Temporary shutdown of Ars comments and logins for upgrades
This is a heads up to our late-night and international readers: we're temporarily shutting down commenting (on both front page articles and in the forum) and logging in tonight to perform some DB upgrades. You'll still be able to read existing comments and forum posts, but you won't be able to post your own.
Because we have to disable logins that also means there will be a short window when our subscribers will see banner ads and lose their special sub privileges. Sorry, we'll make it as quick and painless as possible!
The shutdown will occur at approximately 11pm CDT (that's 4am GMT), extending to probably 2am CDT or so. Don't be alarmed if it takes a little longer, these are just estimates.
We'll have more details about what these upgrades are, and what they mean for our readers later. Thanks for your patience.
Update 3am CDT: Looks like it's going to take longer than we hoped. At this point it's more important to get it right than to rush, so we're going to just let the process take its course. If logins are still locked out while you're reading this we apologize for the inconvenience.
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Ars May Gaming Outlook: From Diablo to Retro
With so many video games released every month, it can be hard to tell which titles are worth your time, and which are worth a pass. The Ars Gaming Outlook is our attempt to pick out just a few of the most interesting games coming up in the next month and tell you what's great about them so you can keep them on your radar.
Diablo III
I doubt I have to tell most of you reading this why Diablo III is going to be the breakout gaming hit of May. With nearly 12 full years separating this sequel from Diablo II, the weight of the expectations on Blizzard's latest are almost unbearably heavy. If you had a chance to check out the beta, you know the gameplay formula is still the click-heavy, sword-and-sorcery affair the series is known for, but with enough new classes, abilities andlittle touches to keep things fresh. I'll be particularly interested to see how the game's controversial real-money auction house affects both the player dynamics and the gameplay balance for those who decide they want to pay to win.
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Weekend Ar(t)s: Pop culture gets the retro gaming treatment
During the weekend, even Ars takes an occasional break from reviewing new self-publishing options or researching all the cyber tools the feds use to catch culprits. Weekend Ar(t)s is a chance to share what we're watching/listening/reading or otherwise consuming this week.
ABOBO SMASH!
"Retro" is the dominant genre. It doesn't matter what kind of media being discussed. Musicians that hearken back to the '70s, '80s, and even the '90s receive critical buzz. Period piece television dramas bring in big ratings. Movie remake culture has been discussed (and largely lamented) on end. Even with fashion, sneakers like the Adidas Superstars or Reebok Freestyle still have relevance today (yes, that is a fashion reference on Ars, ladies and gentlemen).
Gaming isn't immune. Incredible advancements in graphics and gameplay are being rolled out every day, but there's still a hunger for the pixelated, 8-bit culture of gaming's youth. It feels like every week there's another viral, old-school gaming sensation based on some bit of pop-cultural ephemera getting discovered through a Buzzfeed or Neatorama post. This week was no different, with the surreal, lo-fi Rambo Last Blood surfacing to lend a hand with any procrastination needs. It's much less true to the movie source than the real NES Rambo game, but much more likely to make you question the futility of war.
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MacBook Pros may get Ivy Bridge; whither the Mac Pros? The OpenForum speculates
Earlier this week we reported on the arrival of new quad-core mobile processors, which are part of Intel's new Ivy Bridge parts. There’s quite a bit of speculation going on about how those parts could be used for a refresh of the MacBook Pro machines.
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Google releases full details of FCC investigation into Street View WiFi snooping
Google has released the full report of the Federal Communications Commission’s investigation into the company’s collection of "payload data" from millions of business and residential WiFi networks, says the Los Angeles Times. The FCC dropped the investigation earlier this month, after fining Google $25,000 for obstructing the investigation.
A more heavily redacted version of the report was released by the FCC on April 15. The new version released by Google to the LA Times, only redacts names of individuals, and reveals more details about how Google captured the data—and how much the company knew about what was being collected.
