Netflix wants to wield more influence in election season
Earlier this week, Netflix filed a statement of organization with the federal government to form a political action committee, or a PAC, which will allow the company to raise and spend money on campaigns and causes in Washington, D.C. The web service registered its newly-founded committee as "Flixpac."
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, "A PAC can give $5,000 to a candidate per election (primary, general or
special) and up to $15,000 annually to a national political party. PACs
may receive up to $5,000 each from individuals, other PACs, and party
committees per year." Microsoft is an example of a tech company with heavy influence in the capitol, spending $1.3 million in contributions last year.
Behind the scenes, Netflix has employed lobbyists since the mid-2000's, although it has only employed full-time lobbyists since the end of 2010. The recent years have seen an exponential growth in Netflix's cash flow to Congress, however. In 2009 the company spent $20,000 in lobby money, which grew to $130,000 in 2010, and by 2011 the company reported spending half a million dollars lobbying Congress.
A lobbying registration form from November 2010 indicated Netflix's "current and anticipated" lobbying issues included "copyright, telecommunications, consumer protection, tax and the Internet." Donations from Flixpac will likely go to candidates who have strong feelings on those issues as well.
Earlier this year, while congress battled over SOPA and PIPA, Netflix largely stayed out of the spotlight, and vacillated on its support of the acts until it took a publicly neutral stance. While Politico suggests the PAC formation is "another political tool with which to aggressively press a pro-intellectual property, anti-video piracy agenda," the company has historically been much more outspoken about federal issues like net neutrality and working around the Video Privacy Protection Act.
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Apple patent could lead to face-based user switching in iOS and beyond
Apple continues to consider ways to enable easy user switching and control for iOS devices using facial recognition, which may eventually lead to facial unlock features in the iPhone or iPad. A recently published patent application details an automatic user-switching system which can lock, unlock, and reconfigure a device for unique users based on face detection using a front-facing camera.
Beyond the use of a facial recognition to enable the system, however, we think the concept of multi-user iOS devices has been a long time coming. Furthermore, the same system could be easily adapted to desktop systems, making it easier to share an iMac or even a MacBook among family members or coworkers.
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Why you should read the book Before the Lights Go Out
In the very first pages of her book, Before the Lights Go Out, Maggie Koerth-Baker blows my mind. Not in the sense of "Wow, I never knew that!" (although I certainly thought that throughout the book), but more like "Wow, I never thought of it that way!" I’m referring to the revelation that the reasons for pursuing alternative energy don’t have to be focused on climate change. Instead, many Americans care more about energy security, conservation, or simple nationalism. This sets the tone for the whole book: let’s skip the reasons and just focus on the solutions and hard choices that need to be made.
Hard choices, indeed. This isn’t a book proclaiming that the hydrogen economy or nuclear fusion or something else (pick your dream energy source/carrier) will save us all. Koerth-Baker is optimistic, but realistic: we can do this, but there aren’t any easy solutions, and it’s probably going to be expensive. This isn’t about driving a hybrid or changing your lightbulbs—not that those aren’t good things to do—but rather, as she puts it, "about the inconvenient complications, unforeseen side effects, and less-than-perfect solutions."
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How the fitbit got me to walk more and be part of society again
I am a fitness gadget freak. I'm into anything that will help me track, optimize, and analyze my activity stats—that's why I reviewed the Withings Wi-Fi scale and the BodyMedia FIT, and I'm a regular user of RunKeeper, Nike+, and a plethora of other data-driven fitness apps. But rarely do these gadgets and apps actually inspire me to try and beat my previous stats; usually I just use them to track my already planned activity so that I can adjust my own expectations.
This is not the case with the fitbit—or in my case, the fitbit ultra. Given to me as a gift this last January, the "ultra" version of the fitness tracker has been on the market since October of 2011. The most basic element of the fitbit ultra is that it tracks your steps like a pedometer, but it can do a handful of other things: track the number of floors you've climbed, measure your sleep activity, and even display motivational phrases. (Don't laugh—I thought it was campy, too, until my fitbit kept greeting me every day with phrases like "VAMOS JACQUI.") The device can sync your data wirelessly through a USB dock plugged into your computer, so you only have to take it off to charge the battery maybe once a week or so.
