A database leak in Mesa County, Colorado has left the personal information of 200,000 people in jeopardy. And not just any 200,000 people—these are suspects, victims, and informants working with the sheriff's department to out other criminals. The incident has left the sheriff's department scrambling to find out who might have accessed the information—and whether it's now posted elsewhere on the Internet.The leak started flowing when a county IT employee who had legal access to the database copied it to another server in April of this year. According to the Associated Press, the employee had copied over the database in the form of a giant text file with everyone's information available in plaintext, assuming that the target server was secure.
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Feature: HDTV: A Guide for the Perplexed
Television has come a long way since the tiny old black-and-white set. Even the console TV big enough to sit on the floor, or the front projection set that many of us grew up with, are long gone for most. Indeed, for some perspective on just how far things have come in just the past decade, consider that the $1,000 Dell Ultrasharp 2000FP 20" LCD monitor that some of us bought in the early 2000's now has modern equivalents for about $200.
But the evolution in TV technology itself almost pales in comparison to the changes that have taken place in how we get video into a TV. Previously, the average consumer had an antenna on the roof or a cable coming in from the cable company. This coaxial cable was screwed into the input on the back of the VCR, which then had a second connection to the TV. Maybe you got a little fancy and actually had to deal with a cable with yellow RCA plugs for composite video in, plus two more, in red and black respectively, as a separate connection for stereo sound. Things eventually got a tad more complicated with the four-pin S-video standard, but fast-forward a few years to today and things have taken a turn for the confusing.
But generally speaking, just about everything today connects to your TV via HDMI. Your antenna or cable still comes through coaxial wiring, but that ends in your TV or your cable box, and everything spit out from there travels via a single HDMI cable, carrying both audio and video, content protection and all. The HDMI factor does simplify TV purchases a bit, but it still leaves some key questions for us to ponder. Among these questions are: How big a screen do I need? What are the differences between panel types? Does it matter what's being watched? What about glare? What's the difference between 720p and 1080p?
For those of you who are facing these questions during the holiday upgrade season, we're here to help.
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Daft Punk's Tron Legacy soundtrack is unexpected, and wonderful
The grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then one day, I got in.It has been years since Daft Punk released new music, and this is the score that the duo was seemingly born to write. Not surprisingly, in some circles the hype for the soundtrack to Tron Legacy has far outstripped that of the actual movie. This isn't just drum machines and electronics; Daft Punk was given the use of a full orchestra to create the themes used for the film.
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Useless antibodies made adults more susceptible to swine flu
One of the most disturbing aspects of the S-OIV/swine flu/H1N1 pandemic of 2009 is how severely it affected healthy, middle-aged adults instead of the elderly and infirm. Recent work, reported in Nature Medicine, suggests that it is because this population has "an antibody repertoire shaped by seasonal infections," and that these antibodies can recognize, but not fight, the new strain. This preponderance of nonprotective antibodies, combined with respiratory infections, can lead to immune complex mediated disease.The researchers, based in Tennessee and Argentina, examined lung tissues and aspirates from 75 adults with S-OIV. The patients ranged in age from 17-57 years. Twenty-three of them died, and 15 who survived required intensive care. The scientists compared these samples to some taken from adults with seasonal flu virus and infants with S-OIV. In contrast to the US, infants in Argentina were not routinely vaccinated against seasonal flu until 2010.
Adults with fatal S-OIV had damaged lungs, but not more damaged than those with fatal seasonal flu. The levels of S-OIV RNA did not differ significantly between patients in intensive care and ambulatory cases. And, for the most part, levels of inflammatory and other cytokines were also roughly the same between adults with S-OIV and seasonal flu. But people with severe cases of H1N1 did have lower than normal levels of T lymphocytes, a phenomenon associated with immune-mediated viral respiratory illness.
The S-OIV surface proteins are similar to seasonal flu (17 percent of its hemagluttinin and neuraminidase B cell epitopes), so the researchers looked for what are called cross-reactive but nonprotective antibodies. These antibodies would recognize both seasonal and S-OIV flu viruses, but only neutralize the seasonal versions.
Lo and behold, they were found only in "naïve" (previously unexposed) middle-aged adults. Infants in Argentina had no antibodies, and the elderly had antibodies with much higher avidity (they bind the virus more strongly) because of their exposure to an H1N1 virus that circulated before 1957. Severely ill patients had higher levels of H1N1-specific, low avidity antibodies than mildly ill patients, and severely ill patients had antibodies with lower avidity than mildly ill patients.
