PSP Go gets free games, DSi sees international price drop
In an attempt to bolster sales of the PSP and PSP Go, Sony has decided to offer customers cheap—and in some cases free—games. Nintendo, meanwhile, will be offering price cuts on its handhelds later this month in both Japan and the UK. What does this mean for these systems? Let's take a look.
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Kavli prizes awarded for telescope tech, nerve cell signaling
In conjunction with the opening of the World Science Festival in New York City, the Kavli Foundation announced the winners of this year's Kavli Prizes, which honor researchers in fields that really didn't exist as organized disciplines when the Nobel Prizes started: astrophysics, neuroscience, and nanoscience. The prizes are handed out every other year, and were first awarded in 2008. The first time around, it was hard to escape the impression that they were simply given to people who did significant work in the three fields, but this year's prizes seem to have focused on a single, coherent area where significant advances have been made.
This is most evident in the prizes for astrophysics and neuroscience. The Kavli Prize in Astrophysics went to a trio that did the tough engineering work that has let us overcome what once seemed like hard physical limits on the construction of telescopes. Instruments based on their work have allowed us to overcome the obstacles that made building bigger primary mirrors a practical impossibility and, in the process, enabled us to better observe the objects that are governed by the rules of astrophysics.
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ACLU, EFF seek to "sever" gigantic P2P lawsuits
Imagine yourself as a lawyer who wants to sue 4,577 anonymous Internet users for swapping the Uwe Boll-produced film Far Cry through BitTorrent networks. Would you prefer to file one lawsuit, pay one filing fee, and submit one set of documents, or would you like to file 4,577 separate lawsuits, each with their own filing fees and documents?
The question answers itself, and it explains why Boll's law firm of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver filed a single federal lawsuit against "Does 1-4,577" in DC's District Court earlier this year.
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Rdio mixes traditional music streams with your playlists
Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström have moved onto their next venture: a music streaming service. Their new service aims to differentiate itself from the crowd by combining the appeal of other traditional Internet services with the ability to stream your own music to your mobile devices—sort of. Rdio (apparently a combination of "radio" and "audio" to create "r-dee-o") has not yet opened to the public, but has begun testing with an invitation-only group of testers.
Rdio will have two tiers of service—neither of which will be free—that will target both the Web-only and Web-plus-mobile crowd. For $9.99, users will be able to stream music over the Web to their computers and mobile devices (the team has already developed applications for the iPhone and BlackBerry, with an Android version in the works); for $4.99, users can stick to just the Web.
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MeeGo Linux platform gains allies at Computex
The Linux-based MeeGo mobile platform made a strong showing at the Computex conference this year in Taipei. The platform is attracting some interest from hardware makers and mobile Linux software vendors.
When we reviewed the MeeGo 1.0 netbook environment last week, we noted that the official MeeGo system image does not supply a complete Linux distribution. It will be up to downstream Linux distributors and hardware vendors to handle hardware drivers, codecs, and other important bits that are needed to make the operating system practical to use on real hardware. At the time, we expressed our hope for an openSUSE-based MeeGo build from Novell so that users would have an end-to-end MeeGo platform.
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FTC slaps keylogger spyware vendor on the wrist
It's settled: Cyber Spy will stop marketing its keystroke-logging software to the cloak-and-dagger wannabe crowd, or at least less obviously. The Florida-based company has made peace with the Federal Trade Commission, promising that it will no longer advertise its Remote Spy application as a "100% undetectable" way to "Spy on Anyone. From Anywhere."
The government has "put the brakes on the business practices of an operation that was selling spyware and showing customers how to remotely install it on other people's computers without their knowledge or consent," the agency announced on Wednesday.
The FTC took Cyber Spy to US District Court in 2008, complaining that the company's product provided customers with instructions on how to attach spyware to an e-mail, making it look like an innocuous .gif or .jpg file. Once the target clicked the attachment, Remote Spy installed keylogging and image capturing software onto the victim's computer. A Remote Spy user could then track his target's keystrokes (including typed passwords) and online activities by logging onto a website set up by the company.
The agency charged the firm with unfair selling and advertising—selling software that could be operated on a computer by someone besides its owner and without her knowledge, and which could secretly gather personal information. In response, the court issued an injunction, temporarily barring Cyber Spy from selling the product.
