Google's NFC plan: data sharing, targeted ads, and discounts
"Hello Jacqui! I see you buy vodka regularly—would you like a 50 percent off coupon on some cranberry juice to go with it?"Google hopes to give retailers access to more in-depth customer data as part of its push to bring Near Field Communications (NFC) into the mainstream. The plan is apparently part of Google's underground NFC tests being carried out in New York and San Francisco. Google's testing is still said to be in its early stages, but it may roll out NFC to the public later in 2011.
NFC is an evolution of the RFID technology employed in "contact-less" payment systems such as MasterCard PayPass and Visa payWave, and is mostly known in the US as a means of enabling wireless payments at retail stores. (Check out our NFC technology primer for more details on how it works.) That's not all NFC can be used for, though—it can also keep track of gift card and ticketing balances, as well as personal information and consumer preferences.
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Sony v. Hotz: mismatched serial numbers and sealed manuals
The case of Sony Computer Entertainment LLC vs. George Hotz et al is the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to bizarre filings and odd claims. Hotz's attorneys claim that he couldn't have known that Sony Computer Entertainment of America existed, since the manuals for his new PlayStation 3 remained sealed and the box only mentions Japan. The documents also address that pesky PlayStation Network account that Sony claims Hotz created, and it may prove hard to find out who that account actually belonged to, especially when both Sony and Hotz are claiming the system in question has a different serial number.
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Independent Iranian hacker claims responsibility for Comodo hack
The hack that resulted in Comodo creating certificates for popular e-mail providers including Google Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Microsoft Hotmail has been claimed as the work of an independent Iranian patriot. A post made to data sharing site pastebin.com by a person going by the handle "comodohacker" claimed responsibility for the hack and described details of the attack. A second post provided source code apparently reverse-engineered as one of the parts of the attack.
Whether the postings are authentic and accurate is, at present at least, a matter of conjecture. The post specifies a number of details that appear authentic. The writer fingers Italian Registration Authority GlobalTrust.it/InstantSSL.it (the same company operating under multiple names) as the weak link. A Registration Authority (RA) is essentially a local reseller for a Certification Authority (CA); in principle, the RA performs the validation of identity that would be too difficult or expensive for the root CA to do, and then sends a request to the root CA to generate an appropriate certificate. Comodo's systems trust that the RA has done its job appropriately, and issues the certificate. This is consistent with Comodo's statement that it was a Southern European company that was compromised.
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WWDC 2011 set for early June, to focus on future of iOS, Mac OS
Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) has officially been scheduled for 2011. Taking place (as usual) at Moscone West in San Francisco, the conference will be held from June 6 through June 10, 2011 and will focus on "the future of iOS and Mac OS," according to Apple.In addition to learning about where the two operating systems are going, developers will be able to attend the usual technical sessions led by Apple's own engineers. Apple hasn't released the names of the most interesting sessions, however, as those will remain under lock and key until after WWDC's opening keynote.
Speaking of which, the keynote speaker has yet to be announced as well. In the past, both Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller have led the presentation—it could go to either party this year, as Jobs remains on medical leave, though he did present at Apple's media event in early March. Whoever does the keynote, it's widely expected that he will announce the next-generation iPhone during WWDC for public release later in the summer (there are some, though, who believe Apple will put this announcement off until fall). Apple may also roll in the news of a MobileMe revamp, which has been rumored to include social networking capabilities and unlimited music re-downloads.
The cost of a WWDC ticket is still $1,599 before flights and accommodations—Apple bumped the price in 2010 after the previous few years sold out. Some developers felt that the cost was too rich for their blood, but most who we talked to last year were grateful that the crowd was a slightly more serious one. If you're an iOS or Mac developer, will you be opening up your wallet this time around?
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Oops: major Canadian ISP admits throttling World of Warcraft
Back in February, a Canadian gamer wrote the government's telecom regulator with an unusual complaint: her ISP, Rogers, was allegedly throttling games like World of Warcraft, making them all but unplayable. Even more unusual, the government demanded that Rogers look into the accusation, and the ISP has now admitted that it is, in fact, throttling WoW in some cases. But only by accident. Like other large Canadian ISPs, Rogers throttles heavily, clamping down on P2P traffic and handing out miserly data caps starting at 2GB per month. But the company has always maintained that its throttling accurately targeted file-sharing programs and not other software.
