Nexus S beats iPhone in "real world" Web tests, says firm
A Nexus S running Android 2.3 can load most websites 52 percent faster than an iPhone running iOS 4.3, according to a new study conducted by website analysis firm Blaze. The company based its conclusions on 45,000 website measurements using an iPhone 4 and a Nexus S, and says it was surprised by the results, considering the JavaScript performance gains that came with iOS 4.3.
Blaze claims that its metrics are more relevant than those from SunSpider benchmarks because Blaze does "real world" testing on existing websites. The study measured load time on the sites of a thousand Fortune 1000 companies (that is, every company's site in the Fortune 1000) over WiFi, and says that the Nexus S running Android 2.3 loaded the sites faster 84 percent of the time. The median load time for the iPhone 4 on iOS 4.3 was 3.254 seconds, while the Nexus S's median load time was 2.144 seconds.
Mobile sites were another story. One hundred seventy-five out of the 1,000 test sites had a mobile equivalent—the iPhone was able to load those sites in a median time of 2.085 seconds, with the Nexus S loading them in 2.024 seconds. Blaze points out that the Nexus S was three percent faster on the mobile site test, but says the times were "effectively the same."
"We assumed that it would be a closer race and that the latest JavaScript speed improvements would have a more material impact on performance," Blaze CTO and cofounder Guy Podjarny said in a statement. "The fact that Android beat iPhone by such a large margin was not expected."
As noted by Altimeter Group analyst Michael Gartenberg, "real world" site load times can often be affected by connection signal and ads being loaded from other servers, so an individual user's tests could still differ significantly from Blaze's findings. One full second (the difference between the Nexus S and iPhone 4 median load times for non-mobile sites) can seem large relative to the total load times, but it's short enough that it may not even be noticeable to most average users. "[C]onsumers do not make phone purchase based on a stop watches. If it's not a 'just noticeable difference' it doesn't matter," Gartenberg tweeted.
Indeed, it seems that most users at this point are choosing a smartphone based on OS preference and personal usage patterns. What is clear, though, is that benchmarks don't usually reflect much in the way of real world gadget usage—Blaze points out that its SunSpider benchmarks did reflect the expected results, and that the iPhone running iOS 4.3 performed well.
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Global raids shut boylover.net, arrest 184 men, rescue 230 kids
Police around the globe have wrapped up the largest child sex abuse case in history after three years of investigation into the website boylover.net. One hundred eighty-four arrests have already been made in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Europe, with 230 child victims "safeguarded" by authorities. Four hundred more suspected sex abusers are still being sought.The investigation began back in 2007, when boylover.net came to the attention of the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre. CEOP soon learned that the Australian Federal Police had independently identified and begun investigating boylover.net; the two agencies joined forces. By the time they were through, the case would also involve US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the New Zealand Police, Europol, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with additional arrests carried out by police departments in Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and Spain.
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Full House Poker is good, but a step down from 1 vs. 100
The just-released Full House Poker on the Xbox Live Arcade is constantly being referenced as a replacement for the canceled 1 vs. 100, Microsoft's live, multiplayer game show that offered virtual prizes for those who did well. It failed for a number of reasons—such as the cost of producing a show and a schedule that gamers had to plan around if they wanted to play—but Microsoft clearly wants to find a way to make a more formal, live competition work.Full House Poker is a good game, and the $10 asking price is more than fair, but it's simply not interesting enough to fill the hole 1 vs. 100 left behind.
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The politics of metered billing in Canada
Metered broadband billing has become a volatile regulatory question in Canada. It has also become a political issue, with that country's Conservative, Liberal, and New Democratic parties taking stands on the question of whether big telcos like Bell Canada can sell wholesale network access to smaller ISPs via a metered or usage-based-billing (UBB) system.Over 21,000 Canadians have co-signed Liberal industry critic Marc Garneau's commentary to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, calling for a more expansive debate over not only how to charge independent ISPs for data use, but how frame the problem.
