USPS rules for GameFly: mailing DVDs to be cheaper for all
GameFly has been involved in a bitter dispute with the US Postal Service over the cost of mailing games to customers, with the company claiming that Netflix has received better service and better prices for disc mailing. Both Netflix and the Postal Service fired back with detailed reasons for the difference in price, but the Postal Commission didn't buy it, and has ordered the Postal Service to enact new policies for DVD mailers across the board.
This is great news for GameFly, as the company says it is losing $730,000 per month on high postal fees, but it will also help every company that sends discs through the mail. The entire case seemed to boil down to two details: both companies were mailing the same type of product, and Gamefly was willing to change its mailers if offered the same considerations as Netflix.
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Original PC Alice free with purchase of console Madness Returns
We had first asked American McGee about the possibility of an Alice re-release during this year's Game Developers Conference, and he smiled and told us to follow up with EA. The publisher refused to comment one way or the other when we asked, but it's now official. When you buy the upcoming Alice title, you'll get a copy of the original game for free.
"Alice: Madness Returns, shipping on June 14, will include a one-time-use Online Pass registration code (for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360) that gives players access to the original cult-classic American McGee's Alice," EA announced. "Players that do not have the code can purchase American McGee's Alice for 800 Microsoft Points on Xbox LIVE Marketplace and $9.99 on the PlayStation Network through the main menu of Alice: Madness Returns."
This is interesting in a number of ways. Unless you buy Madness Returns, you won't be able to purchase the original Alice title, which limits the audience for the download. This is a twist on the now-standard online pass, where gamers get access to online features when they buy the game new, but have to pay $10 to go online if the code has already been used. This time, instead of online play, you get an entire game for buying a new copy.
This isn't a bad idea, but we hope EA has plans to release the original Alice as a standalone download in the future for fans who may not want to spend $60 on the new experience.
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Steve Jobs: goldbug, investment guru?
In May of last year, Apple's market capitalization passed Microsoft's, making Apple the world's largest tech company and cementing Steve Jobs' status as one of the greatest creators of shareholder value in the modern era. But for all of the shareholder value that Jobs has created in the past thirty years, can he also spot undervalued shares? Or are running a company and running money two different skills, entirely?
Steve Jobs hasn't historically been in the business of giving investment advice, but at one point in 1979, just a year before Apple Computer went public, Alice Schroeder reports that he did just that. Courtesy of a brief aside on page 470 of Schroeder's extraordinarily good biography of Warren Buffett, The Snowball, we meet the young Steven "Glenn Beck" Jobs, confirmed goldbug.
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Intel CEO: x86 to soon be dripping with Honeycomb goodness
On an earnings call this week, Intel CEO Paul Otellini confirmed that Intel is hard at work on an x86 port of Android 3.0, aka Honeycomb. The port is intended to be paired with the company's recently announced "Oak Trail" line of SoCs, for a platform that rumors indicate will be called "PRC Plus." Otellini didn't get specific about when the new platform would launch, noting only that products from Acer, Lenovo, and Asus will be coming in the second half of theyear.
Oak Trail will certainly outperform the ARM competition for CPU-intensive tasks, but at the cost of some battery life. It remains to be seen if and how Intel can use that performance edge to its advantage with Honeycomb. The ARM version of the Android 3.0 OS will be more polished by the time the Oak Trail products hit the market, and most of the performance-intensive stuff that we've seen from the OS so far is interface-centric. As long as the interface remains the primary place where cycles are spent, ARM could still have an advantage, because SoC makers can just pair an ARM core with a capable GPU and drive the interface that way.
Otellini also talked up the company's upcoming 32nm Medfield part, which the CEO claims will probably show up in smartphones before the end of this year.
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Researchers use the ocean to recharge their batteries
When people think of harvesting energy from the oceans, it's typically in the form of wave or tidal power, in which the motion of the water drives the production of electricity. A paper in Nano Letters suggests an alternate way to turn the ocean into power: using the fact that it's salty. There have been a few ideas about how to extract energy from the salinity difference between salt and fresh water, but the paper suggests a rather intriguing approach: treat the entire ocean a bit like a battery medium.
