The PlayStation Network remains down, dev blames hackers
With both Portal 2 and Mortal Kombat released this week, and Steam's much-hyped integration with the PlayStation 3, it is a very bad time for the PlayStation Network to go down. Sadly, the service has been out for the past few days, and Sony isn't sharing much information on what's going on, or when we'll be able to play online.
"While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we're able to get the service completely back up and running," Patrick Seybold, Sony's senior director of Corporate Communications and Social Media wrote on the official blog. "Thank you very much for your patience while we work to resolve this matter. Please stay tuned to this space for more details, and we’ll update you again as soon as we can."
Dylan Cuthbert, game designer and programmer at Q-Games, seems particularly unhappy with the situation. "PSN is being DOS-attacked? [That] doesn't make Sony look bad, it makes hackers look bad, and meanwhile unrelated people (us) lose money... crazy times," he wrote on Twitter.
The failure of the PlayStation Network also negatively impacted the Q-Games' plans for an update to its latest game. "We had a big free Easter weekend [PixelJunk] Shooter 2 unlock planned, but we had to give up on it because of the stupid hacker PSN DOS attack, idiots." Cuthbert continued. He then clarified that he wasn't sure if the outage was due to a hacker attack. Still, why is Sony refusing to comment on the causes of this outage?
For now, the PlayStation 3 is strictly an offline system, leading to many sad gamers this holiday weekend.
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IP address can now pin down your location to within a half mile
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog—but they might now have an easy time finding your kennel.
In a research paper and technical report presented at the USENIX Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NDSI) conference at the beginning of April, researchers from Northwestern University presented new methods for estimating the exact physical location of an IP address tens or hundreds of times more accurately than previously thought possible. The technique builds on existing approaches but adds a new element: it uses local businesses, government agencies, and educational institutions as landmarks, helping it achieve a median accuracy of just 690m—less than half a mile.
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Mobile users: ready to pay extra for Skype, IM, streaming video?
What happens when a major mobile operator gets tired of people ditching voice calls and text messages for cheaper Skype calls and instant messaging? It just blocks those services and charges a monthly fee to access them.
It has long been clear that Internet providers, especially in mobile, would much prefer offering pay TV-style "packages" or services rather than one-price access to an Internet data pipe. "Want access to Facebook? Ah, that's part of our 'premium gold' plan."
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Tit for tat? Samsung sues Apple in Europe, Asia
Samsung has responded to Apple's patent lawsuit by filing its own lawsuits against the company on Friday in South Korea, Japan, and Germany. Samsung's lawsuits don't directly address Apple's suit filed earlier this week in the US, though they do accuse the iPhone maker of violating a number of Samsung's patents related to how devices communicate with cell towers.
According to Samsung, Apple has infringed on patents on how to reduce transmission errors, reduce power during data transmission, and tether a device to a PC to share its data connection. Conversely, Apple's suit against Samsung filed Monday accuses Samsung of copying Apple's user interface design, packaging, and product design for the iPhone and iPad. When we covered the suit on Monday, we theorized that Apple might be targeting Samsung's TouchWiz UI, which is especially iOS-like in its look and feel.
"Samsung is responding actively to the legal action taken against us in order to protect our intellectual property and to ensure our continued innovation and growth in the mobile communications business," Samsung said in a statement.
Additionally, Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee implied that Apple is simply being a bully by smacking down Samsung's success. "When a nail sticks out, [people] try to pound it down," he reportedly told the press on Friday, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Those who are familiar with both the iPad/iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy Tab/Galaxy S see similarities between the two companies' products. It's not just the TouchWiz UI that looks just like iOS—the physical design of Samsung's products have inched closer and closer to Apple's in recent years. There's no arguing that the phones and tablets share certain characteristics, but both companies clearly believe that they have the upper hand when it comes to product design and innovation.
Despite (or perhaps because of?) these similarities, Samsung is one of the first competitors to offer some major tablet competition to the iPad, and Samsung's handsets aren't doing too shabby with Android fans either. According to Apple COO Tim Cook during the company's quarterly conference call on Wednesday, however, Samsung has "crossed the line," so get ready for this patent fight to drag on just like Apple's disputes with HTC and Nokia.
