Two Florida judges reject copyright troll fishing expeditions
Last week we reported on a scathing order signed by a Florida state judge in one of several copyright trolling cases pending in the state of Florida. After we published the story, we learned that Judge Marc Schumacher had withdrawn the order. Evidently, it had been drafted by one of the defendants, and Judge Schumacher had signed it on the mistaken belief that it had been agreed to by all parties in the case.
But while the defendants' celebrations last week were premature, two rulings in related cases this week have dealt a serious blow to the plaintiffs and their dodgy legal strategy. Ordinarily, copyright law is handled by the federal courts, but Florida plaintiffs have begun using an obscure provision of state law called a "pure bill of discovery" to attempt to force ISPs to reveal the identity of suspected file-sharers.
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Researcher publishes specs for real Linux-powered Star Trek tricorder
The Star Trek tricorder has become a reality, thanks to the hobby project of a cognitive science researcher. Dr. Peter Jansen has developed a handheld mobile computing device that has a number of sophisticated embedded sensors. The device is modeled after the distinctive design of the 24th-century tricorder.
He began working on the project in 2007 and aims to make it easy for others to reproduce his designs. He has made complete schematics for two of his four models available under the terms of the TAPR non-commercial hardware license. The underlying source code of the device's software environment is available under the GPL. In a blog post about the project, Jansen explained that he hopes his project will encourage scientific curiosity and help people better understand the world.
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Microsoft talks touch hardware in Windows 8
Touch screens are not all the same. Even screens that use the same technology (capacitive, resistive, or optical) will show different behavior depending on the controllers used and other details. Windows 8 will have to cope with a wide range of touch implementations, and the Building Windows 8 blog has a new post describing some of the challenges.
The post includes an interesting video demonstrating some of the problems that these variations can cause, with inaccurate taps, misinterpreted gestures, and strange tracking issues where dragged objects run away from your fingers.
Hardware with a Windows 8 logo will be required to meet a certain standard for concurrent fingers, touch precision, and sensitivity. This should prevent many of the issues that can occur with poor touch screen implementations. However, the operating system is still designed to work with existing Windows 7 touch systems in addition to new, Windows 8-spec machines.
To accommodate these machines, Windows 8 has to make some concessions to their more limited capabilities. Machines built for Windows 8 will support a minimum of five touch points. However, none of the core gestures use more than two, to ensure that basic interactivity is always possible. The swipe-from-the-edge gestures are also designed to be sensitive to the restrictions of Windows 7 hardware; they have a 20 pixel buffer at the edge of each screen, so even if the gesture does not start right at the very edge (as will tend to be the case on screens with bezels) it will still count.
This work means that although Windows 8 machines will provide the best touch experience, users of current Windows 7 touch systems such as Samsung's Slate 7 will see the best ever Windows touch experience by upgrading to Windows 8.
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First batch of $35 Linux computers arrives in UK, awaiting CE compliance testing
The Raspberry Pi foundation issued a statement today with a status update on their much-anticipated $35 Linux computer. The first 2,000 completed units have arrived in the UK, but the devices aren't ready to be shipped out yet because the foundation's retail partners won't distribute them to purchasers until they have been stamped with the CE marking.
The CE marking, which you can find on many consumer electronics products, certifies that a product conforms with the regulatory standards of the European Economic Area. In order to apply the CE marking to a product, it has to undergo a conformity assessment and the manufacturer has to produce certain documents.
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The IETF is in your Web, fixing your security
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has descended upon the City of Light this week to discuss ongoing work so the pipeline spewing out new RFCs and Internet standards doesn't stall. Probably close to a hundred working groups, covering topics from routing to various aspects of IPv6 (and even IPv4!) to Web security, will keep the some 1,300 participants busy throughout the week. Because eight groups meet in different rooms at any given time, different people work on different topics. Usually, one stands out. This time around, Web security seems to be in the air. The topic was discussed in the websec working group, but also in a panel during one of the few plenary sessions and in a lunchtime briefing by the Internet Society (ISOC).