The battery charge cycle generally involves the exchange of electrons with ions that shuffle between a storage medium and electrodes; normally, the ions themselves remain encased within the battery. The new device takes a very different approach, allowing the ions to exchange freely with water that flows through it.
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Settle up: voicemails show P2P porn law firms in action
The pitch isn't subtle. Lawyers behind the recent wave of mass file-sharing lawsuits in the US want to earn quick settlements from defendants rather than litigate years-long cases, so it's no surprise that their settlement efforts are persistent. Settlement amounts are set at a few thousand dollars—enough to hurt but less than it would cost even to get a lawyer started on defending someone. In addition to the money, there's the time—years of one's life tied up in a court case—and the fact that most of these cases involve "adult content."
The lawyers know all of this, and their settlement folks make all these points explicit while attempting extract cash from defendants. One such defendant, targeted in a mass file-sharing porn case in Illinois, provided us with a snapshot of what it's like to be on the receiving end of these settlement attempts.
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Big Content now opposes FM tuner requirement for smart phones
When it comes to an FM tuner mandate for smartphones, it's never entirely clear who is going to take what position at any given moment. Here's the latest development—the Recording Industry Association of America is supporting Representative Darrell Issa's (R-CA) resolution asking Congress to
"oppose any mandate for the inclusion of terrestrial broadcast radio tuners in the manufacture or sale of mobile devices, which would stifle innovation, competition, and consumer choice."
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Senator questions Apple over iPhone tracking
Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) wants answers. Security researchers today revealed the existence of a file on iPhones and on their computer backups that logs detailed cell phone triangulation data—and has ever since iOS 4 was released last summer. The information is stored unencrypted by default, and is simple to access. That announcement led Franken to fire off a two-page letter (PDF) today, asking nine pointed questions of Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Franken first outlines scenarios in which the release of this data could pose a problem. "Anyone who gains access to this single file could likely determine the location of the user's home, the businesses he frequents, the doctors he visits, the schools his children attend, and the trips he has taken over the past months or even a year," he writes.
Which raises the obvious question: how would an attacker get access to the data? “It is also entirely conceivable that malicious persons may create viruses to access this data from customers' iPhones, iPads, and desktop and laptop computers," the letter continues.
"There are numerous ways in which this information could be abused by criminals and bad actors. Furthermore, there is no indication that this file is any different for underage iPhone or iPad users, meaning that the millions of children and teenagers who use iPhone or iPad devices also risk having their location collected and compromised.”
The letter concludes with a list of questions.
- Why does Apple collect and compile this location data? Why did Apple choose to initiate tracking this data in its iOS 4 operating system?
Does Apple collect and compile this location data for laptops?
How is this data generated? (GPS, cell tower triangulation, Wi-Fi triangulation, etc.)
How frequently is a user's location recorded? What triggers the creation of a record of someone's location?
How precise is this location data? Can it track the users location to 50 m, 100 m, etc.?
Why is this data not encrypted? What steps will Apple take to encrypt the data?
Why were Apple consumers never affirmatively informed of the collection and retention of their location data in this manner? Why did Apple not seek affirmative consent before doing so?
Does Apple believe that this conduct is permissible under the terms of its privacy policy?
To whom, if anyone, including Apple, has this data been disclosed? When and why were these disclosures made?
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Liveblog: Apple's FY2011 Q2 earnings call on April 20
That's right: we're gearing up to cover Apple's earnings results for the second fiscal quarter of 2011. Apple will announce its earnings on Wednesday, April 20, followed by the typical conference call where Apple executives will delve into the details and answer questions from analysts. The company said in January that it was targeting revenue of $22 billion and diluted earnings per share of about $4.90 for this quarter (down from $26.74 billion in revenue from the first fiscal quarter of 2011), though Apple almost always meets or beats its own projections.
What are some of your own predictions for the results, and will Apple reveal anything interesting during the conference call? We'll be covering things live in order to find out.
The earnings call is scheduled to take place on April 20, 2011 at 2:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (see when the liveblog starts in your own timezone).