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Facebook "likes" aren't speech protected by the First Amendment, rules judge
This post references a case decided by the US District Court of Eastern Virginia, Bland v. Roberts, 2012
Bland and his cohorts worked in the Hampton Sheriff’s Office, under B.J. Roberts. Roberts ran for re-election against Jim Adams, and the plaintiffs were lukewarm in their support of Roberts. In fact, three of the plaintiffs went so far as to "like" Adams' Facebook page. Roberts won the election, and he decided to not retain the plaintiffs. He justified the terminations on cost-cutting and budgeting grounds, but plaintiffs argued that their termination violated their First Amendment rights. The court grants Roberts’ motion for summary judgment.
Plaintiffs alleged they engaged in a variety of protected activities, such as placing a bumper sticker on one of their cars and attending an Adams-sponsored cookout, but the court says there is no evidence that Roberts was aware of these activities. The one activity that Roberts knew about was "the presence" of two of the plaintiffs on his opponent’s Facebook page. However, with respect to this activity, the court says that plaintiffs did not point to any specific statements they made on Adams’ Facebook page. One plaintiff claimed he posted a comment to Adams' page, but he later took it down, and the comment wasn't presented to the court. Plaintiffs "liked" Adams' Facebook page, and there was no dispute that Roberts was aware of this, but the court says this is insufficient:
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European Pirate Party shares copyright reform alternative to ACTA
In politics, you can only get so far complaining about the status quo before someone starts asking if you have any better ideas. To that end, Pirate Party MEP Christian Engstrom and founder Rick Falkvinge have released The Case for Copyright Reform a 107-page eBook outlining the party's vision for reconciling copyright protection with the reality of widespread digital sharing.
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Bill banning employer Facebook snooping introduced in Congress
Two members of Congress have introduced a bill that would ban the practice of requiring job applicants, employees or students to provide their social networking information.
The Social Networking Online Protection Act, authored by Congressman Eliot Engel of New York and sponsored by Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, is in response to a growing number of reports of employers demanding their employees’ Facebook passwords as a condition of employment.
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Ask Stack: Should you develop native apps or web apps?
This Q&A is part of a biweekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 80+ Q&A sites.
Alfredo O asks:
I'm in the early stages of developing an application geared toward business use, but I'm unsure whether I should develop a web-based app or a native mobile app.
Developing a separate mobile app seems to mean more maintenance—any time a change goes through online, I'll have to make sure the update carries over to the app. But I know only native apps can utilize certain features such as GPS and digital rights management, and native apps don't require an Internet connection.
Ultimately, what is the best way to go?
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Firefox 13 beta turns on the SPDY, tabs on demand
With Firefox 12 out the door, Mozilla is turning its efforts to polishing up Firefox 13, due out six weeks from now. If you don’t want to wait that long, you can download Firefox 13 from the beta release channel today.
Perhaps the best new feature in Firefox 13 is what’s known as “tabs on demand.” Tabs on demand refers to the way Firefox restarts when you have multiple tabs open. Firefox will now only restore the currently selected tab; background tabs are not loaded. Tabs on demand is a welcome relief for those of us who browse with dozens of tabs open all the time. You no longer need to fear restarting the browser since you won’t have to wait while every tab reloads. Instead, tabs will load only when you select them.
Firefox 13 will bring a slightly new look to some parts of the browser. Both the New Tab and the Home Page have been redesigned. The New Tab page now has links to your most recently and frequently visited sites. It looks more or less just like Opera’s Speed Dial, which Chrome also mimics. There’s an option to pin your favorite sites, as well as a button for rejecting sites you don’t want to see.
The default Home Page now has links to menu items like Bookmarks, History, Settings, Add-ons, Downloads and Sync Preferences. There’s nothing here that you can’t access from the menu bar, but it makes frequently used menu items easier for newcomers to find.