Under the settlement, Cyber Spy will no longer offer its customers ways to disguise Remote Spy as an "innocent file or e-mail attachment." Additionally, the company must tell purchasers that "improper use" of the software may violate the law.
The FTC's Final Order also instructs the firm to "reduce the risk that their spyware is misused, encrypt data transmitted over the Internet, police their affiliates to ensure they comply with the order, and remove legacy versions of the software from computers on which it was previously installed."
As of our visit to Remote Spy's main page on Wednesday, Cyber Spy now describes the app as follows:
"Remote Spy can record all keystrokes typed, websites visited, documents accessed, applications ran, passwords used, screenshots and so much more, all in total stealth mode! Especially perfect for those who want to monitor their employees or children, while away from home or work!"
The page still boasts that Remote Spy can record "all Internet Conversations," "all Keystrokes Pressed," "all Websites Visited," and operate "in Total Stealth Mode." But it does warn that "installing computer monitoring tools on computers you do not own or do not have permission to monitor may violate local, state or federal law."
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Handwritten legal filings can't stop P2P lawsuit juggernaut
As we reported this week, the Virginia-based law firm of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver has filed suit against 14,583 anonymous "John Doe" P2P defendants in the first six months of 2010. The charge: sharing various indie films online without permission. Once a Doe's identity is revealed by his or her Internet service providers, the lawyers then demand a settlement of between $1,500 and $2,500, or they threaten to seek $150,000 in federal court.
Some users have been fighting back, trying to keep their identities a secret. "Motions to quash" have dribbled into the Washington, DC District Court from around the country, several of them scrawled by hand. Each contains a plea—one goes so far as to say that she is "now throwing myself on the mercy of the courts to have this [subpoena] quash or vactated. [sic]"
Lawyers are rarely involved, and the motions are badly formed, sometimes unsigned, often missing key sections or failing to address basic arguments. They are the response of citizens who find themselves one day suddenly caught up in a federal lawsuit happening in Washington. They are alternately weird, sad, or outraged. What they are not is "effective."
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Borders starts offering e-book readers from third parties
For a while, Amazon and Sony were the only companies that took the e-reader market seriously, but traditional booksellers seem to have decided they need in on the action. One of the largest, Barnes & Noble, launched its own, dedicated hardware, the Nook. Now, Borders has thrown its hat into the ring, and just about everything about its efforts appear to be distinct, starting with the fact that it will sell several devices made by third parties. The biggest hook for this latecomer may be the prices: both of the devices it's offering so far are under $150.
In May, Borders announced the first of its partners, a company that the bookseller was backing financially called Kobo. The Kobo reader would be sold both through the Borders website and in dedicated sections of its brick-and-mortar shops, and would read content purchased from a planned Borders e-book store. The Kobo takes the Kindle's general shape, ditches the keyboard, and adds a big blue navigation button. It will sell for $149, and comes with an E-Ink screen, a gigabyte of memory, and Bluetooth, along with ePub and PDF support.
This week, Borders announced a second partner: Aluratek, which is already offering an e-reader called the Libre. The Libre seems to run in the area of $150 at a variety of online resellers but, through the Borders partnership, it will be sold for under $120. The Libre supports PDF, RTF, and ePub formats, among others, and stores its content on an SD card (a 2GB version comes with 100 free e-books preloaded). Instead of the E-Ink screen that was standard for the first few e-readers to hit the market, the Libre is a bit of a throwback to the first laptops: it uses a passive LCD screen. That's still a bit power hungry compared to E-Ink—battery life is good for 24 hours of continuous use—but it should bring responsiveness that E-Ink can't match, at least currently.
The hardware looks okay if you like black, angular plastic, but the unit has a lot of buttons, which could enable a variety of UI abuses. Still, it's tough to say much without trying it out, and Borders is still in the process of sorting out how to arrange review units.
As with the other major players in the market for dedicated e-readers, Borders says it will come out with software for "all PCs" and support iPhone OS, Android OS, and BlackBerry OS devices in an effort to stay hardware-neutral. The PC support seems to be key, given that the hardware doesn't seem to allow a direct connection to the Borders bookstore; instead, synching content over USB seems to be the primary way of getting reading material on the e-readers. The company claims it will be offering 10 different devices by the year's end, so expect to see more announcements in the near future.
