The PAX registration system went live on April 25, it crashed within fifteen minutes. The servers went down, Penny Arcade switched registration vendors, and the servers were brought back up on the morning of May 2.

Later that day, Penny Arcade updated their site with the following message:

"We're shocked to be writing this... but we're completely out of 3-Day badges for PAX Prime 2012. There are still single day passes, and while it's impossible to say how long they will last, it is fair to say "not very long."

But to be perfectly clear: Three-Day passes are gone for good, and the only way to attend PAX is to grab the single day passes that are still available."

Last year it took over 20 days for PAX Prime to sell out of 3-day passes. This year, they sold out in less than 24 hours, including the small amount of time servers were up on April 25. The likelihood of 1-day passes selling out soon is very high.

PAX Prime has added a hotel registration system for attendees. Rather than having to search for individual hotels and comparing rates through a spreadsheet, the new system does all of that for you. This also includes potential savings for exhibitors and groups that reserve two or more rooms.

Congratulations to those who were able to pick up passes before they sold out. Good luck to those who are trying to pick up 1-day passes, or will try their hand at Craigslist or Ebay second-hand tickets. Myself, I might have to try for a media-pass, after I figure out which friends were able to pick up a ticket yesterday.

Update: As @Vapid Soul mentions in the comments, Friday and Saturday daily passes are now sold out as well. Expect Sunday passes to be gone before the day is out.

Update 2: Completely sold out. Scalped tickets are already selling on Ebay for over $200.

Early this morning Penny Arcade snuck open the registration site for PAX Prime 2012, hoping to taper in attendees so the site wouldn't crash. It crashed anyway after about 20 minutes. The PAX staff are working hard to get the site back up and running, so expect registration to come back up sometime soon.

Don't stress too much about buying your tickets as soon as possible. In fact, I'm sure the PAX staff would appreciate you waiting a few days. PAX Prime 2011 took twenty days to sell out of 3-Day Passes. Expect them to sell a little bit quicker this year, but you should still have over two weeks to plan and purchase.

PAX Prime 2012 3-Day Passes will cost $65 and give you full access to the Aug. 31 through Sep. 2 weekend festivities. Single day passes will also be available, as well as passes for the BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) LAN event -- details in the PAX forums. If you're looking for hotel accommodations near to the convention center, read this update:

"Looking for a place to stay? Unfortunately our housing registration system isn't quite ready. If you try to book hotels now, don't be afraid if everything is reserved...it's reserved FOR US. You'll get better luck (and savings) in a week or two when we can push out the hotels system."

If you have any issues or question, the PAX official Twitter account is working overtime. Most of your questions can be answered thusly, "SOON." Get hyped, everyone! PAX is only four months away. Check the source for the official site and registration link -- when it's back up and running.

In a surprising decision, Ken Levine was selected for TIME magazine's Top 100 Influential People list for 2012. Levine, the creative director for Irrational Games, is known for his work on Thief, System Shock and of course, BioShock. If you're interested in voting for Levine, you can view TIME's poll here.

As far as gaming personalities go, you don't get more passionate and well-spoken than Levine. He's constantly providing interviews, speeches on design, panel discussions and is otherwise available on Twitter. He's personable and a likeable guy, but is he one of the most influential people in gaming and on the planet?

TIME's profile for Ken Levine is almost entirely about the original BioShock, a game made in 2007. There's no argument that BioShock may be one of the most influential games ever, but does that justify Levine's inclusion in this list five years later? Does it extend to the fact that another BioShock game will be released this year? If it reviews poorly does Levine get removed?

Ken Levine is an amazing individual and he's important to our industry, but I'm not sure TIME truly understands it.  Without some analysis into TIME's decision making process, it's hard to tell whether this is just the magazine throwing gamers a bone to get more readers or they truly believe Levine has a striking influence on the gaming industry, let alone the world.

In an extremely surprising move, independent gaming site Giant Bomb has been acquired by CBS. The news, reviews and gaming wiki site was created my former GameSpot editors Jeff Gerstmann and Ryan Davis as their solution to modern, PR fueled gaming sites.

Gerstmann announced the news via online stream this morning, promising that there will be no significant changes to Giant Bomb either creatively or editorially. He insisted that this was simply the best business decision for the site, and that the extra financial support will let them evolve in ways they never could have independently. The announcement was made from Giant Bomb's web designer's dining room, where the website's staff enjoyed a healthy pancake and bacon breakfast.

