Switzerland, a longtime haven for all kinds of financial shenanigans, has just expanded its reputation for "discretion" to cover file-sharing as well. That's the conclusion of Logistep AG, anyway, as a Swiss court has just gutted its P2P surveillance business with a ruling that says gathering even publicly-available information is illegal.Logistep has operated in Switzerland since 2004, doing what all of these firms do: trolling BitTorrent sites for movies, music, or software, then connecting to swarms and logging the information of everyone offering the file. Bits of the file are downloaded as proof that these aren't simply "mistitled" files, and information like IP address, file hash value, and time of day are recorded in a giant spreadsheet. Content providers who rely on Logistep can take this information and submit it to local courts, seeking to identify and then sue individual file-swappers.
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Android usage to surpass BlackBerry, iOS by year end
Android is on its way to taking the silver medal in mobile market share worldwide, and gold in North America—as long as the platform maintains its currently strong growth numbers. According to market research firm Gartner, the mobile world will be dominated by Symbian and Android devices by 2014, with RIM's BlackBerry and Apple's iOS projected to come in third and fourth place, respectively. Symbian will maintain its market dominance thanks to Nokia's sheer sales volume, while Android will outpace the rest of the competition because of the impending launch of "many new budget Android devices" by the end of 2010 that will help the OS get into the mass market. "Other players, such as Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola, will follow a similar strategy. This trend should help Android become the top OS in North America by the end of 2010," wrote Gartner.
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Feature: Ars reviews the 6th-generation iPod nano: all screen, all the time
The sixth-generation iPod nano's design marks the largest divergence from the nano line since the device was introduced in 2005. The new device is also the first iPod nano to have a touchscreen interface, and the last iPod with a screen to get a touchscreen interface (not counting the languishing iPod classic, as that would just turn it into an iPod touch). As of now, the nano no longer has the telltale circular click wheel that helped to make the iPod so iconic. However, the new iPod nano differs from its touchscreen iDevice brethren in that it doesn't run iOS, or at least not a version of iOS that any of us are familiar with so far. In reality, the sixth-generation nano is kind of a mutant—a cross between the old iPod and the new, where you can move things around with your finger but can still only play music and perform a few other functions. What to make of this electronic chimera?
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Hands on with VLC Movie-Player for iPad
We know that the iPad is (mostly) great for video playback, as long as you can be bothered to convert it to the right format or buy your movies and TV shows from Apple. But what if there were a way to play not just H.264 MP4 files with AAC audio (yes, the Apple spec is pretty specific), but to play any file? Thanks to VLC for the iPad, there is.VLC is a port of the popular and excellent desktop application. The open-source project is famous for playing video files that will kill lesser applications, and it is set to make its iPad debut early next week. Romain Goyet, the CTO of the developer behind the app—Applidium—was kind enough to send the final version to me for testing.
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God of War: Ghost of Sparta demo is more of the same, wonderful
As the demo for God of War: Ghost of Sparta on the PSP begins, you're on a ship sailing toward Atlantis. You fight on the boat, you land, and you fight on the land. It gives you a feel for the new weapons—a spear and a shield—as well as the new attack, a charging move that lets you pick up and throw down an enemy to punish him on the ground. It looks stunning on the PSP, with water effects and a steady frame rate. The problem is... well, haven't we seen all this before?Yes, you fight an epic boss across a series of confrontations, and at one point you drag a stone to a pressure-sensitive switch to open the way forward. There are quick-time events, some enemies are more powerful than others, and you can of course kill those in very violent ways. There are also hidden red orbs to find, if you don't mind doing a little exploring.
We need to get rid of the usual demo and video dog-and-pony show of showing a boss, having  the character and the boss run at each other, and then the demo is over and we're told to buy or wait for the full game. Seriously.