The cell-killing complement system was also activated to a higher degree in the sickest patients, in keeping with the idea that most of the problems were immune mediated. The same mechanism can be used to explain the 1957 H2N2 pandemic; analysis of archived lung sections in Tennessee revealed that samples with viral RNA and a fatal pulmonary infection had activated complement, but those without a pulmonary infection did not.
The authors note that immunity may play other roles in pathogenesis, and that other factors probably contribute to the different degrees to which one virus can affect different people. But they hope that their new finding—that nonprotective antibodies and complement activation can mediate severe illness in otherwise healthy adults during a flu pandemic—can be exploited to generate new therapies.
Nature Medicine, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/nm.22625 (About DOIs).
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P2P first seeders: pirates or "masked philanthropists"?
Do some P2P file sharers see themselves as the Robin Hoods of the digital age—taking from the greedy content companies and giving to the global have-nots? Amidst all the angst over illegal Internet file sharing and what to do about it, there's a related debate raging over two questions—why do people share files and what do they think about the ethics of the practice?Obviously lots of BitTorrent users simply want free content. But a new study coming out of the United Kingdom suggests that more than a few see their activities in explicitly moral terms, particularly "first seeders"—folks who first post a torrent for public sharing, as opposed to "leechers," those who download torrent files but don't offer any content themselves.
Some first-seeders may see themselves as "masked philanthropists," the survey concludes, "working from the perceived safety of their own homes to defy a legal system that incorrectly ascribes legal liability to their actions, while they generate esteem through their altruistic engagement with the file-sharing community."
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Let your imagination run wild and you may eat fewer M&Ms
Imagine eating an M&M, taking one out of a bowl in front of you, popping it in your mouth, chewing it, enjoying the delicious chocolate flavor, and swallowing it. Now, imagine eating another. And another. Now, here’s the question: after imagining eating 30 of these scrumptious treats, given the chance to actually dive into a bowl of M&Ms, how many would you eat? According to a study in Science last week, you’d eat far fewer chocolates after this mental exercise than you would if you hadn't used your imagination. The participants were divided into three groups and asked to imagine performing 33 actions. The first group—the control group—had to imagine putting 33 quarters into a laundry machine (an action that is mechanically similar to the process of eating a candy). A second group had to imagine putting 30 quarters into a laundry machine, then eating 3 M&Ms; the final group had to imagine putting three quarters into a laundry machine and eating 30 M&Ms.
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Feature: The 2010 Ars Technica Gaming Gift Guide
The Gaming Gift Guide is the third installment in our four-part series of holiday guides. Part 1 focused on gadgets and gizmos, Part 2 was a mix of staff recommendations, and Part 4 (launching tomorrow) aims to provide some relief for confused HDTV buyers.
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iPhone jailbreaker set to bring Cydia to Mac OS X
Cydia is somewhat of jailbreak equivalent of the App Store for iOS devices. It enables users to find and install open source packages as well as buy special modifications made for jailbroken phones—often with features not approved by Apple. Cydia creator Jay "saurik" Freeman has now announced that he is also building a version of Cydia for Mac OS X, called, appropriately enough, Mac Cydia.
Cydia is generally installed either automatically or as a recommended first step after jailbreaking an iOS device. It was originally one of the first sources of installable packages for jailbreakers, including apps and command line tools, but later offered developers an way to sell software that would otherwise be impossible to distribute via Apple's official App Store. Freeman told Ars in 2008 that he named Cydia after the Latin name for a moth larva that is thought of as "stereotypical apple worm."
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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm breaks PC gaming sales records
Activision Blizzard is enjoying an amazing holiday season. Not only has Call of Duty: Black Ops been an amazing success, the company has now announced that the newest expansion for World of Warcraft has broken all PC game sales records, selling 3.3 million copies in the first 24 hours. This broke the previous sales record of 2.8 million units sold in a day... which was held by Wrath of the Lich King.
What's fascinating about these expansions is that, even though the product is digital, sales and excitement were huge at brick-and-mortar stores, with gamers lining up hours before launch to get their copy. "World of Warcraft: Cataclysm delivered even bigger day-one sales than we experienced with StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty in July," said Bob McKenzie, senior vice president of merchandising at GameStop, "making this a record year for Blizzard Entertainment at GameStop."
The game went on sale at midnight at over 10,000 locations around the world, and the game launched in he United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Europe, Russia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand on December 7, and became available in Korea and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau on December 9. That's quite the launch, and the game now has a population of over 12 million players. World of Warcraft is barely a game anymore, as it has become something of an institution.