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Shoot Many Robots preview: working out your toaster grudge
Shoot Many Robots, a side-scrolling shoot 'em up game from Demiurge Studios, was available to play at PAX this past weekend. While we found that we had the most fun with sections of the game that weren't intended to be the main events, we came out tentative fans of the gun-toting, tutu-wearing heros that put holes in their greasy, clanking enemies. Read the comments on this post
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Feature: Playboy, pencils, bags of cash: Don Bluth's sordid gaming history
It was an odd invitation, and one that was impossible to turn down. Don Bluth was doing promotion for Tapper: World Tour, and he was available for interviews during the Game Developers Conference. The legendary animator had started at Disney, and then went solo to work on movies and projects as diverse as An American Tale, the Secret of NIMH, Titan A.E., and, of course, the Dragon's Lair arcade machine. Now, like everyone else in the world, he has made an iOS game, giving the bar-game Tapper a new look for modern audiences.Don Bluth is now in his 70s, but is a strong presence in person. He's funny and smart, and knows how to hold his own in an interview. We talked about what he brings to modern games, the creation of Dragon's Lair, and why he doesn't pay attention to most of today's new games.
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Judge gives Sony access to PS3 hacker's PayPal records
A federal magistrate said Sony may subpoena the PayPal account of PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz, as the game maker ratchets up its civil lawsuit against the man who released the first full-fledged PS3 jailbreak in the console’s 4-year history.Tuesday’s order came two weeks after Magistrate Joseph Spero in San Francisco granted Sony the right to acquire the internet IP addresses of anybody who had visited Hotz’s website from January of 2009. Sony has also won subpoenas for data from YouTube and Google as well as Twitter account data linked to Hotz, who goes by the handle GeoHot.
Respected for his iPhone hacks and now the PlayStation 3 jailbreak, the 21-year-old New Jersey man is accused of breaching the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other laws after he published an encryption key and software tools on his website that allow PlayStation owners to gain complete control of their consoles from the firmware on up. Hotz has complied with a court order and removed the hack.
The latest development allows the Japanese console maker to acquire “documents sufficient to identify the source of funds (PDF) in California that went into any PayPal account associated with geohot@gmail.com for the period of January 1, 2009 to February 1, 2011,” Spero ruled.
The information sought is part of a jurisdictional argument over whether Sony must sue Hotz in his home state of New Jersey rather than in San Francisco, where Sony would prefer.
Regarding the PayPal account, Sony claims Hotz has accepted monetary donations for the hack from people residing in Northern California — an argument that, if true, might make San Francisco a proper venue for the litigation.
Hotz denies he accepted donations. Sony, who has threatened to sue anybody who posts the hacking tools or the encryption key, is seeking unspecified damages from Hotz.
The DMCA prohibits the trafficking of so-called “circumvention devices” designed to crack copy protection schemes. The law, however, does not require Sony to prove that Hotz received payment for the hack, which was designed to allow PlayStation 3 owners the ability to run home-brewed software or alternative operating systems like Linux.
It builds on a series of earlier jailbreaks that unlocked less protected levels of the PlayStation’s authentication process. Jailbreaking a console is also a prerequisite to running pirated copies of games.
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Ms. Splosion Man features a sexy, sociopathic, exploding... hero?
It's fun to cover independent developers. I was scheduled to see Twisted Pixel's latest games at the Game Developers Conference, but they were having equipment issues. Once I returned home, I found builds of their latest games on a USB stick, as they simply mailed me the code to try at home. "Now we can't blame the graphics on the TV," I was told, somewhat mournfully. Being introduced to a game in the uncontrolled environment of my house, with no PR handlers, is a rare joy in this business.Luckily, Ms. 'Splosion Man, Twisted Pixel's first sequel to an existing game, was more than up to the challenge of impressing me.
