It's just a little graffiti, and yet its existence has caused a firestorm of legal wrangling as to who actually owns the work and the building that once housed it. Seems rather odd, until you take a closer look at who is responsible, where it was created and why it exists in the first place.

Of all the derelict buildings filling the city of Detroit, one of the most famous is the former Packard automobile plant. As much as the city of Detroit would like to do something about the the 3,500,000-square-foot facility, nobody seems quite sure who owns the dilapidated building... nor is there any consensus on who should foot the bill for the massive clean-up project.

Recently, though, the old Packard plant became just a little bit more valuable, leading to a skirmish between an assortment of interested parties. The how and why that led to the recently revived interest is a story unto itself.

A few years back, the US publisher was struggling with its hardcore profile.

Its Kids, Family and Casual range (yep, that is a KFC acronym you detect) was flying - taking full advantage of the phenomenal performance from Nintendo formats this generation.

But when it came to the 'real' gamers, there was too much 'me-too' - and too little time for its developers to innovate. The success THQ craved in the hardcore space was not forthcoming.

Global publishing executive VP Ian Curran and his team took stock and went back to the drawing board - forcing THQ to adopt a 'fewer, better' mindset in the space that has started to pay real dividends.

Here's an exciting announcement -- Disney is making a feature film based on the Haunted Mansion, the greatest dark-ride ever conceived, to be directed written and produced by Guillermo del Toro. This last fact is the most critical piece of the news, as it suggests the possibility that this Haunted Mansion movie won't be an unmitigated turd, as the previous one was (it's telling that the official Disney announcement linked below doesn't even mention the Rob Minkoff 2003 suckfest with Eddie Murphy).

Yes, I want to believe. Oh please, oh please, oh please, make a movie as kick-ass as the ride.

I never thought I would be more disappointed in the industry then when Microsoft killed Ensemble Studios. ..however nothing surprises me anymore :)

Rumor has it that there was a project many many months ago at Microsoft that was under wraps. The goal was to bridge XBOX gamers with PC Gamers so they could play against one another in games like Unreal, or Gears of War. This was all part of their Live strategy, and had Microsoft just stuck to their guns and made it work PC Gaming might be in a much better position than it is today.

Not to say that PC Gaming is in a bad position, but it's not like it used to be. The PC is shifting, as I've said many times over the last couple of years. The need for multiple high performance graphics cards is all but dead. You can play any PC Game on an HP Envy at high resolution with high detail, for example. PCs are becoming more mobile, form factors are shifting, touch is being embraced as well as other technologies. The word "PC" is dead, but the concept of personal computing isn't. ..but this isn't the point.

3D may be the industry buzzword of 2010, but did you know a major proportion of the UK population can’t even see it?

Over six million British consumers have poor binocular vision, which means they either cannot see or have difficulty seeing the effects on 3DS or in movies such as Avatar.

The study comes from UK charity The Eyecare Trust.

“It’s more than you think,” Dharmesh Patel, chairman of The Eyecare Trust, told MCV.

“About 12 per cent have 3D vision problems and you’ll find a similar percentage worldwide.

BP's testing of a new cap has at least temporarily shut off the flow of oil, but the federal point man for the crisis said Thursday that the system is likely to be used not as a permanent cap on the well but as an improved siphon.

The fact that the cap was holding up under pressure tests led many to believe that the new system would keep the oil from flowing until a relief well is dug by mid-August to plug the well.

But National Incident Commander Thad Allen issued a statement later in the day, deeming it "likely" that "we will return to the containment process using this new stacking cap connected to the risers to attempt to collect up to 80,000 barrels of oil per day until the relief well is completed."

Last month, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., introduced a bill that might -- we're not really sure -- give the president the authority to shut down all or portions of the Internet in the event of an emergency. It's not a new idea. Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, proposed the same thing last year, and some argue that the president can already do something like this. If this or a similar bill ever passes, the details will change considerably and repeatedly. So let's talk about the idea of an Internet kill switch in general.

It's a bad one.

Security is always a trade-off: costs versus benefits. So the first question to ask is: What are the benefits? There is only one possible use of this sort of capability, and that is in the face of a warfare-caliber enemy attack. It's the primary reason lawmakers are considering giving the president a kill switch. They know that shutting off the Internet, or even isolating the U.S. from the rest of the world, would cause damage, but they envision a scenario where not doing so would cause even more.

