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Duke Nukem Forever is perhaps the iconic vaporware title after being in developmental hell for more than a decade… until now.

Take-Two Interactive will announce at the Penny Arcade Expo this weekend that Gearbox Studios, the studio responsible for Borderlands, will finally pick up the pieces and finish developing the game, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The original Duke Nukem struck a chord with rebellious young male gamers. The character from the original 1996 game, Duke Nukem 3D, was a studly, cigar-chomping, and highly weaponized badass. The game was extremely violent and it was controversial for its depiction of women as sex objects.

3D realms was finally axed in 2009 after working on the Duke Nukem Forever title for 13 years. The most recent sighting of the game in the wild was a teaser released in 2007. The Journal reported that Gearbox began “finishing” the title in late 2009.

It should come as no coincidence that Take-Two also posted blowout quarterly results after the bell on Thursday — beating consensus expectations for revenue by about $50 million and raking in a $26 million profit — as a result of the success of its Red Dead Redemption release. Shares of Take-Two were up 9.5 percent today, to $9.69. They are likely in a better position to take a risk and bet on the Duke.

The game will reportedly ship in 2010 — though we’ve certainly heard that song and dance before. Nonetheless, with Gearbox and Take-Two finally cutting all the malarkey, gamers may finally be able to come get some.

Tags: always bet on Duke, Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem Forever, share ware, Vaporware

Companies: 3d Realms, Gearbox, Take Two Interactive

This one’s a classic case of “easy when you know how.” How many times have you grabbed a comma-separated string, exploded it into an array, and assigned each item in the array to its own variable?

If it’s a small array, it may not be too much of a problem. But it quickly gets tiring to type out all those array assignments if you have a lot of them to do.

Fear not, there’s a better way…

Sponsor

The Slow Way

The Nice Way

See the difference? Much better!

Photo by Book Glutton

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iOS 4.0 was so slow on our 3G, we promptly downgraded after updating. Earlier this week, Apple announced, among other things, that iOS 4.1 fixed performance on the iPhone 3G. We put their claim to the test. More »

Mike Yang, Google’s Associate General Counsel, just published a post on the Google blog, informing users that the company is making its privacy policies shorter and easier to understand for non-lawyers. They are also making some other changes, but to be clear, the Mountain View company isn’t altering its privacy practices as such.

The updates will go into effect October 3, which is 30 days from now.

Until that time, all products and services will continue to be governed by the current version of the privacy policies and Google will update people on the changes via the Google Privacy Center and a notice the company will be putting up on the Google Account sign-in page, enabling people to learn about the changes when they sign into Gmail, Docs, Talk or Calendar.

There’s now also a dedicated page in the Privacy Center where users can find the most popular privacy tools, and some of Google’s product Help Centers will get more content over time.

So what else is changing?

Most Google products and services are governed by the main Google Privacy Policy, which was last updated in March 2009. However, Google writes, a number of its products also have individual privacy policies in addition.

The company will be getting rid of twelve of these product-specific policies to reduce unnecessary redundancies and/or to better reflect how the products work together. These twelve products will continue to be governed by the main Google Privacy Policy.

They are: 3D Warehouse, App Engine, Calendar, Docs, Firefox Extensions, G1, Gmail, Feedback, iGoogle, Maps, Talk and Tasks.

The main Google Privacy Policy will also be made more user-friendly.

Google says it is trimming redundancies and updating some of the legal language to make it more clear to users. For example, Google will be deleting a sentence that reads, “The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies,” because they realized it’s kind of obvious that non-Google sites aren’t covered by Google’s privacy policies.

You can see a preview of the updated policy that will take effect on October 3, 2010. But even better is going to this page, where all the changes are indicated more clearly.

iTunes Ping is apparently full of spam, yet another hiccup in Apple’s road to establishing a legitimate social network.

As Sophos notes on its blog, a barrage of spam links are hitting the music-themed social network. Many of these links are to offers promising free iPad, iPhone or iPod touch devices.

Apple released iTunes 10 and iTunes Ping earlier this week and the rollout has been a little bit rocky. Beyond the latest spam attacks, issues with Facebook Connect, international access issues and unclear policies for musicians have plagued the service.

These messages, which you can see in the screenshot below, are showing up in comments to posts from iTunes Featured Artists or in responses to posts from other users who make their content accessible to anyone.

Online spam is perhaps the annoyance that unifies us all. No matter how big a company or network or blog is (or small), the spammers will come.

What’s curious is that it doesn’t appear that Apple has any spam safe-guards in place. While it’s true that iTunes Ping has a approval process for all profile photos used with Ping (presumably to prevent nude or other NSFW photos from showing up), the real-time nature of Ping prevents that sort of scrutiny for comments on posts.

Real time is actually pretty new for Apple. Users have long been able to leave reviews for music, movies and applications using iTunes, but like the profile photos in Ping, these reviews are held for review before publishing.

Still, it appears as though Apple did anticipate the problem, at least in part. On any post on your wall, there is a “Report” button next to “Like.” That button lets users report content for lots of reasons, including spam. Clearly Apple anticipated people using the post feature to spam friends or followers.

What isn’t an option, however, is the ability to report individual replies to those posts as spam.

A simple starter solution would be to reject any comments that contain “http://” or “www.” in the text box. Comments are not hyperlinked so this would stave off some of the automated spam that seems to be showing up right now.

What is clear is that Apple will need to institute a much stronger anti-spam algorithm into its commenting system to ebb the flow of spam on Ping.