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FTC: kids thwarted 87% of the time on M-rated game purchases
The Federal Trade Commission has released a report tracking compliance with established rating systems across multiple forms of media, and the results follow past trends: video games are the best-regulated form of media in terms of keeping adult content away from children. The easiest form of media for children to buy? Music CDs with the parental advisory label.
Video games didn't just eke out a win, either—the difference in rating compliance between games and other forms of media is great. Let's take a look at the data.
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With no (or few) more IPv4 addresses, where's the IPv6 traffic?
When it became clear that 32-bit IP addresses just wouldn't cut it for a growing Internet, the Internet Engineering Task Force did what its name suggests and created a new version of IP. IPv6 has so many addresses that it will resist our best efforts to waste all of them for many decades, if not centuries. Of course to benefit from the larger IPv6 address space, it's necessary to actually migrate from the existing IPv4 to the new IPv6. That part has been sorely lacking in the 15 or so years since the first IPv6 specifications were published. The good people over at Arbor Networks did a study in 2007 that showed surprisingly little uptake of the new protocol. And remember, that surprise was on top of the already set-in realization that IPv6 wasn't taking the world by storm in the first place. And now, as IPv4 addresses have run out in part of the world already, Arbor has repeated its study.
The result? A reduction in tunneled IPv6 traffic during the study period.
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US Army picks Android to power its first smartphone
For the Army, Droid does, all right.
The Army wants every soldier to carry a smartphone to stay networked. It doesn’t yet have a program for that, having spent the last year working through the implications of what it might mean to have such a system—like, for instance, what operating system would power it. An initial answer: Google’s Android.
A prototype device running Android called the Joint Battle Command-Platform, developed by tech nonprofit MITRE, is undergoing tests. The development kit behind it, called the Mobile/Handheld Computing Environment, will be released to app creators in July, the Army says.
But until then, the envisioned apps for the Joint Battle Command-Platform will run a gambit of Army tasks. There will be a mapping function like the kinds the defense industry is developing for soldier smartphones and tablets. A Blue Force Tracker program will keep tabs on where friendly forces are. “Critical messaging” will exchange crucial data like medevac requests and on the ground reporting.
There are still a lot of questions to be answered about the Army’s smartphone effort, like how to keep data secure and how to use the devices effectively in combat environments with low connectivity.
Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the iPhone lover who moonlights as the Army’s vice chief of staff, has boasted that the devices being tested can withstand the physical wear-and-tear of soldiering, but it remains to be seen just how rugged the smartphone is.
Even when connected to a radio, the Army says its Joint Battle Command-Platform weighs about two pounds. That’s way lighter than the Nett Warrior suite of sensors, computers, radios and mapping functions—the Army’s program of record for doing much of what a smartphone already does.
But that’s not to say the current phone prototype will be what the Army ends up issuing soldiers. And it’s also not to say that whatever makes it through testing will definitely rely on Android as its operating system. That’s all a ways away. But the point of building the Mobile/Handheld Computing Environment is to have a common framework for designing apps that can run on any manner of devices—and that’s an early indication that the Army’s leaning toward Android devices, especially in this age of budget efficiencies, rather than iOS, which is tied to one specific (i)Phone. Score one for open architecture.
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Atmosphere's worth of dry ice found at Mars south pole
Currently, Mars has a thin atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide, with pressures at most of the planet's surface so low that liquid water will immediately boil. But a variety of features we've discovered argue that the planet has once supported copious amounts of water, indicating that the planet's atmosphere must have differed considerably in the past. Using radar data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, scientists have now found a potential resting place for some material that was once in the Martian atmosphere: a huge deposit at the south pole that holds nearly as much CO2 as the planet's current atmosphere.
Mars' south pole has extensive ice deposits, but most of that material is thought to be water, with only a thin coating of carbon dioxide on top. However, the MRO's radar instrument identified several reflection-free zones, where most of the radar signal went entirely through the icy material to the planet's surface itself. Based on the authors' calculations, this can't be water ice, but it does have very similar reflective properties to dry ice, or frozen carbon dioxide. The area also has features that indicate that some of the dry ice has sublimated to a gaseous form, resulting in areas where the surface has collapsed.
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AT&T: T-Mobile sucks (and we'd like to buy it for $39 billion)
After reading AT&T's massive argument (PDF) for why the government should allow it to purchase T-Mobile, you might wonder just why AT&T wants the smaller company at all. And you might have a few questions about AT&T's own network, which the company says will shortly be under severe capacity constraints that its rivals won't face.