Web developers will be glad to know that Firefox 13 introduces support for Google’s not-quite-yet-a-standard SPDY protocol (technically the last two Firefox releases have supported SPDY, but this is the first to have it enabled by default). The SPDY protocol improves on HTTP and in many cases can significantly reduce page load times. SPDY’s other main advantage over HTTP is that all traffic is encrypted. Once Firefox 13 and the Opera 12 preview arrive in their final forms the majority of desktop browsers on the Web will support SPDY.
The Firefox 13 beta also brings a number of improvements to the new Developer Tools. For example, the Page Inspector now allows you to lock in CSS pseudo-classes on inspected page elements—handy for checking out what’s happening in a :hover code block.
For more details on everything that’s new in the developer tools and the rest of Firefox 13, check out Mozilla’s release notes.
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Week in Apple: WWDC ticket madness, Tim Cook on patent suits, and more
Ars took a look at the iPad as a tool for IT professionals this week and discussed what Intel's Ivy Bridge processors could mean for the MacBook Pro. Those were the most popular posts in the Apple section this week, but we also discussed WWDC dates, the WWDC ticket fiasco, Tim Cook's comments on Apple's patent wars during the company's second quarter conference call, and more. Need to catch up? You've come to the right place.
For today's IT professional, the iPad is an addition, not a replacement: It has its shortcomings, but the iPad is worth more to a sysadmin than you'd imagine—thanks to the size of the device itself and a slew of handy applications.
MacBook Pros could go all-quad-core with first-wave Ivy Bridge processors: Apple could use the mobile processors Intel released on Monday to revamp its MacBook Pro line if it chooses to go all in on quad-core MacBook Pros.
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Week in IT: tech support at the South Pole, Google Drive, and Ivy Bridge
Coolest jobs in tech (literally): running a South Pole data center: What does it take to work at a South Pole data center? Good physical condition, a flexible approach to problem solving, and no wisdom teeth.
Google Drive is here, and you can install it right now: Google Drive can be downloaded and installed right now, finally giving Google a viable competitor to Dropbox and other cloud storage and file syncing services.
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Week in Gaming: Tracking Vita prices and Old Republic subscriber numbers
This week, we took a look at online price trends for third-party sellers trying to unload the PlayStation Vita. Bioware chimed in to push back against suggestions that The Old Republic was losing subscribers, while Valve's Gabe Newell piped up about his company's continuing silence regarding a new Half-Life game.
We also delved into a surprisingly weak financial report from Nintendo and examined the company's plans to offer many games as both digital downloads and standard retail releases in the future. Plus, Dan Crabtree had a thought provoking review of indie platformer A Valley without Wind.
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Week in tech: Windows 8 on the desktop, child porn honeypots, and Oracle v. Google
Windows 8 on the desktop—an awkward hybrid: With its two distinct interfaces, what is Windows 8 like as a desktop operating system? Our 8,000-word answer: better than feared, worse than hoped. Get ready for some Metro in your desktop.
"The hidden side of your soul": How the FBI uses the Web as a child porn honeypot: "View the yung [sic] and innocent," the website blared, and it ordered law enforcement to stay away. But when a US government employee tried to view the advertised child pornography inside, he brought the feds to his door—because the FBI ran the site.
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The week in science is counterintuitive
This past week, our biggest story was a scoop that we got to ahead of most major news outlets: a bunch of billionaires were backing a company that planned to retrieve and mine asteroids. If that sounded a bit mind-boggling, it had nothing on the next most popular story, which described how quantum mechanics lets you make a decision that influences the result of measurements you made earlier. Another counterintuitive story indicated that the best solar panels are made of materials that could also be an efficient light emitter. All in all, a pretty surprising week in science news.
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Oracle President testifies, jury told to assume APIs are copyrightable
The presentations of evidence in the Oracle v. Google copyright case wrapped up on Friday, and only a few hours of closing arguments now stand between the jury and their deliberations.
