Infamous antipiracy lawyer gives up, abandons P2P cases
Under scrutiny from a judge, pressure from regulators, and bomb threats from the public, notorious UK antipiracy lawyer Andrew Crossley is getting out of the business. In the UK's special intellectual property court today, Crossley presented a statement saying that he was done sending out "speculative invoicing" letters demanding around £500 from accused peer-to-peer file-swappers, many of whom have totally denied the charges.After years of delay, Crossley recently brought a raft of cases against alleged copyright infringers. Instead of securing straightforward legal victories, Crossley ran headfirst into the buzzsaw that was Judge Birss QC, who bundled the cases together and then blasted Crossley's request for default judgment. It turned out that three of these initial eight cases weren't even in default, while in three more, there was no evidence the defendants had ever been notified. But the case was so badly brought that the judge wouldn't even grant default judgment in the two cases where it might be warranted, pointing out that it was an unsettled legal question whether people were liable for activities committed over their unsecured WiFi networks or activities committed by others using their accounts.
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Verizon iPhones to come with $30 unlimited data option
Verizon will indeed offer an unlimited 3G data plan with the CDMA iPhone once it launches on February 10. The company's COO Lowell McAdam confirmed the rumor with the Wall Street Journal Tuesday morning, hoping that the move would lure away AT&T customers who no longer have an unlimited option for their iPhones.The speculation that Verizon would roll out an unlimited plan for the iPhone started just days before the carrier's announcement that it would begin offering the device next month. At that time, unnamed sources said that Verizon hoped the plan would be a key differentiator to AT&T's two tightly-capped data plans (which currently sit at 200MB and 2GB per month).
"I’m not going to shoot myself in the foot," McAdam told the Journal when he confirmed the rumor. He added that not offering the plan would just give AT&T customers an additional reason to avoid making the switch, and why would Verizon want that? The plan will be $30 per month—$5 per month higher than AT&T's 2GB monthly plan.
This is good news for heavy data users, though those considering the jump to Verizon should exercise some caution: Verizon has already declared that the future of its 3G network is tiered. Although the company appears to still be open to unlimited plans for smartphones, that could always change in the future—just like it did at AT&T.
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Report: USA tops when it comes to cyber-combat
A survey of cyberspace says that the United States enjoys the honor of being the world's "top attack traffic source," accounting for 12 percent of all such malicious data—eight percent of the globe's in the third quarter of 2010.This could represent the activities of "infected hosts that are looking for other hosts to spread to, or it may represent brute force attempts to log in to other systems," according to the Akamai Corporation's David Belson. It's all in the server maker's latest State of the Internet report (registration required).
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Ask Ars: Of solid state drives and garbage collection
Welcome to the re-launch of Ask Ars, brought to you by CDW! Re-launch, you ask? Why, yes! Ask Ars was one of the first features of the newly born Ars Technica back in 1998. Ask Ars is all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our bag of questions, answer a few based on our own know-how, and then comes the best part: we turn to the community for your take.
To launch, we reached out to some of our geekiest friends to solicit their burning questions. Without further ado, let's dive into our first question. Don't forget to send us your questions, too! To submit your question, see our helpful tips page.
Let's get started with a question that was unthinkable in 1998!
Q: I've heard that some SSD controllers do "garbage collection" while others don't. Is this really that big of a deal, and if so, which controllers should I be on the lookout for?
To begin with, an SSD that doesn't do garbage collection would be like an elevator that only goes up—that is, it would never delete anything. However, some drives are able to do it more quickly than others, and some engage in a process called "idle garbage collection" that distributes the workload across periods of inactivity. But before we get into that, we'll take a minute to describe how and why an SSD does garbage collection, and why a drive that does only that would be a weak one indeed.
Solid state drives have two hangups that force them to deal with data differently than hard disk drives do: they can only erase data in larger chunks than they can write it, and their storage cells can only be written a certain number of times (10,000 is standard) before they start to fail. This makes tasks like modifying files much harder for SSDs than HDDs.