That reasoning is based on several flawed assumptions.

Hello everyone,

I'd like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We've been constantly monitoring the feedback you've given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we've decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

It's important to note that we still remain committed to improving our forums. Our efforts are driven 100% by the desire to find ways to make our community areas more welcoming for players and encourage more constructive conversations about our games. We will still move forward with new forum features such as the ability to rate posts up or down, post highlighting based on rating, improved search functionality, and more. However, when we launch the new StarCraft II forums that include these new features, you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code, not your real name. The upgraded World of Warcraft forums with these new features will launch close to the release of Cataclysm, and also will not require your real name.

Researchers have developed an intelligent robot that can navigate itself around a city’s streets and collect resident’s rubbish on demand. An EU-funded project has resulted in a human-sized robot, called DustCart, that balances on a Segway base and can navigate itself to stop outside your door when summoned.

Three students were sent to the principal's office when they appeared to be high on drugs or alcohol in March, said Mustang School District Superintendent Bonnie Lightfoot. She said the kids explained that they had tried something called "i-dosers."

Young people plug into i-dosers through putting on headphones and downloading music and tones that create a supposed drug-like euphoria.

The technology is designed to combine a tone in each ear to create a binaural beat designed to alter brainwaves. Whether it was kids faking it, the power of suggestion or a high wasn't clear to administrators who investigated the students' claims. Adding to the mystery was the fact that these kids weren't troublemakers. So the worried Lightfoot sent parents a letter warning them to be aware of this new temptation to kids.

"The parents' reaction was the same as mine. Just shocked," Lightfoot said. "You've got to be kidding."

Sweden's political Piratpartiet (Pirate Party) and the operators of The Pirate Bay have always stressed their independence from each other, but they are now lashed tightly together–and could soon be much tighter. If Piratpartiet has its way, The Pirate Bay won't be using secret servers anymore. The servers will be quite public and located... inside the Swedish Parliament.

After a pan-European legal attempt to shut down The Pirate Bay, the site has run out of firms who will connect its servers to the Internet. The most recent casualty was German ISP Cyberbunker, which cut off the Bay after an injunction from a German district court. Cyberbunker's boss was furious, but he complied.

Soon after, the site was back up, this time helped out by its fellow Swedes in Piratpartiet. This might seem like a risky move for a nascent political party (Piratpartiet has two members sitting in the European Parliament), given that the Pirate Bay admins were recently found liable for contributory copyright infringement in a Swedish court.

Police are living in a fantasy world if they think arrows on display Tuesday had anything to do with the weekend G20 violence, a Whitby man said Wednesday.

Brian Barrett was shocked to go online Tuesday and see a photo gallery showing toy weapons seized from him while en route to Mississauga for a fantasy role-playing game.

His hand-made scale armour, cushion-tipped arrows and hockey-taped shields were among the items Toronto Police chief Bill Blair said were “seized from criminals” who wreaked havoc on the city Saturday.

They weren’t the only misleading items on display during a Tuesday press conference.

As you’ve probably heard many times by now, one of the biggest complaints facing Apple’s mobile platform on the marketplace is its inability to run native Flash Player code. While the real reasons behind the Apple-Adobe cold war still remain inconclusive, the company simply does not want to negotiate with Adobe because of its heavy involvement with the standardization of HTML5, not to mention its rubbish hypocritical argument that Flash Player is a closed standard.

Regardless of the war being fought behind Mother Apple’s revolutionary mobile i-devices, the rebels have responded by declaring independence from this tyrannical oppression by running Flash on an iPad. The guy behind Spirit untethered jailbreak tool for the iPhone cleverly managed to port the Adobe Flash runtime for Android over to the device using a compatibility layer by comex.

Interestingly enough, the port is named “Frash” and is currently able to play Flash content natively in the Safari browser on the iPad. The developer has mentioned that iPhone 3GS support is planned soon, as well as support for iOS 4, and there is a call for developers to move forward with the project at GitHub. “Frash uses a multi-process model similar to Chrome on the desktop, so a crash in the Frash/Flash plugin doesn’t take down the browser,” says the developer. “You can see this while I’m playing Alien Hominid: the ad above crashed (probably a Frash bug), but Safari stays open just fine, and continues to play other Flash content on the page.”