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Magic quantum wand does not vanish hard math
Hands up, who remembers D-Wave? No? Well, don't worry; it's still around. D-Wave is a company that is pursuing the development of a scalable quantum computer. And, just in case you forgot about them, they wheeled out a black box that apparently calculates stuff. It does this slower than your average iPad, but, you know, it's just a prototype.
Cynicism aside, the company's approach, called adiabatic quantum computing, actually has some interesting properties, and early studies indicated that it might be able to do exciting mathematical things. Unfortunately, a couple of snags have gotten in the way of further progress: adiabatic quantum computing has been shown to be identical to normal quantum computing, and there are no verifiable experimental results. Now, just to really put the screws on any optimists out there, a new paper has shown that adiabatic computers are actually quite bad at hard math problems.
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AdMob tosses in iPad support to compete with iAd
The now Google-owned AdMob has introduced an SDK for integrating advertisements into native iPhone OS applications on the iPad. The SDK, which is available now, contains the new code for iPad, but also code for serving ads to iPhones as well—developers won't have to integrate two different SDKs into a universal application.
Along with the updated SDK, AdMob is also showing off a demo of HTML5 ads that the company will presumably integrate in coming months. This comes on the heels of Apple’s own mobile advertising platform iAd, which will make use of ads created with only HTML5 and CSS 3. It’s not clear who had the idea first, but it at least looks like it may be a case of AdMob chasing Apple’s coattails.
No one is quite sure how Apple will choose to enforce its new iPhone OS terms of service, specifically regarding data collection by third-party analytics services. Steve Jobs talked briefly at D8 about the new TOS saying, “we're only going to allow analytics that don't give our device info—only for the purpose of advertising.” It seems as long as Google and AdMob hold back on collecting the device info, Apple won't have any ground to stand on if it prevents Google from offering a competing ad service.
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Feature: The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective
The Be operating system file system, known simply as BFS, is the file system for the Haiku, BeOS, and SkyOS operating systems. When it was created in the late '90s as part of the ill-fated BeOS project, BFS's ahead-of-its-time feature set immediately struck the fancy OS geeks. That feature set includes:
- A 64-bit address space
- Use of journaling
- Highly multithreaded reading
- Support of database-like extended file attributes
- Optimization for streaming file access
In this short article, we'll take a look at the legendary BFS, starting with some filesystem basics and moving on to a discussion of the above features. Also included at the end of the article are two interviews: one with the person who developed BFS for Be, and another with the developer behind the open-source version of BFS.
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Microsoft unveils Windows Live Essentials Wave 4
After unveiling what's next for the most popular Windows Live client application, Messenger, and the most popular Windows Live web service, Hotmail, Microsoft is now ready to zero in on (most of) the remaining client applications in the Windows Live Essentials suite.
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Verizon seeks partners to blanket rural US with 4G broadband
Looks like the payoff for the Federal Communications Commission's massive 700MHz band auction in 2008 could be coming for rural consumers. Verizon, which bought $9 billion worth of contiguous licenses in that zone, says it's looking for rural companies to help it "collaboratively build and operate" 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks in the countryside.
The local carriers will provide towers and backhaul lines to them. Verizon will bring in the core LTE equipment and regional 700MHz licenses, which can transmit voice and data across rural county sized distances.
"Verizon Wireless may work with rural companies that have towers and backhaul capabilities, even if those companies are not currently wireless operators," the telco also says. "Together, we will plan and coordinate a local LTE deployment schedule that makes sense for both Verizon Wireless and the rural company that we are collaborating with."
2010 is a crucial year for Verizon's ambitious LTE plans. The company just put out a YouTube video extolling the better-than-expected-results of its LTE trials in Boston, Massachusetts. Last year, Verizon's Chief Technology Officer trekked all the way to Barcelona, Spain to promise that it will deploy the broadband technology in 25 to 30 cities by late December.
"We'll double that in 2012," the carrier pledges. "And we plan to cover our entire existing 3G footprint with 4G LTE by the end of 2013."