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First release of LibreOffice arrives with improvements over OOo
The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced the availability of LibreOffice 3.3, the first official stable release of the open source office suite. It introduces a number of noteworthy new features and there are improvements throughout the included applications. More significantly, the release reflects the growing strength of the nascent LibreOffice project.TDF was founded last year when a key group of OpenOffice.org (OOo) contributors decided to form an independent organization to develop a community-driven fork of OOo. The move was necessitated by Oracle's failure to address the governance problems that had plagued OOo under Sun's leadership, particularly the project's controversial copyright assignment policies. Oracle's acquisition of Sun and subsequent mismanagement of Sun's open source assets have created further uncertainty about the future of OOo and the sustainability of its community under Oracle's stewardship.
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The legends speak: how GDC got great developers to look back
The Game Developers Conference has always been a place to hear the best and brightest in the video game industry talk about their craft, but something special had to be done to celebrate the show's 25th year in operation. The show's organizers had an idea: why not book a series of lectures by the people who created some of the best and most influential games in the industry's history to give post-mortems on those games?The list of developers participating is amazing: Toru Iwatani will talk Pac-Man, Jordan Mechner will discuss the original Prince of Persia, and David Crane will talk about the design of Pitfall. The list goes on, and the amount of knowledge and experience is staggering. Will Wright has had many years to look back on his work on Raid on Bungeling Bay, and hearing a present-day Peter Molyneux talk Populous is sure to be a treat. So how did this amazing lineup happen?
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Slap Happy Sam makes PlayStation Home fun, Conspiracy falters
Ever since the release of Home, Sony has experimented with various ways to entice users to enter the virtual world. There have been game-themed spaces to explore, alternate reality games, and plenty of mini-games. Now Sony is attempting something different: releasing Home games crafted by actual game developers. Last week the service saw two of these games released, and Ars headed back into the virtual world to see just how good they are. Our experience was decidedly mixed.Read the comments on this post
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Feature: Regret the past and fear the future: Ars reviews Dead Space 2
Isaac Clarke, the hero of the Dead Space series, began the first game as an engineer sent to rescue a ship that seemed to be having problems. Once there, he tangled with an ungodly strain of mutated humans and the mind of an eldritch relic that had inspired a Scientology-style religion. He escaped that situation with his life, but how much of his mind came with him? Like Ellen Ripley of the Alien films, he's now defined by his experience of fighting something he barely understands.The second game picks up directly after the first... we think. We see everything through Clarke's eyes, the camera peering over his shoulder. He's an unreliable narrator, forced to make sense of where he is and what he's doing, using the words of people he's not sure he can trust. He sees things that aren't there, and even at the end we're left to ask ourselves what just happened. No matter what you think or believe about what the game shows you, you'll leave it knowing you had one hell of a ride.
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Google submits VP8 bitstream to IETF, but not as a standard
Earlier this month, Google submitted a document describing the bitstream specification for its VP8 video compression algorithm for publication by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This isn't a step towards standardization, says Google, but a step towards creating a definitive reference for the technology.IETF publishes Request For Comment (RFC) memoranda, used to describe various technologies used on the Internet. RFCs include IPv4, the Internet Protocol, SMTP, used for e-mail, and many others besides.
VP8 is the video codec used in Google's WebM specification, a royalty-free technology that Google has proposed for providing video over the web. The codec was developed by codec company On2, which Google bought last year.
The bitstream defines the structure of the final compressed data; in conjunction with a description of how to convert that encoded data into usable video, you have a complete description of the compression algorithm. The encoding process—how to turn video into that bitstream in the first place—is typically left unspecified: any process that produces a bitstream that conforms with the specification is acceptable as an encoder. This approach gives developers the ability to develop their own quality-enhancing optimizations even many years after the bitstream specification is published, while ensuring that the resultant file can still be played back by any compliant decoder.
