IT-Code-News: IT News HeadLines (Ars Technica) 09/04/2010

Ars Technica liveblog of Apple's iPhone 4.0 event

Apple's special event starts at 1pm EDT/10am PDT and Ars is on the scene to liveblog the happenings for you. Apple will be showing off the next iteration of Apple's iPhone OS, and hopefully more.

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New Australopithecus fossil may be a human ancestor

It's a busy time in the study of human origins. Hot on the heels of a potential new species found entirely via DNA sequence, we have the announcement of a new species of Australopithecus, discovered in a cave in South Africa. The authors of a paper describing the species, Australopithecus sediba, make the bold claim that it's likely to be the direct ancestor of the entire Homo genes, placing the species on a direct line to modern humans. We'll describe the fossils themselves before returning to these claims.

The site is called Malapa, and is located in South Africa. Other sites nearby have yielded significant early hominin finds, and the area is preserved as the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage site. Miners had evaluated the caves earlier, and had dumped some of their contents outside. It was apparently in one of these waste piles that an author's son found a hominin clavicle. Excavations of the cave revealed two partial skeletons: a juvenile male, and a mature female.

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StarCraft 2 Collectors Edition will be $100, worth it

Blizzard has announced details of the $99.99 Collector's Edition of StarCraft 2, and it looks like it's time to start saving your money. This edition comes with the game, of course, and so much more:

The Art of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, a 176-page book featuring artwork from the game

An exclusive 2GB USB flash drive replica of Jim Raynor's dog tag, which comes preloaded with the original StarCraft and the StarCraft: Brood War(R) expansion set

A behind-the-scenes DVD containing over an hour of developer interviews, cinematics with director's commentary, and more

The official StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty soundtrack CD, containing 14 epic tracks from the game along with exclusive bonus tracks

StarCraft comic book issue #0, a prequel to the comic series

A World of Warcraft(R) mini Thor in-game pet that can be applied to all World of Warcraft characters on a single Battle.net account

Exclusive Battle.net downloadable content, including special portraits for your Battle.net profile, decals to customize your units in-game, and a visually unique version of the terran Thor unit

Are we excited yet? The first games, a soundtrack, an art book, digital content, and a bonus for World of WarCraft fans? The press material notes that this will only be available at retail stores, so it may be a good idea to get your preorder in.

Raise your hand if you'll be picking up the more expensive version. Sadly, no release date has been given.

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Early IE9 Platform Preview results show promise

We've argued that Microsoft needs to engage more with Web developers to give a better understanding of what the company is doing with its Web browser, allow them to provide feedback throughout the development process, and more broadly get them engaged with the development process. With Internet Explorer 9's Platform Preview, Microsoft has indeed taken steps to do exactly this. Though Microsoft still isn't releasing the nightly builds that other browsers offer, the Platform Preview definitely represents progress; it provides early access to IE9's core rendering and JavaScript engines, and will be updated approximately every eight weeks.

The eight-week cycle was chosen because Redmond felt this provided the best trade-off between getting regular updates into developers' hands, ensuring that the preview releases are reasonably robust, and getting useful feedback that integrates well with Microsoft's own development processes. Each version will undergo reasonably extensive testing during the eight-week period, giving ample opportunity for bugs to be filed. For its part, the IE team has committed to investigating every single bug filed, and resolving all that it can.

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Screw you, Internet? Digital Economy bill passes in the UK

The UK's Labour government, partnering with the Conservatives, yesterday pushed through the controversial Digital Economy bill over opposition from Liberal Democrats and some in its own party. The bill allows the UK courts to order complete blocks on websites, it requires ISPs to start sending P2P warning letters from copyright holders, and it opens the door to throttling and Internet disconnection for repeat infringement.

As we discussed yesterday, the bill was moved quickly through the "wash-up" process that occurs at the end of a Parliamentary session. Opponents and critics of the bill argued that such changes to the UK's Internet were too important to head through Commons after a couple hours of debate; surely they could wait until after the election?

