: 'In a meeting that will go down in internet history, the United States government last night conceded that it can no longer expect to maintain its position as the ultimate authority over the internet. Having been the internet's instigator and, since 1998, its voluntary taskmaster, the US government finally agreed to transition its control over not-for-profit internet overseeing organization ICANN, making the organization a more international body.'"

KrispyGlider writes "Vista's installation process is dramatically different from any previous version of Windows: rather than being an 'installer,' the install DVD is actually a preinstalled copy of Windows that simply gets decompressed onto your PC. It is hardware agnostic, so it can adjust to different systems, and you can also install your own apps into it so that your Vista install becomes a full system image install. APCMag.com has published an interview with a Microsoft Australia tech specialist on the inner workings of it as well as a story that looks at some of the pros and cons of image-based installs."

davidwr writes "News.com reports the U.S. Supreme Court will take up KSR v. Teleflex, a patent case in which the defense is arguing the patent is obvious and should be thrown out. The case hinges on a 1952 provision of patent law. Interestingly, several major IT firms are supporting the defense."

HRH King Lerxst with a link to BBC News' report that "Arctic sea level has been falling by a little over 2mm a year — a movement that sets the region against the global trend of rising waters. ... It is well known that the world's oceans do not share a uniform height; but even so, the scientists are somewhat puzzled by their results."

conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece on how pornography is again leading the way and showing Holywood how to fight back against piracy. From the article: 'Some producers of porn are starting to share revenues from online movies with the distributors of their DVDs, who might otherwise feel endangered by digital distribution online. Bolder yet, one large studio is allowing fans who buy movies online to burn them from their computers onto DVDs, with some protections included, of course.'"

1up is running a fun piece looking at how to take your gaming setup from merely functional to truly outstanding. From the article: "So you already took the plunge on a hot new HDTV. You've got an Xbox 360, but you're hungering for more HD gaming goodness, and you don't care how much it costs to get there. If that's the case, you're ready to enter the extremely hardcore domain of rolling your own home theatre gaming PC. This is not a project for the light-hearted. If you've never built a computer before, you're better off experimenting on the one you already have first with simpler exercises, like RAM and video card upgrades. Get comfortable, expect mistakes, and don't be afraid to see your own blood - computers can be pointy on the inside."

1up has a feature revisiting the ongoing struggle for supremacy in the handheld market. The PSP and the DS have had many ups and downs in the past year, and the column lays out the successes and failures for both systems. From the article: "And then there were two. The DS is cleaning up in Japan -- the sheer demand for the console there has siphoned every single unit from the marketplace, while PSPs sit unloved on store shelves. But here in the U.S., it's a neck-and-neck race. And, since the PSP launched one year ago on March 24th, 2005, we thought it'd be an excellent time to revisit the past year and gauge the situation as it stands today."