Feature: Game over—how sanctions and violence doomed Syria's gaming industry
"Life for Syrian game developers has never been better," joked Falafel Games founder Radwan Kasmiya in an e-mail to Ars Technica. "You can test the action on the streets and get back to your desktop to script it on your keyboard."
Kasmiya's icy humor hides a sobering truth about the troubles faced by Syria's once-promising game development industry. The country once looked like a future technology hub, with its centralized location among the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries allowing it to easily draw programming and engineering talent from Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. But that promise has been effectively squashed, first by global economic sanctions and then by more than a year of bloody civil conflict.
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Feature: Future U: Classroom tech doesn't mean handing out tablets
A couple of decades ago the most advanced technology to appear in an average classroom was a mini-cassette recorder and a calculator. For most students, however, typical classroom technology ran the gamut from yellow legal pads to theme books, from pencils to ballpoints.
Computers were restricted to the computer lab. There, the green blinking DOS cursor would excite and intimidate. Most of the thrill of the computer lab, aside from a few basic computer games, came from the fact that you could type up a paper without using Wite-Out.
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Hands-on: testing the GIMP 2.8 and its new single-window interface
The developers behind the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) have announced the official release of version 2.8, the first stable update since 2008. The new version brings a number of significant technical enhancements and user interface improvements, including the long-awaited single-window editing mode.
The GIMP is an open source raster image editor with advanced features, such as support for layers and scripting. It was originally created by students at UC Berkeley in 1996 and later became part of the GNU project. The GIMP has spawned several other notable open source software projects, including the Gtk+ widget toolkit with which it is built.
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Exercises in democracy: building a digital public library
Most neighborhoods in America have a public library. Now the biggest neighborhood in America, the Internet, wants a library of its own. Last week, Ars attended a conference held by the Digital Public Library of America, a nascent group of intellectuals hoping to put all of America's library holdings online. The DPLA is still in its infancy—there's no official staff, nor is there a finished website where you can access all the books they imagine will be accessible. But if the small handful of volunteers and directors have their way, you'll see all that by April 2013 at the latest.
Last week's conference set out to answer a lot of questions. How much content should be centralized, and how much should come from local libraries? How will the Digital Public Library be run? Can an endowment-funded public institution succeed where Google Books has largely failed (a 4,000-word meditation on this topic is offered by Nicholas Carr in MIT's April Technology Review)?
Enthusiasm for the project permeated the former Christian Science church where the meeting was held (now the church is the headquarters of Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive). But despite the audience's applause and wide-eyed wonder, there’s still a long way to go.
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Schools can't stop wondering what students are up to on Facebook
It's graduation season, which means that students, teachers, and administrators alike are all thinking about one thing: Facebook.
Schools around the globe have a fascination with—indeed, sometimes a fixation on—the social networking site and what their students are getting up to online. Questions about the appropriate response to student material on social networking sites have existed for years, but they're exploding into serious policy questions (and even laws) as such sites become almost ubiquitous teen hangouts.
For instance: can school administration use social networking to keeps tabs on what students do during the school day? What about things they do after leaving school property?
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Not-Horrible iPad Cases: a round-up of the best
The following round-up is from our esteemed colleagues at The Wirecutter. We recently were discussing this very topic in the Editor's household, where children abound and the SmartCover fails to do much protecting.
Some people think the iPad is so gorgeous it doesn't need a case. I disagree, and my favorite overall case is Joy Factory's SmartSuit 3.
I'm surprised we could narrow it down; this took some doing. After about 70 hours of trolling published reviews and surveys of every case available for the new iPad, we called in roughly a dozen finalists to check the fit and feel ourselves. We eliminated the obviously ugly, cheap-feeling, poor-fitting, ill-reviewed cases in previous iPad 2 iterations, and selected the most protective, ergonomic and aesthetically pleasing models available. We looked at every model from makers like Speck, Targus, XtremeMac, G-Form, Switcheasy, Marware, DODOcase, Grovemade.
(An up-front tip of the hat to iLounge's Nick Guy is in order here, because he is clearly the best iPad case reviewer around. We gained a lot, not only from his insights but from the sheer number of cases reviewed. His work represents as complete a catalog as you'll find.)
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EPA, Department of the Interior announce additional fracking oversight
Drafts of new regulations relating to hydraulic fracturing in natural gas production were released for public comment Friday. This follows on the heels of the new rules for air emissions released two weeks ago. The US Environmental Protection Agency announced new guidance for obtaining permits when diesel fuel is included as a component of the fracking fluid used to fracture source rocks and free the gas trapped inside. As we laid out in a previous story, a 2005 amendment to the Safe Drinking Water Act exempted fracking from regulation as an underground injection, except when diesel fuel is used. Despite that caveat, the industry continued using diesel fuel without reporting it, saying that the EPA had never explicitly provided a process for them to do so. That process is now laid out in the new guidance. This may become a moot point, however, as public pressure is forcing the industry to move to more innocuous alternatives.
The US Department of the Interior also announced new rules for fracking on federal and Indian land, greatly increasing oversight. Fracking must now be explicitly approved as part of the normal drilling permits companies apply for when operating on federal land. This will require them to submit details on the layers of rock they plan to frack and how they will manage and dispose of the spent fracking fluids. They will also have to submit documentation of tests performed to ensure integrity of the seal around the well before the actual fracking begins. After the process is complete, drillers will have to publicly disclose the chemicals used in the fracking fluid.
In the press release, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar says, “As we continue to offer millions of acres of America’s public lands for oil and gas development, it is critical that the public have full confidence that the right safety and environmental protections are in place. The proposed rule will modernize our management of well stimulation activities—including hydraulic fracturing—to make sure that fracturing operations conducted on public and Indian lands follow common-sense industry best practices.”
Several states (most notably Wyoming and Texas) already have some similar requirements on the books, and others may use the federal rules as a template in the future. The drafts of both the EPA guidance and DOI rules will be revised and finalized following the 60 day public comment period.
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Leave only footprints: how Google's ethical ignorance gets it in trouble
"According to a well written and thorough article in the Virginia Journal of Law & Technology, what we've been saying for over three years has been determined to be true: WarDriving is not a crime."
That's the text of a September 8, 2004 blog post by Marius Milner, the engineer who developed NetStumbler, a tool used to map WiFi networks using a WiFi card and GPS (also known as "wardriving"). Milner is also the engineer Google has claimed was solely responsible for the code that collected personal data from WiFi networks, including e-mail addresses and passwords, with the company's Street View cars between May 2007 and May 2010.
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