A Gaming Rig With an Intimidating Aura, and That’s Even Before You Look Under the Hood

Gaming PCs are the gladiators of the computer world. So while most PCs look like a cross between a fax machine and a breadbox, the Acer Predator looks as if it came out of the bowels of the Roman Colosseum.

The gaming rig, which starts at $1,649 without a monitor, has an IntelCore 2 Quad 2.5-gigahertz processor and an Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT graphics card. The cheapest version comes with 2 gigabytes of memory and two 640-gigabyte hard drives. It also includes an optical disc reader and writer. Acer offers a $400 24-inch display with a maximum resolution of 1,920 by 1,200 pixels.

If all those speeds and feeds don’t catch your attention, the PC’s unique case just might. A front panel slides up like armor to reveal four U.S.B. ports and two audio ports. Front ribs mimic the radiator of a 1950s U.F.O. while the internal cooling system ensures the machine doesn’t go up in smoke. Internal colored lights add a bit of mystery to the proceedings. Most gaming PCs cost about $2,000 without monitors, making the Predator a bit more affordable than some of the other monsters out there.

Advertise on NYTimes.com From Nokia, a Cellphone With Many Familiar Features

For years, "More information about Nokia has shied away from cellphones with large touch screens. Keypads and keyboards seemed to be in the company’s DNA, resulting in a number of phones that look about the same. Now, however, Nokia is ready to expand its music line with a phone that looks suspiciously like a phone that begins with the letter “I.”

The 5800, available near the end of the year for about $300 (no carriers have been named yet), includes an eight-gigabyte memory card and is compatible with Windows Media Player and Nokia Music Store files. A resident PC application allows you to rip CDs to the phone automatically, and it includes a free year of Nokia’s Comes With Music download service.

The 3.2-inch touch screen offers both virtual keyboard and pen-input mode (included are a stylus and an accessory shaped like a guitar pick for swiping through photos and music). Also included is a 3.2-megapixel camera and a built-in GPS receiver.

The 5800 can connect to 3G and Wi-Fi networks and has special social networking features including adding “feeds” for four of your favorite contacts, allowing you to view Twitter and Facebook updates right under their pictures. As the song says: You’ll never walk alone.

NetKlix

A Printer That Won’t Blemish a Stylish Workspace

The lowly printer has long been hidden under our desks, thoroughly out of sight. Epson’s new Artisan 800, however, is easier on the eyes than the traditional gray box.


This glossy black inkjet printer looks more like a sleek piece of modern furniture than a boxy peripheral. It supports Wi-Fi printing and includes a swiveling touch panel and a 3.5-inch L.C.D. screen for viewing pictures before printing them.

The printer can produce graph and college-ruled paper on the fly and also print labels onto inkjet-compatible optical discs. It prints 38 pages a minute in black and white and can print an 8 by 10 photo in 50 seconds. It includes a scanner and copier with a resolution up to 4,800 dots per inch. The Artisan 800 costs $300 and will be available later this month. Of course, owning an attractive printer brings its own problem: do you have the desk real estate to display it?

A Magazine for the Rich (and Lucrative Ads)

SELLING any print advertising these days means sailing against the wind, but as some categories battle a gale, the safest harbor is in ads for luxury consumer products.
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Mark Lennihan/Associated Press

Removing microphones after introducing WSJ. Wednesday were, from left, Ellen Asmodeo-Giglio, its publisher; Michael Rooney, Dow Jones chief revenue officer; Tina Gaudoin, WSJ. editor in chief; and Robert J. Thomson, managing editor of The Journal.

That is the theory behind WSJ., the new magazine from The Wall Street Journal, which was unveiled to reporters on Wednesday and will be delivered to many subscribers on Saturday.

It joins an increasingly crowded field of magazines unabashedly celebrating wealth and consumption, all trying to take advantage of the healthiest part of a shrinking print advertising pool. And it is the latest in a series of bids by The Journal to capture a bigger piece of the consumer ad market and lessen its traditional dependence on ads aimed at businesses.

At just over 100 pages, the first issue of WSJ. has 51 advertisers, mostly of the type publications covet: high-end makers of clothes, handbags and other accessories, with brand names like Hermès, Audemars Piguet and Dior. Executives at The Journal said that some had signed on for two years.