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Nyko's Wand+ Wiimote brings the Motion+ without the +
Nyko's Wand+ controller isn't reinventing the wheel, it's simply doing what the wheel does for a little less money and without two pieces. In fact... let's get away from this metaphor before I hurt myself.The Wand+ is Nyko's take on the Wiimote, albeit with the Motion Plus technology built-in. There is no dongle, there is no extension on the controller—it's just one standard-sized Wiimote that does everything the Motion Plus does. We tested the controller by playing Wii Sports Resort and it worked flawlessly, just as well as the official controllers. Isn't that the mark of greatness when it comes to third-party accessories? Even after switching back and forth between the Wand+ and the first-party controller we couldn't feel a difference in accuracy or responsiveness.
At $39.99 MSRP it's even $10 cheaper than the standard Wiimote with a Motion Plus dongle at most retailers. If you're tired of losing your Motion Plus attachment, or you don't like the added length of the dongle, this is a good alternative. It's neither flashy nor an amazing leap forward. It simply does everything as advertised. There's nothing wrong with that.
Verdict: Buy
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Meet your next 'Net? Academics rethink the Internet's guts
Judging by the National Science Foundation's latest grants for Internet development, our universities are packed with scientists who think that the 'Net is woefully unprepared for the future, and are anxious to tackle the problem. In fact, these people can't wait to untether cyberspace from its current rules and architectures.Take, for example, Professor Lixia Zhang of the University of California at Los Angeles. She started out driving a tractor on a farm in Northern China, then got to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1980s. Now she studies the Internet Protocol at UCLA, where she questions whether IP will carry the Internet to where it needs to go in the coming years.
"Users and applications operate in terms of content, making it increasingly limiting and difficult to conform to IP's requirement to communicate by discovering and specifying location," Dr. Zhang's NSF award statement explains. It's time to get past IP's host/location based assumptions with a new Internet architecture that she calls Named Data Networking (NDN).
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Xbox 360 wins horrid August, Madden dominates software
The gaming industry had its worst August in the US since 1996 this year, but Microsoft has much to be proud of, with both the best-selling hardware and software. That's not to say the PlayStation 3 is in bad shape, as NPD Analyst Anita Frazier points the PS3 "has now enjoyed 13 consecutive months of year-over year hardware sales increases and that momentum is reflected in the content and accessories categories as well."Let's take a look at the hardware sales:
Data source: NPD Group
Things should look very similar next month, when Microsoft releases the sure-to-explode Halo: Reach to retail, along with a new version of the Xbox 360. Sony has the Move and its accompanying games to look forward to as well. Nintendo? Price drops on the DS line of hardware are coming, but don't expect much more sales momentum until the 3DS is released.
- Madden NFL 11 on Xbox 360 with 920,000
- Madden NFL 11 on PS3 with 893,600
- Super Mario Galaxy 2 on Wii with 124,600
- Mafia 2 on Xbox 360 with 121,600
- New Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo DS with 110,400
- New Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo Wii
- Mafia 2 on PS3
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox 360
- NCAA Football 11 on Xbox 360
- Wii Fit Plus on Wii
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ARM's Eagle has landed: meet the A15
Just as products based on ARM's much anticipated Cortex A9 are finally poised to hit the market, the company has announced yet another, even higher-end core design: the A15. Codenamed "Eagle," the A15 architecture is ostensibly aimed at netbooks and tablets, but a look at the spec sheet leaves no doubt that ARM is absolutely gunning for the server market that Intel and AMD currently dominate. Indeed, even going by what little ARM has revealed about the A15, it's very hard to imagine this thing in a smartphone when it launches at 32nm in 2012 or 2013. This is a laptop and server part, and ARM will use it to take the fight to x86. Read the comments on this post
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NoSQL takes a seat on Android with new mobile version of CouchDB
A new mobile version of the CouchDB database system, called CouchOne Mobile, is available for Google's Android operating system. The mobile version is still at a relatively early stage of development, but it will allow developers to take advantage of CouchDB's sophisticated replication functionality to synchronize data between desktop and mobile applications.CouchDB is a schema-less document-based database that uses JSON as a storage format and JavaScript as a query language. It is popular in the so-called NoSQL community and is increasingly seeing deployment in high-profile business and scientific computing environments.