Conservatives have been promising that, should they win the May 6 election, they will patch up any problem areas in the hastily passed bill. This argument was blasted yesterday during the bill's third reading, when one MP said (read the debate transcript):

"I was rather taken aback yesterday to hear someone—I think it was the Conservative Front Bencher—say, 'Let's just get this Bill through and if there's anything wrong with it, we can put it right.' Ten years into being here, I know that if we do things in a hurry and get them wrong, the law of unintended consequences always kicks in. It would be far better to remove [controversial] clauses 11 to 18 and have a period of reflection."

No such reflection was allowed. The bill was voted on for the second time in two days, it passed Commons (and previously passed the Lords), and now waits only for the automatic Royal Assent to become law.

The bill has at least prompted both Labour and Conservatives to pledge support for 2Mbps minimum broadband everywhere in the UK. There is also a robust appeals process for those who want to contest copyright infringement notices (though at their own expense).

That didn't appease the Open Rights Group, which today replaced its homepage with this:

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ROBOTC2.0 gives students cross-platform robot programming

Robot programming is many students' first exposure to the world of computer programming. As with so much of the computing world, however, different robot platforms are generally incompatible. ROBOTC2.0, from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Academy, brings a common language to many of these different robot platforms. With the new language, the same program can more or less run on LEGO Mindstorms RCX and NXT systems, as well as the Innovation First VEX and Cortex systems.

Carnegie Mellon says this cross-platform capability is unique to ROBOTC2.0. Traditionally, student programmers must learn a new language for each robot platform they use, with the result that they spend their time learning new development environments rather than learning how to write programs. With ROBOTC, much more emphasis can be placed on development. ROBOTC skills are also transferable to professional languages like C, meaning that robot development serves as a good basis for a transition to professional development.

The language comes with its own Visual Studio-inspired development environment, including real-time debugging over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, in addition to the normal text and project editing development environment functionality. ROBOTC also boasts substantially better performance than other robot languages, enabling a much broader range of programs to be written.

Encouraging students to take an interest in programming and computer science is seen by many as essential to retaining US dominance in technology and innovation. Though computer science programs saw large growth in the 1990s and early 2000s, last year saw the first increase in program enrollments for some six years. Using robot development to get children bitten by the programming bug could be an effective way of continuing that growth.

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SEC looks to rein in trading battlebots, maybe

In the summer of 2009, the press had a collective freak-out over so-called "high-frequency trading," where math, physics, and AI whizzes from the nation's top universities program the world's most powerful computers to trade against one another on electronic stock exchanges for microsecond advantages and billions of dollars. That's actually how the markets work now. But by the end of the year, the frenzy had died down, as such frenzies do. The practice is back with a vengeance in 2010, and the SEC is close to wrapping up the first phase of its investigation into the issue. It will surprise no one that one of the reforms being seriously considered is not a reform at all.

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Microsoft details Exchange Server 2010 SP1

Microsoft today announced what is coming later this year as part of Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1). SP1 will encompass all the fixes and tweaks from the roll-ups that have already been released. In addition to improvements directly based on customer feedback since RTM, the team says SP1 includes new feature tweaks such as archiving and discovery enhancements, Outlook Web App improvements, mobile user and management improvements, and additional UI for management tasks.

Microsoft is not yet ready to share timeline details for SP1. The company did, however, confirm that a beta of SP1 should be available for download in parallel with TechEd North America this June. Redmond is staying mute when it comes to talking about a second beta or release candidate, and didn't even give a release timeframe for the service pack. That said, we think it's safe to say SP1 will be out before the end of the year. Exchange Server 2010 became available worldwide in November 2009. Taking Exchange Server 2007 into consideration, which saw its RTM arrive in November 2006 and SP1 arrive in November 2007, we think Exchange Server 2010 SP1 should arrive around November 2010, but nothing is set in stone.