The largest reason this news comes as a surprise is Gerstmann's dramatic history with Gamespot. Gerstmann was fired from the site in late 2007. It was rumored that Eidos Interactive pressured GameSpot to remove him after he gave Kane & Lynch: Dead Men a "Fair" rating, a game which Eidos had heavily advertised on the site. It was this termination that led to a number of GameSpot staff leaving to start Giant Bomb. With the acquisition, Giant Bomb's staff will be moving back into GameSpot's offices.

Perhaps in order to counter potential backlash from fans due to Giant Bomb's return to GameSpot, Gerstmann will be performing an interview at 4:00 this afternoon, where he explains the situation that led to his termination. The interview may be streamed live, or will otherwise be made available on both sites.

Giant Bomb was voted one of the Top 50 websites of 2011 by Time Magazine, and is widely known for their Quick Looks and their podcast: The Giant BombCast.

In most parts of the world the Internet is an open resource, with an endless amount of content, where the words “restricted” or “limited” are not usually taken to kindly. So, when domain registrar Go Daddy announced its support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), at least one of their clients took notice and decided to protest with its pocketbook: Wikipedia.

Founder Jimmy Wales noted on Twitter, "I am proud to announce that the Wikipedia domain names will move away from GoDaddy. Their position on SOPA is unacceptable to us."

More than 70,000 domains were also lost in a week, with 21,054 domains transferring just this past Friday alone, though it's not proven how many of these are SOPA-related.

Go Daddy has since changed their stance on SOPA, opposing the bill and noting they're now better aware of its implications, though whether this is genuine or not is a little difficult to say.

Interestingly, not only was Go Daddy a supporter of SOPA, they actually helped craft part of the bill and were even exempt from it. So, while other smaller sites could be targeted by the DOD for pirating, Go Daddy essentially has a get out of jail free card.

Ed. note: this article was edited December 30 to eliminate assumptions and focus on facts. Consider it an extremely rare oversight, one I've already made moves to prevent from happening again.

A Russian man the FBI believes may be responsible for sending 32 percent of all spam email is scheduled to face court in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Monday. Oleg Nikolaenko is believed to be the mastermind behind the largest botnet in the world “Mega-D”. Security researchers believe “Mega-D” was capable of sending a staggering ten billion spam emails a day.

Court documents also allege that Nikolaenko received a payment of $459,098.47 between June 4 and December 5, 2007 from emails selling counterfeit goods such as erectile dysfunction drugs, counterfeit prescriptions, herbal remedies and other fake goods.

A break in finding Nikolaenko came when a seller of counterfeit Rolexes told authorities after he was arrested that he paid more than $2 million working with spammers. The information he provided led officials across several continents, websites, email addresses and eventually back to Nikolaenko.

According to documents, FBI agents had been monitoring him since at least 2007. He was arrested November 4 while attending an auto show in Las Vegas.

Level 3 Communications -- the content distributor for Netflix -- accused Comcast on Monday of charging a new fee that puts Internet video companies at a competitive disadvantage. Level 3 said Comcast had effectively erected a tollbooth that “threatens the open Internet." After a few days of negotiating and being informed the deal was "take it or leave it", Level 3 agreed to pay the fee.

Chief Legal Officer of Level 3 Thomas Stortz had this to say:

"Level 3 believes Comcast’s current position violates the spirit and letter of the FCC’s proposed Internet Policy principles and other regulations and statutes, as well as Comcast’s previous public statements about favoring an open Internet. This action by Comcast threatens the open Internet and is a clear abuse of the dominant control that Comcast exerts in broadband access markets as the nation’s largest cable provider."

Comcast claims the fee has nothing to do with Netflix being a competitor to Comcast but rather the vast amount of bandwidth Netflix uses. A recent study showed that Netflix represented 20 percent of all internet traffic in the United Sates during peak times, positioning it as a strong competitor to Comcast.

There is no law to prevent such a charge from Comcast. Stortz said Level 3 plans to approach government regulators this week to fight for a "fair, open and innovative Internet does not become a closed network controlled by a few institutions with dominant market power that have the means, motive and opportunity to economically discriminate between favored and disfavored content.”