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Weekend Ar(t)s: Longing for another Machinarium iPad experience
During the weekend, even Ars takes an occasional break from discussing Wi-Fi patent owners or the latest Nokia phone. Weekend Ar(t)s is a chance to share what we're watching/listening/reading or otherwise consuming this week.
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NASA's 1966 plan for a mission to Mars
Piloted spaceflight planning typically emphasizes transportation; that is, methods of traveling from Earth to some destination and back again. Other than landing and liftoff, astronaut activities on the surface of a target world normally receive little attention. This is not too surprising at the present stage of spaceflight development, given the many challenges inherent in moving humans between worlds.
What is more surprising is that, as early as 1965, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) turned its attention to the scientific tasks astronaut-scientists might perform on Mars. In that year, as part of an ongoing series of Mars mission studies that began in 1962 with the EMPIRE manned Mars/Venus flyby/orbiter study, the Huntsville, Alabama-based NASA center contracted with Avco/RAD to study manned Mars surface operations. This truly was far-sighted thinking; when MSFC paired with Avco/RAD, NASA, with President John F. Kennedy’s end-of-decade deadline for a manned moon landing fast approaching, had barely begun to pay serious attention to the scientific tasks that Apollo astronauts would perform on the moon.
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Raid of Dotcom mansion was videotaped, footage nowhere to be found
Megaupload.com's servers aren't the only ones being held in limbo by government authorities in the early stages of the prosecution of Kim Dotcom. Now it seems a single personal server storing extensive CCTV footage of the Dotcom mansion—including video documenting the police raid of the Megaupload CEO's sprawling estate—is being held by authorities with no intention of handing it over.
While courts have declared Kim Dotcom a flight risk, leveled firearms charges at Dotcom's head of security, and seized $50 million in Megaupload assets, some have wondered if it all seems a little much for someone embroiled in what is essentially nothing more than a copyright infringement case. And reporter John Campbell of New Zealand's 3 News channel says despite the fact that "security camera footage was not on any seizure warrant and had no bearing whatsoever on any charges laid against Kim Dotcom," the public in general and the Dotcom defense specifically are not being allowed access to the only record of what happened during the raid.
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Week in gaming: PS4 on x86? Whither American gaming arcades?
An x86 PlayStation 4 could signal a sea-change in the console industry: The next-generation PlayStation 4 will use an AMD x86 processor and AMD's Southern Islands GPU according to rumors this week. The next-generation Xbox is also rumored to use Southern Islands. Both rumors are plausible—but if true, they mean that the next-generation console market is going to be very different from the current one.
What ever happened to the American arcade?: Why do video arcades continue to prosper and flourish in Japan while struggling on life support in most other countries? We talked to one of the men behind a new documentary about the Japanese arcade scene to find out.
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Week in tech: Nokia Lumia 900, behind the curtain at Facebook, IE9 resurgence
The Nokia Lumia 900 review: The Nokia Lumia 900 has the weight of two technology behemoths and Windows Phone fans on its polycarbonate shoulders. Ars sees if the flagship smartphone can do them all proud.
Exclusive: a behind-the-scenes look at Facebook release engineering: How does Facebook deploy improvements to one of the world's largest websites—and do so every day? Thank BitTorrent, IRC, karma, and a department called "release engineering." We go onsite with the team.
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Week in science: feeling the chill (and the heat)
The theme of this week's science news seemed to be temperature. We covered how the first organized oceanographic expedition produced data that's still useful today, and how other researchers have reached into the past to track the exit from the most recent ice age. Also making the news were a possible high-temperature superconductor and a low-temperature tyrannosaur. Still, it wasn't all about the hot and cold; we also looked at how technology may have spotted a rarity from the cultural world: Shakespeare's signature.
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Week in Apple: Flashback attack!
