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With only a couple weeks to go before the 2008 E3 Media and Business Summit, video game publisher Electronic Arts is giving the press a sneak peek at its new video game lineup, including products resulting from its partnership with Hasbro.

Mr. Potato Head hosts EA's game Hasbro Family Night.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

In the forefront is the Hasbro Family Game Night video game for the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 2, a result of the 2007 teaming of the board game company and the video game company. With Hasbro's Mr. Potato Head as host, EA said families can partake in classic versions of Connect Four, Boggle, Yahtzee, Sorry!, and Battleship, as well as versions of these games with new twists.

The game publisher will also debut a digital version of Sorry! Sliders, a board game that Hasbro will be selling this fall.

NCAA Football '09 is just one of the new "All-Play" games for Wii.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

Other games displayed by EA at recent coast-to-coast press events include Wii- and PlayStation-adapted games Boogie:Superstar, Littlest Pet Shop, a new Monopoly game, and Nerf N-Strike, which comes with a Wii remote and Nerf gun duo.

All the above titles will hit shelves during the fall of 2008.

Casual gaming aside, last week EA also announced a new lineup for its "EA Sports All-Play" series, which is introducing games specifically designed for the Wii. EA said the new games will level the playing field between ... Read more

A day before the United States celebrates its independence, we continue to question our individual freedoms online. In Thursday's Daily Debrief, CNET News.com Editor in Chief Dan Farber and I discuss a federal judge's recent ruling in the ongoing Google-Viacom lawsuit that orders Google to turn over YouTube user activity. This will include videos watched, IP addresses, and usernames as part of an ongoing copyright infringement case.

Understandably, this news is disconcerting for YouTube users. Sources tell CNET News.com, however, that if Viacom uses this information for anything other than investigating piracy issues, it will be held in contempt of court. Regardless, Farber makes the point that this ruling could now set a precedent for other online privacy and security battles. Representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation agree, arguing that this court order will slowly erode the online rights we have come to enjoy and appreciate. Sounds like fireworks of a different kind this Fourth of July.

A fresh look at Yahoo's search results Thursday by Hitwise Intelligence raises the question of whether Yahoo could survive just fine without its search engine.

Such a question is rather important to Yahoo investors, given the Internet search pioneer has given a cold shoulder to Microsoft, which has previously expressed interest in buying Yahoo's search assets. Yahoo, however, rebuffed the offer, noting in its investor presentation that selling its search assets, including its algorithmic search, would:

Jeopardize the Yahoo user experience and make it difficult for Yahoo to maintain search and display volume.

But Heather Hopkins, vice president of research for Hitwise, noted in her blog that Yahoo's valuable sites would not necessarily fair poorly without Yahoo's search engine.

Hopkins took Yahoo's top 20 U.S. Internet properties for the month of June and ranked them, based on user traffic.

As expected, Yahoo Mail represented a 37.5 percent slice of the traffic pie, followed by the main Yahoo site with 30.6 percent and Yahoo search with 12.l percent.

Then Hopkins compared whether these top 20 sites were getting their users by way of a Google search or a Yahoo search. In all but six of the top 20 sites, more users were coming to Yahoo's top 20 sites by way of a Google search--even to its popular Yahoo Mail and Yahoo.com.

Yahoo Answers showed the disparity the most, with 49 percent of its U.S. traffic coming from Google in ... Read more

Viacom is getting its hands on some of YouTube's sensitive user data as a result of the copyright infringement lawsuit the conglomerate filed a year ago.

The two companies are in the discovery part of the case and must make certain information available to each other. On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that Google must turn over YouTube user activity--videos watched, IP addresses, and usernames.

Google responded on Thursday in a statement to the court's order.

"We are pleased the court put some limits on discovery," Google said in the statement, "including refusing to allow Viacom to access users' private videos and our search technology. We are disappointed the court granted Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history. We are asking Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court's order."

CNET News.com reported that Viacom is under strict instructions from the court not to use the data for anything other than proving the prevalence of infringement on YouTube.

Viacom, therefore, is forbidden from targeting individual users in the manner of the Recording Industry Association of America's lawsuits against individuals found to be downloading illegal music.

The case is important to Internet users because it could help define the scope of the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That's the part of copyright law that Google and other Internet service providers claim protects them from being held responsible for the actions ... Read more

Got dial-up and don't want to give it up? You're not alone.

An estimated 10 percent of Americans are surfing the net via dial-up connections, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

And a lot of those people apparently see no compelling reason to change. The report indicates that those users are not itching to make a change to a speedier broadband connection in large part because, they say, broadband is too expensive.

Of this dial-up group, 35 percent cited the cost issue, while 19 percent say nothing will ever prompt them to change. Another subset--14 percent--say they're still on dial-up because broadband is not available in their neighborhoods

The Associated Press, in its posting on the report, cited this assessment by the report's author, John Horrigan: "That (resistance to change) suggests that solving the supply problem where there are availability gaps is only going to go so far."

The survey collected information from 2,251 U.S. residents, between April 8 and May 11.

Earlier this week, AOL said it would be raising the subscription fee for its dial-up service by 20 percent, starting at the end of July.

After navigating some rough seas, Sony's Electronics division has been starting to right the ship.

Over the past year, the company has been forced to rethink its product lineup and catch up to competitors in some cases, but now the Japanese electronics giant's U.S. division is looking ahead and betting big on the future of flat-panel televisions and high-definition media.

CNET News.com sat down with the head of Sony Electronics' U.S. operation, Stan Glasgow, to talk OLED (organic light-emitting diodes) TVs, Blu-ray Disc, the importance of the PlayStation 3, consumer electronics, and the dwindling margins for manufacturers and retailers on notebook PCs.