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Broadcom swims upstream, tackles Linux WiFi woes with new open drivers
Broadcom announced today the initial release of its new open source wireless drivers for Linux. The drivers, which are built using the kernel's own native SoftMAC framework, are currently in the kernel staging tree and are expected to eventually be merged upstream.Broadcom networking hardware has typically been problematic on Linux because the community-developed open source drivers had to use a proprietary firmware blob from Broadcom that wasn't available under terms that facilitated redistribution. This has historically precluded out-of-the-box support for popular Broadcom chips that are used in many laptops and netbooks. Broadcom is finally addressing the issue and is working with the upstream kernel community.
"Broadcom would like to announce the initial release of a fully-open Linux driver for its latest generation of 11n chipsets. The driver, while still a work in progress, is released as full source and uses the native mac80211 stack," wrote Broadcom's Henry Ptasinski in a message on the Linux wireless mailing list.
When the new drivers are mature and are merged into the kernel mainline, it will allow Linux distributions to provide first-class support several common Broadcom wireless chips. According to a Canonical kernel developer, the new drivers will be included in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 release and may be backported to the current stable version. The driver currently supports BCM4313, BCM43224, and BCM43225, but it can be extended in the future to support additional Broadcom hardware components.
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No new cars or power plants? Still locked into 1.3° of climate change
There are a lot of ideas on how to limit emissions of CO2 in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and ocean acidification. But most of those focus on future infrastructure and equipment; in the meantime, we have a large portfolio of power plants and vehicles that will continue to emit for as long as we use them, and we're unlikely to stop doing so. Just how significant are the carbon emissions that we've committed to? A study that will be released by Science today indicates that we're not in terrible shape yet, as we haven't built the hardware that could cause the most significant shifts in the climate.The new analysis focuses on what it terms "committed emissions" by taking known values like a car's typical emissions per year of driving, and totaling those for the projected lifespan of the vehicle. The database the authors use for this has separate figures for passenger and industrial vehicles, and provides numbers for things like coal-fired power plants and the like. For land use changes, it relies on values in the IPCC report. It also has figures for fossil fuel use by industrial equipment and the like, but these are simply based on total energy consumption, as this hardware is too varied to project accurately.
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Is there room for a Zune in a post-Windows Phone 7 world?
Remember when Microsoft unveiled the successor to Windows Mobile and said that every Windows Phone 7 will be a Zune? The consequences of that decision for Zune as a platform and for future devices are starting to pile up as we draw closer to release.Microsoft is considering at least one Zune HD, and is currently working on version 2, according to ZDNet (an echo of a six-month old SlashGear rumor). The name of Microsoft's iPod touch competitor is unknown: it might be Zune HD 2, Zune HD2, or even Zune HD7 (if HTC is okay with it).
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Microsoft Patch Tuesday for September 2010: nine bulletins
According to the Microsoft Security Response Center, Microsoft will issue nine Security Bulletins addressing 13 vulnerabilities on Tuesday, September 14. It will also host a webcast to address customer questions the following day.Four of the vulnerabilities are rated "Critical" and the other five are marked "Important." All of the Critical vulnerabilities earned their rating through a remote code execution impact, meaning a hacker could potentially gain control of an infected machine. At least four of the nine patches will require a restart.
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Feature: Capitol Hill, the Internet, and Broadband: An Ars Technica Quarterly Report
Introduction
The promises
Table of Contents
I. Internet privacyII. Cyber war and cybersecurity
III. Copyright enforcement and security
IV. Net neutrality
A. Ancillary questions
B. 535 wildcards
V. Stimulus & the FCC's national broadband plan
A. Stimulus
B. National planning
C. AllVid
D. Left Out
VI. Mobile wireless broadband oversight
A. Early termination fees
B. Bill shock
VII. Anti-trust issues
VIII. Conclusion
"I'm a big believer in net neutrality," Obama told a reporter shortly after taking office, noting that both he and his pick for the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, shared the view that "we've got to keep the Internet open, that we don't want to create a bunch of gateways that prevent somebody who doesn't have a lot of money but has a good idea from being able to start their next YouTube."