For more information, check out the 12-minute video below (Silverlight) which features the Exchange team's Ann Vu and Ian Hameroff discussing the investments the team has made around archiving in Exchange 2010.

The Exchange team breaks down each of the features a bit more at the links below (the team's blog post and the whitepaper). Remember that what is being revealed today is not an all-inclusive list: Microsoft will have a much more thorough changelog in the coming months as we get closer to the beta release. We'll keep you posted as the development cycle rolls forward.

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Add-ons responsible for 70 percent of IE8 crashes

In a recently published whitepaper titled "Enhancing the performance of Windows Internet Explorer 8," Microsoft detailed browser add-ons, toolbars, malware, restricted sites, plus more advanced topics such as User Agent String and concurrent download settings. In itself, it's a useful guide for IE8 users who are having trouble with their browser's speed. For our purposes, though, there's some interesting information about add-ons included:

Although browser add-ons can add great new features to your browser, they can also introduce performance issues if written poorly. Add-ons cause most browser crashes, accounting for over 70 percent of Internet Explorer 8's crashes. Slowdowns in Internet Explorer 8 are very often caused by add-ons—especially when you open a new browser window or tab.

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Format shifting dead trees: can e-book piracy be ethical?

A question of ethics: say you want a new novel bad—really bad—but you want the digital version for your Kindle/iPad/Sony Reader. The publisher, hoping to goose sales of the book in hardcover for $28, isn't about to offer a $10 e-book version until the novel comes out in paperback. So you buy the hardcover and then pirate a homebrew e-book, which someone has helpfully made available in one of the darker corners of the Internet. Should you be fitted for an eye patch and peg leg?

As a matter of law, you probably are a pirate (or, to be accurate, an infringer). But the interesting question isn't one of law, it's one of ethics, and New York Times syndicated columnist Randy Cohen tackled the conundrum in last week's "The Ethicist" column.

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Can we actually taste water? Insects can

Think back to the last glass of water you drank. Did you actually taste the water? Before you answer, keep in mind that taste and feel involve two different mechanisms. For example, if you coated your tongue with a thin plastic film, you wouldn’t be able to taste the sweetness of a jelly bean, but you would be able to feel its presence in your mouth. In much the same way, we can feel the water we drink, it's not clear whether we actually taste anything beyond trace elements in the water.

Water is essential for animals, but surprisingly little is known about how different animals taste water as they are drinking it. There is virtually no research on humans, and there is only a smattering of studies that suggests cats and rats can taste water. There is, however, a general agreement among taste and behavior scientists that insects can taste water.

Peter Cameron, a cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, explained that "insects have a unique set of neurons, including water sensing ones, but the actual water taste receptor was unknown." Thus, Cameron set out to identify one for his PhD thesis project, done under the guidance of Professor Kristin Scott. His work is published in a recent issue of Nature.

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Custom firmware on PS3, Linux on Slims? GeoHot fights back

Noted iPhone and PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz, or GeoHot, told the gaming community not to update their systems until he was able to release custom firmware allowing them to continue using their Linux partitions, and it looks as if he's close to his goal. A new video posted today shows the hack, although a release date hasn't been given for the rest of us to download his work.

"This can be installed without having to open up your PS3, just by restoring a custom generated PUP file, but only from 3.15 or previous," he writes. "It's possible this CFW will also work on the slim to actually *enable* OtherOS; I'll know when my infectus gets here."

If GeoHot has given gamers the ability to install custom firmware on their systems, and enabled the use of Linux on the PlayStation 3 Slim hardware, the system may be compromised to allow all sorts of other nefarious uses. This is great for the hacking community, but Sony may be getting a bad case of the sweats.

He takes one final swipe at the company in the blog post. "Note to the people who removed OtherOS, you are potentially turning 100000+ legit users into 'hackers.' There was a huge(20x) traffic spike to this blog after the announcement of 3.21. If I had ads on this site I guess I'd be thanking you."

