Lego has given the green light to a set of the famous building bricks based on the world of the cult cyber-block game Minecraft.

The idea came from fan submission site Lego Cuusoo, where users can suggest new creation kits. If these submissions gather sufficient interest among the site’s visitors, the Danish toy maker takes note and sometimes agrees to take the concept to retail.

It’s amusing to think that the next generation of Lego users may consider it to be a spin-off of Minecraft for use offline.

While Multiverse, the development platform that was supposed to be the driving force for possible Buffy and Firefly MMOs, suffered a studio shutdown, the source code lives — and has been snatched up by the newly formed Multiverse Foundation. Fortunately for those who were holding out hope for an online version of Joss Whedon’s scifi western, it looks as though this new company wants to pick up where the previous team left off.

Don’t let your hopes soar too high: this is still very far from being a complete product (and the organization’s website is still in deep lorem ipsum marination). It is, however, a sign that there’s still enough life in the fan community for the Joss Whedon properties that it appears viable for someone to take this on.

Move aside, Milosevic. Out of the way, al-Bashir. It’s the world’s videogamers who should be hauled up on war crimes charges, some members of the Red Cross seem to think.

During the 31st International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, which took place in Geneva last week, attendees were asked to consider what response the organisations should make to the untold zillions of deaths that can be laid at the feet of videogamers.

[. . .]

There is “an audience of approximately 600 million gamers who may be virtually violating international humanitarian law (IHL),” it noted.

The key word there, folks, is ‘virtually’. Ruthlessly gunning down civilians, fellow combatants and/or extraterrestrial visitors may be a crime if you do it for real, but not if you merely imagine the action, even if helped by the realistic visuals of the likes of Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

Windows XP’s retail release was October 25, 2001, ten years ago today. Though no longer readily available to buy, it continues to cast a long shadow over the PC industry: even now, a slim majority of desktop users are still using the operating system.

Windows XP didn’t boast exciting new features or radical changes, but it was nonetheless a pivotal moment in Microsoft’s history. It was Microsoft’s first mass-market operating system in the Windows NT family. It was also Microsoft’s first consumer operating system that offered true protected memory, preemptive multitasking, multiprocessor support, and multiuser security.

The transition to pure 32-bit, modern operating systems was a slow and painful one. Though Windows NT 3.1 hit the market in 1993, its hardware demands and software incompatibility made it a niche operating system. Windows 3.1 and 3.11 both introduced small amounts of 32-bit code, and the Windows 95 family was a complex hybrid of 16-bit and 32-bit code. It wasn’t until Windows XP that Windows NT was both compatible enough — most applications having been updated to use Microsoft’s Win32 API — and sufficiently light on resources.

In the history of PC operating systems, Windows XP stands alone. Even Windows 95, though a landmark at its release, was a distant memory by 2005. No previous PC operating system has demonstrated such longevity, and it’s unlikely that any future operating system will. Nor is its market share dominance ever likely to be replicated; at its peak, Windows XP was used by more than 80 percent of desktop users.

Two years ago The Register‘s Andrew Orlowski, writing for the New Statesman, poked crater-sized holes in the notion that “long tail” economics were good for musicians. In 2011, it’s equally clear that the long tail* is bad business for app developers, brands, and, well, everyone. The internet has not diffused the ability to make money; it has concentrated it.

The reason is clear: the more abundant the content or apps, the greater the value of separating wheat from chaff. We simply don’t have the time or patience to scavenge the long tail of production.

This isn’t a new idea. For me, Orlowski’s review of the music industry was dispositive on the issue, along with Nick Carr’s analysis of web traffic. But it bears repeating because of the continued euphoria around app stores and their supposed ability to share the wealth in a growing mobile economy.

If only.