The whole document is a rather amusing exercise in making both AT&T and T-Mobile look like underdogs in a field of unbeatable competitors. Actual quote from AT&T: "With sharply declining prices, dazzling innovation, soaring output, enormous product differentiation, new entr[ies], and fierce advertising, the intensity of the competition in the US wireless marketplace is extraordinary."
And here is AT&T's own description of the company it plans to buy for $39 billion:
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Verizon to launch $300 LTE Samsung Droid Charge on April 28
The unnamed Samsung LTE handset the Verizon showed off at CES in January has been formally introduced as the Droid Charge. The device, featuring a 4.3" Super AMOLED Plus display and powered by Android 2.2, will be available April 28 for $299.99 with a two-year contract commitment.
Samsung claims that its Super AMOLED Plus technology sets a new standard for "brightness, clarity and outdoor visibility" in a smartphone display. A Verizon spokeperson told Ars that the resolution is 800 x 480 pixels. Given the large screen size we had hoped it would match the qHD resolution of the recently announced HTC Sensation.
The Droid Charge is powered by an ARM-based, single-core 1GHz application processor. It's not clear if it uses Cortex A8 or A9 architecture, but Verizon did make the claim that it "maximizes high-speed 4G LTE connectivity for faster downloads and graphics processing," for whatever that's worth. Hopefully we'll know more when the device ships later this month.
Rounding out the hardware, the Droid Charge has an 8MP rear camera with flash, a front-facing 1.3MP camera, and 4G mobile hotspot that can be shared with up to 10 users (limited to five when using 3G). It comes loaded with Adobe Flash and the Swype soft keyboard, as well as access to Samsung's Media Hub video content service. The Droid Charge has a distinctive subtle chevron shape that sets it apart from the rounded rectangles of most other handsets coming to market. Most notable, however, is the handset's 4 hardware action buttons arranged along the bottom—we prefer these to the capacitive touch buttons on the Galaxy S series of phones.
The Droid Charge will be Verizon's second LTE handset to launch on its fledgling 4G network this year, following the HTC Thunderbolt. Motorola's Droid Bionic and LG's Revolution are planned to launch in the coming months.
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Apple reportedly ahead of Google with digital locker music plans
Apple may beat Google to the finish line when it comes to rolling out a cloud-based service for music, according to two sources speaking to Reuters. The service, as the sources described it, is along the same lines as previous rumors: iTunes users would be able to upload their purchased music to a remote server, which would then be streamable to anywhere with a 'Net connection. Still, there's no official date yet for the launch, and Apple has yet to sign any new licenses.
Google's plans, on the other hand, have apparently stalled. According to Reuters' sources, which are allegedly familiar with both companies' plans, Google keeps changing what it wants to offer. First, the company planned to launch a digital locker similar to what Apple is apparently planning, but now, the company is supposedly focusing on a vanilla subscription-based music service. Google's music service was supposed to launch alongside Honeycomb and the Xoom tablet months ago, while Apple's is expected to launch sometime this summer.
Neither company has signed any licenses yet—and why would they? Amazon launched its own digital locker/streaming service nearly a month ago without signing any new licenses with the music labels, beating both Google and Apple to the punch. And now that Amazon insists it doesn't even need new licenses in order for customers to play their own music back from the cloud, Google and Apple "would be fools to get licenses because they'd be at a cost disadvantage," according to MP3tunes CEO Michael Robertson.
It's likely that Apple and Google are waiting to see how Amazon's Cloud Player plays out before launching, but Apple is supposedly a year behind its plans already. The company will need to move soon if it wants to keep in step with Amazon and remain ahead of Google. Maybe we'll hear something about it at WWDC in June?
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AT&T: T-Mobile users can keep their rate plans, devices
AT&T today unveiled its official pitch (PDF) to the government, arguing that its acquisition of T-Mobile should be approved. And, as part of the massive filing, AT&T provided key details about what would happen to T-Mobile users swallowed up by the new network.
Bottom line: so long as existing T-Mobile customers stay on contract with AT&T, they can continue at current rates—even if they upgrade to a newer AT&T phone.