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Thanks, Internet! Conspiracy theorists (and skeptics) thrive online
It was July of 2009. The economy was on the edge of collapse, with 467,000 jobs lost the previous month. The unemployment rate was 9.5 percent. But for thousands of Americans, the real crisis was a dark secret that the government was supposedly hiding: President Obama wasn't born in the United States. "Will you keep the Republic, or will you allow it to be stolen from us because of apathy?" asked one "birther" brochure. "Demand that Barak [sp] Obama prove he is a Natural Born American. The burden is on him to prove, but the burden is on you to demand the proof."
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Feature: From the first e-mail through the WELL and USENET: a pre-history of social networking
Johnny Ryan's A History of the Internet and the Digital Future has just been released and is already drawing rave reviews. Ars Technica is proud to present three chapters from the book, condensed and adapted for our readers. This third installment is adapted from Chapter 6, "Communities based on interest, not proximity," and it traces the development of online communities from the first email lists through the WELL and later developments.Read the comments on this post
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Strictly business? Personal tweets make profs more "credible"
Those who use their Twitter accounts for both personal and professional purposes often find themselves wondering whether they are damaging their credibility with funny anecdotes or social tweets. According to a study published in the March issue of Learning, Media and Technology, however, the answer to that question is a resounding "no."Instead, students perceive instructors who make social tweets as more credible than instructors who remain strictly business, lending support to the idea that knowing a real human is behind the Twitter stream helps people feel more confident about that person's abilities.
Authored by Elizabethtown College professor of communications Kirsten Johnson and undergraduate student Jamie Bartolino, the paper examines how students perceive professors when they follow their social media updates on Twitter. The paper refers to five "factors of credibility" identified in a 1974 study: competence, character, sociability, composure, and extraversion.
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Dying for the greater good: Ars reviews PSN, XBLA Swarm
Swarm is kind of like Mario—if you were controlling around 50 Marios at once who were constantly being burned, impaled, electrocuted, or murdered in some other brutal fashion. It's a difficult platformer with the structure of an arcade game and a Pixar-meets-Itchy & Scratchy sense of style. It can be frustrating at times, but it's all worth it to watch those little aliens die.Read the comments on this post
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5 years later, first P2P case to be tried still chugging along
Yes, the first file-sharing case in the US to go all the way to trial is still going. Filed on April 19, 2006 and progressing through a remarkable three trials, the recording industry case against Minnesota resident Jammie Thomas-Rasset continues to burn through cash and judicial attention. Thomas-Rasset was at first hit with a $222,000 fine in 2007, which was set aside in 2008. Another jury trial in 2009 ended with a $1.92 million judgment, which was set aside in 2010. In November 2010, a third trial ended with a $1.5 million verdict, which the judge is unlikely to allow (his previous orders suggested that a few thousand dollars per song would be the maximum permissible damages). At the moment, both sides are still arguing over the appropriateness of that $1.5 million damages award.
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Weird Science pulls an all-nighter to study, ends up dumber
When you're low on sleep, it all looks good: I get a bit cranky when I'm not getting a sufficient amount of sleep, but I have seen people who get a bit giddy instead. This latter reaction is apparently the norm. After a bout of sleep deprivation, a trip to the MRI shows that subjects tend to have an overactive reward system, making them more prone to judge emotional stimuli as pleasant compared to control subjects. The risk here is that anyone trying to make a decision after pulling an all-nighter will be prone to assuming everything will work out well. "Based on this evidence, I'd be concerned by an emergency room doctor who's been up for 20 hours straight making rational decisions about my health," said the paper's author. I also wouldn't necessarily trust the sleep-deprived to take an important exam.
NFL updates are violently upsetting: This is a pretty weird study: gather all the reports of domestic violence around the time of a football game and correlate them not only with the final outcome but with the Vegas odds on the game. The goal was to see whether unexpected losses—losses where the oddsmakers expected a win—were more likely to be associated with post-game violence. Compared to a win or an expected loss, they were. According to the authors, things were even worse when the home team was still in playoff contention or was playing one of its traditional rivals.
Some of these effects were pretty subtle, and some of the comparisons were done against days without games, so I wouldn't necessarily expect them to hold up in larger studies. Still, the upset vs. expected loss comparison seems pretty solid.
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The 3DS is here: our guide to launch coverage, games, hardware
Right now you can go to your favorite electronics store and purchase a brand-new Nintendo 3DS... assuming you can find one on store shelves. The system is now officially on the market in the United States, which gives us the perfect excuse to round up all our coverage of the American system and give you some advice on what you need to buy—and what can safely be avoided.Here's what we think of the system and the launch games, but we'd love to hear your launch day thoughts and purchasing decisions in the comments.