More About: apple, itunes, itunes ping, Ping, spam

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John Osher, developer of the low-cost spin toothbrush, was a successful entrepreneur because he thought differently. William Sahlman, professor at Harvard Business School, breaks down the three most important factors in Osher’s success in this entrepreneur thought leader lecture given at Stanford University in 2007.

The key to improving your fortunes, he says, comes down to:

• Reflecting on your experience to improve your understanding.
• Looking at the situation differently to successfully innovate.
• Scanning your environment to find new opportunities.

Tags: Stanford University

People: John Osher, William Sahlman

Only 24 hours after the launch of Apple’s new social network, Ping, the service has been overrun by spammers. The fraudsters have created iTunes profiles and are posting links to a number of online scams, including ones that promises “free iPhones” or “free iPads” in exchange for filling out online surveys. For the most part, these suspicious links are being posted in the comments sections of the most popular artists on Ping, like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, U2 and others, all of whom are among the recommended accounts linked to from the Ping homepage.

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As security expert Chester Wisniewski points out, Apple doesn’t require a credit card or any other positive identification in order to establish an account on Ping, which itself is a part of newly launched iTunes 10. Doing so wouldn’t be advisable, either, as it would lock out a lot of “credit card-less” kids, teens and young adults from using iTunes. There’s actually quite a bit of free content available from the iTunes Store, from apps to music to video, allowing parents to feel comfortable in letting their children manage their own iTunes accounts without close supervision.

Given those lax requirements sign-up requirements, however, it’s somewhat surprising that Apple didn’t build in a good spam filtration system into its social network, too. The types of links being posted now are what any halfway decent blog commenting system like Disqus or Echo would pick up automatically, or at least flag for review, especially since the posts contain links.

Although not mentioned by Wisniewski, we think the lack of attention to this security detail should have new Ping users concerned, or at least wary. If Ping’s spam filter (assuming one even exits) doesn’t block links to obvious online scams, how can we be sure it’s blocking links of a more nefarious nature – like those to sites containing viruses, trojans or other phishing scams?

Where’s the Spam Filter?

What’s odd is that Apple is managing other aspects of the Ping network’s security. User profile pictures have to be approved before becoming visible, we’ve yet to see blatantly offensive comments or posts which seems to indicative some sort of filter, and, as the Apple-watching blog MacRumors notes, there is a “report activity” mechanism in place. Clicking the “report” link on any spammer’s comment brings up a dialog box of choices such as “offensive comments,” “inappropriate photo or video” and “spam.”

But typically a report mechanism would be used to deal with the items the spam filter missed, not as the first line of attack. Due to the rampant nature of the spam – we’ve yet to see an artist profile not affected by this problem – that means that either Ping’s spam filter needs major improvement or the report mechanism is the only spam filter Apple has.

We would ask Apple for comment on this, but they never return our calls. (Working in Apple PR must be a great, right?) So we’ll just leave you with this warning instead: you can’t get a free iPhone from filling out an online survey, OK? Don’t click those links.

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If you’re doing some major overhauling of your space, be it decluttering your closet or remodeling your office, it pays to skip the dumpster and donate as much as you can. More »

We all know Google Music is coming, it’s just a question of when – and what it’ll look like, of course. According to Reuters, Google hopes to launch the service as early as December 2010.

Citing unnamed ‘people familiar with the matter’, Reuters says Google’s VP of Engineering Andy Rubin (which we likened to a Steve Jobs-caliber product fanatic in the past) is spearheading talks with music labels on plans for a digital music download store and cloud-based song locker service, which he hopes will see the light of day before year’s end.

Only thing that could get in the way of a pre-Christmas debut: the company has yet to sign a single licensing deal with the music labels, those same sources told Reuters.

It’ll be interesting to see if Google can get some of those deals signed in time for the launch of Android 3.0, code-named Gingerbread, which is expected to come in the fourth quarter of this year. Perhaps writing Santa a letter will help?

We recently broke the news that Google had hired well known music attorney Elizabeth Moody to assist them with negotiations with music labels and other rights holders for their upcoming iTunes rival. Needless to say, such negotiations aren’t exactly a walk in the park.

Each major label has different goals and strategies for digital music, and people in the know we’ve spoken to in the past say it’s nearly impossible to get them to agree to terms that will make a streaming music service viable. In particular, they tend to disagree over how long a free trial period might last, and whether or not a credit card from the user needs to be on file before the trial starts.

That’s not to say the industry isn’t excited about Google’s imminent entry into the digital music arena. As good as Apple’s iTunes, which just got a new, social-network enhanced version with the launch of iTunes 10 earlier this week, has been for them, executives at the major music labels have long considered Apple’s immense stronghold in the field an issue.

Surely, they welcome competition from a rival the size and reach of Google, as the iTunes Music Store has cemented itself the king of the hill over the years, accounting for approximately 70 percent of all digital music sales in the United States. Dependence on a single player isn’t exactly the industry’s vision of a bright future.

One label executive, who asked not to be named, told Reuters as much:

“Finally here’s an entity with the reach, resources and wherewithal to take on iTunes as a formidable competitor by tying it into search and Android mobile platform. What you’ll have is a very powerful player in the market that’s good for the music business.”

Another unnamed label executive expressed more caution despite his or her optimism, stating that Google lacks a track record in “selling stuff” (which is true).

It’s also worth questioning if Google’s entry in the digital music space leaves much breathing room for smaller, innovative startups to compete and maintain viable relationships with the music industry.

With Apple, Google and Amazon fighting for every penny, it’ll become even harder for the likes of Spotify, Rdio and MOG than it has already been so far. Which, to be clear, isn’t to say none of them will thrive or attract sizeable audiences – I just wonder if they’ll be left battling for increasingly smaller pieces of the pie rather than grow into giants themselves.