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iPod touch is one-third of iPod, iOS sales to date
Apple has never broken out numbers for individual iPod models when it reports quarterly sales results, making it difficult to determine just how may iPod touches Apple has sold since the device's introduction in late 2007. However, the number was revealed this week after the complaint filed in Apple's lawsuit with Samsung was posted to PACER. According to the filing, Apple has sold "over 60 million" of the iOS-compatible devices in three and a half years.
To put some perspective on this number, we dug into Apple's quarterly reports since fiscal first quarter of 2008 to find out the total number of iPods sold since the iPod touch was first launched. (Apple's fiscal first quarter is October through December of the preceding year, so the first quarter of fiscal year 2008 is the first full quarter of iPod touch availability.) Including an estimated 10 million iPods for the most recent quarter, Apple has moved a total of about 188 million iPods since September 2007.
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How Apple tracks your location without consent, and why it matters
If you haven't yet enabled encrypted backups for your iPhone or iPad, now's definitely the time to start. Two security researchers have discovered a simple way to map out where you've been almost anywhere in the world—without any hacking involved. The information comes from a location cache file found within your iPhone's backups on your Mac or PC, bringing out serious privacy concerns and opening the door for a jealous spouse, thief, or even a crafty trojan to take a detailed look at your whereabouts. And it's information that no one should have access to—not even law enforcement, barring a court order.
Researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden revealed their findings on Wednesday ahead of their presentation at the Where 2.0 conference taking place in San Francisco. The two discovered that the iPhone or 3G iPad—anything with 3G data access, so no iPod touch—are logging location data to a file called consolidated.db with latitude and longitude coodinates and a timestamp. The data collection appears to be associated with the launch of iOS 4 last June, meaning that many users (us at Ars included) have nearly a year's worth of stalking data collected.
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Online poker players: your deposited money isn't lost
US online poker players, the federal government has a message for you: it wants to help you get your money back.
Last week, the FBI and the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York seized the domain names of the three largest Internet poker operations in the US market: PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker. In addition to replacing the sites with a scary-looking FBI warning image, the government went after several US-based payment processors and also obtained a restraining order against bank accounts used by the poker companies. As a result, all of the money deposited by US players with the offshore poker companies suddenly became much harder to access.
That money is not necessarily lost. The government today announced an agreement with PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker under which it will return their domain names temporarily—so long as they agree not to allow US-based IP addresses to gamble for real money, and so long as they don't allow any further US-based deposits. The move was made to make it easy for US players to withdraw their deposited cash.
“No individual player accounts were ever frozen or restrained, and each implicated poker company has at all times been free to reimburse any player's deposited funds,” said US Attorney Preet Bharara. "In fact, this Office expects the companies to return the money the US players entrusted to them, and we will work with the poker companies to facilitate the return of funds to players, as today's agreements with PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker demonstrate."
Absolute Poker can sign on to the same deal if it wishes.
The sites are free to continue offering real gambling services in other countries, but the US government has cracked down on their US operations, which it says have earned a combined $3 billion in total revenue over the years.
Committed players won't be deterred from gambling, of course. One player described his own plan two days ago on a poker forum:
I am a US player and I have a plan that I am looking into and would like to know if anyone else has looked into it. I just emailed FTP [Full Tilt Poker] support to ask if it would be alright to change my address to a non-US address, use a VPN to change my IP to outside the US, and change my bank account to a non-US account. I asked them if they would consider it to be a violation of their Terms of Service. Also, I asked if they would consider me a non-US player… If they say OK, then I am going to get it set up but to be safe, I am not going to play until I hear about many successful cashouts to non-US players over the course of the next week or two.
Also, I have heard that a couple of Latvian bank accounts are good, safe, and easy to open same with HSBC, RBS, etc. Until I get a foreign bank account set up, I will use friends and GB (please PM me for more info) to cashout. GB said he is stopping wires to the US for now but he can still mail checks.
Sounds like a lot of work—which is exactly how the government wants it.
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Politics and self-confidence trump education on climate change
This week saw the arrival of both a paper and a new survey which track the US public's awareness of climate change. The two use slightly different sources and come to slightly different conclusions, but there's one trend that trumps all: when it comes to climate change, politics dominates, eclipsing self-assessed knowledge and general education. In fact, it appears that your political persuasion might determine whether an education will make you more or less likely to believe the scientific community.