The current draft was submitted on January 6. As it stands, the draft is not an authoritative description of the codec: it acknowledges that there may be discrepancies between the draft and the reference source code published by Google. If such discrepancies are found, the document states that Google's source is definitive and overrides the specification. Elsewhere, the specification relies on snippets of C source code rather than describing the structures and algorithms used.
This kind of issue would stand in the way of any eventual standardization should Google seek to go that route in the future, but indicates that the company is interested in providing a better specification that allows implementers to support VP8 without having to make reference to thousands of lines of source.
For the time being, however, the company has not indicated any intent to go the standards route with VP8. According to CNET, the company says that this move is "independent from a standards track": rather, it is to ensure that there is a "canonical public reference" for the document.
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NVIDIA's roadmap leaks, hinting at a 3D tablet
A leaked NVIDIA roadmap reveals that the graphics chipmaker is working on two new additions to its Tegra line of ARM-based chips: the Tegra 2 3D, and the Tegra 3.
The Tegra 2 3D is a 1.2GHz version of the recently unveiled Tegra 2 chip, but with added support for 3D displays. Given the number of prototypes we've recently seen for glasses-free 3D on a small screen, it's no surprise that the company is including explicit support for 3D output (glasses-free or otherwise). The only really interesting twist to the news is that, like the rest of the Tegra line, the 3D chip will come in both phone and tablet flavors.
There's no indication whatsoever that the Tegra 2 3D will be included in any sort of 3D tablet, and, indeed, we aren't even aware of any such tablet being officially announced by anyone. There have been rumors on multiple sites that LG will produce a 3D version of its upcoming, Android-based G-slate tablet, but these remain unconfirmed. But given that G-Slate uses Tegra 2, though, the leaked roadmap slide adds a bit of weight to the rumor.
The other chip on the leaked roadmap slide is the Tegra 3, a 1.5GHz beast of a chip that will have four Cortex A9 cores and an improved GPU; regarding the latter, the slide claims a 3X improvement over Tegra 2's already solid GPU performance. The tablet version of the Tegra 3 will add support for Blu-ray and 1900x1200 output. Along with an ultra-low-power mode, it looks like NVIDIA may well position this chip for use in both home theater devices and laptop-style portables. In other words, Tegra 3 could pave the way for Project Denver, which isn't due out for some two more years.
The smartphone version of the Tegra 3 will come in quad- and dual-core flavors, and will support a lower display resolution (1366x768).
BSN appears to be the source of the leaked slide, and the site is reporting that the Tegra 2 3D will drop in February, while the Tegra 3 will come in the fall of this year. Given that the G-slate is rumored for a February or early March launch, my guess is that we will indeed see some a 3D version of the tablet that uses the Tegra 2 3D.
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Obama nominates former RIAA lawyer for Solicitor General spot
President Barack Obama on Monday nominated former Recording Industry Association of America lawyer Donald Verrilli Jr. to serve as the nation’s solicitor general.If confirmed by the Senate, Verilli, now the White House deputy counsel, would assume the powerful position left vacant by Elena Kagan, who was elevated to the Supreme Court. Obama said he was “confident” that Verrilli, one of five former RIAA attorneys appointed to the administration, would “serve ably.”
The solicitor general is charged with defending the government before the Supreme Court, and files friend-of-the court briefs in cases in which the government believes there is a significant legal issue. The office also determines which cases it would bring to the Supreme Court for review.
Verrilli is best known for leading the recording industry’s legal charge against music- and movie-sharing site Grokster. That 2003 case ultimately led to Grokster’s demise when the US Supreme Court sided with the RIAA’s verdict.
Until recently, Verrilli also was leading Viacom’s ongoing and flailing $1 billion copyright infringement fight against YouTube.
A court dismissed the case last year, a decison Viacom is appealing. Viacom claims YouTube committed copyright infringement because it did not police the video-sharing site for copyrighted works uploaded by its users.