Our own Casey Johnston is cranking away at the review, but I have a feeling that most of our readers who play the game have already bought the expansion. By the looks of these sales figures, you'll have plenty of company on the servers.
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Researchers turn bacterial colonies into logic gates
For the past several years, researchers have been creating living logic gates, using the genetic on and off switches we've discovered in the biochemical world to create simple logical functions. But these systems typically run into a wall: we can only stuff so many functions into a single bacterium before the noisy processes within the cell start to interfere with their function, causing unpredictable results. Now, researchers have avoided this problem by getting small populations of bacteria to produce soluble factors that act as circuit wires. Arranged appropriately, these bacteria can perform any possible logical function. The key to the new work is stretches of DNA that act as logical OR and NOR functions. Both of them rely on small stretches of DNA called promoters that control the activity of nearby genes. In this case, the authors used promoters that activate nearby genes in response to simple chemicals (arabinose and tetracycline for these two promoters). By putting both promoters next to a reporter gene, the system acted as an OR gate: when either of the chemicals was present, the reporter was on.
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Google, Microsoft distribute malware after domain name trickery
Ads served by DoubleClick (Google) and MSN (Microsoft) were distributing drive-by malware last week after attackers were able to trick the networks using a ploy from the phishers' playbook: they masqueraded as a legitimate advertising provider by using a domain name that looked the same as the provider's.AdShuffle.com is a legitimate company selling ads to various ad networks, including DoubleClick and MSN. AdShufffle.com—three fs—is not, but it looks close enough to AdShuffle.com that the networks were tricked. These banner ads attempted to use a range of exploits (two Internet Explorer, one Java, and four Adobe Reader flaws—all which are currently patched), to install the HDD Plus malware. HDD Plus is bogus disk diagnostic software; it warns of impending failures, and says that to avoid trouble you should buy the full version.
Analysis of the attacks suggests that various obfuscation techniques were used to disguise the exploitation, and that as a result, antivirus software was having a hard time detecting and trapping the attacks. The offending ads have been pulled by the networks in question, but the people behind the attack have registered more domains and similar attempts are likely to occur in the future.
Phishing attacks aimed directly at end-users have long used this kind of look-alike URL to trick users into trusting content that they shouldn't, and typo-squatting, relying on users misspelling URLs when they type them into their browser, is a long-standing phenomenon. Clearly these techniques work, but it's a little disappointing that the gatekeepers at both DoubleClick and MSN fell for the same trick. The broad reach of these advertising networks means that exposure to the bad ads may have been significant, though neither network has disclosed exactly how many people were exposed to the ads in question.
In addition to exposing human flaws, the attacks show that the automated procedures used by the networks aren't good enough; though the networks do claim to have malware filtering that detected the malware in question, this was not sufficient to prevent real-world exploitation.
This is not the first time that a company has been tricked into running malicious ads; last year, the New York Times' Digital Advertising department ran Vonage ads that included drive-by malware. Tricking an advertising network like DoubleClick and MSN allows for even more widespread distribution, making it likely that other networks will be similarly targeted—indeed, they may have been targeted already.
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Using Outlook's mail rules can make you a wiretapper
Reading your boss' e-mail account isn't just a bad idea—it could also get you hauled in federal court on wiretapping charges. David Szymuszkiewicz, an Internal Revenue Service worker in Wisconsin, found this out the hard way after using an Outlook mail rule to copy his supervisor's messages over to his own account for a full three years. Here's how Seventh Circuit Chief Judge (and University of Chicago law professor) Frank Easterbrook described the case in a ruling (PDF) made back in September:
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Apple, Google, RIM go shopping for Nortel patents
Apple and Google are reportedly in a bidding war for bankrupt Canadian telecom Nortel's patent portfolio. Unnamed sources speaking to Reuters confirmed that the two companies—among others—participated in the first round of bids on Nortel's IP portfolio, the most highly prized being patents related to 3G and 4G wireless tech.The source claims that, following the first round of bids, Nortel has grouped the patents into six different technology buckets—this will reduce the possibility that a single company will end up owning all of Nortel's patents. With more than 4,000 patents to Nortel's name, that still puts several hundred into each group, ranging from optical data to online advertising, PCs, and wireless tech.
None of the companies involved in the bidding have publicly disclosed their participation, but Reuters points out that RIM, Apple, and Google are seen as "likely bidders" when it comes to Nortel's patents on 3G and 4G handsets and networking. Nortel had previously been one of the first entrants into fixed and mobile WiMAX in the US (the 4G tech used by Sprint and Clearwire), but later got out to focus on Long Term Evolution (LTE, the 4G tech used by Verizon).