One set of polls, conducted by the University of New Hampshire, focused on a set of rural areas, including Alaska, the Gulf Coast, and Appalachia. These probably don't reflect the US as a whole, but the pollsters had about 9,500 respondents. The second, published in the The Sociological Quarterly, took advantage of a decade's worth of Earth Day polls conducted by Gallup. These each had in the area of 1,000 participants, which the authors pooled. That provided a lot more to work with statistically, but ended up pooling data on a topic where the public's view is not fixed. In fact, the one timing analysis the authors performed showed that the gap between liberals and conservatives grew quite a bit larger over the last decade.
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New elastic polymer self-heals in just one minute
Self-healing polymers are extremely sought after by scientists, as they have many useful—not to mention lucrative—applications. Back in 2009, we reported a polyurethane-based polymeric material that heals itself in roughly an hour when exposed to UV light. That particular polymer, made by Biswajit Ghosh and Marek W. Urban, would be useful as a protective coating for phones, cars, etc. It worked based on the principle of having a reactive chemical component that would split open when physically damaged to create two reactive ends that can then covalently link together under UV light to repair itself.
In a recent issue of Nature, Mark Burnworth and his colleagues report a different type of self-healing material, one that can repair itself in about a minute under UV light. Burnworth’s polymeric material also doesn’t function on the basis of forming chemical bonds between organic compounds for repair. Instead, it relies on localized heating and metal-ligand interactions.
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Feature: How to build your own computer: Ask Ars DIY Series, Part I
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.
For Ask Ars, we typically respond to a reader question about some specific tech quandary, but this time around we've got something special. We've put together a new PC-building guide, complete with video selections that both inform and entertain. Our original guide hasn't been updated since the Celeron overclocking era, and many readers wrote in to let us know that it was long in the tooth. So if you've been thinking about building your own, or you're curious about what goes into the build process, this Ask Ars is for you.
This guide is aimed at people who have not built a PC before, but who know the basics ins and outs of DIY life.
In recent years, building your own computer has become more of a niche technophile activity than it was in the earlier part of the decade. Few people see the benefits of expending the effort to figure out how all the different components of a PC fit, screw, and plug together when you can just as easily fill out a customization form at any number of online retailers and have your own custom build arrive in just a matter of weeks.
But we know that there are still good reasons to go the do-it-yourself route. Our System Guides continue to see amazing traffic, and staff members (some, but not all) are still exercising their Type A personalities and building their own PCs. Ars has a long history of supporting PC builders, and this guide is designed to bring first-time and relatively green builders into the fold.
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Security researchers find iPhones, 3G iPads track user location
Two security researchers have discovered that iPhones and 3G-equipped iPads regularly record and store location information to a hidden file that is backed up to iTunes and even transferred to new devices. While the information isn't necessarily accessible to remote hackers, the researchers noted that it does raise some important concerns about privacy.
Researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden announced this morning that they are presenting their findings at the Where 2.0 conference on Wednesday. "Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps," the pair noted in a post to O'Reilly Radar. "We're not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it's clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations."
Warden developed software to view and analyze the database of locations stored by your iOS device, a copy of which is likely sitting unencrypted on the computer with which you sync your iPhone or iPad. The pair advised that turning on backup encryption in iTunes is an easy way to protect the information from leaking, though anyone with physical access to your iDevice could potentially access and analyze the database.
We have contacted Apple and several security experts to get a better understanding of the privacy and security implications of Allan and Warden's findings. Keep an eye out for our in-depth analysis on the issue later today.
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Latest buzz: September launch for iPhone 5
Recent rumors have pointed to the next-generation iPhone hardware launching in the fall instead of the usual summer timeframe. Now, new sources with "direct knowledge" of Apple's supply chain are saying the device should begin manufacturing in late July or early August, in time for a September launch.
Reuters cited three sources with inside knowledge of Apple's plans for the iPhone 5, which agreed that the design will largely be unchanged. The major difference will be a "faster processor"—undoubtedly the A5 processor used in the iPad 2.
