Researchers put viruses to work to build a better solar cell
Angela Belcher's research group at MIT has made a name for itself by using viruses—the biological kind—as a key part in a variety of nanoscale construction projects. So far, the work has focused on batteries, but this week a paper came out that indicated Belcher has turned her attention to photovoltaic devices. The work uses a virus to prepare carbon nanotubes for incorporation into a solar device, and sees a big boost in conversion efficiency.
One of the limiting factors in solar cell efficiency is the ability to shuffle electrons around. Once a photon knocks an electron off the active material of the solar cell, the electrons need to be moved away quickly and converted into current—otherwise, they'll simply recombine with the material they've been set loose from, and the photon's energy will be lost.
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Facebook shoots first, ignores questions later; account lock-out attack works (Update VIII)
Got enemies on Facebook? Facebook is so eager to protect copyright that the mere accusation of copyright infringement is enough to get an account locked. Ars found this out the hard way Thursday morning when our own Facebook page became inaccessible, with no warning, no explanation, and no clear appeal process.
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Sony: some PSN data encrypted, hardware moving to new location
Patrick Seybold is the senior director of corporate communications and social media for Sony Computer Entertainment of America. Right now, he's got a tough job. Sony's updates on the PlayStation Network are written by Seybold and posted to the official blog. There's a new update on the blog, in the form of a Q&A about the attack. There are a few interesting details here, including the lack of encryption on some of the personal data, and the fact that the location of the hardware that runs the PlayStation Network is being moved.
It has to be said that, at this point, no one is envious of Seybold's position within Sony.
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Apple may brand its rumored cloud services "iCloud"
Apple has reportedly been working hard to launch new cloud-based services for iOS and Mac users, including a revamped MobileMe and an iTunes-based "digital locker," all powered by a huge data center in Maiden, North Carolina. Now, a new rumor published Wednesday night suggests Apple may be calling its new services "iCloud."
According to GigaOm, a Swedish-based company called Xcerion had until recently been using iCloud.com to run a cloud-based storage service of the same name. Xcerion has just rebranded rebranded the service "CloudMe," and a source for GigaOm claimed that the iCloud.com domain name had been sold to Apple for $4.5 million.
Xcerion—not Apple or its domain name management service—is still listed as the domain owner in Network Solutions Whois database, so for now we consider this rumor plausible if unverifiable. Apple is believed to be launching its new services soon, since Apple has stopped selling new $99 per year MobileMe subscriptions. Apple is also believed to planning to discuss its digital locker service in early June at WWDC 2011.
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Feature: Together, we work alone: two days with Star Wars: The Old Republic
It's lunchtime during the first of two Star Wars: The Old Republic immersion days at the EA Redwood Shores campus, and the game designers leading the event are panicking: everyone is talking about Portal 2. Instead of discussing the three exclusive hours of SWTOR we just played, most of the writers are chatting about yesterday's Portal 2 release and single-player campaign, which everyone feels pales in comparison to its co-op.
Eventually one writer prompts another with, "So, what do you think of TOR?" (All the BioWare representatives refer to it as TOR.) And the reactions are positive: the voice acting is great, gameplay is fun, and maybe the trash planet Hutta doesn't make for the most impressive starting area, but there are few complaints beyond game balance tweaks.
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Department of Justice's long oversight of Microsoft to end
Nearly a decade of government oversight of Microsoft's operations is set to end, after the Department of Justice, 17 states, and District of Colombia opted not to object to the expiration next month of the company's antitrust settlement. The Thursday hearing was their last opportunity to extend the settlement terms, which will now expire on May 12.
Under the terms of the settlement, Microsoft was required to both document and license key APIs and protocols that were used by the Windows operating system. A three-person Technical Committee with full access to the company's source code, staff, and systems was created to oversee its actions, tasked with ensuring it did not engage in predatory behavior or construct barriers to entry. The company was also prohibited from making agreements with hardware, software, and PC vendors that penalized them if they promoted non-Microsoft operating systems or restricted them from preinstalling non-Microsoft applications.
The settlement was the culmination of the antitrust case brought by the Department of Justice and states in 1998. The initial remedy, delivered by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in 2000, would have split the company in two. This remedy was appealed and subsequently rejected by the Court of Appeals. In late 2001 the settlement was proposed by Microsoft, and the courts agreed to it in 2002.