Our top Apple news from the last week was spiked with stories about the Flashback Mac trojan that is making the rounds. We also published some original stories about whether Apple holds the encryption key to your iCloud data, and whether Apple has a backdoor to your iPhone's PIN or passcode. And that's just the beginning! Read on for the weekly roundup:
Flashback trojan reportedly controls half a million Macs and counting: The Mac Flashback trojan has reportedly infected more than half a million Macs, according to one antivirus firm, and the number just keeps going up.
Mac Flashback trojan exploits unpatched Java vulnerability, no password needed: The Flashback trojan for the Mac is now exploiting a critical bug in the Java software framework, allowing it to hijack machines even when users don't enter an administrative password. Apple has yet to distribute a fix.
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Half-million Mac infection estimate backed by new analysis
A second security firm took a shot at estimating how many Macs are infected by the Flashback malware and it arrived at the same conclusion as the first—more than half a million machines. That figure, documented in a Kaspersky Lab blog post published on Friday, would mean Flashback has infected slightly more than 1 percent of the 45 million Macs in existence.
Kaspersky Lab Expert Igor Soumenkov said researchers arrived at that number by registering a domain name used as a fallback command and control channel and logging the number of machines that reported to it. In less than 24 hours, a total of 600,000 unique bots connected to their server. Because Flashback shows the universally unique identifier of each bot, he said they're confident they didn't count the same one multiple times, although they couldn't rule out the possibility that some of the machines were running FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, or other operating systems.
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Copyright-trolls: mind your own extra-judicial business, court says
A Northern California District Court handed down an order on March 30, denying permission to a company called Hard Drive Productions to subpoena ISPs for user names and addresses associated with certain IP addresses.
The order shows a growing impatience on the part of many judges for "copyright troll" cases, especially in instances where the plaintiff has no desire to litigate, but hopes to merely use the court system to extract monetarily attractive settlements from a wide range of defendants that the plaintiff can't directly identify. Instead, copyright holders have been suing "John Does" for each IP address caught downloading their copyrighted material. But this doesn't fly in Judge Howard R. Lloyd's court anymore.
"After filing suit, the plaintiff requests that the court let it conduct expedited discovery, by subpoenaing the various ISPs whose IP addresses appear in the [BitTorrent] swarm, ostensibly to identify and name the defendants in the action," presiding Judge Lloyd's order read, "Ordinarily, such discovery is prohibited by Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(d). However, plaintiff assures the court that if it will permit this 'limited' discovery, the plaintiff can subpoena the ISPs for subscriber information associated with each IP address, and then name and serve the defendants so that the case may go forward."
In recent days, judges in Illinois and Florida have denied similar "fishing expeditions" by copyright holders to reel in contact information from IP address holders.
In his order, Judge Lloyd references an prior Ninth Circuit court decision that allowed such a discovery period "unless it is clear that discovery would not uncover the identities." As with many instances where copyright holders subpoena ISPs for the identity of IP address holders, the resulting IP address holder is not always the copyright violator. Many individuals can upload and download files on a single IP address, so the early discovery allowance is not valid.
The order is an important one, signalling that courts are wising up to copyright holders that may be manipulating the court system to conduct extrajudicial business. It's not the end of litigating illegal file-sharers, but the order was certainly something of a win for a more free and anonymous Internet. "The court realizes that this decision may frustrate plaintiff and other copyright holders who, quite understandably, wish to curtail online infringement of their works," Judge Lloyd's order read, "Unfortunately, it would appear that the technology that enables copyright infringement has outpaced technology that prevents it."
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Activists fight "cyber-security" bill that would give NSA more data
An online activist site has collected 300,000 signatures in opposition to a pending "cyber-security" bill that critics say would allow increased government spying on the Internet. The petition focuses on a bill by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), but his legislation is one of at least four proposals now being considered by Congress.
According to Jerry Brito, a researcher at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, there are four competing bills because the two parties—and the two houses of Congress—disagree about how best to deal with online security issues. One point of controversy is over who will take the lead on the issue, the Department of Homeland Security or the National Security Agency. A bill by Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), which would have given the leading role to DHS, was originally expected to pass easily through the Senate. But several Senate Republicans, led by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) were dissatisfied with the Lieberman bill and introduced competing legislation that envisioned a larger role for the NSA.
