Microsoft has announced plans for a new Web version of its Games for Windows Marketplace. Come November 15, Windows PC users will be able to use the online portal to buy digital copies of video games from their browser, with 100 titles available from the likes of Rockstar and 2K Games, among others. The new marketplace will require a Windows Live ID and users will be able to purchase games with their Microsoft Points or a credit card. In addition to online access from any PC, Microsoft is touting "ultra-fast" transfers, fewer clicks for both purchase and download, easier navigation, improved search, dedicated publisher pages to find new games, and recurring specials such as "Deal of the Week." Much like competing services, gamers will be able to easily redownload games they purchased.
Microsoft currently offers PC software for downloading and managing the more limited set of games that work with its Games for Windows Live online gaming service. The Games for Windows Marketplace is really just a browser-based version of this, but that's the crucial part: the store is more accessible and the number of steps required to purchase a game has been slashed.
Digital downloads in the video game industry are growing in importance, and Microsoft is still playing catch-up. Just recently, Steam passed the 30 million user mark and Valve announced the platform was offering over 1,200 games.
Launch and upcoming titles include Age of Empires Online, Dead Rising 2, Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition, Fable: The Lost Chapters, Fable III, Flight Simulator, Gears of War, Grand Theft Auto III, Halo, Lego Universe, Lost Planet 2, Max Payne, Microsoft Flight, Zoo Tycoon, and others.
"With Games for Windows Marketplace, we set out to create a digital store built for PC gamers end-to-end," Kevin Unangst, senior global director of PC and mobile gaming at Microsoft, said in a statement. "And by integrating with our existing Xbox LIVE and Windows Live services, we've made it easier than ever for millions of gamers to see for themselves how easy buying PC games can be."
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Judge: Third trial against P2P user Jammie Thomas will go ahead
The first file-swapper to take her copyright infringement case all the way to a verdict will have a remarkable third trial next month. Jammie Thomas-Rasset has fought the RIAA through four years, two trials, a name change, and a $1.92 million judgment; on November 2, she gets to do it again.Just weeks before the third trial was supposed to begin, Thomas-Rasset's lawyers asked the judge overseeing the case to alter his earlier ruling slashing her damage award. That change would put an end to the district court trial and would open the way to the appeals court, and it would keep Thomas-Rasset from paying yet another visit to the Minneapolis federal courthouse.
Today, Judge Michael Davis refused to change his original ruling. "The Court has thoroughly reviewed the parties’ submissions and its January 22 Order and concludes that the January 22 Order contains no manifest errors of law or fact," he wrote. The trial is on.
We'll be covering the case, which should be quite different from the first two. This trial is only a trial on damages; Thomas-Rasset is already presumed to be liable for infringement, and a jury will hear testimony only about the size of the fee she should pay. The RIAA is hoping for another big award, one which would make the previous $1.92 million decision look "reasonable" by showing that multiple juries can come to similar conclusions.
Jury decisions in the two major P2P cases to reach a verdict have been wildly mixed. Thomas-Rasset was originally hit with a $222,000 damage award, but the first trial was thrown out over a bad jury instruction. Her second trial then landed her with $1.92 million in fees, which was slashed by the judge to a mere $54,000. In Massachussetts, another file-swapper named Joel Tenenbaum then racked up a $675,000 judgment, which that judge also slashed dramatically.
What will yet another Minnesota jury decide? And will the decision lead Judge Davis to slash the award once more? We'll know soon.
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Facebook touts encryption as solution to security flaw
Facebook has proposed a solution to a recent security flaw that allowed apps to transmit personal data that involves encrypting the relevant string of numbers, according to a post on its Developer Blog on Thursday. The new set of parameters would allow developers to apply encryption within the next few weeks, preventing data that identifies application users from leaking to places it shouldn't be.Facebook's security flaw works something like this: when a Facebook user loads a particular kind of application (one that uses iframes) and authorizes the application to access their profile, the URL of the iframe then carries the user's UID, a number that can link the account to actions on other websites.