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Reversing the Doppler effect
Everyone has experienced the Doppler effect. An ambulance's siren has a higher pitch as it approaches you, and a lower pitch when moving away. Now, imagine that the pitch goes down as the ambulance moves towards you—that is the inverse Doppler effect. Scientists have now demonstrated it in action using light; by shining an CO2 laser through a negative-index material, they were able to demonstrate an inverse Doppler effect, in which the laser frequency went down as the material approached a detector.What is a negative-index material (NIM)? Simply put, NIMs are substances that have a negative index of refraction. Normally, when light moves into a material with a different index of refraction, the light is bent into the material. If you were to trace it on paper, the slope of the line would change, but the sign of the slope would remain the same—provided the material has a positive index of refraction. If the material has a negative index of refraction, the traced light path would have the same change in slope but the opposite sign. It acts like it was reflected in the material as well as refracted.
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CCIA: copyright wiretaps are Hollywood's "PATRIOT Act"
Yesterday's White House wish list of new intellectual property laws focused on things like counterfeit medicines, but it also included proposals to extend wiretaps into copyright cases and to ensure that illegal streaming video is a felony. A DC trade group representing companies like AMD, Facebook, Oracle, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft today objected loudly to the plan, saying that legitimate concerns about counterfeiting have been "hijacked to create draconian proposals to alleviate the content industry of the burden of protecting its own interest using its own extensive resources."And that was just the beginning. Computer & Communications Industry Association chief Ed Black tapped his inner prophet to roll out a barnburner of a response to the White House. Over the top? Decide for yourself:
Some in Congress and the White House have apparently decided that no price is too high to pay to kowtow to Big Content's every desire, including curtailing civil liberties by expanding wiretapping of electronic communications. Even the controversial USA PATRIOT Act exists because of extraordinary national security circumstances involving an attack on our country. Does Hollywood deserve its own PATRIOT Act?That sound you hear is Obama "IP czar" Victoria Espinel scratching Black's name off her Christmas card list.
This new punitive IP agenda follows just weeks after dictators spying on citizens online was the lead story in every major newspaper. Perhaps the obvious hypocrisy caused someone to decide to wait to announce the US goal of expanding our government’s powers to spy online. A screenwriter could almost market this plot as a comedy—if it weren’t so serious.
Maybe we should be grateful our government only wants to make streaming a song or movie a felony with potential prison time as punishment. What's next, corporal punishment?
This is the latest indication of the extent to which the content industry has infiltrated this administration and managed to turn the Administration's IP agenda into a policy which protects old business models at the expense of consumers, citizens' rights, and our most innovative job creating industries.
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Obama administration endorses new privacy regs, Do Not Track
The Obama administration raised alarm Wednesday about the state of online privacy and called for new legislation on the issue. Speaking before the Senate Commerce Committee, Assistant Commerce Secretary Lawrence Strickling announced the Obama administration's support for a "consumer privacy bill of rights" and asked Congress to give the Federal Trade Commission new powers to enforce it.At the same hearing, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz reiterated his agency's support for a "Do Not Track" mechanism and urged Congress to mandate its adoption if the industry does not embrace the idea voluntarily. Leibowitz pointed to his agency's recent enforcement action against Chitika as evidence that the FTC was making online privacy a priority, but argued that more action—by industry and possibly from Congress—was needed to fully address the problem.
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WebM filter preview gives IE9 WebM compatibility
Google has released a preview WebM filter for Windows Vista and Windows 7. When installed, the filter will allow Windows programs—including Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, and perhaps most importantly of all, Internet Explorer 9—to play back WebM-encoded video.Internet Explorer 9, which was released earlier this week, introduced support for the HTML5
It does exactly what it's supposed to.
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Visa taking on PayPal in personal payments game
Visa is getting into the personal payments game and will soon allow Visa account holders to send and receive funds directly to or from other Visa account holders. The company announced on Wednesday that it had made enhancements to VisaNet (Visa's payment processing network) in order to enable new transactions between customers, adding that it also struck deals with CashEdge and Fiserv to integrate the new service into their respective platforms.From the sound of it, Visa's new system will require some involvement from your financial institution before you can send or receive funds. Customers who do frequent a participating bank will be able to enter someone's 16-digit Visa account number, phone number, or e-mail address in order to send the funds directly to that account. Visa notes that financial institutions outside the US can already do this (once again reminding us why banking in the US is so awesome—not), but that this will be the "first time a major payment network has introduced a global requirement for account issuers to accept incoming funds and thus enable a new generation of personal payment services."