The relationship between Verizon and rural providers hasn't always been smooth. Last summer, Verizon's diplomatic core spent a hefty chunk of time trying to make nice with them and Congress over two sore points: exclusive handset deals and more roaming access. Rural telcos say the exclusive arrangements lock their customers out of access to the latest gadgets.
But with Verizon promising LTE data rates of 5-12 Mbps on average, we've got to believe it's going to start getting inquiries about this offer.
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Voyage to the Heart of Matter, a popup book for physics geeks
During a recent press event at Brookhaven National Lab, we had a sneak glimpse of a rather unusual product: a popup book for adults. Entitled Voyage to the Heart of Matter, the book focuses on the ATLAS detector at CERN's LHC particle accelerator. Last week, the New York Academy of Science hosted an event to celebrate its release on the US market, complete with a panel discussion moderated by Alan Alda. The book will go on sale later this month, but those in attendance were able to both purchase a copy, and get an update on what's new at the LHC (if you don't care about the book, you can scroll to the bottom for the update).
Voyage was made by CERN's Emma Sanders, who worked with Anton Radevsky, a man who knows his paper but who normally applies his skills to children's books; both were in attendance in New York. Radevsky said he's got a good feel for whether a given 3D object can be flattened down, so he set some limits on what ideas could and could not make it into the final product. For Sanders, who does outreach for CERN, the keys were accuracy and telling the story of how the LHC works and why we've built it.
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A dose of testosterone makes women more wary
In both humans and other animals, cheaters run rampant. For social species, being able to accurately determine whether a partner is trustworthy can be essential to an individual’s success. However, very little is known about the physiological bases of trust. A study released by PNAS last week found that testosterone may reduce a woman’s tendency to trust unfamiliar people.
Twenty-four women participated in the double-blind study over two days. On the first day, half of the women were given a dose of testosterone under their tongue, while the other received a placebo; the treatments were switched on the second day so that each participant experienced both treatments.
After the testosterone treatment, the researchers administered a facial trustworthiness task, in which each subject was shown a series of human faces and asked to assess how trustworthy the person in the image is. Economic exchange tasks, which are usually employed in similar experiments, were not used because of the possible confounding effects of testosterone on risk-taking and reward-seeking behavior.
Overall, women doled out lower trustworthiness ratings after receiving testosterone than they did following the placebo. Interestingly, this effect was largely driven by the 12 “socially naïve” subjects who were most trusting in the placebo treatment; testosterone elicited a far greater reduction in interpersonal trust in these women than it did in the less trustful half of the study group. By administering mood tests and asking the participants to guess what treatment they had received on each day, the researchers ruled out the possibilities that either subjective preconceptions or mood confounded the results.
The authors of the study hypothesize that the trust-reducing effect of testosterone is adaptive and might be especially advantageous for socially naïve women. When competition is high and resources are on the line, highly trusting individuals are at the greatest risk for being cheated and might benefit from a little dose of testosterone-induced skepticism.
PNAS, 2010. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0911700107 (About DOIs).
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Blur review: fast and intense—and released at a bad time
There is something to be said for the experience of picking up a game and knowing exactly where it came from. Blur is clearly a Bizarre Creations... creation, from the voice-over explaining the events to the handling of the cars. The difference here is that Blur takes place in an ultra-stylized universe where the roads are littered with glowing power-ups that give your car seemingly magical offensive and defensive capabilities.
This is where Blur falters conceptually. There is something to be said for a pure video game, but there is no internal logic here. Why are rusted-out Beetles going neck-and-neck with sports cars? Cars don't get destroyed when hit with powerful weapons until they're out of health. Until then they just slow down, fishtail, or fly end-over-end before landing back on their wheels. At one point I was hit by a car and twisted nearly all the way around. The screen went black and paused for a moment, leading me to believe the game had crashed. But then I was deposited back on the track, pointing forward.
It's one thing to have a stylized reality, it's quite another when an internal logic doesn't seem to exist.
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"Canadian DMCA" defends DRM, legalizes DVRs
Canada's long-awaited copyright modernization bill appeared today. If passed, it would explicitly legalize DVRs, YouTube mashups, backups, and parodies—and it would slap strong, US-style restrictions on bypassing DRM.