Though some silly folks would tell you piracy is rampant online, research on the North American sector from Web analytics firm Sandvine shows P2P usage has been declining in recent years, dropping to 13.2 percent of all bandwidth, while video and music streaming account for a whopping 45.7 percent. Suprisingly enough, this comes in ahead of web browsing at 24.3 percent (presumably this refers to browsing that doesn't involve streaming). Basically, people really love to stream.

This is all great news for companies like Netflix who are surely raking in the dough, accounting for 20.6 percent of all "peak period bytes downloaded on fixed access networks in North America." And having launched recently in Canada, it has accounted for 95 percent of all traffic at its peak, and that's been with a limited selection (quite a few more titles have been added the past few weeks, though). You may have wondered why the service was experiencing brief outages recently -- yeah, we're pretty sure that's why.

This actually puts Netflix ahead of BitTorrent services, which goes to show the solution to piracy is to compete with it -- any sensible person will tell you the experience on Netflix is just easier and better than pirating.

An Xbox 360 gamer has earned an apology from Microsoft itself after a review of a complaint filed against the company's Xbox Live enforcement policies for wrongful suspension of an XBL gamertag. 26-year-old Josh Moore found himself on the receiving end of a temporary ban after Microsoft deemed his hometown of Fort Gay to be either an immature trolling attempt or a plain old slur. The thing is, Fort Gay is an actual town located in the Wayne County of West Virginia, but Microsoft couldn't be bothered to verify it for themselves.

Instead, they slapped the onus on Moore himself, which lead to him spending some quality time with customer service and a great deal of difficulty. According to Moore, customer service initially refused to take him seriously no matter how much he tried explaining:

"At first I thought, 'Wow, somebody's thinking I live in the gayest town in West Virginia or something.' I was mad. ... It makes me feel like they hate gay people. I'm not even gay, and it makes me feel like they were discriminating.

"I figured, I'll explain to them, 'Look in my account. Fort Gay is a real place... I told him, Google it — 25514!' [Customer service] said, 'I can't help you.'"

Even Fort Gay Mayor David Thompson decided to help Moore clear things up with Microsoft, but was simply told that the word "gay" was "inappropriate in any context" on XBL no matter what the city's name actually is. Moore would eventually file a complaint with Microsoft, which fortunately saw the matter reviewed a little more seriously. Microsoft's director of policy and enforcement for Xbox Live, Stephen Toulouse, admits that Moore's case was handled improperly due to miscommunication.

While he does give his team some benefit of the doubt for the challenges inherent in approaching cases without the full context of the situation, Toulouse explains it is absolutely untrue that the word "gay" is inappropriate no matter what on Xbox Live. This is consistent with the revisions made earlier this year to the Xbox Live Terms of Use and Code of Conduct.

To recap, Microsoft now allows users to "more freely express their race, nationality, religion and sexual orientation in Gamertags and profiles", so long as "self-identification" is not misused. Toulouse himself would come to review Moore's complaint, leading to the gamer's suspension being revoked with an apology on the way.

That's good for Microsoft's commitment to making things right for XBL gamers, but the damage had been done to more than Moore's Gamertag. The ban also caused him to miss out on an online competition over XBL; the team he would have been on ended up losing, possibly due to Moore's untimely absence.

Just 24 hours after the Gmail call service was introduced, 1,000,000 calls have been made. This is an impressive feat for such a new feature, but considering there are more than 175 million Gmail accounts, it is still just a fraction of the available users.

The service rolled out on Wednesday and it allows most Gmail users (where supported) to make free calls to phones directly through their Gmail account. To enable the service a quick plug-in is required. Once the program is setup Gmail users will have a new "call phone" option, which works via a drop down menu.

When a call is placed the receiving phone will see the number as 760-705-8888. This is the same number for all Gmail accounts, so a return call will only yield a voice recording stating the number is not in service.

For now the service is free when placing calls within the U.S. or Canada. There is, however, a 2 cent per minute fee to call other countries such as United Kingdom, France, Germany, Argentina, China, and Japan. There is talk of changing the fees in the near future, but it will remain at its current rate through the remainder of the year.

The high call rate could merely be a result of the service being new and a novelty; it remains to be seen if it will become a true success.