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“And 19 advertisers are new to The Wall Street Journal,” said Michael Rooney, chief revenue officer of Dow Jones & Company, the division of the News Corporation that publishes The Journal.

In this climate, 51 advertisers is “a very solid number, a respectable number,” said Roberta Garfinkle, senior vice president and director of print strategy at TargetCast TCM, a media agency.

“It’s a smart move on The Journal’s part to go after that luxury retail marketplace that they really haven’t had,” she said, despite the growing number of magazines chasing essentially the same ads. “What remains to be seen is their execution.”

The Journal starts with a major advantage in that it can offer advertisers the wealthiest readership of any American newspaper. An even more affluent subgroup of subscribers will receive the magazine, Mr. Rooney said, with an average household income of $265,000.

Out of The Journal’s domestic Saturday circulation of about 2 million, 800,000 copies — those sold by subscription or at newsstands in 17 large markets — will include WSJ. In addition, 160,000 copies will be distributed on Fridays overseas. The magazine begins as a quarterly, with plans to go monthly next year.

Executives would not say how much The Journal had invested in WSJ. or when the company expected it to break even.

For several years, advertising for luxury goods has outpaced mass-market and business-to-business ads, and a number of publishers have tried to capitalize on that trend, including The New York Times, which introduced T, a style magazine, in 2004.

As the economy has struggled over the last year, the divide between high-end ads and others has widened. Ad pages in United States magazines fell 7.4 percent in the first half of 2008, according to the Magazine Publishers Association, but some categories appealing to affluent consumers — high-end apparel and other retail, and hotels and resorts — were roughly flat.

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Newspapers have fared worse, with advertising revenue down almost 8 percent last year, and about 13 percent in the first half of 2008. The Journal does not make figures public, but executives there have said that ad revenue is down sharply this year.

In this decade, The Journal has taken several steps to broaden its identity as a publication primarily about business news, read mostly by men, to win more consumer ads. It added the softer Personal Journal and Weekend Journal sections, and in 2006, began publishing on Saturdays.

Since being taken over last December by News Corporation and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch, the paper has put greater focus on general-interest news, including politics and international news.

WSJ. resembles How To Spend It, the weekend magazine of The Financial Times, a Journal competitor, with slightly less focus on consumption — though there is plenty of that, from canine couture to face cream to trench coats. It aims a bit more for features articles, with items on, among other things, business executives, philanthropy, feuding over the America’s Cup and the workout regimen of Gov. Sarah Palin, a piece planned well before she became Senator John McCain’s running mate.

Tina Gaudoin, editor in chief of WSJ., said her magazine was less about how to spend it and more about “how to live it.”

Reflecting the magazine’s high style, its unveiling was held at the Pierpont Morgan Library over a breakfast that included smoked salmon, caviar and raspberry parfait, with a digital slide show and executives reading from teleprompters.

Robert J. Thomson, managing editor of The Journal, poked a little fun at the pomp, saying, “This being convention season, histrionics are the order of the day.”

Mr. Thomson, like Mr. Murdoch, likes to take a few shots at the competition, in keeping with the rough-and-tumble of British newspapering — he was the editor of The Times of London — and Wednesday was no exception.

Referring to the industry’s woes, he said, “We don’t have the fetid air of failure at Dow Jones,” and proceeded to take a veiled swipe at T magazine. And as for the magazine of The Financial Times, he said, “How to Spend It is like a BMW 3 series, and this is a BMW 7 series.”

Yahoo to Let Users Switch Off Customized Ads

Yahoo announced Friday that it will allow users to turn off the customization of advertising on the pages of Yahoo.com. The opt-out option should be available at the end of August, through Yahoo’s privacy center, the company said.

Yahoo already allows users to opt out of customized ads that it serves on other companies’ pages. This tweak would stop the company from serving ads based on a user’s behavior on Yahoo’s own pages.

The company made the announcement as part of a response to a letter about privacy that was sent last week by four House members. The top congressmen at the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent letters to 33 Internet and telecommunications companies, including Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and AOL, asking them to detail their privacy policies. The committee asked for responses by Friday.

