There was a certain Web site going around that claims to offer access to the Halo 4 beta. Let’s just ignore that Halo 4 has only had one trailer and Microsoft has been rather mum on it since. A beta isn’t completely out of the realm of possibility, but offering it to everyday gamers before releasing any information to the press is.

Now, David Ellis warned us of this fake beta a while ago via Twitter. That must have been enough to deter most gamers, but not all Halo players are on Twitter. They might not have heard the news and a Halo 4 beta would certainly make their day.

Well, the Web site was taken down after the press got a hold of Ellis’ warning. Best to get out of the scam business before it explodes in your face. Microsoft is forcing it to explode by filing a complaint against the Web site with the National Arbitration Forum according to Fusible.

Microsoft has a 99.9 percent chance to claim the domain name from the fraudster. It won’t be long before halo4beta.net becomes Microsoft property and can be used for the actual Halo 4 beta that will most likely precede Halo 4’s expected launch at the end of this year.

So as to avoid falling for such a scam in the future, remember these helpful tips regarding multiplayer betas. Betas are always announced by the publisher/developer proper before they are deployed for public play. Even if it’s a closed beta, there will be a press release or announcement of some kind. The Web site for a beta will also have links to the Web sites of the developer/publisher and are usually already tied into the Web site proper anyway.

In other words, the old saying remains true: If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

“Welcome to the Year of the Dragon!”

That’s the headline for the Arenanet article, announcing the upcoming beta. A-Net has already started closed beta testing, and looks to expand upon it in the upcoming months. In February, select members of the press will be invited to test the game. In March-April, A-Net will “aggressively ramp up the size” of their beta events. They go on to say the game will release this year.

Mike O’Brien, president of A-Net, said this of the work put into the project, “It’s been an incredible adventure over the past five years, working with our community and our team of dedicated artists, designers, and programmers to realize this vision. This year, the seeds of that work come to fruition. We can’t wait to play the game with you.”

As someone who’s been playing Guild Wars since the alpha test back in 2004, the release of Guild Wars 2 is definitely on the top of the most wanted in 2012 list.

Also, Happy Chinese New Year to everyone! 2012 is the year of the dragon, which I think we can all agree is the best.

It appears that we are getting closer to the official launch of the iTunes Match service, as Apple has just released another beta to developers.

iTunes Match, the $25-a-year subscription service from Apple that “matches” a user’s iTunes music with a high-quality version in the cloud (so that it’s accessible anywhere), was scheduled for a late October release – but has obviously been delayed.

MacRumors reports that Apple has released iTunes 10.5.1 beta 3 to developers, and it contains stability improvements that are said to benefit the iTunes Match service.

From the beta update:

iTunes 10.5.1 beta 3 includes a number of important stability and performance improvements for iTunes Match, and is a required update for all subscribers to iTunes Match beta.

Backup regularly and do not delete the music you add to iCloud from your computer. Apple may periodically delete all iCloud libraries during the beta period. This will require you to scan, match, and upload songs again

Currently, these developers are the only users with access to iTunes Match. These developers have seen Apple delete their iTunes Match libraries on a number of occasions in order to facilitate the testing – and this update is no different. Apple reminds devs that their iTunes Match music is never really safe and that they should always have backups stored to their computers.

So it looks like stability is the big reason for the delay. These beta releases with “stability and performance” updates, as well as Apple’s wording in the announcement emails suggest that the iTunes Match launch shouldn’t be too far away.

Are you going to sign up for the service? Let us know in the comments.

Normally, when users click on a celebratory doodle, they are taken to a search results page for the entity being recognized. The Google birthday doodle is no different. Once clicked, a search results page for the term “Google” is returned. Naturally, the first result for the Google query is Google.com, followed by Google Images Search, and Google’s Twitter account.

For those who perhaps feel the latest doodle is self-serving — you know, like a Senate committee that doesn’t want Google Maps results showing in Google search engine query results — considering all of the other doodle’s Google has dedicated to other, non-Google entities, if they want to celebrate their own company, it’s not hurting anyone. Nor is it reducing the quality of using Google, either.

To help celebrate Google’s 13th birthday, we can take a trip down memory lane, thanks to the efforts of Archive.org. Their first scan of what would become Google, which was done on November 11, 1998, returns the following result:

Welcome to Google

Google Search Engine Prototype
Might-work-some-of-the-time-prototype that is much more up to date.

Once clicked, the links return the following pages, which some, if not most, of you have seen before, but since we’re celebrating Google’s birthday, it won’t hurt to see them again.

First, we have Google as it was at when it was hosted on Stanford’s servers. Aside from the more refined font, there’s not an incredible difference between then and now:

Click for a bigger image

Followed by Google in its alpha stage:

Click for a bigger image

Until now, word-of-mouth recommendations have been the force in driving traffic to the Google search engine. Google currently averages about 65 searches per second at peak times and three and a half million searches per day.

And this, which attempts to explain how PageRank works:

Patent-Pending PageRank Technology: Google’s PageRankTM technology performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages that is calculated by solving an equation of 500 million variables and more than 2 billion terms. Google does not determine results by counting links. Instead, Google’s PageRank uses the vast link structure of the web as an organizational tool. In essence, Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote by Page A for Page B…

There’s much, much more where that came from, and it’s a fun read, especially if you’re curious about Google’s evolution. With that in mind, happy birthday, Google. It’s hard to imagine a world without you, although, this particular web comic did so with a pitch-perfect offering:

StumbleUpon’s new Explore Box, however, is putting a little more targeted search into the experience. The new feature, which we told you about last month, is still in beta according to a press release.

The official StumbleUpon YouTube channel has released this short video explaining the new box. “Easily explore thousands of interests. When you’re interested in something new, the Explore Box has something for you.”