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Know your nukes: understanding radiation risks in Japan
Coverage of the recent problems with Japanese nuclear reactors has increased public awareness of radioactive isotopes of cesium, iodine, and uranium, but it hasn't helped people understand what makes a given isotope dangerous. It's no surprise, really; the threat posed by a particular isotope depends on a combination of factors, including its half-life, mode of decay, and what happens to the isotope once it gets inside the body. We'll look at each of these issues separately to help clear up some of the confusion.Half-life isn't just a game
Radioactive decay is largely a random process. There is no way to predict when a specific atom will decay, but it is possible to get a sense of how often an average atom will survive before decaying. The most common measurement for this average is a half-life: the amount of time it takes for half the atoms in a sample to undergo decay. For some isotopes, the half-life is a fraction of a second; within a few seconds, nearly all of it will be gone. For other isotopes, a half-life can be hundreds of thousands of years or more, so you need a substantial amount of the material for the radiation to really register. If you only had 100,000 atoms of a long-lived isotope, chances are low that there would be any decays during a short exposure.Read the comments on this post
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Vaccine's success spurs whooping cough comeback
There has been a decline in vaccination rates in response to unfounded safety fears, but there's been a slightly different dynamic when it comes to one specific disease: whooping cough, caused by Bordetella pertussis. In areas where vaccination is erratic, like Africa, whooping cough is estimated to cause as many as 170,000 deaths annually, many of those in infants. However, in most developed nations, aggressive vaccination programs brought the disease under control by the 1970s. But, about a decade later, rates began to rise again, and there's been a bit of an argument over why. The authors of a study that was released this week by PNAS note that there has been something unusual about the disease's resurgence. Prior to vaccinations, the disease primarily struck children under 10; since its return, however, the peak age of infection has been 13, and people in their 20s through 50s are now contracting the disease despite having been vaccinated.
The paper indicates that three explanations have been proposed for this shift: better diagnosis, evolution around the vaccine by B. pertussis, and a time lag, after which the vaccine's effectiveness gradually declines. The authors favor the last of these, since previous work has shown that vaccinated individuals, when exposed to B. pertussis, can show an increase in antibodies against it without actually developing symptoms. So, they used a mathematical model to show that a decline in vaccine effectiveness can produce the sort of behavior seen in the real world.
What actually happens is that, while vaccination rates are moderate, there's enough of the pathogen around to consistently re-expose vaccinated individuals, providing them a boost. Once vaccination becomes thorough enough, however, this opportunity for a boost vanishes, leaving children susceptible if they get exposed in later years. In their model, the researchers saw "large-amplitude multiannual cycles," meaning sporadic outbreaks of the sort that are being seen in high schools.
In response to these trends, Massachusetts has become one of the first states to start requiring a booster in high school aged children. The authors' model indicates that this should be effective at reducing the overall incidence, but will do little to protect the most vulnerable individuals: pre-vaccination infants, who may pick up the disease from their parents. The authors suggest that giving the booster to expectant parents might be a better approach if money or resources aren't available to do both.
PNAS, 2011. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1014394108 (About DOIs).
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Week in gaming: 3DS review, Crysis 2, George Hotz
There is nothing that makes me happier than interesting gaming news to talk about and good conversations in the comments. This week brought us plenty of both. We reviewed the 3DS and found it a solid system that's only going to get better. We reviewed Crysis 2 and found it an engaging shooter with a nice amount of depth. We interviewed the people behind the iPad hit Sword and Sworcery and found they had great things to say about gaming.That's just the tip of a very diverse iceberg, and now that I've murdered that metaphor I'll get out of my own way and invite you to catch up on what you might have missed last week.
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Week in Apple: ZFS on Mac OS X, rogue tethering, DUI apps, and more
This week on Infinite Loop we interviewed the creator of a commercial ZFS solution for the Mac and offered a how-to on Automator and shell scripting. We also covered news about AT&T shutting down rogue tetherers, Apple's App Store lawsuit against Amazon, the open source Chameleon project, and more. Read on for the top stories of the week:Z-410: How ZFS is slowly making its way to Mac OS X: With 20 years of experience at Apple behind him, developer Don Brady is launching a small software company to finally bring ZFS to Mac OS X. By incorporating the latest ZFS features from Open Solaris with integrated GUI support, Mac users will have access to a modern file system with integrated data integrity as early as this summer.