And in 2008, Verrilli told a federal judge in Minnesota that merely making copyrighted works available on file sharing networks amounted to copyright infringement—and that no proof of somebody else downloading those files was required.
That argument came in the first of three iterations of the infamous Jamie Thomas file sharing case brought by the RIAA. The judge eventual declared a mistrial of the jury’s first $220,000 civil judgment for sharing 24 songs on Kazaa.
Two more trials later, a third jury has rendered an almost $2 million verdict against Thomas for sharing the same two dozen tracks.
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How many Internet pirates are there, anyway?
The music industry's latest annual report on the digital world has one main "ask" in it: would governments around the world please, please, pretty please get off their collective lard-filled posteriors and start passing the sorts of laws that would dragoon Internet providers into the antipiracy wars?Whatever one thinks of this as a policy approach, it certainly represents a considerable shift in Internet regulation. Given the strength of the medicine, it's worth examining just how bad the disease is; that is, how many music pirates actually exist?
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Leaked docs finger 1.2GHz CPU for 9.7" Topaz webOS tablet
All manner of details about Palm's upcoming webOS updates and one of HP's imminent tablets came flooding out today. PreCentral got its hands on documents describing everything from the internal hardware to various aspects of the touch interface, and while they're not all current (the touch interface one is from sometime last year), they give more hints about where HP and Palm are planning on taking their new tablet line and revamped operating system.The hardware plans for the 9.7-inch Topaz tablet, as described in documents from last fall, include a 1.2GHz Qualcomm MSM8660 processor, an Adreno 220 GPU, and 512MB of RAM. The screen's resolution will be 1024x768, and the Topaz will come in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB sizes. The battery is rated at 8 hours, though the documents don't specify what the Topaz is doing during that time. The only camera mentioned is front-facing and sized at 1.3 megapixels, and the tablet has only three buttons: power, volume up, and volume down.
The Topaz will be available either in WiFi-only flavors or with HSPA and LTE network support, with CDMA support planned for later. HP also plans on including support for something it refers to as "Touchstone v2," which will not only allow for inductive charging but also wireless printing, audio streaming, video streaming, and wireless video game-playing via the Touchstone video dock.
The biggest news about the webOS interface is its planned addition of new multitouch gestures, which include tap and drag, tap and hold, and a two-finger tap and drag. The virtual keyboard, like that of the iPad and iPhone, will have buttons to jump between fields and to hide the keyboard. Palm is also planning a paned interface for e-mail, similar to the iPad's Twitter interface. WebOS will come with cut, copy, and paste functions as well as tabbed browsing.
As noted above, some of the documents are a bit old, so the shipping hardware and software may see some evolution. Engadget got its hands on some images of HP's other tablet, codenamed Opal, and the few details it could glean match up with the Topaz.
HP and Palm have an event scheduled for February 9, where they've said directly they will make announcements regarding their tablet line and about the future of webOS in general. Ars will be on the scene.
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Preschoolers better at navigating iPhone than tying their shoes
Hand a two-year-old child a shoe and she will probably end up throwing it. Hand her an iPhone, however, and she'll navigate through it to find her favorite app in no time. Those are two lessons that I (and other members of the Ars staff) have learned first-hand in recent years, but it's not just us. According to a new survey from security software maker AVG, kids can grasp new tech skills long before they even learn how to do normal kid things, such as swimming or tying their shoelaces.AVG surveyed 2,200 parents with children between the ages of two and five in the US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Nineteen percent said their kids know how to access a smartphone application (and it's not just the older kids either—17 percent of 2- to 3-year-olds did as well). Another 58 percent can play a computer game, and a quarter of kids can open and operate a Web browser. By comparison, only nine percent of kids between 2 and 5 can tie their shoelaces, 20 percent can swim without help, and 43 percent can ride a bike.
