The right-leaning Drudge Report made it a habit in November and December to trumpet any and all headlines relating to the “Climategate” controversy — the story involving hacked emails attacking critics of global warming, which found their way onto the Internet. Those emails raised suspicions among global warming deniers of a conspiracy to hide or destroy climate data that would help make their case. A House of Commons inquiry cleared Jones of any possible wrongdoing, but a day later, that headline was nowhere to be found on the Drudge Report.

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IUGO Mobile has used Apple’s iPhone to dial up a measure of success with its smartphone-based games. The development company was the first gaming outlet to get its own featured section on the iTunes for PC Store. IUGO’s games are used for demo purposes in Apple Stores, and “Toy Bot Diaries” was part of the montage of games used in the first iPod touch gaming-centric TV commercial. When the ad came out, however, it wasn’t Apple that let IUGO Director of Business Development Sarah Thomson know that the game would soon be seen on TVs across North America.

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The file manager utility more than any other system app on any computing platform is the workhorse of daily computing tasks. Linux users have numerous file managers as choices. Depending on the distro, usually one or two default apps are preinstalled — but these might not be the best options. Thunar and Rox Filer offer flexibility and features not found in other typical Linux file managing systems. Thunar is designed for the Xfce Desktop Environment, but it works natively on the Gnome Desktop as well. Rox Filer runs on multiple platforms and is an integral part of the Puppy Linux distro.

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Silicon Valley is known for innovative ideas in technology, and now some of the area’s greatest minds have come up with a new way to solve one of their biggest operational problems: securing foreign talent. It’s called the “startup visa” and it’s getting a lot of attention in both California and D.C., because it would help create new jobs. The idea is to issue a work visa to foreign entrepreneurs who start a company in the U.S., provided that they raise at least $250,000 from qualified U.S. investors.

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The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, finally smashed two beams of protons together at high speed on Tuesday after a couple of failed starts. CERN was trying to get the two proton beams to collide at an energy level of 7 trillion electron volts, but problems with the electrical system forced the scientists to reset the system and try again. The experiment succeeded shortly after 1 p.m. central European summer time. CERN will run the collider for 18 to 24 months.

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Facebook is proposing another round of changes to its privacy policy. The updates are meant to better explain certain features, said Facebook Deputy General Counsel Michael Richter in a blog post — such as why an invitation that a non-users receives to join Facebook might include the names of persons other than the one who sent the invitation. (It’s because those people have imported their own contact lists to Facebook, and their lists include the invited person’s email address, he said). Some of the proposed changes are raising hackles in the privacy community.

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Though the iPhone, iPod touch and imminent iPad all sport a full browser and much-touted Web capabilities, video has been the sticking point. Much to some Web site publishers’ frustration, Apple doesn’t support Flash-based video playback, which limits what types of streaming content the users of these devices can view, whether through 3G or WiFi connections. It’s a situation MacCast’s publisher and producer Adam Christianson has dubbed “The Great Flash War of 2010.” Now Brightcove a video publishing tool that works using the common Internet protocol HTML5.

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In what will surely be a blow to Linux fans the world over, Sony is dropping support for the open operating system on its PlayStation 3, citing security concerns. The move will take effect Thursday with the release of a firmware update to version 3.21. That new version will disable the “Install Other OS” feature that was available on older PS3 systems — those released prior to the current slimmer models that launched last September. PS3 users won’t be required to upgrade to the new software. Those who choose not to, however, will miss out on several key features.

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Technologists tend to think of so-called smart cities as being tied together by technology. Their focus is on using technology to change our lives and make cities more efficient and smarter. The problem with this approach is that it only focuses on making application management more efficient and tying applications together. Ants are efficient, and their nest’s structure ties them together quite well. There are sections for worker ants, soldier ants, larvae and the queen, and they emit chemicals to tell each other what to do and where they have located food.

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People who placed pre-orders for the iPad after Saturday, April 27, are finding that they will have to wait a few weeks beyond the April 3 launch date to receive their devices. The shipping date for those pre-orders is now April 12. These dates apply to the first wave of iPads that will hit the market — the WiFi-only units. It appears that consumers who ordered the 3G + WiFi iPads are still on track to receive their devices in late April.

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Victorinox, maker of the Swiss Army Knife, has come out with a model that would make James Bond proud: a pocket knife with a super-secure USB stick. How secure is the Secure Pro USB stick? Well, it’s equipped with both a fingerprint reader and a thermal scanner so, if someone cuts off your finger and applies it to the fingerprint reader, that won’t work. Oh, and if a bad guy tries to force open the USB, it will self-destruct. The USB stick comes in three versions. The basic model is the Secure Pro, which is available in capacities of 8 GB, 16 GB and 32GB.

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When Microsoft first launched its Bing search engine less than a year ago, the company promised to map out a strategy that involved more frequent updates and feature additions. This week, the company reiterated its commitment to that road map with the announcement of some new tweaks and technology integration starting immediately and continuing into the summer — tweaks including, of course, mapping in search results. Changes include current and future refinements to the Quick Tab feature providing related information to main search queries.

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