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New Mass Effect 2 content brings character, gun, high price

What if you could find the memories of someone you cared about... someone who is no longer with you? How far would you go? The new content for Mass Effect 2 , called "Kasumi—Stolen Memory," deals with a master thief who has joined Cerberus for a price: you need to help her find those files.

What follows feels almost more like a James Bond film than a Mass Effect 2 mission, but that's a good thing. You dress up in new formal wear, which you get to keep and wear for the rest of the game if you'd like, and try to crash the party of a wealthy art collector to find the memories. We'll keep the spoilers to a minimum, but here are our thoughts on the mission and on the value of the content.

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Get your e-book on the iPad (and keep all the royalties)

Tunecore has been a boon for musicians like Trent Reznor, who pay the Brooklyn-based company a flat fee of $40 or so and then see their music available for sale on Amazon, iTunes, and eMusic. The copyrights all remain in the artists' hands, as do the revenues; after paying the flat fee, 100 percent of the payout returns to the artists. (The digital stores take their cut first, of course.)

Today, Tunecore announced that it would extend this model to e-books through a service called Bibliocore. After an upfront payment, the e-book is delivered to Apple's iBookstore, rights remain with the author, and Bibliocore takes no cut of the royalties.

To participate, you need a few basic things. First, you need an ePub formatted book that has passed the 1.0.5 ePub check, contains no unmanifested files, and has its own ISBN number. Second, you need some cover art, at least 600 pixels "along the larger axis." Third, you fill out some metadata and set the price. Boom.

The service, now launching in beta, doesn't currently offer listed prices; interested authors must e-mail for a custom quote. Along with numerous other services like Smashwords, Bibliocore makes it simple to get books into the iBookstore. But once you're in, then what? Authors face the challenges of abundance that musicians have faced for the last decade. How do you get noticed? Who will help you market your work? How does one book a reading tour?

For those who already have an established audience, such services look like an incredible way to up one's royalty percentage on each sale—at the cost of being much more entrepreneurial about spreading the word, getting a cover designed, generating blurbs, getting an ISBN, buying all that brie for the launch party... But if you're ready to become youre own indie publisher, it's quickly becoming simple to do. Companies like Smashwords can even distribute to multiple stores, including Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and now the iBookstore, saving would-be authors even more work.

Publishers have been watching the music biz carefully, and have hopefully learned some lessons. They're about to face the same pressures: infringement gets easier, disintermediation means that publishers aren't the gatekeepers to quality work they once were, and digital storefronts can soon start dictating terms to you if they grow too powerful.

Print-on-demand has done its own disintermediation work for the last five years, but the sheer ease of the new devices and the digital storefronts, along with their recent popularity, look set to bring a whole new level of entrepreneurial activity to the book world—and that probably means more pain for traditional publishers.

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PSP Metal Gear title: flush with tie-ins, ads

The Metal Gear Solid series is no stranger to cameos and product placement—MGS4 let players use a virtual iPod, while Solid Snake made an appearance in Super Smash Bros. Brawl on the Wii—and the upcoming MGS: Peace Walker on PSP won't be any different.

According to a report from 1UP, Peace Walker will feature collaborations with two different game series: Monster Hunter and Assassin's Creed. The Monster Hunter section will allow Snake to explore a part of that game, using his own particular stealth skills to dispatch monsters. Meanwhile, the game will also feature the "assassin's straw box," originally announced as an IGN April Fool's joke, which can hold two players at once during co-op play.

The game will also be rife with product placement, so expect to see Doritos, Axe, Sony Walkman, Pepsi, and Mountain Dew, as well as a number of different Japanese clothing companies and gaming and manga magazines sprinkled throughout the game.

In addition to all the in-game advertising and collaborations, series mastermind Hideo Kojima also spoke about his decision to release the game on the PSP, explaining that he hopes the game will appeal to a younger audience.

"Peace Walker is an experiment to see if younger generations could enjoy MGS as well," he explained. "It's also an experiment to see what MGS will need to be like in the future, when hardware platforms are less important and gamers will be able to play their title of choice anywhere they want. It may not be a sequel on a high-spec console, but it is a new challenge for the series."