Usually the UID is responsible for webpage personalization, as when a box informs you which of your other friends have "liked" something on a page outside of Facebook. If an ad network or similarly nefarious Web presence is able to mine the iframes for UIDs, it could open users up to a new level of targeting.
To make iframe-based applications handle UIDs more responsibly, Facebook's Mike Vernal has proposed that developers begin encrypting the parameters passed to these applications. Facebook has posted the technical details of the proposal, followed by a comment thread for developers to give feedback.
InformationWeek notes that while this would prevent the accidental sharing of UIDs, it will not make HTTP referrer headers less prone to carrying information about the use of other websites. Data sharing via HTTP headers is a "Web-wide problem" that Facebook wants to address as a whole in the coming months.
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How Qt could bring better third-party software to Ubuntu
Mainstream graphical applications for the Linux desktop are generally developed with either Gtk+ or Qt. These open source development toolkits supply user interface frameworks and other components that are needed to build desktop programs. Although Gtk+ has historically been favored by the major commercial Linux distributors, Qt's numerous technical advantages and growing relevance in the mobile industry are increasingly difficult for Linux vendors to ignore.In a blog entry posted this week, Canonical CTO Matt Zimmerman outlined how the capabilities of Nokia's Qt development toolkit can benefit Ubuntu. Some of the specific advantages that he highlights include Qt's strong corporate backing, robust suitability for cross-platform development, and increasingly rich support for touch interaction.
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iFixit finds MacBook Air full of pesky screws, proprietary parts
The new 11" MacBook Air has hardly arrived in one piece, and already iFixit has broken it down to get a first-hand look at its components. The system is more closed than ever, with tricky screws on the bottom and its RAM soldered to the logic board. Still, once inside, some of the parts are still easily replaceable.
iFixit seemed pretty miffed about the new five-point Security Torx screws that hold the MacBook Air's underside together. The screws' points are rounded, like flower petals, and the authors had to "file down a couple of flathead screwdrivers" in order to prise the thing open.
Once inside, the biggest changes were readily apparent. Six lithium-polymer cells that make up the 35-watt-hour battery take up a large amount of space next to the 64GB flash storage board, composed of four 16GB Toshiba chips.
Everything in the case was held together with more easily-routed six- and eight-point Torx screws, and iFixit notes that the drive comes out easily enough. However, it appears to be a custom part, and will likely only be available through Apple Support services.
The new MacBook Air uses the same Broadcom WiFi/Bluetooth chip as the current MacBook Pro line, though in a different form factor. The IR sensor, present in the last MacBook Air for use with an Apple remote, is gone, as is the sleep LED, affording room for the second USB port.
The RAM, which even Apple usually concedes as a necessarily user-replaceable part, is soldered to the MacBook Air's logic board. This makes the online order decision to upgrade from 2GB to 4GB a do-or-die moment.
Overall, iFixit rated the Air a 4 out of 10 for serviceability. Many parts, like the flash drive, fan, and WiFi chip, are held in by only a couple of screws. However, all parts are proprietary, not to mention barricaded by the five-point Security Torx.
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Not so shocking: TV networks block Google TV
Google describes its new Google TV as a "platform that combines your current TV programming and the open Web into a single, seamless entertainment experience." But broadcasters don't necessarily want to see that delicious combination of Think of this as a continuation of the "Hulu Wars." Hulu has always made it difficult to access its content on TV screens even as applications like PlayOn tried to blend the two. The reason isn't hard to find: the TV networks that created and control Hulu aren't keen on cannibalizing their TV revenues by making it too easy to dial up an on-demand, ad-limited experience. If you want to watch Hulu, you're supposed to watch it on the slightly-less-comfortable screen of your computer.