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New autism studies find new mutations, many genes behind the disorder
Autism clearly has a genetic component, since if one half of a set of identical twins suffers from the disorder, the other generally does as well. But there are also a high number of cases where it seems to appear spontaneously, with affected children being born in families with no history of problems.
In recent years, new molecular tools like DNA chips have allowed researchers to look at these sporadic cases in more detail. The results have suggested that spontaneous mutations may play a large role in causing the disease. But these studies were limited to looking at large changes, the loss or duplication of huge regions of the genome. Technology has marched on, however, and DNA sequencing has reached the point where we're now able to look for small individual changes in the genomes of families with an autistic member. These new studies reinforce the role of spontaneous mutations, but suggest that up to a thousand genes may be behind autistic behavior.
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AT&T to set (some) iPhones free beginning April 8
AT&T has confirmed that it will begin unlocking iPhones for qualifying customers beginning Sunday, April 8. This means that, if you have purchased an AT&T-locked iPhone and you meet AT&T's (somewhat strict) requirements, you'll be able to take that phone to another GSM carrier here in the US or abroad.
Engadget was first to report the anonymous information about the new policy, but AT&T was quick to confirm once the word got out. According to AT&T, the iPhone you want to unlock can't be associated with a current active term commitment, and you must already be out of your contract terms (usually two years from purchase) or you must have paid an early termination fee. Your account must be in good standing, too—no $700 overdue phone bills for you.
Apple does sell already unlocked, contract-free iPhones that work on GSM carriers, including AT&T. But those devices cost $649 up front for the 16GB iPhone 4S, going up to $849 for the 64GB version—significantly higher than the $199 subsidized starting price when you buy from AT&T or another carrier. As such, the majority of current iPhone users in the US have carrier-locked devices, but AT&T's latest announcement will undoubtedly help to set a few of those users free with minimal pain involved. How many of you are going to try and get your devices unlocked come April 8 so you can hop over to T-Mobile?
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How to check for—and get rid of—a Mac Flashback infection
So you're a Mac user who has heard that more than half a million Macs have been infected by the recent Flashback malware. When the news began to spread about how the malware took advantage of a previously unpatched Java vulnerability on the Mac, the the horror stories began pouring in. "My dad heard about the Flashback malware and subsequently deleted his Java folder. Now his Mac won't boot," a friend told me.
Needless to say, this is not the way to properly nuke a possible Flashback infection or prevent yourself from catching one. Still, there is a reasonable level of concern out there. Maybe you haven't been keeping up on your antivirus software (and let's be honest, most Mac users don't), or perhaps you simply have suspicions about your Mac acting funny. How do you check if you have Flashback, and if you do, how do you (properly) get rid of it?
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Megaupload: Erasing our servers as the US wants would deny us a fair trial
On Friday, Megaupload asked the Virginia judge overseeing its criminal copyright case to spare the data on its servers from deletion. Megaupload had leased 1,103 servers holding 25 petabytes of data from Carpathia Hosting, but it was unable to continue paying its bills after the government froze its assets. Carpathia recently complained that maintaining the servers was costing thousands of dollars per day. The hosting company asked to either be compensated for the expenses of running the servers or be given permission to re-provision them for use by other customers.
Megaupload has been trying for months to get custody of the servers. It had previously negotiated a deal to purchase the servers from Carpathia for about $1.5 million. But because Megaupload's assets have been frozen, it lacked the funds to complete the transaction without court approval. And the government objected, claiming, among other things, that the servers could contain child pornography.
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Facebook: iOS-based credential theft only works on lost or jailbroken devices (Updated)
Are the Facebook apps for iOS and Android susceptible to exploits that allow attackers to steal credentials used to log in to the social networking site? Facebook has largely discounted a recent report claiming as much, stating that such an exploit only works when users have modified their operating systems or granted an attacker physical access to their devices.
The attack was first proposed by app developer Gareth Wright, who discovered that a Facebook configuration file kept on iPhones and other Apple devices stored the cryptographic tokens that apps use to authenticate themselves. He later told The Register that Android devices probably suffered from a similar weakness that also stemmed from the failure to cryptographically secure the token.
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