As the President spoke these words, champions of Internet- and broadband-related reform rushed to the nation's capital, eager to advocate their ideas after eight frustrating years of looking in from the outside. Prominent telecom analysts augured rapid change at the FCC. The new president "looks at technology as holistic and as a catalyst for job creation, economic development, closing economic divides, clearly a multiplier impact on the economy," predicted attorney Andrew Lipman. "Especially with broadband. And everybody knows he's an enthusiast for the Internet. Why not with 370,000 Internet contributions?"
Besides net neutrality, the new causes include privacy rights for social network users, device openness for mobile phones, pro-fair-use changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, easier line sharing access to the big cable and telco networks, spectrum reform, consumer protections for mobile phone users, and, perhaps most importantly, a national strategy for getting high speed Internet into the homes of most Americans.
The results
Eighteen months later, it is clear that all these reforms are still at play, but their full or even partial enactment is by no means guaranteed. While we believe that a variety of Internet-related changes are in the offing, substantial political- or interest-based roadblocks stand in the way of most of the major reform causes.Partisanship is certainly a major factor here, especially as it plays out in the media, with one cable TV host famously comparing net neutrality to Satan worship. And the incumbent Internet Service Providers are sparing no expense to make their voices heard—Verizon, for example, spent over $4.4 million on lobbying Congress in the second quarter of this year.
But in other instances, while key sectors of the DC policy community agree that adjustments are needed in various areas, the rapid evolution of the Internet makes it difficult to achieve consensus on laws or regulations at any given legislative or rulemaking opportunity.
To put it more plainly, the Internet may be the fastest moving target in policy history. While many political movements in the United States have effectively harnessed cyberspace for their immediate purposes, the 'Net itself uniquely eludes the goals of reformers and incumbents alike. This challenge is particularly obvious in the areas of consumer privacy and cyber security.
Nonetheless, some things have already changed. One of the most important developments we have noticed is that the constant threat of regulation from the federal government has often been met by voluntary reforms from industry. This has been particularly noticeable in the mobile and social networking sectors. We expect that dynamic to continue.
This quarterly survey reviews efforts to regulate the Internet and broadband at the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Copyright Office, the Library of Congress, the Department of Justice, the Department of Commerce, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security, and on Capitol Hill.
I. Internet privacy
Rivaling the rancor of the net neutrality debate is concern about privacy and data security on social networks like Facebook. The premiere site, which now serves half a billion members, is a source of constant anxiety for the public. While consumers can't get enough of Facebook, and delight in sharing their most intimate secrets on the service, they also worry about how that data is being used. In late May, researchers disclosed that Facebook, MySpace, Digg, and other sites were sharing users' personal data with advertisers without their knowledge or consent.Even before that disclosure, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and 14 other consumer groups complained to the Federal Trade Commission that Facebook was engaging in unfair trade practices.
"Facebook continues to manipulate the privacy settings of users and its own privacy policy so that it can take personal information provided by users for a limited purpose and make it widely available for commercial purposes," read their letter. "The company has done this repeatedly and users are becoming increasingly angry and frustrated."
The colorful statements of prominent figures on Capitol Hill mirror these concerns. The social networking environment has become a "machine," declared Senate Commerce Committee Chair Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) at a recent hearing.
"The machine records your every move that day," Rockefeller ominously warned. "Then, based on what you look at, where you shop, what you buy, it builds a personality profile on you. It predicts what you may want in the future and starts sending you coupons. Further, it tells businesses what a good potential client you may be and shares your personality profile with them."
Government regulation in this area could come from two places: Congress or the FTC. Activity at the latter venue has been characterized by repeated warnings to the industry to self-regulate, or the government will step in.
This 20-page report is available only in PDF form via Ars Technica's subscriber-only PDF library. To read the rest of it, subscribe today!