With Google entering the TV platform game, that concern still exists (Hulu now charges $9.99 a month to access its service on other devices, like a TV screen or a smartphone, although it's rumored that will drop to $4.99), but it's joined by another. Google isn't a TV company or a content company; it's essentially a giant advertising company. As Google TV takes off, sucking in every scrap of video on the Web and on TV, the company is poised to become a content aggregator that makes money from advertising on the Google TV service. The networks don't want to continue the model where the aggregator makes cash by the boatload while the content it aggregates sometimes struggles to make any money.
The networks also don't want services like Google TV to destroy the cable subscription model too quickly by making "over-the-top" Internet video too appealing, since big chunks of their cash come from cable's retransmission fees.
So the new Wall Street Journal report about Google TV being blocked comes as no surprise. ABC, CBS, and NBC have all restricted access to the TV episodes on their own websites, though Google is taking the route it usually takes: it tries to strike a monetary deal when content owners put up resistance to unpaid aggregation (this has happened with Google Books, with the Associated Press, etc). Reuters reports that Google is negotiating to free up access to this content, something that will be necessary if Google TV will be used to access more than just broadcast channels and YouTube content.
The DC advocacy group Public Knowledge argues that broadcasters have a public duty to allow access to this material. "It is truly disappointing that broadcasters would leverage their programming to deny access to viewers who watch the shows over another medium—on cable or online," said president Gigi Sohn. "When a broadcaster exercises its market power in pursuit of maintaining a business model while stifling competition by blocking Hulu, Fox.com (or Google TV), the broadcaster violates that public trust and harms consumers... If online video is to emerge as an independent medium, it must be free from the power that broadcasters bring to bear."
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Fantasy University: Harry Potter meets Scott Pilgrim on Facebook
Fantasy University is a menu-based role playing game with enough pop culture references to put Scott Pilgrim to shame. From Spongebob Squarepants to Penny Arcade to Harry Potter, virtually every aspect of the game is, in some way or another, a nod to something else. The first character you meet is an amalgamation of virtually every one of the characters that Johnny Depp has played, and at one point you'll run across a walking vending machine named Admiral Snackbar. It's also a Facebook game.The platform alone will likely cause many people to write off Fantasy University—charmingly abbreviated to F.U.—but, aside from a few nagging issues, being on a social network doesn't hinder the game much. You play as a new student at the school, which is probably what bizzaro world Hogwarts would look like. You can customize your character in a variety of ways, including choosing from five different classes like slackninja or dodgebrawler, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. And after a brief tutorial, you're free to explore the grounds.
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Prosecutors seek to block Xbox hacking pioneer from mod-chip trial
Want a live tutorial on how to hack an Xbox by the guy who actually wrote the book on it?If so, you should plan to attend what likely will be the nation's first federal jury trial of a defendant accused of jailbreaking Xbox 360s—installing mod chips that allow the console to run pirated or home-brew games and applications.
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Watch out weather balloons: big wireless wants your spectrum
Want to know how bad the government wants to get more spectrum licenses to the wireless industry? Now they're going after the frequencies used to guide weather balloons."Last spring we identified some bands for analysis based on two criteria," Assistant Secretary of Commerce Larry Strickling told an audience of communications lawyers on Thursday. First—"could the band be used for wireless broadband without having to relocate the existing Federal users and second, could the band be made available to the commercial sector within five years."
Based on those conditions, Strickling's National Telecommunications and Information Agency found three federal bands ripe for the picking: 200MHz in the 4200 to 4400MHz bands used for radio altimeters for military and commercial airplanes, 150MHz in the 3GHz zone used by the Department of Defense for naval radar, and 1675-1710MHz used largely by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration for weather satellites and balloons.
