With the release of the PSP Go and the DSi, both Sony and Nintendo brought small, downloadable games to traditional gaming handhelds. It's a concept that has been met with mixed success on the iPhone and other mobile platforms, spawning both a refreshing wave of creative new games and a glut of shovelware. But several months after the launch of the DSiWare shop and PSP Minis on the PlayStation Network, both services are still struggling to find their legs.

Ars spoke with several developers to get their perspectives on the burgeoning marketplaces.

The lobbying group European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) today called on antitrust regulators worldwide to follow the European Commission and pressure Redmond into offering a browser ballot, similar to what the company began serving yesterday to European customers via Windows Update, everywhere. The ballot is offered to consumers on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

ECIS members include Adobe Systems, Corel, IBM, Nokia, Opera, Oracle, RealNetworks, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. It was Norwegian browser maker Opera that first filed a complaint with the European Union in December 2007, accusing Microsoft of violating EU antitrust law by bundling IE with Windows. And the company isn't satisfied yet. "Opera is a member of ECIS, which supported the complaint to the European Commission because it promoted the ECIS core values of competition, interoperability and consumer choice," reads a statement in an ECIS press release today. "Microsoft agreed to change its business practices in the face of formal charges from the Commission. Consumers deserve the same unbiased browser choice on all the world's more than 1 billion personal computers." Of course, Opera doesn't rule the ECIS alone, but given that the lobbying group is mainly composed of Microsoft rivals, we doubt any of them would object to Opera's proposition.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has dismissed the ECIS' call to arms. "The issues in the Internet Explorer case have already been the subject of extensive legal action in several other countries around the world, including the United States, which have each developed their own legal solutions which are different than the browser choice screen pursued by the European Commission after years of litigation," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars.

Microsoft is not obligated to take the ballot screen outside the boundaries of the EU, but the push from ECIS could spur other consumer groups, competition agencies, and antitrust regulators to band together against the software giant. It worked in Europe, but will it work in the rest of the world?

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Parents of Internet- or TV-addicted teens finally have confirmation of something they have long suspected: the more screen exposure teenagers get, the more detached they are from those around them. Those are the findings of a paper set to be published in the March issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, which examined the relationship between adolescent screen time and social involvement with parents and peers. Though the paper doesn't quite say that Internet and TV are the cause of the detachment, it's clear that the two are related.

The paper, called "Adolescent Screen Time and Attachment to Parents and Peers," surveyed behaviors of 3,043 New Zealand students in 2004. Among the findings were a 4 or 5 percent increase in detachment to parents for every hour spent watching TV or surfing the Web, respectively. It's not all about the parents, either—more time spent gaming was associated with low attachment to peers as well. More time spent reading offline and doing homework was associated with higher attachment to parents.

Portal's eerie symbolism was ramped up another notch this week when Valve announced a patch that has gamers playing what seems to be an alternate reality game within the platformer. The update to the game doesn't seem to include much new content at first glance, but what has been added is clearly only the beginning of a much bigger trip down Valve's latest rabbit hole.

Today's announced update was accompanied by a short, cryptic note: "Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations." When you next boot up the game, there is a radio in your cell that broadcasts morse code when you hold it and stand on the red button in the first level (as seen in the video below). It turns out there are a total of 26 different radios in the game now, and they all have morse code.

The game's new achievement, "Transmission Received" is unlocked when you discover the first morse code radio broadcast. Not only that, but the sound the radios make when a radio is thrown into a force field is extremely unnerving.

Enterprising Steam community members rooted around the game files and discovered a new group called "dinosaur" that contained a ton of morse code audio, as well as some images that seemed to be corrupted by strange data.