The beginning of the week was dominated by Google's defense case, with more star witnesses, including two former CEOs of Sun Microsystems: Eric Schmidt, who later became CEO of Google, and Jonathan Schwartz. Schwartz testified that he never considered suing Google over Android, "because we didn't feel we had any grounds."
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Backdoor that threatens power stations to be purged from control system
Mission-critical routers used to control electric substations and other critical infrastructure are being updated to remove a previously undocumented backdoor that could allow vandals to hijack the devices, manufacturer RuggedCom said late Friday.
The announcement by the Ontario, Canada-based company comes two days after Ars reported that the company's entire line of devices running its Rugged Operating System contained a backdoor with an easily determined password. The backdoor, which can't be disabled, had not been publicly acknowledged by the company until now, leaving the power utilities, military facilities, and municipal traffic departments using the industrial-strength gear vulnerable to sabotage that could affect the safety of huge populations of people.
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Giving Kindles to Ghanaian kids may be an OLPC alternative
So you've heard of the $100 laptop. (Ok, it's actually about $180—you know, the OLPC XO.) But what about that other $100 device, the Amazon Kindle? (Yes, the sub-$100 versions have ads, but still.)
Some educators hope that Kindles and similar e-readers, given their low price and streamlined design, could be the new learning tool in developing countries. A Seattle-based non-profit, Worldreader, has been attempting to bring Kindles to sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2010, the group has expanded its offerings to around 1,000 students in schools across Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana.
On Thursday, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the group's sponsors, published a new report (PDF) outlining the 18-month pilot project examining over 300 students in Ghana between 2010 and 2011. The study was conducted by ILC Africa, a local Accra-based evaluation group, and it looked at groups of students who did not have e-readers (NE), those who did (E), and those who had Kindles along with "Out-of-Classroom Exploration" (E+OCE).
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Android platform developer: five-month wait for OS update is "reasonable"
Sony recently updated its Tablet S product from Android 3 to Android 4. The latest version of Android, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), was released in November. According to Jean-Baptiste Queru, an Android platform engineer at Google, the five-month wait is “very reasonable,” in light of the complexity involved in moving from Honeycomb to ICS.
Queru also acknowledged that Google has yet to roll out the ICS update to some variants of its own flagship Nexus device. He attributed the issue to delays caused by the network operator approval process. The remarks, which were posted on Google+, have drawn scrutiny from Android enthusiasts and developers who are concerned about Android version fragmentation and the lack of predictable update availability in the Android ecosystem.
At Google I/O last year, Google’s Andy Rubin announced a new initiative to streamline the update process. The search giant said it would collaborate with handset manufacturers and mobile carriers to come up with a strategy for making Android updates more timely and predictable.
At the time, Rubin said that the effort was still at an exploratory stage and that it hadn’t produced any actual solutions yet. Google hasn’t issued any further remarks on the status of the update initiative. The update situation arguably hasn’t improved much since that announcement.
Ultimately, there might not be much that Google can do to address the issue. Critics of the Android update model often compare it to Apple’s approach with iOS, where new versions of the operating system are rolled out to old devices at the same time that they launch on new devices.
Apple has a much smaller range of devices to contend with, however, compared to the breadth of the Android ecosystem, which has a more diverse spectrum of hardware. It’s worth noting that Microsoft has also encountered update difficulties with its own Windows Phone operating system.
One thing that Google could do to help simplify the process is to start developing Android in the open instead of developing it behind closed doors and doing a code drop for each major release. Easier access to the code while it’s in development would allow handset makers to do continuous integration and give them a head start on addressing challenges they need to overcome to align their own customizations with new versions of the platform.
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Big Content eyes Google Fiber deployment in Kansas City warily
As of early April, Google told press in Kansas City that it would stick to its target of bringing fiber service to the city within the first half of 2012.
While the search giant has been a bit reticent to offer details about what precisely the level of service will be, who will have access to it, and how much it will cost, one thing remains clear: fiber is freakin’ fast. It’s expected to raise the average level of connectivity by about two orders of magnitude, with speeds reaching up to one gigabit per second.
