Geek News Roundup for 10/03/2010 – Internet Trolling

If you ever remotely wondered what a world map representation of today’s online communities would look like XKCD webcomic artist Randall Munroe has you covered. As expected Facebook is the juggernaut on the map while other communities have gradually gotten smaller. Munroe’s original 2007 map depicted a much different online landscape. MySpace, anyone? Unsurprisingly, the area known as “Bay of Trolls” has become somewhat larger. Given the increase in online trolls over the years it should as no surprise to learn scientists at Yahoo are constructing new ways to deal with pesky trolls. The scientists are looking into methods such as steering trolls into productive conversations instead of removing comments or banning the commenter. Such a method could work with registered forum users but anonymous users could be harder to work with. PCs are a completely different matter. One senior researcher at Microsoft has no problem with proposing an internet ban on virus-infected PCs. Hopefully the irony of someone at Microsoft proposing such an idea isn’t lost on you. Or maybe hypocrisy would be a better term to use?

Last weekend The Social Network took the top spot at the U.S. box office bringing in an estimated $23 million. The box office results aren’t unexpected considering the press the movie has had. Additionally, the movie portrays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in an interesting light. As expected the portrayal isn’t exactly true but few Hollywood movie portrayals are. In gaming entertainment World of Warcraft has finally reached the 12 million subscribers mark. The increase in users is most likely in anticipation of the December 7th Cataclysm expansion. Alundra and Arc The Lad are PS1 RPGs that are far less popular but fans of these classic games can soon purchase them on PSN starting tomorrow. Fans of Xenogears have been clamoring for a North American release of the game on PSN for a while now. Fans won’t get their wish any time soon (if ever) but at least they can look forward to a release of an orchestrated Xenogears album. Better yet, Square Enix and Yasunori Mitsuda are asking fans to vote on which tracks to include in the game. While Mitsuda’s request went out via Twitter in English only Japanese fans can vote. Personally speaking I’ll take an orchestrated Xenogears album before seeing the actual game released on PSN. (Of course I still have a perfectly working copy of the game so that effectively voids my judgment.) Speaking of games, Ars Technica has confirmed what older gamers knew all along, video games price have actually come down over time. If you played consoles games in the 1990s you probably remember the games costing as much as $80 in some cases– I certainly do.