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Kindle Fire update: version 6.3 to your device in the next few days
Amazon is releasing a free software update to all Kindle Fire users over the next few days. The over-the-air update will upgrade the devices from version 6.2.2 to version 6.3. A downloadable upgrade file is also available on the site for the eager.
Most of the updates involve enhanced reading features and extras. Amazon says its latest upgrade will also include "faster re-connect of WiFi after Kindle Fire has been asleep, and general performance enhancements." Amazon has been vague about what specifically those general performance enhancements might entail.
Users of version 6.3 will have the ability to share passages from a book by highlighting a passage and choosing "share" within the book's toolbar. These shared passages will be available to other Kindle readers perusing the same book, and passages can be shared on Facebook and Twitter as well. Sharing passages is a feature that regular Kindle owners can already do, so this feature simply incorporates Kindle Fire.
Amazon is also bringing "Book Extras" to its books. It's an application powered by Shelfari, an Amazon-owned wiki for books. Version 6.3 will allow users to access Shelfari discussions, character descriptions, glossaries of terms, and other information about the book from within the book. That update should prove quite helpful if you like 19th century Russian novels.
Although the new update obviously won't deliver your Fire any more storage than the dinky 6GB (or so) it already has, Fire users will also be able to buy a large selection of print replica textbooks (which preserve the layout, text, and coloring of textbooks without being transferred to e-book confusion). Also, Amazon's Whispersync will now be available to archive personal documents in the cloud for re-download any time.
The update also means the rental period for movies on a Kindle Fire will start when the user starts watching the movie, not when the movie is downloaded.
Finally, a reading view for Amazon Silk will be available. Amazon claims it will load the body of any Web page in a single-screen view, even if it's a multi-page article, an allow the user to toggle back and forth between the original content and the reading view.
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Samsung announces 5 million Galaxy Notes sold and Premium Update upgrade
Samsung announced today the Galaxy Note, their 5.3-inch smartphone released in October, has surpassed the 5-million-units mark in its first five months. The rapidly selling device has led Samsung Electronics to gain about two-thirds of the South Korean mobile phone market share, making the company Korea's leading mobile phone provider.
When the Note was first announced, the device struck Ars as odd enough to be labeled "strange." But clearly the demand exists for the Note and its 1.4GHz dual-core processor, 16 or 32GB of internal storage, rear 8-megapixel camera, and front 2-megapixel camera (compatible with either HSPA+ or LTE). Samsung's official blog touts the device's the device's S Pen, the company's "revolutionary" stylus tool that "accurately recreates the analogue experience of using a real pen."
In addition to sharing its sales figures, Samsung announced an upgrade for the Note. Called the "Premium Suite" upgrade, the company states the new software includes extra multimedia features, a range of new S Pen optimized applications, and an OS upgrade to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
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New SimCity to be available outside of Origin, need 'Net connection to play
For those of you who have an overwhelming hatred of EA's Origin digital ditribution service, I'll give the good news first: you'll be able to download the publisher's upcoming SimCity revamp on a variety of non-Origin download services. Now the bad news: you'll still need to be connected to the Internet through an Origin account to actually play the game.
The news comes via Joystiq, which confirmed the distribution information from an EA representative during a preview event for the upcoming title, due sometime in 2013.
While the requirement for an "always-on," Origin-linked Internet connection might just seem like an Ubisoft-style attempt to protect the game from piracy, lead designer Stone Lebrande told Joystiq that the persistent connection was necessary for in-game features that focus on how one city impacts both its regional neighbors and other metropolises worldwide through a simulated global economy.
A complete list of digital distribution options for SimCity has not been finalized, according to the report.
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Red Hat hits $1 billion in revenue, a milestone for open source
Red Hat today announced that it has crossed the billion-dollar mark in revenue, with $1.13 billion in the fiscal year that ended February 29.