Forget fair dealing; as in the US, digital locks trump all.
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Microsoft previews Windows Embedded Compact 7
Microsoft has announced the Windows Embedded Compact 7 public Community Technology Preview (CTP). Windows Embedded Compact 7 is the next generation of the Windows Embedded CE platform, which according to Microsoft, provides OEMs with the tools and technologies to deliver "the power of Windows 7" across another family of specialized devices, such as slates, portable media players, e-readers, and so on. Hardware manufacturers and developers will get resources to help bring high-performing devices to market quicker with support for multicore CPUs along with the latest ARM-based architecture and tools, including Platform Builder, Visual Studio, Expression Blend, and Silverlight for Windows Embedded.
For consumers, the release will eventually hold the promise of being able to share and manage content across networked devices (including new HDTVs) with Digital Living Network Alliance, a new media library with more codecs and seamless integration with Windows 7-based PCs. The new version also brings a major update to Internet Explorer that includes support for Adobe Flash 10.1.
Enterprise users will have an easier way to connect to corporate e-mail, calendar, and contacts through Microsoft Exchange 2010 AirSync or Microsoft Exchange Server support. They will also get Microsoft Office and Adobe PDF viewers to access documents, and Windows 7 Device Stage to transfer files between PCs and portable devices.
Developers can snag the CTP; to download it, you'll need to use your Windows Live ID to apply for the Windows Embedded Compact program on Microsoft Connect. The platform is expected to be released to manufacturing in the fourth quarter of 2010.
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iPhone data usage: we show you ours, please show us yours
With this morning's news of AT&T's data plan shakeup, many iPhone-using readers were outraged. 2GB to the average nerd doesn't sound like very much, and many smartphone owners who read Ars consider themselves to be among the heaviest data consumers. However, as users started checking their own data usage on AT&T's website, they began to find that not only did they almost never cross the 2GB threshold in a month, they might even be able to downgrade to the new 200MB monthly tier.
Since we on the Ars staff believe that AT&T's new tiers will translate into savings for most users, we decided to put up or shut up with graphs of our own data usage since November of 2009. As you can see from the graphs below, most of us hover in the general 80MB to 300MB per month range on our phones alone, though those numbers tend to go up and down depending on certain factors (such as when and how often we travel).
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Mobile app usage on the rise, even among non-smartphones
The mobile app craze has really taken off thanks to the growing popularity of the iPhone, Android phones, and BlackBerrys among consumers. Even among users who are still using "feature phones" (basically your standard cheap phone), mobile apps are taking off, but in understandably lower volume than their smartphone counterparts, according to the latest data from Nielsen.
While the most popular app list is very similar among the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and other smartphones, their order of popularity differed slightly. Facebook sat in the number one spot for all smartphone varieties except for Android OS, where it took second place after Google Maps. Music-related apps—such as iPod on iPhone OS, and Pandora on all of the OSs—were popular, as were weather-related apps, according to Nielsen's 4,200-person sample.
The average number of applications installed on smartphones sat at 22 over the last month, while feature phones had about 10. When broken down by OS, iPhone users had the most apps (37), followed by Android (22). BlackBerry users had an average of 10 apps, tying the OS with your average feature phone user. And, unsurprisingly, feature phone users were the biggest fans of games—after all, there isn't much else available for your standard cell phone.
Nielsen says that 21 percent of wireless users in the US had a smartphone at the end of 2009, up from 14 percent at the end of 2008. "With smartphones expected to overtake feature phones in the US by 2011, the popularity of mobile apps will only grow," wrote Nielsen.
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Meritocracies get their start at your local high school
If we ever develop meritocratic views, we are most likely to get them in our adolescence, according to a study published in Science last Thursday. When researchers had kids of various ages divide resources they had earned with partners, the children tended to divide them equally, while older teenagers were more likely to divide the resources depending on what they felt each party had earned.
To humans, fairness often involves consideration of circumstances. For example, if someone at work is more productive, many people would consider it fair for him to be paid more money, though he has no more need or rank than his colleagues. It's not obvious how this evaluation process enters the fairness equation, and researchers have wondered how and when we start to take things like effort into account.