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Appeals court rules AdWords doesn't infringe bidding patent

Bid for Position has lost an appeal to a ruling that its bidding system patent was not infringed by Google's or AOL's search advertising purchasing system. The decision of the lower court was affirmed by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit this week.

Bid for Position owns rights to US Patent #7,225,151, titled "Online Auction Bid Management System and Method." The company claimed that search advertising systems from AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Miva, Inc. infringed on its patent because they use auction bids to determine pricing for ads on search results. However, the court determined that there were important functional differences between the bidding system described in the '151 patent and Google's AdWords/AdSense and AOL's Search Marketplace.

US District Judge Jerome Friedman ruled in October of 2008 in favor of Google and AOL in a summary judgement that neither company's system infringed the '151 patent. Microsoft and Miva had been dismissed as defendants before the case was decided.

Google has faced other lawsuits over AdWords, including another patent infringement case and a class-action suit alleging that Google unfairly sells ads for keywords that are registered trademarks of other companies.

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Internet cut-offs, website censorship about to drop on UK

"Wash-up" might sound homely, conjuring visions of a family scrubbing up after a cheerful dinner as the evening descends. But it's also the name of a UK legislative process in which bills can become law through a quick process that bypasses normal debate. Wash-up happens at the end of a parliamentary term, just before new elections, and it is designed to finish non-controversial outstanding business.

But is it appropriate to use wash-up to make major changes to UK Internet access, giving copyright holders tremendous new power to go after P2P pirates and even block entire websites?

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Verizon CEO: Studies be damned, US is tops in broadband

Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg sat down for an on-the-record conversation yesterday at the Council for Foreign Relations, and he pulled no punches: the US is number one in the world when it comes to broadband. We're so far ahead of everyone else, it's "not even close."

Given that a central piece of the National Broadband Plan was concerned with America's poor showing on broadband metrics, this was an intriguing claim to make. In essence, Seidenberg hauled out one of the NBP's main reasons for existence and just kicked it in the groin. Perhaps we don't even need a national plan?

Seidenberg: Anytime government—whether it's the FCC or any agency—decides it knows what the market wants and makes that a static requirement, you always lose. So this FCC decided that speed of the network was the most important issue. So that's all they measured.

So they will say, if you go to Korea or you go to France, you can get a faster Internet connection. Okay? That could be true in some companies—in some countries. The facts are that, in the US, there is greater household penetration of access to the Internet than any country in Europe.

In Japan, where everybody looks at Japan as being so far ahead, they may have faster speeds, but we have higher utilization of people using the Internet. So our view is, whenever you look at these issues, you have to be very careful to look at what the market wants, not what government says is the most important issue.

Let's take wireless, for example. Everybody says the European system was kind of better. Well, that's very interesting. If you look at minutes of use, the average American uses their cell phone four times as much—four times as much—as the average European. If you look at Europe, they publish penetration rates of 150 (percent), 160 (percent), 170 percent meaning that people have more than one phone, two phones, three phones.

You know why? Roaming rates are so high. My guess is you probably have two or three different phones to carry to—to use in different countries because your roaming rates are so high. And you say, yes.
So my point is it's a fallacy to allow a regulatory authority to sit there and decide what's right for the marketplace when it's not even close.

[WSJ executive editor Alan] Murray: So on the measures that matter most to you, where does the United States rank in terms of—
Seidenberg: One. Not even close.

Murray: Number one?

Seidenberg: Yes. Verizon has put more fiber in from Boston to Washington than all the Western European countries combined. All. We have—if you look at smart phones—not us, Apple, Google—they have exploded this market in the US. Ask any European if they're not somewhat envious of the advancements of smartphone technology in the US. So it just seems to me this is just not even close.

Given how mind-blowingly awesome US Internet is, one can't help but wonder why France's Free.fr can offer a triple play of phone, TV, and Internet for â‚¬30 a month. Perhaps price and features, along with speed, aren't really "important" to consumers, either.