Red Hat is unique in becoming the first vendor of its size to make all or nearly all of its money from building, maintaining, and selling open source software. We examined the company's long journey in the recent article, "How Red Hat killed its core product—and became a billion-dollar business." Red Hat's quarterly earnings announcement today shows that the company did cross a billion, as expected, with $297 million in fourth quarter revenue, up 21 percent over the previous year's fourth quarter.
For the entire 12 months ending Feb. 29, Red Hat pulled in $965.6 million in subscription revenue, and $167.5 million in training and services, for a 25 percent year-over-year improvement. Net income was $35.97 million for the quarter and $146.6 million for the full 12 months. Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin praised Red Hat in a blog post today, saying "This achievement will finally put to bed the argument that 'nobody can make money with open source.'"
Red Hat is most famous for Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with its contributions to the Linux kernel, but the company builds and sells many enterprise software products in addition to its flagship distribution. As we noted in our previous story, the only Red Hat technology that hasn't been completely released under open source licenses is the OpenShift platform-as-a-service software, which is based largely on the 2010 acquisition of Makara. Red Hat has good news on that front too—the source code for the core technology behind OpenShift will be released on April 30.
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Hot, crowded, and running out of fuel: Earth of 2050 a scary place
A new report published by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development paints a grim picture of the world in 2050 based on current global trends. It predicts a world population of 9.2 billion people, generating a global GDP four times the size of today's, requiring 80 percent more energy. And with a worldwide energy mix still 85 percent reliant on fossil fuels by that time, it will be coal, oil, and gas that make up most of the difference, the OECD predicts.
Should that prove the case, and without new policy, the report warns the result will be the "locking in" of global warming, with a rise of as much as 6° C (about 10.8° F) predicted by the end of the century. Combined with other knock-on effects of population growth on biodiversity, water and health; the report asserts that the ensuing environmental degradation will result in consequences "that could endanger two centuries of rising living standards."
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Microsoft offers free cloud backup beta for Windows Server "8"
In a post to Microsoft's Windows Server blog, Microsoft Senior Program Manager Gaurav Gupta revealed that the company will offer an integrated cloud backup service for Windows Server "8"(the current designation of Microsoft's next release of its server operating system). Microsoft Online Backup Service is now available as a free preview, but is limited to 10 gigabytes of cloud storage, works only with Windows Server "8" beta, and will only be offered to a limited number of customers. While it's not an enterprise data protection solution, it does provide an option that may be attractive for small and medium businesses, as well as for servers that are hosted in the cloud.
Microsoft Online Backup is designed to provide incremental backups of server data, tracking changes at both the file and storage block level and only copying changes to backup storage. It also encrypts and compresses files before transferring them to Microsoft's cloud, and can throttle the network usage of backup during business hours.
The Online Backup client integrates into the backup functionality of Windows Server "8," and can be managed both through the existing Windows Server Backup utility and Windows PowerShell command line. In addition to backing up to the cloud, it can also manage backups to local storage.
Gupta said in his post that the service also provided data integrity checks on the cloud side, to ensure no data was corrupted in transit. And administrators can also put a retention policy in effect that sets how long to retain backups in the cloud—based on how much cloud storage they're willing to pay for, as well as company policy. The service can also be customized to work with other providers through Microsoft's Cloud Backup Provider API.
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PS3 successor "Orbis" rumored for late 2013, ties retail games to online accounts
Just because Sony isn't planning to unveil its next game console at this year's E3 doesn't mean the system isn't in the works, or that information about it isn't going to leak out. Case in point: Kotaku is citing unnamed "reliable sources" in reporting that "select developers" are already receiving development kits for the follow-up to the PS3, code-named "Orbis." It will reportedly hit stores in time for the 2013 holiday season.
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Who needs WHOIS? Kanye West launches WhoDat instead
File this one under "things we never thought would exist."