Just when you thought it was safe to use your computer, hackers have figured out how to attack everyday items. Your printer, your cellphone -- even the blender in your kitchen -- can be hacked and used against you.

And in the not-too-distant future, as the medical field makes advances with machine-to-human interfaces, even your own body and brain could be at risk.

Here are 10 everyday items that are open to fresh attacks from criminals.

Windows Phone 7 users will be in for a treat when it comes to gaming on the go, Microsoft has detailed to Pocket-lint.

In a round table briefing in London, Oded Ran, head of Consumer Marketing for Windows Phone, told Pocket-lint that all games currently available on the Xbox Live Arcade service on the Xbox 360 will be able to be ported to the new phone operating system by adding just a couple of lines of code.

"Just four lines of code changed an Xbox Live Arcade game to a Windows Phone 7 game in a recent publisher test", Ran told us.

Although Ran was cagey about telling us the publisher in question, he did confirm that Microsoft was actively talking to all Arcade Live publishers to help bring them to the new phone OS in time for launch later this year.

Seattle-based Amazon has owned a minority stake in Woot since 2006 but bought out the remainder of the company owned by founder and CEO Matt Rutledge for an undisclosed sum.

Technology websites reported the price was $110 million in cash.

Rutledge, 38, will stay on to run Woot, which includes a wholesale operation that sells to Amazon. Woot will operate independently, much like shoe website Zappos and audiobook seller Audible since they were acquired by Amazon, he said.

Woot last disclosed annual sales of $164 million in 2008. That year, Inc. magazine named Woot the fastest-growing private retailer in the U.S. and the fastest-growing private company in Dallas-Fort Worth.

One of the biggest trends we're seeing with MMOGs is that they're beginning to offer free-to-play models. Two big-name titles already come to mind: Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online, both of which were developed by Turbine and have switched (or are switching in regards to LOTRO) over to the new scheme within the last year.

Free-to-play offers a way for casual gamers--those who don't have three to four hours a pop to spend on a game per day--to enjoy the same realms and experiences as paid subscribers. Rather than forcing players to dump money into time that may never get used, the free-to-play scheme draws revenue from microtransactions and item purchases.

Apparently Blizzard has taken notice and believes that this system will eventually make its way into World of Warcraft. Why? Because eventually a game will launch and pull subscribers away from Blizzard's reigning MMORPG king. According to World of Warcraft’s lead designer Tom Chilton, MMOGs with free-to-play models weren't created to compete with World of Warcraft, but rather to compete with other MMOGs using the free-to-play model.

I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn't seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself.

At this moment, 4,547 comments have rained down upon me for that blog entry. I'm informed by Wayne Hepner, who turned them into a text file: "It's more than Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov." I would rather have reread all three than vet that thread. Still, they were a good set of comments for the most part. Perhaps 300 supported my position. The rest were united in opposition.

If you assume I received a lot of cretinous comments from gamers, you would be wrong. I probably killed no more than a dozen. What you see now posted are almost all of the comments sent in. They are mostly intelligent, well-written, and right about one thing in particular:

I should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games.

These are the button-by-button instructions on how to beat Super Mario 3 in 11-minutes. I assume they work but I wouldn't know because I can't read and play video games at the same time. As a matter of fact, I can't read and do anything at the same time. Because I never learned to read do anything. What? Tying shoes is for pussies.

A New York company named iPodmeister is all over the web, offering a way to dump old CDs and DVDs for a free iPhone 4 -- or iPad or iPod.

For a new 16GB iPhone 4, you just have to rustle up 349 CDs, put them in a box and ship them to NY, and you get a new phone.

The fine print: you don't actually get the phone -- but instead a check for $199 to get a new phone. You then go to AT&T and either open a new contract or extend your service. He can't actually send you the device, because it has to be registered directly to you.

Depending on how you hold your iPhone 4 during calls you may or may not notice your reception drop. There's no great fix for the iPhone 4 reception issues right now. Here are the best pseudo-solutions so far.