PS3 "fat" models working again after fake February 29 passes
The issue causing older-model PlayStation 3 consoles to cease functioning has been fixed, allowing gamers to once again safely play their games without fear of harming their console or being locked out of their content. The PlayStation Blog explained the issue, and states we should have nothing else to worry about.
"We are aware that the internal clock functionality in the PS3 units other than the slim model, recognized the year 2010 as a leap year. Having the internal clock date change from February 29 to March 1 (both GMT), we have verified that the symptoms are now resolved and that users are able to use their PS3 normally.
"If the time displayed on the XMB is still incorrect, users are able to adjust time settings manually or via the internet."
The world exhales.
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Insubordination? Infinity Ward cofounder gone from Activision
Last night reports began to spread across the Internet that something was happening at Modern Warfare 2 developer Infinity Ward's offices. G4 then reported on a tip that uniformed men showed up at Infinity Ward's offices, and refused to answer questions from employees. Soon after, it became clear that cofounder Jason West has left the company, either forcibly or by his own choice.
"Jason West is drinking. Also, unemployed," West's facebook status read. His LinkedIn profile was also updated, showing his work as president of Infinity Ward as ended. He was with Infinity Ward for nine years and three months.
It seems as if Activision knew this was coming. On Monday Activision filed a form 10:K with the SEC, detailing problems at the developer. "Consistent with past practice, the Company intends to release a Call of Duty game in 2010 developed by another wholly-owned studio," it read, in part. "The Company is concluding an internal human resources inquiry into breaches of contract and insubordination by two senior employees at Infinity Ward. This matter is expected to involve the departure of key personnel and litigation. At present, the Company does not expect this matter to have a material impact on the Company."
At the moment, all that's known is that Jason West is no longer with the company, and the information contained in the SEC filing. Modern Warfare 2 has been a monster success for everyone involved, selling millions of copies across multiple systems. Tim Schafer, whose Brutal Legend was dropped by Activision before the company circled back to attempt to profit from the game, commented on the story via Twitter: "Getting mad at Activision for this kind of thing is like getting mad at an ape for throwing feces. It's just how the beast communicates."
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feature: The end of analog: Blair Levin on the National Broadband Plan
Several weeks ago, Federal Communications Commission press person Jen Howard sent me a note, apologizing for not responding to one of my e-mails. "I'll only forgive you if you can get me 30 minutes with Blair Levin," I jokingly replied. Guess I should kid around with the FCC more often, because when Levin, the FCC's lead on broadband planing, was in San Francisco for a conference on Wednesday, I got the interview.
His formal title at the agency is "Executive Director, Omnibus Broadband Initiative." In non-bureaucratese, that means Levin is in charge of getting the FCC's National Broadband Plan out the door. The plan is due before Congress on March 17 and will be unveiled at the agency's next Open Commission meeting the day before. Levin is no stranger to the Commission, having served as FCC Chief of Staff in the mid-1990s. More recently, he worked as communications technology analyst for the Wall Street firm of Stifel Nicolaus.
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Orbital changes warmed the Earth's interglacial periods
Scientists think they have a pretty good idea of how orbital variations drive the glacial cycles that have dominated Earth's recent history. Periodic changes in the Earth's rotational tilt and orientation, called Milankovitch cycles, alter how sunlight gets distributed over the planet's surface, driving the advance and retreat of ice sheets. But some of the details of how this system operates remain a bit hazy, and researchers have been puzzled by a transition called the Mid-Brunhes Event, which took place 430,000 years ago. Before the Mid-Brunhes, even the warm interglacials were colder than the present, with significant ice sheets left behind; afterwards, the conditions were similar to our current ones.
A paper published this weekend at Nature Geoscience examines a number of interglacial periods both before and after the Mid-Brunhes Event, and ties the climatic changes into differences in the Milankovich influences on the climate, enhanced by forcings from greenhouse gasses. The net result is a more moderate interglacial, with warmer winters and slightly cooler summers, with most of the changes happening during the Southern Hemisphere's summer.
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feature: Snowmobiles are for sissies: a review of Bad Company 2
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has an easy job on the PC: it just has to suck less than Modern Warfare 2. There have been videos released showing how the game has been optimized for the PC, there is a server browser, the graphical and sound settings can be tweaked and adjusted, and dedicated servers are back!
Of course, you have to rent the dedicated servers from EA's partners, but baby steps... right?
We've played and beaten the single-player game, and there have been multiplayer servers running all weekend to give reviewers and various street date breakers the chance to play with the final code. Considering we've put more time into the multiplayer beta on the PC than the length of most retail games, there is a fair chance that there is something special going on here. Let's take a look.
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Coming to a P2P network near you: your medical records
A team of Canadian medical researchers have inadvertently provided a very clear picture of the current state of the security risks posed by P2P networks. The authors intended to determine whether P2P clients were exposing personal health information, but their approach—downloading all files from a set of common document formats—provided them a clear picture of just what's being made available on Gnutella and eDonkey: personal identification, health, and medical information, and a healthy collection of trojans.