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Flickr/Facebook sharing options greatly improved in iPhoto '11
We have, in the past, been harshly critical of iPhoto's Flickr and Facebook sharing features—if not on the site, at least in our personal lives. The feature was introduced to iPhoto in January of 2009 and ended up being both a blessing and a curse: we had longed for native uploading capabilities to our favorite photo sites, but Apple implemented it in a confusing and frustrating way, and many users kept their preferences to use third-party options like FlickrExport. Although third-party options still offer different (and, depending on what you like to do, potentially better) features, Apple has completely revamped how it shares photos to Flickr and Facebook in iPhoto '11. Announced as part of iLife '11 at Apple's recent Back to the Mac event, iPhoto no longer forces users to upload their photos into sets originally created in iPhoto. Finally, we can upload photos to sets that we created from the Web or another app, or to no set at all—gasp! Even better, iPhoto pulls in additional data from the photo sharing sites. So, we decided to give it a quick hands-on to show you the changes.
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Feature: Windows Phone 7: The Ars Review
The smartphone market ain't what it used to be. Four years ago, Symbian ruled the world—it was totally dominant in every market but three: Japan and China both had strong showings from Linux, and the North American market was split roughly evenly between RIM, Microsoft, and PalmSource. Worldwide, smartphone sales amounted to some 60 to 65 million.Then Apple came along with the iPhone in 2007 and changed the world.
The iPhone did four things. It showed us what could be done with finger-based user interfaces—that they could be easy to use, easy to type on, flexible, and good-looking. It made smartphones mass-market, consumer-oriented gadgets, breaking them free of their corporate shackles. It showed that smartphones were viable web browsing platforms, just as long as they were equipped with a good browser. And, eventually, it showed that there was a lot of value to be had in integrating an online application store.
Windows Mobile was a solid performer in the old smartphone world, but it never moved into the new, post-iPhone smartphone world. Windows Mobile 6.5, released in May 2009, was a half-hearted attempt to bring the system up-to-date with a finger-friendly home screen and Start menu-type-thing, but the interface was crudely grafted on and plainly unsatisfactory. This wasn't finger-friendly, consumer-friendly, modern smartphone software, and everyone knew it. It didn't halt Windows Mobile's marketshare slide, much less turn it around.
If Microsoft wanted to remain a player in the smartphone market, something would have to change. Windows Phone 7 is that change.
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The ninja, the robot, and the french fry: Costume Quest review
At its core, the downloadable Costume Quest is a game about imagination. It's about what it's like to be a kid, put on a blue cardboard outfit, and imagine that you're a huge, awesome robot. Or a unicorn. Or a ninja. Or even some sort of strange french fry monster. The game manages to capture this feeling perfectly, both through its charming presentation and its hilarious dialogue. Unfortunately, the actual gameplay doesn't quite match up to the same standard.Read the comments on this post
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Judge tells copyright troll Righthaven no, it's fair use
Righthaven, the company that scours the Web for copies of Las Vegas Review Journal stories and then sues the posters for mad cash and their domain names, has hit a small bump on the copyright lawsuit superhighway. A federal judge has just tossed one of its many cases because the posting was a "fair use."Righthaven has no problem going after small-time operators (read our profile of the company and its tactics). In this case, it sued a Las Vegas realtor named Michael Nelson, who runs a small blog related to home ownership. Nelson put eight sentences of a 30-sentence Review Journal article in one of his posts, along with a link back to the paper; for this he was sued in federal court.
Righthaven demanded that his domain name should be locked and transferred to Righthaven. In addition, the company demanded "willful" statutory damages for copyright infringement, which can be as high as $150,000. (Righthaven sends no cease-and-desist letters before suing.)