Yahoo’s response to the House letter (below the press release, here) was somewhat predictable, but provided some interesting details about its behavioral targeting. It is experimenting with links on targeted ads that say things like “what is this” or “about this ad.” These take users to a page that explains the targeting. Opting out is not very common: in July, 75,000 users visited the opt-out page within Yahoo’s privacy pages (Yahoo said it could not estimate the total number of users who had opted out). And Yahoo said it has an internal group, the Ad Council, that reviews requests from advertisers to determine whether the topics they want to target are too sensitive — for example, if they include certain medical terms.

I’ll be writing more about the Congressional interest in online advertising for Monday’s paper.

Google Told to Turn Over User Data of YouTube

—A federal judge has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom its records of which users watched which videos on YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far.

The order raised concerns among YouTube users and privacy advocates that the video viewing habits of tens of millions of people could be exposed. But Google and Viacom said they were hoping to come up with a way to protect the anonymity of the site’s visitors.

Viacom also said that the information would be safeguarded by a protective order restricting access to the data to outside lawyers, who will use it solely to press Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google.

Still, the judge’s order, which was made public late Wednesday, renewed concerns among privacy advocates that Internet companies like Google are collecting unprecedented amounts of private information that could be misused or fall unexpectedly into the hands of third parties.

“These very large databases of transactional information become honey pots for law enforcement or for litigants,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.

For every video on YouTube, the judge required Google to turn over to Viacom the login name of every user who had watched it, and the address of their computer, known as an I.P. or Internet protocol address.

Both companies have argued that I.P. addresses alone cannot be used to unmask the identities of individuals with certainty. But in many cases, technology experts and others have been able to link I.P. addresses to individuals using other records of their online activities.

The amount of data covered by the order is staggering, as it includes every video watched on YouTube since its founding in 2005. In April alone, 82 million people in the United States watched 4.1 billion clips there, according to comScore. Some experts say virtually every Internet user has visited YouTube.

Google and Viacom said they had had discussions about ways to further protect users’ anonymity, but as of Thursday evening the two companies had yet to agree on how to do that.

“We are investigating techniques, including anonymization, to enhance the security of information that will be produced,” said Michael D. Fricklas, Viacom’s general counsel.

Mr. Fricklas said Viacom would not have direct access to the data, and that its use would be strictly limited by the court order. Viacom would not, for example, chase down users who had illegally posted clips from “The Colbert Report.”

“The information that is produced by Google is going to be limited to outside advisers who can use it solely for the purpose of enforcing our rights against YouTube and Google,” Mr. Fricklas said.

In a letter sent Thursday, Google’s lawyers pressed their counterparts at Viacom to accept a more limited set of data. “We request that plaintiffs agree that YouTube may redact user names and I.P. addresses from the viewing data in the interests of protecting user privacy,” wrote David H. Kramer, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

In a response, a Viacom lawyer wrote that Viacom was “committed to working with Google” on the privacy issue.

Interestingly, Google has rejected demands by privacy groups for more stringent protections for I.P. address records, saying that in most cases the addresses cannot be used to identify users. Yet Google argued that YouTube viewing data should be kept from Viacom, in part, to protect the privacy of its users.

Judge Louis L. Stanton of the Southern District of New York, who is presiding over Viacom’s lawsuit against Google and YouTube, referenced Google’s past statements on I.P. addresses to conclude that its “privacy concerns are speculative.”

“It is an ‘I told you so’ moment,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington.

Other privacy advocates said they welcomed Viacom’s commitment to limit its use of the information, but they remained concerned about user rights.

“Users should have the right to challenge and contest the production of this deeply private information,” said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group.

That right is protected by the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, Mr. Opsahl added. Congress passed that law in 1988 to protect video rental records, after a newspaper disclosed the rental habits of Robert H. Bork, then a Supreme Court nominee.

Mr. Opsahl also said that even records that did not include a user’s login name and I.P. address might be able to be associated with specific people.

In 2006, after AOL released for research purposes the search records of thousands of anonymous users, reporters from The New York Times were able to track down one person by analyzing her search queries. Mr. Opsahl said anonymous viewing habits may similarly yield clues about the identity of viewers.

Viacom wants the viewing data in part to help it determine the extent to which YouTube’s success was built on the popularity of copyrighted clips that were illegally posted to the site. Outside experts say that without the data it would be virtually impossible to pin that down.

Judge Stanton agreed that the information could help Viacom make its case. “A markedly higher proportion of infringing-video watching may bear on plaintiff’s vicarious liability claim, and defendants’ substantial noninfringing use defense,” he wrote.