The numbers got even more interesting once AVG split them out by country—for example, 44 percent of Italian kids can successfully place a mobile phone call, compared to 25 percent in the US. Young boys and young girls, however, are almost equal in their skills; AVG said that 29 percent of girls could make a mobile call compared to 28 percent of boys, and 59 percent of girls could play a computer game compared to 58 percent of boys.
This may not be particularly shocking to those who have watched their kids zip through an iPad before even fully learning the alphabet, but AVG points out that parents need to be on top of technology too. "[T]hese children are growing up in an environment that would be unrecognizable to their parents," AVG CEO J.R. Smith said in a statement. "As our research shows, parents need to start educating kids about navigating the online world safely at an earlier age than they might otherwise have thought."
Online safety is definitely becoming an issue to start thinking about at birth instead of later in life. However, those of you with kids should rest assured that the Internet isn't as scary a place for kids as it seems, as long as they're educated on how to handle themselves. The next question is: will you be Facebook friends with your children once they are old enough to have Facebook accounts?
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Mozilla, Google take different approaches to ad tracking opt-out
Google announced today the availability of a browser add-on for Chrome that will make it easier for users to opt out of the behavioral tracking that Internet advertising companies use to improve ad targeting. The add-on relies on a standardized cookie-based opt-out system that is supported by a growing number of companies, including the 15 largest advertising networks.Mozilla has also announced its own effort to facilitate user opt-out of Internet tracking. Dissatisfied with the technical inelegance of Google's approach, Mozilla has proposed a simpler and more robust method that would involve using browser headers rather than cookies. Although it's a better long-term solution, Mozilla will have to get buy-in from the advertising companies before it will actually work.
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Italian consumer group sues Microsoft over "Windows Tax"
Complaining that it is too hard to get a refund for unwanted preinstalled copies of Windows, an Italian consumer group, Associazione per i diritti degli utenti e consumatori (ADUC), has filed a suit against Microsoft. The suit acknowledges that hardware manufacturers share some part of the blame, but claims that the primary problem is Microsoft.This is not the first time ADUC has taken to the courts over Windows preinstalls. In 2007, the group successfully sued HP after it failed to abide by the terms of the Microsoft End User License Agreement, which explicitly permits a user to refuse to accept the terms and receive a full refund.
The group claims that although the terms of the EULA are clear enough and include a provision for the refund, actually obtaining one is harder than it should be: PC manufacturers are failing to abide by their contractual obligation. These failures are claimed to be a result of Microsoft using its market position to unlawfully promote its products, to the detriment of users.
ADUC is calling on Italian computer buyers who have bought computers with unwanted and unused Microsoft software to join the suit, arguing that said users should be entitled to a refund.
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Nintendo confirms 3DS content locked to single system, no transfers
The good news about buying a Nintendo 3DS is that you'll be able to transfer your digital purchases from your DS system to your 3DS using an SD card, and Nintendo will be giving us more details on how that will take place closer to launch. The bad news is that once you buy content on the 3DS itself, it will be locked down to that system. Wired.com spoke with Bill Trinen, Nintendo’s senior manager of product marketing, to get the details.Wired.com: If I buy a piece of 3DSWare on my 3DS, is that restricted to that 3DS that I purchased it on?While this isn't a major surprise, it is disappointing. If you want to upgrade into the inevitable Nintendo 3DS part 2 or mini or whatever the plans are, there doesn't seem to be a way to keep your games. If your system breaks? We'll see if Nintendo has a way to retrieve the games you purchased.
Trinen: That would be similar [to] how Nintendo DSi works.
Wired.com So it would be restricted to one 3DS, and I can't move it? Even if I put the software on an SD card?
Trinen: Correct. Once you've bought it, it's for the system you bought it on.
There is no other way to put this: this is bad for Nintendo, bad for third parties developing downloadable games for the platform, and bad for gamers.
Update: Nintendo's official page claims that you will be able to transfer content from system to system a limited number of times at some point after launch. This is in direct conflict with Trinen's words in the interview, and we've asked Nintendo for clarification.