With the explore box, users can enter specific topics that they want to stumble – for instance, Lady Gaga, Vampires, Bourbon, Guitars. Once they begin stumbling that specific topic, they can easily opt out of it in the top toolbar and go back to stumbling all interests.

StumbleUpon already lets you narrow your stumbling down to categories, but those categories aren’t all that specific (Music, Art, Technology, American Literature, Alternative Rock). This new Explore Box expands the topics that you can stumble from around 500 to hundreds of thousands.

“Millions of people already enjoy stumbling to be entertained and inspired, and the Explore Box now makes content discovery easier for those who want a more precise way to explore their interests,” said Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon CEO and co-founder. “The Explore Box enables discovery for anything you want to learn about, and surfaces the hidden gems you can’t find anywhere else.”

The new feature definitely makes the “discovery engine” a little more like a search engine. But it shouldn’t take away from the randomness that makes StumbleUpon so much fun. For instance, my targeted exploration of “Bourbon” netted me articles about different types of Bourbon, recipes with Bourbon, the Bourbon-making process, the French House of Bourbon, and other tangential topics.

As indicated, the new OS is being designed with touch in mind, although, traditional methods of computer input will work, too. According to earlier reports, Windows 8 will be “app friendly,” which demonstrates the changing landscape of computer terminology. Apparently, the phrase “computer program” is going the way of the dodo, as Microsoft looks for ways to identify with the younger generation, a group who identifies with the “apps” abbreviation more than they do the word “programs.”

Yay, marketing.

Anyway, there are rumors out now about potential release dates for the new build, and it looks like September 2011 could be the date for the Windows 8 beta, with April 2012 being a potential time the operating system is released to manufacturers. ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley, their resident Microsoft guru, has more:

I’ve received new information from a trusted source that Microsoft is actually on track to release to manufacturing all Windows 8 versions by April 2012.

I’ve also heard from my contact that Microsoft’s game plan is to deliver a beta build– not a pre-beta or preview — of Windows 8 around the time of the Build conference in mid-September. This allegedly will be the one and only Windows 8 beta, my contact said.

Foley goes on to say that Windows 8 will indeed be optimized for touch tablets — do you wanna touch the Windows? — although, one wonders if such optimization will have a negative impact on its usability for standard PC input methods.

For those of you following the operating system details, are you ready to move on from Windows 7, especially if that touch thing gets good reviews? Let us know what you think.

Are you downloading the Beta version? Let us know.

What makes Firefox 4 Beta so special, compared to its earlier editions? Not only did Mozilla redesign the user interface they’ve also incorporated a ton of new features. Check out the list below from Mozilla’s release notes.

It should be noted that this is just a Beta preview, and some bugs will happen… as Mozilla wants to catch all errors now before the final product is released.

If you’ve downloaded Firefox Beta 4 – Let us know what you think about it.

On the official Google Blog, Matthew Glotzbach, Director, Product Management, Google Enterprise writes:

Ever since we launched the Google Apps suite for businesses two years ago, it’s had a service level agreement, 24/7 support, and has met or exceeded all the other standards of non-beta software. More than 1.75 million companies around the world run their business on Google Apps, including Google. We’ve come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn’t fit for large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phase. So we’ve focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark.

Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both enterprise and consumer versions — are now out of beta. "Beta" will be removed from the product logos today, but we’ll continue to innovate and improve upon the applications whether or not there’s a small "beta" beneath the logo. Indeed, today we’re also announcing some other Google Apps features that we think will appeal to large enterprises: mail delegation, mail retention and ongoing enhancements to Apps reliability.

Clearly the removal of "beta"  does not mean that these are the final versions of Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Talk. I think it’s safe to say that Google will continue to add new features just as it always has. At least the company is apparently comfortable enough with the services that they are certain users can rely on them.

Unfortunately some of the services have been known to see the occasional outage in recent memory, but as a user of some of these services, I have to say that they have been pretty solid for the most part in terms of being accessible.

On a sidenote, Google has included a new lab in the list of gmail labs that allows you to put the beta logo back on. Somebody out there will want to do this. It’s called "Back to Beta."

A Look Inside A Very Controversial Startup

You paid for that mp3 and you don’t want it anymore. Why not sell it? Despite a a legal quagmire that suggests that you shouldn’t, startup bopaboo.com says you can and they’ll help you. 

Still in private beta, bopaboo provides a simple marketplace to buy and sell mp3′s and potentially other digital content. In a test, I was able to upload a random mp3 and have it on sale for 45 cents (a typical price) in seconds. Using a bopaboo provided $1 credit, I bought another mp3 and downloaded it easily.  Seconds later, since it was still in my online locker (bopabox) as well as on my computer, I had the same track back up for sale.

Therein lies the legal rub for the music industry and for bopaboo, the ease with which digital music can be copied.  Music attorney John Strohm looked at the issue…

and concluded that the most obvious illegal act happened when the track was copied and bopaboo did not do the copying. But "is there a way to confirm that the files being sold are obtained legally and that the seller is not retaining copies?," he wrote on Idolator. "If not, is a company truly able to insulate itself from liability through its terms of use, and are consumers willing to take the risk?"

In other words, just like a pawn shop can be prosecuted for selling goods it could reasonably have suspected were stolen, bopaboo might be proven to be facilitate and even encourage the sale of illegally copied tracks and the buyer to have purchased stolen or copied goods.

Bopaboo is not unaware of the legal challenges it is certain to face. "When we began Bopaboo, we set for ourselves not a modest challenge: can we provide consumers a legal method and marketplace to buy and sell digital music?," executive Alex Meshkin wrote on the company’s official blog. The next chapter’s should be interesting.

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