Those LTE patents are likely what Apple is most interested in, since it's rumored that a "Verizon iPhone" will come with LTE support. Since Verizon plans to have LTE coverage in 30+ cities by the end of this year and plenty more in 2011, such a move would definitely be advantageous for Apple.
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UK cracks down on undisclosed "sponsored" tweets, posts
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) in the UK is making good on its threat to punish companies that purchase coverage online without public disclosure. The OFT says it has "received undertakings" from at least one company for violating the UK's fair trading laws—a warning to others that might pay for blog or Twitter posts without admitting to doing so.Handpicked Media, a UK-based startup that provides "sponsored" posts to hundreds of blogs, got a public slap on the wrist from the OFT on Monday following the discovery that the company was not properly disclosing its paid online promotions. OFT noted that Handpicked Media cooperated with the investigation, but said that the company has now agreed not to engage in such activity without making it obvious that the posts had been paid for "in a manner unavoidable to the average consumer."
"The integrity of information published online is crucial so that people can make informed decisions on how to spend their money," OFT Consumer Group senior director Heather Clayton said in a statement. "We expect online advertising and marketing campaigns to be transparent so consumers can clearly tell when blogs, posts, and microblogs have been published in return for payment or payment in kind. We expect this to include promotions for products and services as well as editorial content."
Here in the US, the Federal Trade Commission has similar rules in place for sponsored blog posts, but it is not always easy to enforce since it's hard to confirm whether a writer has received payment or not. Still, there have been some results—Reverb Communications recently settled with the FTC over accusations that company employees posted positive reviews for the games the company was hired to promote.
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Supreme Court lets ban on "gray market" imports stand
The Supreme Court has upheld a ban on unauthorized "gray market" imports—products sold legally in other countries, but not authorized by their maker for US sale. Any manufacturer who makes items overseas and slaps a copyrighted logo on them can go after importers who don't play by the company's rules. What about US "first sale" rights? They don't apply.Retailing giant Costco got its hands on several boatloads of expensive Omega watches through gray market middlemen and sold them cheap, but Omega sued for copyright infringement. Because the watches weren't made in the US, Omega said that they did not qualify for first sale rules, which let companies and buyers do what they like with a product after purchasing it. Instead, Omega argued that all foreign-made, copyrighted products could only be sold in the US with the manufacturer's permission. (An earlier Supreme Court case held that first sale protections do apply if the item was made in the US, even if it is then sold overseas and re-imported without permission.)
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Verizon cops to handoff problem with LTE modems
Verizon launched its high-speed USB modems for its LTE (long-term evolution) network only a week ago, and already they're having problems. PCWorld reports owners of the modems have discovered that there is serious handoff lag when the modems switch between LTE and the more widespread 3G network, resulting in the modem holding onto its 3G connection for a while after it has entered an LTE area. Testers have found that the LTE network is living up to the hype, so far: it pulls down 20Mbps and uploads at 5Mbps, as long as the area is relatively uncrowded. But if you're going to be moving from the comfort of your LTE-wired area, perhaps passing through a 3G-covered train tunnel, it looks like you might have a smidge of difficulty upon LTE reentry.
When the modems lose their LTE connection and pick up 3G, they don't hop back onto LTE once they're in range of the higher-speed connection. One user noted that unplugging the modem and plugging it back in helped it picked up the LTE connection again. Verizon spokesman Jeffrey Nelson claimed this wasn't necessary, but said that it may take the modems up to two full minutes to get reacquainted with the LTE signal.
Going between LTE and 3G areas is admittedly not the direst of circumstances—you're still on the Internet while on a train or in a park, without being physically connected to anything. But if you're the impatient type, it might be best to save Skype calls or video streaming for times when you know you won't be moving around too much.
Nelson noted that a fix is in the works for the problem, and said that Mac compatibility will be coming soon.
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Paul Allen's patent infringement lawsuit dismissed
Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen has hit a snag in his massive patent infringement suit against Apple, Google, Netflix, Facebook, YouTube, and numerous others. US District Judge Marsha Pechman dismissed the lawsuit on Friday, according to court documents, saying that Allen's company failed to specify infringing products from any of the 11 companies.Interval Licensing LLC, Allen's patent holding company, filed the lawsuit in August and accused 11 Internet giants of violating four patents. The patents covered three main concepts: browser use for navigating through information, managing a user's peripheral attention while using a device, and alerting users to items of current interest. They collectively addressed the general concept of presenting searched-for information to a user along with related news articles, media, status updates from friends, or other data.
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