closings

The Sims Social was once heralded as Electronic Arts' "most successful Facebook game," but now it's being laid to rest along with SimCity Social and Pet Society. These three social games will be extinct from Facebook as of June 14.

The game maker made the announcement today, saying that it was a hard decision but had to be done in order to "reallocate servers and resources to more popular titles," according to the FAQ section of its Web site.

"Today we are informing players of the difficult decision to retire some of our Facebook games: The Sims Social, SimCity Social, and Pet Society," EA wrote in a blog post today. "After millions of people initially logged in to play these games, the number of players and amount of activity has fallen off."… Read more

Low Latency is a weekly comic on CNET's Crave blog written by CNET editor and podcast host Jeff Bakalar and illustrated by Blake Stevenson. Be sure to check Crave every Friday at 8 a.m. PT for new panels! Want more? Here's every Low Latency comic so far.… Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Fiery meteor explodes over Russia's Ural Mountains; 1,100 injured as shock wave breaks windows.

- Watch asteroid 2012 DA14 fade out via streaming video.

- Iceland wants to ban Internet porn.

- Chubby Checker in a twist over an old app.

- One Direction's new toothbrush streams sound vibrations through your teeth.… Read more

Mozilla Firefox (download for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, or the Portable App) didn't invent tabbed browsing, but they sure as heck perfected it, or at least the extended network of extensions developers did. If Firefox doesn't include a tabbed-browsing feature you want, there's a good chance you can find one among its numerous add-ons.

Personally, I'm a tab glutton. I might be using a Windows XP box from 2004, but that doesn't stop me from running four Firefox windows with 10-15 tabs open in each. Each window usually relates to a specific task, project, or … Read more

As more Blockbuster video rental stores slip into the red, its parent company Dish Network has decided to shutter 300 stores across the U.S., according to Reuters. The closing of these stores could mean that as many as 3,000 employees would also be laid off.

After Dish bought Blockbuster in 2011, for $320 million, the company said it planned to keep 1,500 of the chain's rental stores open and maintain 15,000 employees. However, with profits dropping, and with video streaming and downloading popping up all over the place, Dish ended up keeping only about 850 locations open. … Read more

Even with Apple's top product arriving in more stores around the world, and its last products of the year shipping out, Wall Street's not so hot on the company today.

Shares of Apple closed at $509.79, down $19.90, or 3.76 percent, on Friday. That's near where the stock was trading in February, ahead of the journey that would take it beyond its high of $702 in September.

Of course everyone's looking for explanations behind the slump, a behavior that's become regular in the nearly three month span since the iPhone 5 went … Read more

YouTube added six more languages to its closed caption feature today, allowing users to read a video's audio in German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch.

Viewers just turn on the closed captioning by clicking on the "CC" button in the toolbar during the video. YouTube is also testing a translate feature, available in beta, that translates the caption into another language.

In addition to the automatic captioning, video creators will have editing tools to improve the automated captions since there will undoubtedly be errors in the initial text, according to YouTube. These tools include the ability … Read more

Need to shut down your PC in a hurry? Simple. Here are two handy keyboard shortcuts to save you time and mousing.

Close all open programs A little-known set of keystrokes will shut down all active programs at once in no time.

Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and then Alt-T to open Task Manager's Applications tab. Press the down arrow, and then Shift-down arrow to select all the programs listed in the window. When they're all selected, press Alt-E, then Alt-F, and finally x to close Task Manager.

For those of you keeping score at home, that's seven steps that … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- While Apple has painted Samsung as a copycat, Samsung fired back today, saying that if Apple wins its case, consumers would lose.

"Your decision, if you go Apple's way, could change the way competition works in this country," Samsung attorney Charles Verhoeven told jurors after pointing to the large collection of press in the back of the courtroom who were there to see closing arguments from both sides in the Apple v. Samsung patent trial.

"Rather than competing in the marketplace, Apple is seeking a competitive edge in the courtroom," he … Read more