Swedish software company MindArk, which operates the online game “Entropia Universe,” has authorized a Beijing company to create a version of its online game for the Chinese market.

“Entropia Universe,” which has more than 580,000 players, is set game set on a fictional planet in which users can work, meet friends, trade and buy virtual land. It’s unusual among online games in that its currency is convertible at a fixed rate to the U.S. dollar.

Gothenburg-based MindArk said in a statement Friday that the Chinese virtual world will have a capacity of 7 million concurrent players and aims to draw 150 million users in total.

It said the new game is expected to generate $1 billion in economic activity every year.

Elina Heng, a spokeswoman for the new project, said MindArk aims to launch the new game in August 2008.

The ongoing war between content producers and hackers over the AACS copy protection used in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs produced yet another skirmish last week, and as has been the case as of late, the hackers came out on top.

The hacker “BtCB” posted the new decryption key for AACS on the Freedom to Tinker web site, just one day after the AACS Licensing Authority (AACS LA) issued the key. In true tongue-in-cheek hacker fashion, the site posted the 128-bit key as a method of decrypting a small haiku that they placed on the same page, noting that it just might accidentally (wink, wink) be the same key that will decrypt new high-definition discs as well.

If you’ve been playing with Google’s new Street View feature–that $25 billion time suck–you may well have wondered how the heck they took those 360-degree images while driving down the street.

Well, wonder no more. Thanks to our good friend Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing, we now know that many of the images, at least those shot outside the San Francisco Bay Area–were shot using this fairly disco-ball-esque device by the outside contractor, Immersive Media.

Microsoft Corp. said on Thursday it would offer improved capacity to search copyrighted books on the Internet as the company battles Google Inc. for advertising dollars from Web-based services.

Microsoft said it had received permission from dozens of publishers including Cambridge University Press, McGraw-Hill Cos Inc. and Simon & Schuster, a CBS Corp. unit, to use their copyrighted titles.

Microsoft said Live Search Books would now include a counter telling how many pages are left within the number of pages they are allowed to view, and tools to allow people to more easily search within books using specific keywords.

The preview pane will include a cover image, book summary and table of contents and the system will have links allowing readers to buy books from online retailers or the publisher.