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Visual Studio Lightswitch grows to support cloud, plug-ins
Microsoft announced yesterday the second beta of Visual Studio Lightswitch, its new business application-oriented development framework. New to this beta is support for third-party extensions as well as application deployment to Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing platform.In spite of its "Visual Studio" branding and availability via MSDN, Lightswitch is not aimed at traditional, professional developers. Rather, its purpose is to assist business users in developing line-of-business applications. There is a rich history of this kind of program—simple database or spreadsheet-driven applications, developed by accountants, or business analysts, or other nonprofessional developers to assist in some business task. The programs are often quirky, temperamental, and developed in unique and unconventional programming styles, but they have an important feature: they work, and they do something useful at relatively low cost to the business. These applications are typically developed in Access, Excel, and perhaps even Visual Basic 6. Often, the programs become essential to the business, shared among members of a department, and distributed and used far more widely than their creator ever intended.
It's at this point in their lifetime that professional developers often become involved, after the company that has become so dependent on the software discovers that Access doesn't actually work very well when you have a dozen people all trying to use the same database at the same time. So the professionals inherit undocumented, badly structured software and are then tasked with making it good, or at least fit for its newly expanded role. This tends to make future development expensive and complex.
It's this kind of application—and this kind of nonprofessional development—that Lightswitch is aimed at. The goal is to make these applications better for all involved. For the nonprofessional developer, it will provide all the tools they need to quickly assemble their program. The applications will tend to be simple—a database supporting the standard create/read/update/delete operations, reporting, graphing or charting of the data, a little light number crunching—and Lightswitch provides templates for screens with prebuilt functionality to support these operations, easy database connectivity, data validation, and so on. This is where the newly announced third-party extensibility comes into play: third parties will now be able to provide features like new screen templates, database connectors, and themes, further extending the capabilities of the product.
And for the professional developers who often end up supporting and extending these programs? Lightswitch provides a more structured environment for development, ensuring that whatever the pros inherit is better-designed and more easily understood. Instead of cobbled-together Access databases, they'll get good, clean, well-structured programs. If Lightswitch gains market traction, it will be a big win for all involved.
The new beta is available to MSDN Subscribers, and from March 17, to the general public. The beta is available in English and German; a Japanese version was planned, but has been delayed. Final availability will occur later this year.
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Major report debunks alleged link between piracy and terrorism
On February 15, the film industry, the movie business, video game publishers, and business software developers submitted a massive report to the US government, as they do every year. That report, part of America's "Special 301" process, is a key tool used each year to develop a list of other countries that the US wants to pressure on intellectual property laws. This year's version alleged that piracy is now, in many countries, a product of organized crime (PDF). And it claimed that pirated DVDs are worth more than cocaine.Such claims have been made many times over the last decade, but a major new report, funded by Canada and by the Ford Foundation and buttressed by fieldwork around the globe, suggests that neither assertion is true. Indeed, far from being supremely lucrative, commercial piracy is under pressure from the same force pressing on legal distribution: free Internet file-sharing.
As for the drugs... well, there's a reason the gangs in The Wire weren't selling bootlegs of Spider-Man 3. There's just not much money in it anymore.
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Ask Ars: How can I secure data I need to carry with me?
In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly-launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our question bag, provide our own take, then tap the wisdom of our readers. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.Question: What's the most secure way to transport 100GB of data via Sneakernet?
Sharing small files across the Internet with a good amount of security keeps getting easier, but large datasets can still create long, painful upload times. In this video edition of Ask Ars, we cover the most secure ways to transport large datasets by trekking the dusty trail, otherwise known as Sneakernet, even with predators in hot pursuit.
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