"With this acquisition, T-Mobile USA consumers will be able to keep their current rate plans," said AT&T. "AT&T will map T-Mobile USA’s rate plans into AT&T’s billing systems as we have done in the case of prior acquisitions, so that if a T-Mobile USA consumer wishes to change her existing smartphone to a comparable smartphone from AT&T’s device portfolio, she will be able to keep her existing data plan."
The filing stressed that AT&T's own "broad selection of rate plans" would be available as a "benefit" to T-Mobile subscribers. In addition, T-Mobile users should be pleased to pay the same price for "improved service quality" on AT&T's network, and they will "benefit from free mobile-to-mobile calling to a substantially expanded customer base."
Existing T-Mobile handsets will also continue to work without alteration on AT&T's network.
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Verizon, AT&T sold less than 30% of iPhones shipped in 1Q 2011
Both AT&T and Verizon have announced their financial results for the first quarter of 2011, and both carriers had a few interesting data points to share regarding iPhone sales. While the launch of the iPhone 4 on Verizon broke sales records for the company, it hasn't been the sales miracle some originally predicted. Regardless, both AT&T and Verizon combined were only responsible for about 29 percent of Apple's record-busting iPhone 4 sales for the quarter, revealing that international markets are becoming increasingly more important to Apple.
Verizon announced on Thursday that it activated 2.2 million iPhones for the quarter. That number may seem low given that the launch of the CDMA iPhone 4 broke Verizon's previous launch day sales numbers by a significant margin, but Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu had predicted Verizon would move between 2 million and 3 million units per quarter. The fact that the iPhone hasn't yet adopted LTE might not be the handicap that some believe—Verizon only activated about 260,000 LTE-capable HTC Thunderbolts in its first two weeks of availability. That's in sharp contrast to an analyst prediction that the Thunderbolt would "best" iPhone sales.
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Microsoft-Nokia pact signed, success by no means assured
Announced back in February, the Microsoft-Nokia agreement that will result in Nokia using Windows Phone for its high-end smartphones has finally been formalized.
In announcing that the agreement has been signed, the two companies outlined four main features of the relationship: sharing of technology and ecosystems, royalties, cash injections, and intellectual property licensing.
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Bouncing neutrons may allow for high-precision tests of gravity
Gravity is an incredibly weak force. It may be the force we perceive the most, especially when we fall down the stairs, but it takes the mass of the entire Earth make that happen. Despite its weakness, it is also the force that gives the Universe its structure, provides the pressure to drive stars, and keeps galaxies together. We might be grateful that gravity isn't stronger, but it is also curious that it is so much weaker than everything else.
When scientists are faced with something they don't understand, their first response is to make more and better measurements. Past experience tells us that understanding is often a function of the number of significant figures in our measurements. The truth is that our measurements of gravity have been well and truly left behind by those on electromagnetism. So, taking techniques learned in our fight to understand quantum mechanics and electromagnetism and applying them to our measurements on gravity makes a great deal of sense. This is exactly what a group of physicists who happen to like bouncing balls have done.
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A silent friendship: adventures in Portal 2's co-op mode
There have been many complaints about the length of Portal 2 but, like many of the complaints leveled at the game, they're mostly unfounded. The single-player game can take six to 10 hours to play, and the co-op campaign is at least five hours long. This standalone campaign stars a duo of robots called Atlas and P-Body who have to work together to solve all the puzzles, each with his own Portal gun.
What's amazing about the co-op mode isn't that it exists and is a very good time—although both of those things are good news for gamers—it's that Valve has created a mode that gives you a bunch of innovative tools to work together. It works so well that voice chat is almost unnecessary.
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Stem Stumper: puzzle gaming for visually impaired on the iPhone
You can't go too far in the App Store without coming across yet another cute puzzle game. They're everywhere, but even in that crowded field, Stem Stumper provides an experience that's unique. While the gameplay itself may not be original, the game is completely accessible to the visually impaired.
The premise is simple: you guide an anthropomorphic plant creature around a series of obstacles—ranging from angry tree stumps to clouds of weed killer—in search of bags of fertilizer. You drag your finger along to create a path and various clues will alert you when you stumble across something important. If you're playing in the standard mode you'll be able to see as well as hear when you get close to something. And when you play in sonar mode, the visuals melt away completely, forcing you to focus on the sound.
