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Microsoft's Hohm energy efficiency and tracking service, still in beta, has a unique sense of style. Who expects a discussion about insulation R-values to involve pirate jokes?

"What do pirates look for in attic insulation?" Hohm asks. "The arrrr value! Insulation R-value measures how well a material stops heat flow, the higher the better."

This can be a bit jarring at first—are the sorts of people who write about "arrrr value!" really the ones you go to for home improvement questions?—but if you're going to use Hohm, you'd better get used to it.

"Read and follow the instructions that came with your new refrigerator. (This will not harm your street cred)," says a tip on buying more efficient iceboxes. You'll also want to keep the new fridge away "from anything hot like an oven, direct sunlight, or visiting supermodels." 

When it comes to lighting your room, consider task lighting; it can save money because, the site informs us, "you won't need to turn on the overhead light for your ironic cross-stitch." Advice from Bob Vila this is not.

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Belgians are probably most interested in knowing whether their country will survive its strife between the French and Flemish-Dutch speaking groups, or whether it will break apart into separate nations. Here at Ars, however, we’re more interested in the country's peculiarities with respect to copyright law and broadband technology (and, of course, Belgium's wide variety of beers and chocolate). We recently wrote about Belgian bandwidth hogs, and in the past on ISPs having to filter P2P and newspapers suing Google News. This week it’s Belgian broadcasters seeking to cripple Digital Video Recorders and get compensation for their introduction.

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It's hard to pin down exactly when Nerf started going for broke with its gun designs, but it may have been around this time last year when the Vulcan was released. That gun featured a 25-dart, belt-fed design that handled both full-auto and single-shot firing, but it also had some issues with jamming and was a little too heavy for child-sized warfare. This year, Nerf went back to the drawing board for the Stampede, and the $50 package features several steps in the right direction.

From office warfare to friendly dart battles in the backyard, this is a great addition to the arsenal.

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There are few examples of good writing in video games. The medium tends to tackle the same issues and genres, and only rarely steps outside of that comfort zone. At the recent Fan Expo in Toronto, a group of veteran writers and producers, with credits ranging from Too Human to Splinter Cell Conviction, discussed what makes a good writer and a well-written game.

The majority of the discussion centered on why games aren't yet at the same level as film or television.

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It's apparent that the physics lexicon has been dragged kicking and screaming out of the 19th century with a recent paper published in Nature Photonics titled "Hacking commercial quantum cryptography systems by tailored bright illumination." I never thought I would live to see the word "hacking" used in its proper context in a physics paper. But enough about physics lingo. What about the quantum encryption hacks alluded to by the title?

What we have is another paper demonstrating that the weak point of quantum encryption systems is the point where classical meets quantum. This is not the first hack of its kind, but, it is, in true hacker tradition, the first focused on a commercial system.

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After months of pressure from state attorneys general, Craigslist pulled its adult services listings offline over the Labor Day weekend. Visitors to the site were greeted with a black bar with the word "censored" in white text (as seen to the right) where the link to the adult services listings would normally be.

The adult services listings have been a perpetual source of concern for law enforcement, including numerous state attorneys general, who have said that listings facilitate prostitution and that children are often victimized by the ads. Craigslist originally had an Erotic Services section, but shut it down in May 2009 in response to pressure from law enforcement. The company had previously attempted to stave off criticism by verifying listings over the phone and working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, but decided that having an entire section of the site devoted to the sex trade was a bad idea. Shortly after the erotic services section was yanked, it was replaced with the adult services section.

The new section, which required credit card payments for listings that were reviewed by moderators before going live, failed to mollify critics. The attorney general of Connecticut and 37 of his colleagues across the country subpoenaed the classified site over what they described as its brothel business. In late August, Kansas attorney general Steve Six called on Craigslist once again to shut down adult services, saying that the site had not done enough to fight "illegal sexual activity on the Internet."

At this time, it's not clear whether craigslist is going to get out of the adult services business altogether. The classifieds giant has remained silent so far, not offering any rationale for its move. If this does indeed mark the end of the line for the adult services section on Craigslist, it doesn't mean that all adult services ads will magically vanish; they're likely to migrate to other parts of the site. That said, the attorneys general will no doubt view the apparent shutdown of the adult services section as a victory in their war against the online sex trade.

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An Apple event means lots of new announcements. Almost the entire iPod line got updated, Apple TV got a serious makeover, and iTunes 10 got... something. But we also covered a patent suit, some lessons learned from Delicious Library 2, and a rumor about an iPhone revision. Read on for the roundup:

Microsoft cofounder drops patent bomb on Apple, Google, Facebook: Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen has filed a lawsuit against 11 tech companies for violations of his current company's patents that cover basic Internet concepts. The list includes Google, Facebook, and Apple... but not Microsoft.

Hands-on photos, observations of new iPods, Apple TV: Following the fall Apple media event, Ars got some hands-on time with the new iPod touch, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, and Apple TV. We have some up-close and personal photos to share with you, as well as extra product details that we got out of the Apple representatives.

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The fallout from Google's Buzz social networking aggregator continues: the company has agreed to settle a class action lawsuit over concerns that the service's original configuration violated users' privacy. While Google has made numerous changes to the service since its February launch and maintains that it did no wrong, the company has agreed to pay out $8.5 million to end the litigation.

Buzz launched in early February to a lukewarm reception, which was quickly followed by an enormous controversy over concerns that the default settings revealed private information. At the heart of the problem was an auto-follow feature meant to facilitate quick adoption. Users quickly found, however, that it could reveal their Google accounts to people they'd like to avoid. Journalists were concerned that confidential sources could be revealed to the public, while one woman noted that her private Google account was auto-followed by her abusive ex-husband.

Google worked quickly to make changes, turning the auto-follow feature off in favor of recommendations, and making some features easier to opt out of. Still, it wasn't long before a federal class-action suit was filed on behalf of all Gmail users who were automatically opted-in to the Buzz service.

Google has also faced criticism from advocacy groups like EPIC and the EFF, US lawmakers, and foreign governments.

In the proposed settlement submitted to the court this week, Google agreed to make efforts to better educate Buzz users on issues of privacy and the particular privacy features that Buzz offers. Additionally, Google also agreed to pay out $8.5 million to a fund which will be disbursed as cy pres awards for organizations that focus on Internet privacy policy or education.

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Would it be sad to admit I was excited when our Move feature was pimped on the official True Blood twitter account? If so, chain me to the sad pole, because that was awesome. We went toe-to-toe with Sony's PlayStation Move for a week, and liked what we saw. Microsoft announced the price for Xbox Live was going less than the price of a cup of coffee a month, and the rage was intense.

There will also be a new official Xbox 360 controller, but right now we don't know if it will be better... or just different. This is what gamers were talking about this week.

P.S: go buy Ivy the Kiwi.

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Samsung fires first Android-powered salvo at iPad with Galaxy Tab: Samsung is putting the iPad in its crosshairs with its new Android-powered Galaxy Tab touchscreen tablet. The well-specced device will launch in a few week in Europe, with the US and Asia to follow soon.

Chrome 7 shows off hardware acceleration, "Tabpose": Google's Chrome Web browser will soon gain hardware-accelerated graphics—the latest trend for Web browsers that has already shown up in early builds of Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4.

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