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Building the next big thing: 25 years of MIT's Media Lab
Last Friday, MIT's Media Lab hosted a series of talks to celebrate its 25th anniversary. Anyone who has paid attention to technology news over that period has undoubtedly heard of the various strange and interesting developments that make their way out of the Lab—Guitar Hero, LEGO Mindstorms, One Laptop per Child, and E Ink all started off as Media Lab projects. But far fewer people fully understand how the Media Lab operates, fits into MIT, and encourages such a creative environment; about half of the anniversary celebration's program focused on simply defining what the Media Lab is. So, for the benefit of those who weren't there, we'll attempt to explain how it has generated its reputation for being at the leading edge of technology. An independent lab
According to one of its founders, Nicholas Negroponte, the Media Lab was set up as an independent department within MIT because that would allow it to make its own tenure decisions and choose its grad students. That latter factor is a significant one. Most departments accept grad students based on their prospects for academic success; the Media Lab attempts to select ones that will best be able to help with some of the ongoing projects.Read the comments on this post
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Feature: Ars answers your burning questions about the 11.6" MacBook Air
Following our initial hands-on of the new MacBook Airs at the "Back to the Mac" event on Wednesday, we wanted to do a more in-depth hands-on in order to answer the huge pile of questions we got from our readers in the comments. The machine we have here is a stock 11.6" Macbook Air with a 1.4GHz Core2Duo CPU and 2GB of RAM. The built-in storage is an Apple 128GB SSD.This is just a first look; we are hard at work putting this machine through its paces, and you can expect a full Ars review of the new MacBook Air soon.
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Stanford faculty homes get 1Gbps fiber, thanks to Google
If you live in Stanford University's campus-owned faculty/staff housing development, you're in for a treat—1Gbps fiber optic Internet, courtesy of Google.The search giant today announced plans to build a small testbed network connecting the 850 homes in Stanford's Residential Subdivision, pitching it as the next logical step up from its Googleplex testbeds. The project is "our first 'beta' deployment to real customers" and will help Google "take what we learn from this small deployment to help scale our project more effectively and efficiently to much larger communities." Construction begins in early 2011.
So why Stanford? "Most important was Stanford’s openness to us experimenting with new fiber technologies on its streets," said Google, which has been experimenting with things like micro-trenching. "The layout of the residential neighborhoods and small number of homes make it a good fit for a beta deployment. And its location—just a few miles up the road from Google—will make it easier for our engineers to monitor progress."
The project doesn't affect Google's high-profile plan to build a much larger 1Gbps fiber network throughout an American city. Plans for Google Fiber are still in development, with city selection due by the end of the year.
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Nokia boosts Qt commitment, changes Symbian strategy
Nokia has announced some new plans to refine its mobile platform strategy. The company says that the current Symbian versioning scheme will be dropped in favor of a more rapid and incremental approach to development. The company also affirmed its commitment to the open source Qt development toolkit, which will become the "sole focus" of Nokia's application development efforts across both Symbian and the Linux-based MeeGo platform.When the Symbian Foundation formulated its roadmap last year for transitioning from the classic S60 environment to the next generation of the platform, the plan was to deliver three major version releases at six-month intervals. The existing S60 stack was dubbed Symbian^1, and the foundation's first official release was Symbian^2. Symbian^3 debuted on Nokia's new N8 handset and Symbian^4 was originally expected to launch in 2011. That plan is being abandoned in favor of a new incremental development model that will see new features and capabilities rolled out on a regular basis.
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Mac App Store: boon or bust for developers?
During Wednesday's Mac OS X 10.7 preview, Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed that the company is bringing an iOS-like App Store to the Mac platform. The store will launch within 90 days, well before 10.7 (code-named Lion) is expected to ship in the summer of 2011. Given the issues developers have had in the past with the iOS App Store, we asked a number of independent developers their opinions about the announcement.
Most of the developers we talked to feel that a Mac App Store will open up a much larger market for Mac OS X applications. "I'm excited about the Mac App store, because it should be an awesome way for us little dudes to reach new customers who aren't necessarily in the 'Mac community,'" Delicious Monster's Wil Shipley told Ars. "We can choose to play by Apple's rules and get publicity from them and not have to all write our own stores—which, believe me, is a huge pain."
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Opera 11 alpha out: developers, start your extension engines
Last week, Opera announced that it was working on version 11 of its desktop browser and hinted that it would share an early version soon. Today, the company released Opera 11 alpha for Windows, Mac, and Linux to the public.