Stem Stumper
Stem Stumper doesn't use 3D audio like Papa Sangre, but it still works very well. If you close your eyes the game is completely playable, albeit quite a bit harder. Every item in the game, both obstacles and tools, has a specific sound. You'll hear music when you're near, and when you land on the right square that cues the sound. And since there are only a handful of sounds—and each one is distinct—it's easy to remember what's what.
The game also supports VoiceOver, making it possible to play without any visual hints at all. VoiceOver reads out the instructions for each stage, and the sound effects and musical cues guide you towards your goal.
Even for fully sighted players, Stem Stumper provides an interesting experience. With the visuals turned on it's a by-the-books iOS puzzler that's cute and fun, but not particularly memorable. When you play on the sonar mode, throw on some headphones, and close your eyes... it's completely different—not to mention much more challenging. This $2 game is well worth a play for puzzle fans.
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Mobile phone users wary about privacy, says Nielsen
The majority of mobile app users—those who use mobile devices and have used an app in the last 30 days—are cautious about sharing their locations via mobile phone, with the youngest and oldest users showing the most concern for privacy. This research from the Nielsen Company comes on the heels of disturbing revelations about the iPhone's own location-logging practices.
According to Nielsen, 59 percent of female app users and 52 percent of male ones are concerned about location privacy on their mobile devices. Only 8 percent of female users and 12 percent of male users marked themselves as "not concerned" whatsoever, with the remainder being indifferent.
The company also noted that different age groups tend to take different attitudes towards mobile app piracy. Users between the ages of 13 and 17 were a bit more concerned than their slightly older peers at 55 percent (while the 18-24 group was at 52 percent, and the 25-34 group was at 50 percent). But once users cross the 35-year barrier, the numbers start going up again. Unsurprisingly, the oldest age group—those 55 and up—showed the highest level of concern for location privacy at 63 percent.
Mobile app and location privacy has been a hot topic for well over a year now thanks to the explosion in popularity of location-based apps on iOS and Android. There have been several incidents where third-party Android and iOS apps were caught sending various levels of personal data to ad networks, and that's before you bring Google or Apple into the picture.
Apple's cellular location log that came to light this week (despite existing for much longer) may not be sent around to third parties, but the sheer amount of data stored is a wakeup call for users who want to keep their private data private. As the ACLU wrote on its blog, "You shouldn't have to choose between using an iPhone or iPad and keeping control of your location information."
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Rep. Ed Markey wants privacy answers from Steve Jobs (again)
Questioning Apple's privacy policies has become a bicameral proposition. Twenty-four hours after researchers provided a new open-source tool for iPhone users to view their phone's logged location history, Senator Al Franken (D-MN) and Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) have both issued sets of questions for Apple CEO Steve Jobs. While Franken's letter requests a "prompt" response, Markey wants answers "within fifteen business days."
Markey has long been a leading voice on tech questions, and has previously chaired key committees related to tech issues, so his letter was hardly a surprise. Indeed, in June 2010, Markey co-authored another set of questions for Steve Jobs on the issues of privacy and location-based services.
Apple's response last summer (PDF) went into considerable detail about how Apple generates and handles such information. Apple describes how, if location-based services are on, the iPhone will collect both cell tower and WiFi network data, collate it into a batch file, encrypt it, and send it to Apple over a WiFi connection every 12 hours. This helps Apple build its own location database to resolve or refine location requests when GPS is not available.
Apple notes that customers can always turn off "all location-based service capabilities with a single 'On/Off' toggle switch… If customers toggle the switch to 'Off,' they may not use location-based services, and no location-based information will be collected."
Markey's new letter (PDF) asks many of the same questions his old letter did, including one about whether Apple complies with Section 222 of the Communications Act, which "requires express prior customer authorization for the use, disclosure of, or access to the customer's location information for commercial purposes."
Apple responded to this issue last year, saying that Apple is not subject to Section 222 but that "the privacy protections described in detail in this letter are consistent with the intent of Section 222."
Markey also wants to know if iPhone users can really disable the cell tower and WiFi logging, and he follows Franken's lead in asking about widespread use of iPhone and iPads by minors. "Is Apple concerned that the wide array of precise location data logged by these devices can be used to track minors, exposing them to potential harm?" he asks.
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Postal Regulatory Commission 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 Regulatory Commission didn't buy it, and has ordered the USPS 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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Available Tags:Samsung , Apple , Android , smartphone , Google , Portal , gaming , iPhone ,
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