To study this, they set up a game where teams of children in grades five through twelve were given access to two websites. One allowed them to earn credits by completing tasks, an analogue of hard work, and the other let them play games or watch videos. At the end of each round, each pair of kids was awarded either 8¢ or 4¢ for each credit he earned, a measure that introduced an element of luck.
The researchers then added the pairs' earnings together, and asked one of the kids to divide the money between them. They found that kids in fifth grade tended to be more egalitarian, dividing the money equally regardless of how much either had earned.
However, meritocratic views began to sneak in as the subjects' age increased: older adolescents not only gave partners less money for earning less, but also awarded themselves less when they had not been as productive. There was also a small but steady number of what the researchers termed "libertarian" subjects, who divided the money exactly as it had been paid out, without considering the aspect of luck.
Based on this study, most people seem to gain the ability to judge fairness based on relevant criteria (how hard someone worked) while ignoring irrelevant criteria (whether the person was lucky enough to receive the higher payout) through age and experience. Unless they're "libertarians," in which case, everyone's playing the hand he or she is dealt.
Science, 2010. DOI: 10.1126/science.1187300 (About DOIs).
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Google's Chrome OS to arrive on hardware "later this fall"
Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai announced that the company's browser-centric operating system will be released this fall. Chrome OS is built on top of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, but uses a completely custom user interface based on Google's Chrome Web browser.
The announcement was made at the Computex conference in Taipei where hardware makers are unveiling a multitude of new tablet and netbook products. Pichai reportedly said that Google is working on bringing the first Chrome OS device to market.
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New AT&T data plans milk data gluttons, lower costs for most
As AT&T Wireless CEO Ralph de la Vega has hinted at for months, AT&T announced this morning a major overhaul to its smartphone data plans. AT&T will now offer two-tiered data plan pricing, with a top cap set at 2GB. Though most users should save money, according to AT&T's research, users that relied on unlimited data will be paying more.
The company has also announced that a long-awaited tethering plan will for the first time be available to iPhone users, about a year after tethering functionality was enabled in last year's iPhone OS 3.0 upgrade. iPhone tethering will become a reality "this summer" with the iPhone OS 4.0 upgrade; curiously, the new pricing plans go into effect the exact same day that Steve Jobs is expected to announce the next revision of the iPhone at WWDC. Along with the new smartphone plans, AT&T is also capping iPad 3G users at 2GB per month, effectively wiping out the "amazing" pricing that Steve Jobs announced back in January after only one month of iPad 3G availability.
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India vows to sabotage ACTA
Fed up with the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), India hopes to whip up an anti-ACTA chutney so spicy that negotiators have no choice but to purge every trace of the loathed agreement from their systems.
Though countries like Morocco are involved, rich countries have driven the ACTA process. The World Trade Organization—ignored. The World Intellectual Property Organization—bypassed. Instead of using the very fora that they played such a role in establishing, countries like the US, EU, Canada, Japan, and Australia formed a coalition of the willing. ACTA has been negotiated in secret, though the recently released negotiating draft text envisions a permanent secretariat that will receive new members.
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Shadow of the Colossus in HD: this is what it could be
Ever since the release of God of War Collection, rumors have been swirling that Team Ico's PlayStation 2 games—Ico and Shadow of the Colossus—would be getting similar treatment prior to the release of The Last Guardian. And while Sony has yet to confirm these rumors, Eurogamer has decided to run the game through an emulator to see what a potential HD version might look like.
When originally comparing the HD versions of the GOW games with their PS2 counterparts, the team at Eurogamer found that the running the PS2 version on the PC via the PCSX2 emulator yielded results that were comparable to the PS3 version. So, to see what an HD Ico might look like, they did the same thing and recorded the results.
As you can see, the results are impressive, showing improved texture and detail, though the emulator was unable to render the fog effects from the original game. In the case of SotC, running the game through an emulator not only increased the resolution, but showed the possibility of an HD remake actually improving the frame rate of the game, something that was a bit of an issue with the original. This is also what the game would look like without any new texture work added; updating the textures or models would make the game look even better.
Hopefully we'll hear more about both the HD Team Ico collection and The Last Guardian later this month at E3.
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