Version 11 comes with a new version of Opera's layout engine. Presto 2.6.37 improves performance while also adding hundreds of bug fixes and enhanced Web standards support as well as support for Websockets. There's also a new installer for Windows that Opera claims makes the installation/upgrade process twice as fast, with a 10 percent smaller download size.
The biggest new feature is easily Opera Extensions. Unlike Opera Widgets and Opera Unite applications, extensions allow adding features and functionality directly into the browser itself; some extensions have interface elements while others can run exclusively in the background.
Developers can create extensions using open standards such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and supported APIs (the alpha release supports injectable JavaScript, callouts, certain UI items, plus a basic Tabs and Windows API). Extensions are based on the W3C Widget specification, which is being considered for an Open Standard effort. The company is also trying to make it easy to port extensions from certain browsers, which it says will only require "a few tweaks" to the code.
To create an extension, read the tutorials and "getting started" guide, develop the code, and upload it to the Opera extensions webpage. Opera says it will check all extensions for defects and malicious software before they are made public.
The addition of extensions marks an important milestone for Opera. The company has always insisted on including features right in the browser, arguing that Opera included everything important you could get out of extensions without any extra installation ("the most powerful browser out-of-the-box").
At the start of the year, Google added extension support to Chrome in version 4. Apple just added extension support this past summer in version 5 while Firefox has had them for years. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
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Finding the genes that make a human stem cell
Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) have been touted for their potential ability to cure, or at least help, many human diseases. That is because they are pluripotent: they are able to differentiate into every type of cell, from neurons to blood cells. But we still don’t know exactly, at the genetic level, all the factors that confer and maintain this pluripotency. ESCs from mice have been studied in greater detail, but there are differences between the two species. A group in Singapore has recently performed a genome-wide RNA interference screen to identify the genes that determine hESC identity. RNA interference (RNAi) is a method by which scientists can selectively turn off one gene at a time and look at the consequences of eliminating it. They screened 21,121 human genes and found 566 candidates where knocking the gene down interfered with hESC identity.
Among these were genes known to be essential for the maintenance of ESCs, confirming the validity of their approach. Many of these genes encode proteins involved in transcription (copying DNA into messenger RNA) and translation (transcribing mRNA into protein). A number of others are part of known biochemical complexes, like the complex that splices immature mRNAs (the spliceosome) and a complex that remodels the packaging of chromosomes—these particular genes were never before implicated as important for hESC development.
Of the genes they identified, the researchers chose to focus the remainder of their study on the transcription factor PRDM14. RNAi interferes with gene function, so to perform a complementary experiment, the authors introduced extra copies of the PRDM14 gene into cultured human cells, and found that it induced genes associated with pluripotency.
The authors also identified the sequence of DNA to which PRDM14 binds. They found that this sequence overlaps those of other transcription factors known to be important in stem cell development, and that it appeared in 2,755 genes. PRDM14 was previously known as a transcriptional repressor—when it bound to certain genes, it turned off their expression. Yet here it was found to upregulate 24.1 percent of the genes to which it bound.
In mice, PRDM14 is required to establish the germ cell lineage, but is not required for the maintenance of ESCs. Its importance in maintaining hESCs should help us to understand the mechanisms involved in reprogramming human somatic cells to gain pluripotency, and hopefully to eventually fulfill the clinical possibilities promised by ESCs.
Nature, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/nature09531 (About DOIs).
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Europe smacks "indiscriminate" copyright levies on blank CDs, DVDs
Spain allows its citizens to make private copies of copyrighted works—but it compensates creators for the economic harm of this practice by laying down a levy on digital media and devices. If you purchase blank CDs or DVDs, or if you buy DVD burners or possibly even an MP3 player, you have to pay up. But what if "you" aren't a person at all? Imagine a nonprofit that needs to back up its donor records, or a business that wants to burn its own promotional CDs, or a government agency that buys some computers with DVD burners built in. They won't be churning out Bob Dylan CD mixes, so how can it be fair to make them pay the levy?According to the European Court of Justice, it's not fair—and it needs to stop.