A new report in BusinessWeek suggests that Hollywood may be a little worried that this will enable rampant piracy, but it could nonetheless be beneficial for studios who know how to take advantage of it.
"We want to reinforce that higher speeds could be a great opportunity for consumers, and that's the bottom line," Howard Gantman, spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America, told Ars on Friday. "There are problems that can, in terms of [an] increase of digital piracy, come with that, but we are hopeful that efforts can be made... to address digital piracy."
A spokesperson for Viacom declined to comment.
Google has not said whether it will participate in the "six strikes" scheme between the country's major ISP players, which was announced last year.
Meanwhile, 180 miles to the north, in Iowa, Google is also getting busy. This week, the company announced plans to build a new $300 million data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, just outside of Omaha. This facility is expected to continue to do what another Council Bluffs site did when it came online in 2009: host Gmail, Google Maps, Google+, and of course, search.
Given Google’s FCC filing from earlier this year, that Iowa station may also serve as a future IP video facility to be used in conjunction with Kansas City's fiber service.
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Apple indeed has a TV in the works, claims Reuters
Apple has reportedly engaged in talks to stream films to a long-rumored Apple-created TV, among other devices, according to sources speaking to Reuters. The company was allegedly talking to EPIX to stream movies to Apple's devices, but according to Reuters' sources, those talks were in the preliminary stages and have since stalled.
Talk of a TV created by Apple has been floating around for many years, but the company has not yet released such a product nor commented on rumors about one. In Walter Isaacson's recent biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, however, it was revealed that Jobs was at least thinking about how to develop an integrated television set that would be "completely easy to use" and seamlessly sync data across iCloud, similar to current Apple devices like the iPhone and iPad. Jobs had reportedly tapped iTunes creator Jeff Robbin to help with the project, and told Isaacson that he had "finally cracked" a way to make TVs as simple and elegant as Apple's other products.
But even though Jobs was pondering the concept, it doesn't necessarily mean that Apple is currently planning to roll out such a product. According to Reuters, a TV was part of Apple's streaming plan, though the publication offers no further details about the supposed product. Unsurprisingly, Apple officially told Reuters that the news was "speculation" and did not comment further.
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Your Google Drive isn't ready? Just wait a day… or maybe two
When we reported Tuesday that Google Drive is here, and you can install it "right now," some of our readers were understandably frustrated that they couldn't, in fact, install it right away.
Some people who signed up were greeted with messages saying that their Google Drive wasn't "ready" yet, with the option to get an e-mail notification when Google had room to let them in. What we're hearing from readers on Twitter is that people who don't get into Drive immediately are rewarded for their patience within a few hours or a day. A handful report having had to wait a couple of days, but 24 hours seems to be the longest wait for the vast majority of folks.
I got in right away, after signing up within five minutes of the service being announced. I have two Google accounts, though, and to test out its availability, I tried to sign up with my second account late yesterday afternoon. Within about 20 hours, I was in. My colleagues are reporting getting in right away, or enduring waits of between 12 hours and a day. Google declined to tell us how many people have signed up and how many have gotten in. The service is rolling out "over the next several weeks," the company told us.
Users of the Google Apps service we've heard from are reporting quick, if not instant, turnarounds—although Google said Apps users still have to go through the same opt-in process as any other user, so it may just be luck.
In a Google Apps administration support page, Google says it is transitioning users' Google Documents list to Google Drive by early summer. The current "opt-in period" will be followed by a temporary opt-out period, and then a full transition of all Apps users to Drive for document storage. Drive appeared in the Google Apps control panel for all administrators on Tuesday, and users at organizations that are Apps customers will get access at the same rate as Google's non-business users. There's one exception to that—users who work for organizations that have chosen the slower, "scheduled release" track for Google Apps won't be able to opt in to Drive until the next batch of scheduled updates.