Beyond the promise of a "faster processor," not exactly the most shocking revelation, the sources for Reuters also claimed a September introduction for the updated iPhone. Previous rumors were less precise, merely indicating a later "fall" launch, leading many to conclude Apple would introduce the new iPhone alongside updated iPod touch devices in September—the usual timeframe for iPod updates. This latest intel seems to confirm that conclusion.
One possible major change not mentioned by Reuters' sources is that the iPhone 5 might use dual-mode Qualcomm baseband chips that are capable of connecting to both GSM/HSPA and CDMA/EVDO networks. The CDMA-compatible iPhone 4 launched earlier this year makes use of such a chip, but the GSM capabilities are disabled. It's further possible that moving the iPhone 5 introduction to the fall will give Apple a chance to use next-generation Qualcomm chips that are also compatible with 4G LTE networks.
Other rumored improvements for the iPhone 5 not discussed in the Reuters report include an 8 megapixel camera and integration of NFC hardware, possibly connected to an iTunes-based mobile payment service.
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Kindle Lending Library comes with strict terms, preserved notes
Kindle users will soon be able to borrow Kindle books from more than 11,000 US libraries. Amazon made the unexpected announcement Wednesday morning, noting that users would be able to read the borrowed books on any Kindle-enabled device, including older-generation Kindles and apps on iOS, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone, Mac, or PC.
Amazon is working with digital content distributor OverDrive in order to deliver the library books to Kindle users. Although OverDrive offers e-books to a number of different devices in various formats, all the books borrowed through the Kindle Lending Library will apparently be in Kindle format only.
What's cool, however, is how Amazon and OverDrive are treating any notes or highlights made in the borrowed e-books. Users will be able to annotate and bookmark to their heart's desire, yet those markings won't show up for whomever checks out the e-book next. They will be preserved on your account, though—if you decide to check out the book again or even purchase it from Amazon, your markings will remain intact. (It's unlikely, however, that you'll be able to access your markings after you "return" the book, but before you borrow or buy it again.)
Amazon announced in October 2010 that Kindle users would finally be able to lend books to one another, but under strict conditions. The downside is that the book can only be lent to an individual user for 14 days, and it sounds like the terms for the Kindle Lending Library will be at least the same or more stringent. Amazon spokesperson Kinley Campbell told Ars that the lending time will vary by library, "generally 7-14 days," but that users should check with their local libraries for information.
Although we're excited about the Lending Library, the lending terms are a bit of bummer. Also, independent book lending services, such as BookLending.com and Lendle.me, still exist for Kindle users who want to swap books online (Amazon restored Lendle's API access after revoking it a month ago). The Lending Library may be Amazon's way of "competing" with those services by driving users towards libraries with more restrictive terms.
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Why complaints about Valve's Portal 2 ARG miss the point
Valve put together a comprehensive and deep alternate-reality game to get the word out about the launch of Portal 2, as if this was a title that needed an extra level of publicity. The ARG lead to a lot of speculation, people playing games in order to speed up the release of Portal 2, and a network of players coming together to try to figure out what it all meant. Now Portal 2 has been released and the game is over—we think—and there are a large number of people oddly bitter about the whole thing.
That's silly: the entire point of any alternative-reality game is to publicize something, and there was no downside for anyone. For the gamers that played along, there was much to be gained. This is why the complainers have it all wrong.
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HBGary's open letter: full of denials that don't hold water
HBGary, the security firm that saw its servers hacked and its e-mails released after its HBGary Federal offshoot angered the Anonymous hive, published a rather peculiar open letter this past Friday in an effort to address the "large amount of misinformation reported in the press." But the letter makes some questionable claims of its own.
The unsigned letter outlines the basics of the attack and asserts that HBGary's internal systems remained safe and uncompromised. To ward off future attacks, the letter also claimed that HBGary's website, which was hacked using a basic security flaw, and its e-mail system, which fell victim to weak, re-used passwords, were now back in operation with "even stronger cyber defense mechanisms."
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Available Tags:Intel , Apple , iPhone , iPod , iOS , Ars , Security , iPhone 5 , Kindle , Portal ,
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