If you recall, Kanye West launched his own startup, Donda Media, to much fanfare earlier this year. Taking to Twitter, the American rapper quickly put forth a call for "architects, graphic designers, directors musicians, producers, AnRs, writers, publicist[s], social media experts, app guys, managers, car designers, clothing designers, DJs, video game designers, publishers, tech guys, lawyers, bankers, nutritionist[s], doctors, scientists [and] teachers" with the intention of creating... something.
Well, at least we know what that something finally is. Today, Mr. West unveiled WhoDat.biz, which is—well, it's a WHOIS information service. Billed as "the Facebook of websites," you can use WhoDat to look up information on the people—the "crew," if you will—behind a given website's domain.
You'll be pleased to hear that, not only is the service free, but it works exactly as you'd expect from your typical registrar lookup. Sure, the functionality may be relatively barebones when compared with more established sites—but in our opinion, no one WHOIS service should have all that power anyhow.
Given that the Twitter and Tumblr accounts are just a few days old, we're going to take the existence of WhoDat with a grain of salt.
Update: and it turns out our skepticism was warranted. Gizmodo has confirmed it's a fake.
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New, easier-to-update Flash designed to snuff out malware attacks
Adobe has released a long-awaited update to its Flash Player that allows users to apply security patches with no prodding.
The background updater, which Adobe announced in a blog post published on Tuesday, is designed to better protect users against malware attacks that exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities in the ubiquitous media player. Over the past few years, organized crime gangs and spy rings have milked such zero-day flaws to surreptitiously install keyloggers and other data-stealing software on vulnerable machines. The new mechanism is intended to reverse that trend by reducing the time it takes for the majority of Flash users to plug critical holes that come under attack.
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From parody to production: How @petermolydeux inspired a wacky weekend game design marathon
There's a common saying: every joke has an element of truth to it. If so, there's a lot of truth buried in the hundreds of wildly imaginative, highly silly game ideas that have come out of @PeterMolydeux—the loving Twitter parody account that takes Black & White and Fable designer Peter Molyneux's penchant for ambitious, industry-changing game concepts to ridiculous extremes.
Hundreds of game designers will try to bring that truth to the surface this weekend by taking part in the "What Would Molydeux?" Game Jam, a 48-hour group game design and programming marathon based on the idea of bringing the Twitter account's often-ridiculous ideas to life.
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Leaks imply first Ivy Bridge-based Macs could launch in late April
Release dates for Intel's next-generation Ivy Bridge processors, which have been delayed from their original first quarter launch, have now been leaked. According to the alleged leak posted to CPU World, some quad-core parts suitable for the iMac and MacBook Pro will be available on April 29, suggesting revised models could be available from Apple in late April or early May.
CPU World reported that several higher-end Ivy Bridge-based quad-core processors in both desktop and mobile flavors are set to launch on April 29, 2012. A couple of the Core i5 and Core i7 desktop processors seem likely candidates for updated iMacs. And two of the mobile processors—Core i7-3720QM and Core i7-3820QM—seem like a good fit for 15" or 17" MacBook Pros.
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FSFE celebrates Document Freedom Day by sending handcuffs to policymakers
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is celebrating open standards today in an annual event called Document Freedom Day. The event, which was first held in 2008, is observed on the last Wednesday of March. The purpose of the celebration is to raise awareness of the critical role unencumbered interoperability and open standards play in protecting data from vendor lock-in.
According to the FSFE, 34 organizations are hosting 48 events in 17 countries to honor the occasion. The FSFE's list of Document Freedom Day partners includes The Document Foundation, the KDE eV, the Pirate Party of Baden-Württemberg, and many regional Linux user groups.
Document Freedom Day is also endorsed by Google and Oracle, with both credited as sponsors. Many advocates of free culture and open standards issued statements in support of Document Freedom Day, including actor and humorist Stephen Fry.