AT&T shames unauthorized phone tetherers, gives ultimatum: AT&T apparently has an eye on people who are tethering their smartphones to their computers without paying for it. The company has begun sending out e-mails to those users asking them to either quit or pay up, and they have until March 27 before AT&T upgrades their plans for them.
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Week in tech: mega-merger mania
Back to the front of the pack: Ars reviews Firefox 4: Mozilla has released Firefox 4, the latest version of the open source Web browser. Ars takes a close hands-on look at the updated browser, which brings performance improvements, synchronization support, and a significant user interface overhaul.The Linux graphics stack from X to Wayland: Ars looks at the evolution of the Linux graphics stack, from the origins of the X project in the 1980s to the recent Wayland effort.
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Week in science: fast-charging batteries and quark pairs
How to feed 9 billion people: the future of food and farming: The global food supply is starting to get tight, with increasing sensitivity to droughts and floods causing price spikes and food shortages. The UK commissioned a report to examine how to feed a planet with a population that is set to increase to 9 billion by 2050. Serotonin-lacking male mice not picky about sex of their mates: Male mice that can't signal using serotonin seem to share their affection indifferently, showing little preference for mating with male or female mice.
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Apple's mobile products do not violate Nokia patents, says ITC
The International Trade Commission (ITC) has ruled in favor of Apple in one of the company's patent disputes with Nokia. ITC Judge E. James Gildea said on Friday that Apple did not violate any of Nokia's five mobile device patents, though the Commission's members must first review the decision before taking any further action.The patent war between the two companies began in October 2009 when Nokia accused Apple of infringing on 10 of Nokia's patents related to GSM, UMTS, and WLAN wireless standards. At the time, Nokia's VP of intellectual property Ilkka Rahnasto said that Apple was not establishing its own intellectual property, and that the company was "attempting to get a free ride on the back of Nokia's innovation."
Soon thereafter, Nokia took its complaint to the ITC in hopes of blocking sales of iPhones in the US. Meanwhile, Apple launched its own patent lawsuit against Nokia and asked the ITC to block Nokia's device sales in the US.
"Nokia has demonstrated its willingness to copy Apple's iPhone ideas as well as Apple's basic computing technologies," read the countersuit, "all while demanding Apple pay for access to Nokia's purported standards-essential patent."
According to the ITC, Apple's products are free of patent violations and the company can continue importing its products into the US. The details of the judge's findings won't be released until after both companies have a chance to redact sensitive information.
Unsurprisingly, Nokia wasn't pleased with the decision. "While we don’t agree that there has been no violation, we’ll wait to see the details of the ruling before we decide on any next steps,” Nokia spokesperson Laurie Armstrong told Bloomberg.
It's possible that the ITC will end up ruling that neither company violates the other's patents. In late 2010, ITC staff members submitted a recommendation in Apple's counter-complaint against Nokia saying that "the evidence will not establish a violation" of Apple's patents. That case is not related to today's decision, and another judge is expected to rule on it in June.
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iOS 4.3.1 fixes iPod touch graphics glitch, TV flickering issue
It has only been a couple of weeks since the release of iOS 4.3, but Apple has already released an update. iOS 4.3.1 is now available via iTunes for the GSM iPhone 4 (yes, you CDMA users are still out of luck), the iPhone 3GS, iPad 2, original iPad, and third- and fourth-generation iPod touches.
According to Apple, the update brings with it fixes for a fourth-generation iPod touch graphics glitch as well as bugs that caused iPhones to have trouble activating and connecting to cell networks. The update also addresses flickering issues that occur when connecting a device to certain HDTVs with Apple's Digital AV adapter and "resolves an issue authenticating with some enterprise web services."
The release notes don't make specific reference to fixing some of the battery issues reported around the Web or patching iPad jailbreak vulnerabilities, though rumors had suggested that iOS 4.3.1 would address both of these topics. It's possible, however, that they (and other fixes) could fall under Apple's umbrella of general bug fixes. Let us know if you happen to see any other changes that Apple didn't mention.
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Walking on water: Ars reviews Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery
There's a moment in Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP when you come up to a lake, with the moon reflected in the water, and one word appears on screen: believe. And you realize you can walk on water.Sworcery is a game of moments: some as small as watching a deer hop into the bushes, others more revelatory and world-changing. But each one is powerful. It's an intimate game that makes you feel like it was created solely with you in mind. A point-and-click adventure that won't make you feel frustrated, with puzzles that often force you to simply poke around until you find the solution. It's leisurely at times, and heart-pounding at others. It's like nothing else you've played before.