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Forget Apple: Oracle to bring Java security fixes directly to Mac users
Oracle released Java SE 7 Update 4 this week, which finally gives Mac owners the means to receive critical Java security patches at the same time they're available for users of Windows and Linux operating systems. The new release means that OS X should be receiving regular Java updates directly from the source—helping to prevent attacks like the recent Flashback infection—as well as a fully supported Java development environment.
Before this week, Apple built and released a version of Java for OS X on its own, and often lagged weeks or months behind Oracle in pushing out updates that patched serious security holes. However, Apple deprecated its own Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and other tools in 2010. Though the company committed to maintaining Java for Leopard and Snow Leopard, it warned that "developers should not rely on the Apple-supplied Java runtime being present in future versions of Mac OS X."
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FTC hires legal big guns for possible antitrust lawsuit against Google
The Federal Trade Commission announced on Thursday that it had hired an outside litigator in the antitrust case likely to be brought against Google. The Feds have been looking into whether Google has been abusing its overwhelming market share in search to quash competition and to artificially inflate online advertising prices.
The new litigator is Beth A. Wilkinson, a Washington, DC-based attorney who served as special attorney to the United States Attorney General in the case of US v. McVeigh and Nichols, the two men accused and convicted in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. She delivered the closing arguments in the case, which resulted in a death sentence for McVeigh, and earned her a second award for service from the Department of Justice.
The New York Times notes that the FTC has only hired outside litigators twice in the last decade, suggesting that there will likely be a case brought against Google.
"It’s a watershed moment when you hire someone like this," said David Wales, a former Federal Trade Commission official now in private practice with Jones Day, in an interview with the Times. "This shows Google that if it doesn’t give you the remedy you want, you’re going to litigate."
However, FTC officials have been quick to stress that no decision has been made with respect to potential charges against Google.
UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal notes that in Google's most recently quarterly regulatory filing, that the company is apparently now also under investigation for "certain business practices" in Argentina and South Korea.
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New Facebook tool fills queries in under a second—even with terabytes of data
A network as large and vast as Facebook needs to be fast—and the social network's engineering team has a new tool to help make the experience even faster.
Not satisfied with how its current set of tools was measuring site performance across its myriad data centers, Facebook has instead developed Scuba, a system for "real-time, ad-hoc analysis of arbitrary datasets."
In other words, Scuba is helping Facebook gather important data on the health and status of its server infrastructure—and fast. In a blog post by Lior Abraham, the site performance team engineer says Facebook traditionally relied on pre-aggregated graphs, or sample data stored in MySQL databases. As the site has grown, however—it now boasts just over 900 million users—these tools became slow and unwieldy.
Instead, "the same approach we use to serve News Feed stories in real-time"—where data is stored primarily in memory—"can be used to serve statistics data about our internal systems," he wrote.
As a result, queries now take less than a second to fulfill, "even traversing hundreds of millions of samples and hundreds of gigabytes of data." Employees also have the ability to view heat maps of racks and servers based on such factors as CPU consumption and packet throughput, or find data on "sick" machines that are performing the least effectively.
However, speedy access to such massive amounts of data has a tradeoff. Because the tool is designed for real-time analytics in the here and now, "we typically only keep around 30 days of data," said Abraham in an e-mail exchange with GigaOm.
Scuba's front-end, meanwhile, is designed to visualize all of this data in an easy and simple to understand manner, using what the team describes as "goggles." Nearly any dimension, including "page, server, source version, datacenter, and country, to name just a few common ones," can be aggregated and visualized as a dataset.
Internally, the tool has proven successful. Abraham says that dozens of engineers contributed features and fixes, "and now over 500 employees use the tool monthly."
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Available Tags:Ars , Gaming , Ivy Bridge , MacBook , Mac , Google , Facebook , Firefox , Ivy Bridge , Windows 8 , Windows , Oracle , Android , Apple , TV , Java , security ,
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