During our chat, Glasgow made it clear that Sony is only focused on TVs when it comes to the impossibly thin OLED technology and that soon the company's 3mm-thin TV will be even thinner. And, though the company just won a long and drawn out format war with HD DVD, Glasgow spoke openly about the limits of Blu-ray and what the medium still lacks. Plus, he sounds pretty high on the mini-notebook concept, even if he won't admit the company is developing a product yet.

Stan Glasgow, president of Sony Electronics USA

(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)

The following is an edited and condensed version of the interview.

Q: You have an 11-inch OLED and said you'd be putting $200-plus million into the next stage of investment. How big are we talking here in terms of screen sizes?
Glasgow: ... Read more

UPDATE:To include mention of a report that Facebook valued itself at $3.75 billion.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--What is Facebook really worth?

One of the burning questions in the technology business during the past year also played a major role in the dispute between social networks ConnectU and Facebook, according to documents obtained by CNET News.com.

Some interesting details about Facebook's valuation were revealed in partially redacted court records released Wednesday by federal district judge James Ware. The documents were a transcript of a June 23 hearing in the case, which Ware had closed to the public. The judge released the redacted transcripts after CNET Networks, parent company of News.com, objected to the closing and launched an effort to have relevant documents unsealed.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

(Credit: Facebook)

ConnectU, founded by brother Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, filed suit against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 and accused him of stealing their business plan. The two sides reached a settlement, but ConnectU's side tried to pull out of the deal after alleging that Facebook fraudulently misrepresented the value of its stock. Ware disagreed and last week ordered that the settlement be enforced. That means Facebook is nearing the end of the ConnectU case.

But what the transcripts show was just how much Microsoft inadvertently influenced the proceedings.

Last fall, Microsoft paid $240 million to acquire a 1.6 percent share of Facebook. The day that news of the deal broke, headlines screamed

A bit of deja vu is creeping into recent media reports of Microsoft whispering into the right ear of News Corp. and Time Warner's AOL about potential partnerships, while Yahoo is whispering in their left.

According to a Reuters report, Yahoo and Time Warner have been chatting for months about a potential deal involving Time Warner's AOL and Yahoo. The report, however, notes that the parties don't appear any closer to inking a deal than they were when Microsoft had a buyout bid on the table for the Internet search pioneer.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Yahoo's talks with Time Warner have regained some traction, now that Microsoft's withdrawn offer of $33 a share for the Internet search pioneer appears to remain comatose. But as with Reuters, the Journal also notes that the discussions don't appear to be serious. For one thing, the Journal notes such a combination had put an approximate $10 billion valuation on AOL, but that was before Yahoo's stock had plummeted back to trading levels near the pre-Microsoft offer watermark.

In the end, Yahoo is looking for ways to bring its value back to the $33 a share that Microsoft had offered before merger talks broke off in early May, and Microsoft is looking for ways to bring scale to its online advertising search business, which may one day ultimately pay for any free business applications the Redmond giant gives out to compete with those currently ... Read more

Update at 1:30 p.m. PDT July 3, with additional comments from Micron Technology (at bottom).

Has the image of solid state drives as power misers been shattered? A recent review would seem to dispel the notion that these devices are more power efficient than the hard disk drives used in laptops.

In an article at Tom's Hardware titled "The SSD Power Consumption Hoax", the authors state: "We have discovered that the power savings aren't there: in fact, battery runtimes actually decrease if you use a flash (solid state drive)."

One of the key selling points of solid state drives has been that they use less power than hard disk drives. The claim has seemed plausible because solid state drives have no moving parts, while hard disk drives have a number of moving components.

The Tom's Hardware review, however, says: "While conventional hard drives may operate at relatively low power when little movement is required...flash based drives do not. They will draw their maximum power level constantly when in use, and as a consequence, simply spend more total time drawing maximum power than conventional drives."

The review goes on to test four solid state drives (SSDs) from Crucial (Micron Technology), Memoright, Sandisk, and Mtron. For example, in evaluating the Crucial CT32GBFAB0 32GB drive, the review states, "Users who purchase this drive because of Crucial's statements such as 'low power consumption' and the product being ideal for 'users who want longer battery life' will most likely be disappointed."

Though Intel's drives were not tested in the review, the chipmaker stated Wednesday that SSDs "can be architected to improve battery life." Intel is expected to bring out drives ranging in capacity from 80GB to 160GB later this year.

Google scored a legal victory in keeping its search source code secret from Viacom, but YouTube users were not so fortunate with their privacy.

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday (PDF) that the search giant doesn't have to turn over the code to Viacom, which filed a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google in 2007.

In granting Google's motion for a protective order, U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton in Manhattan agreed with Google's characterization of the source code as a trade secret that can't be disclosed without risking the loss of business.

"YouTube and Google should not be made to place this vital asset in hazard merely to allay speculation," the judge said. "A plausible showing that YouTube and Google's denials are false, and that the search function can and has been used to discriminate in favor of infringing content, should be required before disclosure of so valuable and vulnerable an asset is compelled."

The judge also denied Viacom's motion for Google to produce source code for its Video Identification Tool, which helps copyright notify Google of copyright infringement.

However, the judge granted a Viacom motion that records of every video watched by YouTube users, including their login names and IP addresses, be turned over to the entertainment giant.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation called the ruling a threat to YouTube users' privacy.

"The court's order grants Viacom's request and erroneously ignores the protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection ... Read more