Tech brief

On Tech Brief today: Google Games gets going and how to save water with a soccer pitch.

• Rare is the student who has any cash to spare. Especially when they are called Joel Tenenbaum. The graduate student was ordered to pay $675,000 in damages for illegally sharing 30 songs. He appealed and the judge in the case reviewed it and agreed the total was ""unconstitutionally excessive". So she reduced the damages payable to $67,500. Mr Tenenbaum responds:

"Obviously, it's better news than it could have been. But it's basically equally unpayable to me."

• When Google turned the logo adorning its search pages into a playable copy of Pacman it sucked up hundreds of hours of productivity as folk spent time eating dots and avoiding Blinky, Inky, Pinky and Clyde. Now, reports TechCrunch, social games giant Zynga has been the recipient of a $200m investment by the search firm.

"Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga's games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games."

• Robots can build cars, clean your floors and now educate your children. The New York Times reports on initiatives to use robots in classrooms to teach youngsters social skills, how to keep things tidy and, in the case of a robot called RUBI, languages. The upside is the robot's endless patience and delight in repetition. But it's not all good.

"Like any new kid in class, RUBI took some time to find a niche. Children swarmed the robot when it first joined the classroom: instant popularity. But by the end of the day, a couple of boys had yanked off its arms."

• The NSA is watching. The National Security Agency handles many of the secret cyber activities of the US government. Now, in a programme called "Perfect Citizen" it plans to keep an eye on net-based attacks directed at those running power plans or other parts of critical infrastructure.

"Perfect Citizen will look at large, typically older computer control systems that were often designed without Internet connectivity or security in mind. Many of those systems--which run everything from subway systems to air-traffic control networks--have since been linked to the internet, making them more efficient but also exposing them to cyber attack."

• The success of water pumps disguised as roundabouts has been well documented. Now Atopia Research is taking the idea further by producing a sports pitch that can harvest rainwater and be a community centre.

"The field and stands are permeable and allow water to collect right below the surface into cisterns kept at ground level to be easily accessible to the local community. The football field's bleachers can also be used to house schools, health clinics and local stores. It can be built using local materials that are readily available such as abandoned shipping containers for cisterns to make it an extremely cost-effective model."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to @bbctechbrief on Twitter, tag them bbctechbrief on Delicious or e-mail them to [email protected].

Links in full

• Jonathan Saltzman | Boston Globe | Judge slashes penalty in illegal music downloading case
• Michael Arrington | TechCrunch | Google Secretly Invested $100+ Million In Zynga, Preparing To Launch Google Games
• Benedict Carey and John Markoff | New York Times | Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot
• Siobhan Gorman | Wall Street Journal | US Plans Cyber Shield for Utilities, Companies
• Naresh Kumar | PSFK | Man-Made Eco System Doubles As Playing Field And Community Center