In any event, we also learned that Seidenberg has an iPad, but that he didn't stand in line for it.

Murray: You didn't stand in line on Saturday?
Seidenberg: No, I had somebody else stand in line. (Laughter.) But we had people standing in line.

Finally, if you're a high-bandwidth user of Verizon's smartphone data services, the company will soon hunt you down and throttle you. (The company has long had a maximum transfer limit on monthly data plans.)

Seidenberg: But when we now go after the very, very high users, the ones who camp on the network all day long every day doing things that—who knows what they're doing—those are the—
Murray: It's video, right? I mean, it's video.
Seidenberg: But those are the people we will throttle and we will find them and we will charge them something else.

Seidenberg is a colorful guy, and the interview is worth reading and watching in full. In particular, look out for his answer to the question, "What's a cable splicer?"

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Comcast 1, FCC 0: what to look for in the inevitable rematch

There is a venerable old proverb, often invoked in American politics. "Success has many fathers," the saying notes. "Failure is always an orphan."

Funny, but the opposite seems to be the case regarding Tuesday's court decision telling the Federal Communications Commission that it had no power to sanction Comcast for P2P throttling. Suddenly, this epic legal fail is surrounded by prospective parents, all fretting over the poor child and fighting about its future. That's because everyone knows that the foundling in question may have no legal garments today, but it's going to cry until it finds some, and plenty of self-appointed guardians are anxious to help it get a new wardrobe.

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iSuppli: $499 iPad components estimated at $260

The dust has (mostly) settled, and iSuppli's analysis of the cost of the components that make up an iPad reveals that the hardware itself only accounts for about half the retail price of $499. Taken together, iSuppli estimates that the cost of the hardware components totals $259.60. This fact will be used widely to support criticism that the iPad is "too expensive," but it leaves out numerous costs in launching a product like the iPad.

Unsurprisingly, the display contributed the most to the cost of the iPad. Along with the LCD panel, touch-sensitive overlay, glass covering, and necessary drive and touch electronics, that subsystem accounted for over 40 percent of the component costs. Flash memory was also a big contributor to the costs, and the higher priced iPad models maintained a component cost of roughly half the retail price as the storage capacity increased.

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Memristors combine memory, logics set in one device

Memristors, a type of circuit element based on magnetic flux, were first proposed back in 1971, but remained limited to the realm of theory until 2008. That's when some researchers from HP Labs figured out that memristors could be read and written using applied voltages, and didn't need to explicitly involve magnetic flux at all. Since then, the group has continued to develop memristor production, hoping to find a place for them alongside the existing capacitor, inductor, and resistor devices. Now, in their latest work, the researchers have shown that it's possible to simultaneously use memristors to perform a full set of logic operations at the same time as they function as nonvolatile memory.

Our past coverage goes into the actual physics of how a memristor functions, so we'll just summarize the basic operations here. The devices can adopt either high- or low-resistance states, which can be considered bits. A positive voltage above a specific threshold will set the memristor in its high-resistance state in as little as two microseconds. A negative voltage of the same magnitude toggles it to its low-resistance state.

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FTC uneasy about Google-AdMob deal, may try to block it

Poor Google just can't catch a break when it tries to make advertising deals with other companies. The Federal Trade Commission looks to be gearing up to block Google's acquisition of mobile advertising company AdMob. The antitrust challenge has not yet been finalized, though, and Google insists that the world of mobile advertising will "remain competitive" even after the two companies merge.

According to people "familiar with the matter" speaking to the Wall Street Journal, the FTC has sent letters asking AdMob's competitors to testify about the impact of the purchase and has briefed members of Congress on its concerns. The Commission has also put together a litigation team "to prepare for a possible effort to block the deal," though a final decision has not yet been made.

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Friday, April 9, 2010

IT News HeadLines (Ars Technica) 09/04/2010

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