The oversight required under that initial settlement was due to expire after five years. The expiration was appealed in 2007, amidst fears over Silverlight and inadequate documentation of network protocols, with the result that it was extended for another two years. A second extension was granted in 2009, again due to network protocol documentation. It's that second extension that will expire in May.
There are unlikely to be any immediate implications for Microsoft, with the company saying that it will continue to abide by most of the terms of the settlement anyway. The European Commission prevailed in its antitrust case against the company, and among other remedies, created similar requirements for API and protocol documentation and licensing; a continuation of these programs is hence likely to keep regulators on both sides of the Atlantic happy. It currently has some 400 employees tasked with creating this technical documentation. Nonetheless, the removal of court oversight may allow the company to respond a little more quickly, and a little more aggressively, to the actions of its competitors.
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Ubuntu 11.04 released, a Natty Narwhal rises from the depths
Canonical has announced the official release of Ubuntu 11.04, codenamed Natty Narwhal. This major update introduces the new Unity desktop shell, which is designed to improve ease of use and deliver a more modern user experience.
Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth unveiled the Unity project a year ago during an Ubuntu Developer Summit keynote in Brussels. The new shell was originally created for the Ubuntu Netbook Edition and first shipped as the default netbook environment in Ubuntu 10.10. The Ubuntu developers have worked intensively over the last six months to adapt Unity for the desktop. The effort entailed a significant overhaul of the Unity frontend that boosts its performance, reliability, and suitability for use on larger screens.
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Looking for a drinking fountain? There will soon be an app for that
You're in a new city and enjoying the sights on foot, public transportation, or bicycle. You're also one of those staunch travelers who packs your own drinking water. And not the plastic, over-the-counter, bottled stuff, either. No, you carry your H2O in your own container. But you are constantly frustrated by the scarcity of public drinking fountains in many urban places in the United States.
What you'd really like is a click-and-go online source for where the nearest public water cooler is. The good news is that there's a Android application for that. It's a collaborative app called WeTap, being developed by Google and the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California. The driving force behind the idea is Dr. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, and author of Bottled and Sold: The Story of Our Obsession with Bottled Water.
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Are we talking "cyber war" like the Bush admin talked WMDs?
Turn any corner in the complex metropolis that is Internet policy and you'll
hear about the "cybersecurity" crisis in two nanoseconds. As a consequence,
the public is treated to a regular diet of draconian fare coming
from Sixty
Minutes and Fresh
Air about the "growing cyberwar threat."
Former National Security Adviser Richard A. Clarke suggests a thought exercise in his hit book Cyber War: imagine you are the assistant to the president for Homeland Security. The National Security Agency has
just sent a critical alert to your BlackBerry: "Large scale movement of
several different zero day malware programs moving on Internet in US, affecting
critical infrastructure."
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Windows Phone NoDo rollout nears completion, Telefonica, Telstra still testing
Universal availability of the copy-and-paste update to Windows Phone 7, codenamed NoDo, is almost here, according to Microsoft's latest schedule update. The final unpatched phone available in the US market, the HTC Surround sold by AT&T should start to receive its updates within the next ten business days. The network's other two handsets, the Samsung Focus and LG Quantum, have been receiving updates since last week.
European carrier Deutsche Telekom (which includes T-Mobile UK) has at last finished its testing, as has Australian carrier Optus. Updates from phones on these networks should also appear within the next ten business days or so. This leaves only two carriers still delaying the updates due to "testing": Telefonica, in Spain, and Telstra, in Australia.
The next patch for the operating system is already on the horizon. Currently believed to be shipping on May 3rd, Microsoft is due to roll out a fix for the bogus certificates issued by Comodo in March. This much-needed update highlights the difficulties Microsoft is having with shipping Windows Phone updates in a timely manner: the corresponding update for desktop Windows was delivered on March 23rd, just a week after the company was notified of the problem by Comodo.
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Small areas of the brain go to sleep when we're up too late
Sleep deprivation is one of the most common forms of mental impairment, as it reduces performance in a variety of cognitive and motor tasks. A new paper has identified what might be the cause of this poor performance: small parts of a mammal's brain appear to go into a sleep-like state while they're otherwise apparently awake. And, in rats, the degree to which the brain is experiencing these tiny episodes of sleep correlates with their decline in performance on a simple task.