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Trademarked keyword sales may soon be restricted in Europe
Google has had some luck in the courts when it comes to selling ads with trademarked keywords, but European companies buying those keywords may soon face some hurdles. An advocate general to the European Court of Justice has recommended that restrictions be placed on the use of keywords owned by other companies, though Google itself will likely remain free of liability.Advocate general Niilo Jأ¤أ¤skinen issued his opinion as part of a legal case between flower delivery service Interflora and Marks & Spencer, which runs a competing flower operation. Interflora had sued Marks & Spencer after Google searches for Interflora began turning up ads for Marks & Spencer, which Interflora argues is confusing to consumers and ultimately leads to lost business.
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GameFly to USPS: higher postage than Netflix costs us $730K per month
GameFly is a service where customers pay a monthly fee to rent games which are delivered via the US Postal Service—kind of the Netflix of gaming. The mailing of these games, and the danger of games breaking in transit, are major ongoing concerns for the company, and in 2009 GameFly filed a complaint with the United States Postal Service alleging that Netflix mailings were given priority over—not to mention better rates than—GameFly's mailings.On March 23, the president of GameFly wrote to the Postal Regulatory Commission asking that the complaint be resolved. The reason is startling: the cumulative cost difference between the shipping of a Netflix and GameFly disc exceeds the net monthly income of the company.
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People officially say "LOL" out loud
The venerable Oxford English Dictionary has long been the definitive reference work on the English language. This week, it lent the majesty of its name to “LOL" (laughing out loud), a shiny new entry which will now join OMG, IMHO, TMI, BFF, and other linguistic "initialisms" in the dictionary. And why not? It's a perfectly cromulent word.
LOL is defined as an interjection, “originally and chiefly in the language of electronic communications: ‘ha ha!’; used to draw attention to a joke or humorous statement, or to express amusement.”
The real surprise here isn't the online ubiquity of LOL but its growing offline presence as a spoken word. As this week's announcement makes clear, LOL is now "found outside of electronic contexts, however; in print, and even in spoken use, where there often seems to be a bit more than simple abbreviation going on. The intention is usually to signal an informal, gossipy mode of expression, and perhaps parody the level of unreflective enthusiasm or overstatement that can sometimes appear in online discourse, while at the same time marking oneself as an ‘insider’ au fait with the forms of expression associated with the latest technology."
The hallmark of the Oxford English Dictionary is the way it illustrates word use over time through the use of quotations. In the case of LOL, the earliest quote that the editors could find comes from the comp.misc Usenet newsgroup on June 13, 1990, where it was included in a “Jargon File Draft” (and was therefore already in use).
But a quote from the 2003 UK novel Freshers reminds us that common abbreviations like LOL can eventually migrate from the screen to our lips. Two characters in the book share this bit of dialogue:
“Wow, man! Are you, like, really from a council estate [a public housing project]?”Working at Ars, where we rely heavily on digital communication tools like instant messaging, Internet relay chat, and e-mail, comes with certain downsides. One is the tendency of online expressions like LOL to leap unbidden to our lips when away from the computer. I've personally felt LOL threaten to burst forth on occasion; it may have once even escaped my lips. Not because I was trying to be an "insider au fait" so much as because, after typing it so many times in response to my too-witty colleagues, it became an almost hard-wired, instinctual reaction to comedy.
“Yep.”
“Lol! Awesome."
The urge to "LOL" in public was an embarrassing one, and yet—what's so highbrow about shouting "ha-HA," anyway? Where some see linguistic decline, it's probably more accurate simply to see linguistic changes, changes that have piled into English over the last 500 years from so many cultures, languages, and communities that it's now one of the world's richest languages.
But even if you accept this view and make peace with "LOL" as a spoken word, one problem remains. Is it pronounced "loll" or "lole" or "ell-oh-ell"?
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Android openness withering as Google withholds Honeycomb code
During a keynote presentation at Google's IO developer conference last year, Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra proclaimed that the search giant created Android in order to bring freedom to the masses and avoid a "draconian future" in which one company controlled the mobile industry. Looking past the self-congratulatory rhetoric, Android's poor track record on openness is becoming harder to ignore.The company revealed Thursday that it will delay publication of the Android 3.0 source code for the foreseeable future—possibly for months. It's not clear when (or if) the source code will be made available. The decision puts Android on a path towards a "draconian future" of its own, in which it is controlled by a single vendor—Google.
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