"Open standards make sense. What makes no sense is that large companies in the field still do not understand this. It is time once and for all to end the pointless nonsense of one document sent on one platform being incomprehensible to the user of another," Fry said in a statement.
The FSFE has published a list of activities interested parties can get involved with to help the cause, including promoting open formats in public libraries and creating street art raising awareness of open standards.
In addition to the typical advocacy activities, the FSFE has come up with an unusual means of drawing attention to their cause this year. The organization intends to send policymakers informational packets including a pair of handcuffs, a gesture intended to symbolize the restrictiveness of proprietary formats.
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Security researchers kill Kelihos again after Bitcoin crime spree
Security researchers have disabled the latest botnet created with Kelihos malware, stopping a 116,000-bot-strong operation devoted to Bitcoin hacking and other crimes. Announced today, the operation took place last week and was run by Kaspersky Lab, CrowdStrike, Dell SecureWorks, and the Honeynet Project.
While the first Kelihos botnet (also known as "Hlux") was taken down last September, an entirely new botnet using the same code was identified earlier this year.
In addition to spamming and distributed denial-of-service attacks, this latest botnet was capable of both stealing Bitcoin wallets from infected computers, and BitCoin mining, which uses the resources of victimized computers to make new Bitcoins.
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Hacking Scarlett Johansson—and 50 other celebs—using Google and gumption
On November 13, 2010, 34-year old Jacksonville, Florida resident Christopher Chaney went hunting for unreleased nude photos of celebrities. According to court documents, he had the e-mail address for celebrity stylist and handbag designer Simone Harouche, but he didn't have Harouche's password. No matter; after connecting to Apple's e-mail servers, Chaney used the password reset feature. He answered the required security questions by supplying publicly available information gleaned from the Internet—and he was in. What to do next?
Account settings were a top priority. From there, Chaney could have a copy of all Harouche's incoming e-mail mirrored to nickchulbert@yahoo.com—an account created specially for this purpose. Even after Harouche regained control of her account, she was unlikely to start poking around immediately in her account settings, and Chaney might maintain his virtual view of her life for weeks or even months.
With the mirroring in place, a quick stroll through the actual contents of the account might be in order. For Hollywood celebrities, a search of all e-mails containing attachments could bring up everything from film scripts to scans of a driver's license to intimate photos. When he found these last items, Chaney saved them to separate folders on his computer. He then used three e-mail accounts with names like trainreqsuckswhat@yahoo.com—an I'm-better-than-you reference to a 2008 hacker named "trainreq" who had broken into Miley Cyrus's Gmail account—to distribute nude pictures to various Internet sites.
But such pictures weren't always sitting around, waiting to be downloaded; sometimes Chaney had to work for them.
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Sweden may also investigate Apple over iPad 4G/LTE marketing
Just a day after the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission filed a complaint over Apple's 4G/LTE marketing in the new iPad, Sweden is considering an investigation of its own. The Swedish Consumer Agency says it has received a number of complaints from iPad buyers about the device's LTE capabilities—LTS is only available in the US—and is now weighing whether it wants to open its own investigation into Apple's marketing practices.
"One may rightfully ask if the marketing of the new iPad is misleading," Swedish Consumer Agency lawyer Marek Andersson told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. "The question is whether this information is clear enough in Apple’s marketing."
Apple's LTE-equipped iPad went on sale on March 16, but the company doesn't sell different versions of the device in different countries. Although the WiFi+4G version of the iPad only works on LTE networks in the US, it's capable of functioning on 3G GSM networks worldwide. Apple does provide disclaimers on its site stating as much and, at least in Australia, WiFi+4G iPad boxes come with stickers that explicitly state the product is "not compatible with Australian 4G LTE networks, and will only operate at up to 3G speeds in Australia."