Some of the blame for this diminished opportunity for small app developers has to go to the app store’s organization (or lack thereof). In the Apple App Store, I found it very hard to find what differentiated many apps from all the (sometimes dozens) of similar apps other than the odd spelling of the name and the even odder choices for the app icons. Early gaming of the review and ranking made it even less useful. I’ve had an iPhone for over three years, but it must be at least a year since I downloaded a new app — partly because my aging iPhone 3G is no longer able to run the current iOS — but mostly because it’s such a pain to find things in the App Store.

I’ve spent a week with an iPhone 4S loaned to me from Apple, and I got hooked on Siri quickly. Creating Reminders with Siri was the most useful. I found it silly, however, that items you create with Reminders do not show up in the Calendar app. That means if I create reminders and calendar events, I have to open two different apps to see everything I have to do. I’m hoping Apple integrates Reminders into Siri in a future update.

The only other problem with the iPhone 4S is that once you start using the robot assistant, you’ll wish it did a lot more. It is limited, but really good at what it can do so far.

Here are some of my favorite examples from experimenting with Siri:

Me: “I’m drunk.”

Siri: “I found a number of cabs fairly close to you.” (Perfect; it didn’t dial my ex-girlfriend.)

Me: “I have a flat tire.”

Siri: “I found 14 towing services. 12 of them are fairly close to you.”

Me: “Remind me to steal a ream of paper when I arrive at the office.”

Siri: “Here’s your reminder for when you get to work: Steal a ream of paper. Shall I create it?”

Me: “I’m going to kill myself.”

Siri: “I found four mental health agencies. Three of them are fairly close to you.” (This was just a test — don’t be alarmed.)

Just remember, if you’re going to do something silly with Siri, that everything you do can be (will be?) recorded on Apple’s servers. Siri doesn’t work without an internet connection, as most of the processing is done remotely and the response is generated on your iPhone. In case you thought it’d be wickedly funny to pretend to plot something illegal with Siri’s help.

A computer virus that captures the strokes on a keyboard has infected networks used by pilots who control US air force drones flown on the front line, according to a report.

Wired magazine reported that the spyware has resisted efforts to remove it from computers in the cockpits at Creech air force base in Nevada, where pilots remotely fly Predator and Reaper drones in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

The story said there were no confirmed reports that classified data had been stolen and that the virus did not stop pilots from flying missions. Network security specialists were uncertain whether the virus was part of a directed attack or accidentally infected the networks, the story said.

The air force said in a statement that it did not discuss threats to its computer networks because it could help hackers refine their tactics.

This Firefox extension was inspired by the launch of Google’s encrypted search option. We wanted a way to ensure that every search our browsers sent was encrypted. At the same time, we were also able to encrypt most or all of the browser’s communications with some other sites:

• Google Search
• Wikipedia
• Twitter and Identi.ca
• Facebook
• EFF and Tor
• Ixquick, DuckDuckGo, Scroogle and other small search engines and lots more!

Firefox users can install HTTPS Everywhere by following this link.

As always, even if you’re at an HTTPS page, remember that unless Firefox displays a colored address bar and an unbroken lock icon in the bottom-right corner, the page is not completely encrypted and you may still be vulnerable to various forms of eavesdropping or hacking (in many cases, HTTPS Everywhere can’t prevent this because sites incorporate insecure third-party content).

Today’s plan is to do it in two stages: back up the old machine’s files to the NAS, then install the files from the NAS to the new laptop.

I’m currently trying to transfer files and settings from my old laptop to the new machine. The Windows Easy Transfer tool makes it look pretty straightforward . . . but it’s slow, slow, slow. I started a transfer last night after dinner, anticipating it’d be done this morning, but the WiFi router glitched not long after I started the process, so it didn’t happen. Plus, we had some lively thunderstorms roll through early this morning, which meant I had to jump out of bed and shut everything down anyway.

Second attempt this afternoon, once the weather cleared up, and it’s now telling me to expect the transfer to take “1 day 15 hours”. And, of course, you can’t use either machine for anything else while the files are being transferred.