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Channeling the Piano Man: a preview of the Rock Band 3 keyboard
Rhythm games have been run into the ground, with multiple releases in multiple franchises choking retail shelves with plastic guitars and marked-down prices. Rock Band 3 has a hard road ahead of it, with the Guitar Hero series having already released DJ Hero 2 to good reviews, and more hardware being sold to gamers in order to take advantage of the "Pro" experience. Rock Band 3 is coming into a busy market with an expensive product in a crowded genre.While it's easy to be skeptical, all that falls away when you plug in the new keyboard attachment, a microphone with a stand, and play John Lennon's "Imagine" while playing the piano line. Rock Band 3 needs to deliver a new experience in order to justify itself, and that's what we were looking for when we took our first look at the keyboard peripheral and game in the privacy of our office. Luckily, we found it.
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More privacy headaches for Facebook: gay users outed to advertisers
Facebook's privacy problems continue this week after researchers discovered that Facebook may inadvertently be outing gay users to its advertisers. Saikat Guha from Microsoft and Bin Cheng and Paul Francis from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems set out to study the challenges in targeted advertising systems (PDF) online, but found that advertisers can ferret out gay users from straight users just by looking at who's clicking—even when that sexual orientation is hidden.The team set up profiles for straight men, straight women, a gay man, and a lesbian to see how the ads differed between the different types of users. The ads did change for the gay and lesbian users, though the difference in the ads was much greater for the gay males (compared to the straight males) than gay females, "indicating that advertisers target more strongly to [gay males]" reads the paper.
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The oldest thing we've ever seen
Earlier this year, Ars Technica celebrated the Hubble Space Telescope's 20th anniversary with a retrospective of what we considered to be some of its best images returned to date. The last image we highlighted was one from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which shows some of the earliest stars and oldest galaxies known to exist. Buried within a similar image was a speck known as UDFy-38135539, a galaxy with a redshift of approximately 8.6. Since the shifting of light towards the red end of the spectrum increases with distance (and hence time), a redshift of this magnitude means that the light seen by Hubble was generated over 13 billion years ago.The apparently extreme redshift seen in the Hubble data was only a guess—albeit a scientifically supported one. The same data was consistent with the unlikely possibility that UDFy-38135539 existed at a more pedestrian redshift of 2.12, and was a much closer galaxy that appeared unusually young. To figure out which of these is the case, we needed to accurately measure the galaxy's distance from Earth by carrying out a spectroscopic analysis of the light that is just now reaching Earth.
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FaceTime for Mac opens giant Apple ID security hole
FaceTime for Mac was released yesterday with an apparently slack-jawed, if not exactly gaping, security hole. Macworld Germany has noted that once a user has logged into FaceTime for Mac with his or her Apple ID, the password on the account can be changed from FaceTime without knowledge of the old password, leaving the account ripe for the picking by any passersby of the physical computer. The sabotage of an Apple ID is as easy as navigating through FaceTime's preferences menu to the "View Account" page. Once there, whoever happens to be sitting at the computer can change the associated account password.
As long as the password satisfies all the security rules, the change instantly applies across the Apple ID account. For example, changing the password in FaceTime and subsequently accessing the iTunes Store will result in a prompt from iTunes to re-enter your password, and the old one will not work.
Signing out of FaceTime won't help, either—the program saves your password to the field, and there's no way to opt out of password memory. FaceTime will not let users delete the only e-mail address associated with the account, so if you've already signed up, you're kind of stuck.
If your account is hijacked, the worst-case scenario is your tormentor going on an iTunes Store shopping spree on your dime. If you're wise to the password change, you can flip the password back just as easily. Still, you might want to maintain constant vigilance until Apple releases some kind of hotfix. Especially if the office prankster asks if he can use your computer to FaceTime with his sick grandmother.
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