This hasn't stopped Australian consumers from buying the new iPad with the expectation that it would function on Telstra's LTE network, and Apple has offered to refund any buyers who felt they were misled about the iPad's 4G capabilities. The same will likely prove true in Sweden—customers do have access to an LTE network via TeliaSonera, but the iPad won't be able to make use of it—and it's a near guarantee that Apple will also offer refunds to disappointed Swedish customers.
Apple did not immediately respond to our requests for comment.
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Op-ed: the Mac App Store needs paid upgrades
Op-ed: Talk of how to improve the Mac App Store experience has steadily increased since its launch in 2011. In this op-ed piece, Omni Group and Delicious Monster founder Wil Shipley argues why the Mac App Store needs a mechanism for paid upgrades and how it would improve the store experience for both developers and customers. This piece originally appeared on Shipley's blog. The opinions in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of Ars Technica.
The Mac App Store has been a huge boon to Mac software developers, but it has an enormous flaw: it needs to allow developers to charge existing customers a discounted price for major upgrades.
Right now developers selling through the Mac App Store face a lose/lose choice: either provide all major upgrades to existing customers for free (thus losing a quarter of our revenue), or create a “new” product for each major version (creating customer confusion) and charge existing customers full price again (creating customer anger).
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Box for business wants to put your iOS apps in OneCloud
The lack of a visible filesystem on Apple's iOS devices is something of a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it reduces the need to manage documents and files as you would on a traditional Mac or PC—which, for some, is a plus. But without a shared repository or filesystem for all of your documents, the document- and file-management task falls to each individual app instead.
Today, cloud storage provider Box introduced a new product called Box OneCloud, billed as "the first enterprise mobile framework to bring together your mobile content and the mission-critical apps designed to work with it." In other words, Box wants to subvert the fragmented, app-specific file management systems that exist in iOS, and unify them under the company's cloud instead.
Of course, this has always been possible, even with competing apps such as Dropbox. However, Box wants to take the experience a step further by making Box integration seamless, especially for users of its collaborative and business-oriented products. Now, when you want to open a document using Box OneCloud, you'll be offered a choice of Box-capable partner apps, with the option to install or purchase those you don't have.
Some of these apps are also being billed as Premier Apps, which the company promises will have deeper "round-trip" integration with the company's cloud. What this means is that a file modified using a Premier app can be saved to its original location in Box's cloud, which the company hopes will appease the security-conscious business crowd.
An updated version of the Box iOS app including OneCloud integration is available in the App Store today.
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NASA's ATREX rockets allow study of the little-researched upper jet stream
After several canceled attempts, the five sounding rockets in NASA's Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX) finally made their way up into the thermosphere just past the edge of space early Tuesday morning. Launched 80 seconds apart, they each released a cloud of trimethylaluminum into the Earth's upper atmosphere.
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Quasiparticles won't bring us an easy quantum computing nirvana
Everyone loves a more powerful computer, right? This is probably the underlying motivation that drives much of modern quantum computing research. "I've got a superBogus™ gen 2 quantum processor, how about you?" Okay, maybe not the primary motivation. Along the way to quantum computing geek nirvana, scientists are learning an awful lot about quantum mechanics. These are not discoveries that shake the foundations of physics; instead, we are learning about the practicalities of manipulating quantum properties
One of the new kids on the block is called topologically protected quantum computing. The basic idea is to create a setup where the shape or layout of a quantum system self-stabilizes, making it impossible for the environment to effect it. Even at a distance, pairs of particles can link up, creating something called a Majorana fermion. This was thought to be immune to something called decoherence, making it the perfect object for a qubit. Unfortunately, a bit of thought shows that this is entirely untrue.
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The billion-dollar fight for control of mobile money
"Mobile payments" is about as unsexy as technology buzzwords get. We're basically talking about phones and money. And it's hard enough to get people excited about money in the first place—unless you're receiving large sums of it, that is—let alone using a phone to make or spend it.
But it is exciting! Trust us. And there's a reason why you're going to be hearing a lot more about mobile commerce before this year is done.
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