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25% of files downloaded from The Pirate Bay are fakes
For years, antipiracy companies like MediaDefender (read our 2007 profile) have scratched out a living by flooding peer-to-peer file-sharing networks with bad data. While the techniques differ, the goal is the same: to make online piracy just enough of a hassle that legal alternatives look good by comparison.This attempt at poisoning the P2P well started a quiet war between the file-swappers and the antipiracy groups, each escalating the arms race by rolling out new weapons and new countermeasures. File-swappers began blocking known IP ranges that served fake files, and sites like The Pirate Bay worked to remove bad links to fake content and to ban the user accounts of those who uploaded the listing information.
And yet, despite years of this sort of sniping, P2P networks remain flooded with fake files. New research suggests that nearly a third of the files at big BitTorrent trackers are bogus.
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Why a "retina" display might not come to iPad until next year
Numerous rumors have proclaimed that the second-generation iPad—expected to ship in early April—will have a higher resolution display. However, some sources now seem certain that the resolution will remain the same, and that iPad users may have to wait until the "iPad 3" for sharper text and graphics.The 326ppi "retina" display of the iPhone 4 quickly made the iPad's 1024 x 768 pixels look decidedly fuzzy when spread over 9.7 diagonal inches. Many assumed Apple would bring a retina-class display to the next iPad, though matching the same pixel density as the iPhone 4 could likely be technically unfeasible, surpassing the pixel count of Apple's LED Cinema Display.
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Massive volcanic eruptions + coal fires = the Great Dying
The late Permian extinction, which kicked off roughly 250 million years ago, has a rather gruesome nickname: the Great Dying. Over 90 percent of the species in the oceans went extinct in the geological blink of an eye, and similar devastation took place on land. It's about as close as we've come to having multicellular life wiped out. The timing of the event coincides with a volcanic outburst that covered an area the size of Western Europe in volcanic rock. That might be enough to trigger a major catastrophe on its own, but new research indicates that the hot magma ignited coal deposits, sending toxic coal ash into the oceans. The remains of these eruptions, called the Siberian Traps, now cover about 2 million square kilometers of Russia. The rock formation is what's called a flood basalt, thought to be caused by a plume of hot mantle breaking through to the surface. The Siberian Traps may be the largest event of this sort we know about, and the dimensions are staggering: over 1,000 Gt (Gigatonnes) of magma were released during the eruptions that created them, and they are thought to have put material into a plume that rose over 40 kilometers into the atmosphere.
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Report: Motorola Xoom to launch February 17 for around $700
The Motorola Xoom's pricing and launch date have been set internally, according to some Best Buy documents Engadget received over the weekend. The Android Honeycomb tablet is set to launch on Feburary 17 for $700, according to messages the big box store sent to its employees, though conflicting Verizon documents say the price will be $800.A table of minimum advertised prices posted at Android Central on Friday suggested the Xoom would be available for $800, a price that would remain valid until mid-July of this year. But on Saturday, a Best Buy employee tipped Engadget with internal missives that state the Xoom will be priced at $700 when it hit stores on February 17.
It's hard to say which document predates the other, but even with 4G service and Honeycomb, $800 might be outside of some consumers' comfort zones. Then again, Apple's 32 GB 3G-enabled iPad is $729, so the higher price is still plausible. The Xoom will likely follow the contract-free model of the iPad and the Samsung Galaxy Tab, so there probably won't be any way to mitigate the cost, either. The stock is scheduled to arrive in Best Buy stores the day before launch, on February 16.
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Canada wants unedited "Money for Nothing" back on the radio
Canada's official telecommunications regulatory agency is unhappy about the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council's recent decision that the unedited version of the Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" is "unacceptable for broadcast." The CBSC, which represents 760 private Canadian radio/television license owners, made that call earlier this month in response to a complaint that the tune includes three references to an offensive word.
We're confident that you can figure out which word that is from this excerpt:
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