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Astronomers staring at the sun hope to see dark matter
The evidence for dark matter has come from big objects, generally starting at galaxy-sized and going up from there to the structure of the Universe itself. But a paper in today's issue of Science indicates that we can look to something smaller (and much closer) if we want to start figuring out what dark matter looks like: our own Sun. Since dark matter interacts primarily through gravity, the Sun should have the largest concentration around, and the paper argues that the additional matter should influence the production of neutrinos in a way that we may be able to detect. The paper is a Brevia, and its text doesn't even take up a full page, but it packs a lot of information into that short space. Its authors point out that the sun will gravitationally capture dark matter as it moves through the Milky Way and, provided these particles can at least undergo rare and weak collisions with regular matter, they'll eventually accumulate in the Sun's core. Once there, they'll influence the fusion reactions that take place.
According to our current model of the Sun, different reactions take place at different depths, and this should lead to an uneven distribution of the neutrinos these reactions produce. The dark matter will shift these reaction locations, and cause detectable differences in the neutrino flux coming out of the Sun. Right now, we don't have the hardware to detect these differences, but the authors say they should be within reach of future neutrino observatories.
It's worth noting that the dark matter-solar model they use contains a few assumptions beyond weak interactions with regular matter, such as the mass of the particles themselves and their ability to annihilate each other upon collisions. But the authors show how changing these assumptions can produce significantly different results. This means that, even if future experiments don't provide convincing evidence of dark matter, they could at least rule out several potential models of what the dark matter particles themselves look like.
Science, 2010. DOI: 10.1126/science.1196564 Â (About DOIs).
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Did Internet founders foresee future filled with paid, prioritized traffic?
AT&T has set off yet another net neutrality firestorm, claiming that a crucial Internet standards-making body gave its blessing to ISP priority access deals way back at the beginning of it all. In the late 1990s, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) added the "DiffServ" field to Internet Protocol (IP), AT&T insists, "to facilitate paid prioritization as a means for encouraging the further growth and development of the Internet."Paid priority access "was fully contemplated" and even "expressly contemplated" by the IETF decades ago, the telco has told the Federal Communications Commission, and is "fully consistent" with that body's standards-making discussions.
Baloney, insists the IETF's current chairman. "AT&T's characterization is misleading," Russ Housley told National Journal several days later. "IETF prioritization technology is geared toward letting network users indicate how they want network providers to handle their traffic, and there is no implication in the IETF about payment based on any prioritization."
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We were not ready: the PlayStation turns 15
There was a time when Sony's entry into the world of gaming was far from assured. When the PlayStation One was announced many claimed it was a fool's errand, and that only Nintendo and Sega could do well with gaming hardware.1995, it stands to point out, was a very different world.
After saving for almost a year I finally had enough for the PlayStation and a few games, along with one of these new-fangled memory cards. The PlayStation games would come on discs, you see, so you couldn't save your game directly to the cart. Despite my friends' laughter at the purchase, I felt like we were looking at the future. Looking back, we certainly were. The PlayStation was one of the most popular systems of all time, and helped usher in modern gaming. Happy Birthday.
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Righthaven: saving the newspaper industry, one lawsuit at a time
The Trauma Intervention Program (TIP) of Southern Nevada is a nonprofit that sends trained volunteers to the site of severe accidents, suicides, fires, and violent theft. The volunteers comfort family members, witnesses, and bystanders—traumatized people who can't be helped by anything found in an ambulance.TIP might seem an unlikely target for a federal copyright lawsuit, but it found itself hauled into court last week for posting 14 local newspaper articles about TIP and its volunteers to the group's website. In most of the articles, TIP volunteers are the main sources for the reporters, providing plenty of quotes and (sometimes jarring) anecdotes about their work.
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The PlayStation Kinect, The Microsoft Move: the mix begins
Sony and Microsoft want you to think they have very different strategies for motion controls. "You are the controller," the bathroom mirrors at E3 proudly exclaimed, in one of the creepier bits of advertising at the show. Sony, on the other hand, is combining its own camera technology with a more conventional controller for its games. What we're already seeing is that both technologies are more alike than either company would like to admit.Read the comments on this post
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