The study relies on differences in the resolution at which we measure neural activity. On a crude level, rats and humans show a similar pattern of neural activity when non-REM sleep is recorded with an EEG: rhythmic peaks of activity, in between which the brain goes largely silent, with the neurons effectively "offline," as the authors call it.
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Guns at home more likely to be used stupidly than in self-defense
This morning, a press release dropped that seemed designed to create controversy, given its title: "Guns in the home provide greater health risk than benefit." The fact that it came from a relatively obscure journal—the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine is not indexed by the PubMed system, and has no impact factor—suggests it might be an attempt at getting some publicity. Studies on this topic are also extremely challenging, as it's difficult to control for cultural and economic differences between nations and US states.
The author of the review, David Hemenway, however, specializes in this area, and works at the Harvard School of Public Health. Hemenway has been termed an "anti-gun researcher" by the NRA, and writes with a clear perspective. Nevertheless, within the limited scope of the review, his conclusions make sense: people do stupid things when angry or depressed, and the presence of a gun helps make that stupidity fatal. In contrast, successful use of a gun in self-defense is far more rare, and challenging to get right, so the public health perspective will always be skewed.
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Ars readers report credit card fraud, blame Sony
Sony has informed consumers who have used the PlayStation Network that much of their personal information has been stolen by a person or group of people who broke into the system and made off with the data. What Sony can't (or won't) tell us is whether our credit card information remains secure.
The number of Ars Technica readers who have had issues with their credit cards in the past few days, and have commented, e-mailed, or Tweeted about the issue, is alarming. We may be dealing with a coincidence in timing, but when your inbox is heavy with people saying they're fighting fraudulent credit card charges, it may be the first signs of fire somewhere in the smoke.
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Supreme Court: AT&T can force arbitration, block class-action suits
The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that AT&T—and indeed, any company—could block class-action suits arising from disputes with customers and instead force those customers into binding arbitration. The ruling reverses previous lower-court decisions that classified stipulations in AT&T's service contract which barred class arbitration as "unconscionable."
The particular case at hand, AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, stemmed from a California couple (the Concepcions) that had been charged sales tax on mobile phones that AT&T had advertised as "free." The couple believed the charges were unfair and constituted false advertising and fraud on the part of AT&T. They filed a lawsuit against AT&T, which was later promoted to class-action status. AT&T attempted to have the case dismissed on the grounds that its service contract requires individual arbitration and bars "any purported class or representative proceeding."
AT&T and others have similarly tried to have class-action cases dismissed on these grounds, though state supreme courts in both California and Washington have held that contractual waivers for class arbitration or litigation are "unconscionable" and therefore void based on those states' consumer protection laws. Using this reasoning, courts have allowed class-action lawsuits to proceed despite the contractual requirement for individual arbitration.
AT&T appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit, though the court noted that section 2 of the Federal Arbitration Act states that arbitration agreements "shall be valid, irrevocable, and enforceable, save upon such grounds as exist at law or in equity for the revocation of any contract." Since California consumer protection laws allow "unconscionable" contract clauses to be vacated, and the FAA includes the provision that arbitration agreements could be ruled unenforceable if law provided for the revocation of the contract, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the class-action case could proceed.
In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court disagreed with the lower court's decision. In his majority opinion, Justice Scalia argued that the purpose of the FAA was designed to promote arbitration over more costly and lengthy litigation. Quoting an earlier ruling by the court, Scalia explained that "[a] prime objective of an agreement to arbitrate is to achieve ‘streamlined proceedings and expeditious results,'" and that requiring the class-action litigation to proceed would be at odds with the intent of the FAA and the benefits that arbitration agreements ostensibly provide.
Justice Breyer, in his dissenting opinion, noted that the saving clause in the FAA left ground for individual states to determine how a contract or its clauses may be revoked. "[R]ecognition of that federalist ideal, embodied in specific language in this particular statute, should lead us to uphold California's law, not to strike it down," he wrote.
The decision, which fell precisely along ideological lines, could have far-reaching effects on consumers' ability to challenge corporations in court over future disputes. In cases where an unfair practice affects large numbers of customers, AT&T or other companies could quietly settle a few individual claims instead of being faced with larger class-action settlements which might include punitive awards designed to discourage future bad practices.
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