The motivation for the work is pretty simple. With the increasing digitization of health records, individual users are more likely to exchange e-mails and files with their doctors, insurers, and other health care officials. An obvious consequence is that personal health information (PHI) will end up on the users' hard drives, which creates a potential security hole. In the past, the research team has found that they could scrounge PHI from roughly 10 percent of the used hard drives available through second-hand computing vendors.
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Coding error leads to uneven EU browser ballot distribution
The Windows Browser Ballot, the browser selection screen that is being offered to Windows users in Europe starting this month, is already coming under fire. Slovakian IT news site DSL.sk decided to test the ballot and found that its distribution was very peculiar, with Internet Explorer appearing in the rightmost position almost 50 percent of the time when the ballot was viewed from within IE.
Notable ODF proponent and IBM employee Rob Weir took a closer look at the ballot to determine why it was acting in this way. It turns out that the problem is more likely than not a bad programming decision rather than some deliberate ploy by Microsoft to pick a particular spot.
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Mac OS X North American installed base almost 11%
Web analytics firm Quantcast has recently published some usage statistics for operating systems, broken out into geographical regions. The company's data shows that 10.9 percent of online users in North America are using Mac OS X, an increase of nearly 30 percent over the past year.
Unlike determining market share by units sold, Qauntcast measures OS share by comparing the operating system of users via the company's "audience measurement services," similar to statistics gathered by Net Applications. Such usage patterns can give us a rough idea of the installed base of an OS among end users.
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Poll Technica: should Apple add HDMI to the next Mac mini?
Apple may finally bring HDMI to its Mac mini in a future product refresh, according to sources speaking to AppleInsider. Better yet, Apple should be introducing improved support for audio in a revision to the Mini DisplayPorts used throughout the company's line of computers.
The unnamed sources said Apple currently has prototype Mac minis with HDMI built in, replacing the current model's mini-DVI port. Such a change would be immediately beneficial to those that would like to use a Mac mini as a media center hooked up to a TV. Though adapters exist to connect the miniDP port to HDMI, Apple's current implementation of miniDP doesn't include carrying audio signals. That necessitates using multiple cables or special adapters that mix USB audio into an HDMI interface, a hassle that HDMI was meant to eliminate.
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FTC crams a major crammer as phone fraud goes global
It's as much fun to be on the receiving end of a "cramming" as the name suggests. Dodgy companies have long slapped monthly charges on people's local phone bills thanks to a practice called "LEC billing," and few phone users notice the charges for months. When they do, it can be difficult to have them removed—and good luck getting a refund.
For the operators of these scams, it can be a lucrative game. How lucrative? The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has just obtained a court order (PDF) against two brothers whose various enterprises pulled in $19 million over five years, nearly all of it from companies and individuals who had no idea they were paying for such "useful services" as search engine marketing and Internet yellow pages.
This isn't your garden-variety cramming operation, however; brothers John and Ray Lin showed up to court and fought the FTC's case every step of the way, alleging that theirs was an honest business and that they in fact were the parties being abused here. The judge, whose final opinion borders on the sarcastic, slammed the Lins for (among other things) signing their dead mother's name to their own legal documents after she had passed, setting in motion "an army of telemarketers who committed fraud," and being a part of the "vulnerable underbelly of a widespread and under-regulated practice called LEC billing."
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Judges: you can't claim "innocence" of musical copyrights
While she was a teenaged cheerleader, Whitney Harper downloaded music using P2P networks. She was caught by MediaSentry, which investigated file-sharing for the music labels, but she claimed that she was an "innocent infringer" under US copyright law. That defense, accepted by the judge in the case, reduced the statutory minimums against Harper from $750 per song down to $200.
On appeal, though, the decision was overturned by a three-judge panel (PDF). The "innocent infringer" portion of law says that "where the infringer sustains the burden of proving... that [she] was not aware and had no reason to believe that... her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200."
But the judges noted that the defense has a limitation: when a copyright notice "appears on the published... phonorecords to which a defendant... had access, then no weight shall be given to such a defendant's interposition of a defense based on innocent infringement in mitigation of actual or statutory damages." That is, since CDs contain printed copyright notices, Harper could not claim innocence of the law—even though she testified that none of the tracks in question came from compact discs.
Final damage award: $750 per song, multiplied by 37 songs, or $27,750.
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Firefox may never hit 25 percent market share
Firefox is on a decline. It may not be as steady as Internet Explorer's death spiral, and it certainly has not been going on for as long, but if the last three months are any indication, Firefox will never hit that 25 percent market share mark that looked all but certain just a few short months ago. Meanwhile, Chrome is still pushing steadily forward; in fact, it was the only browser to show positive growth last month.
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US military surrenders to social media, changes policy
Members of the US Military will now have limited access to certain social media sites thanks to a new policy (PDF) from the Department of Defense. The DoD finally released its updated policy late last week, which will also apply to parts of the military that have banned social media use from their own networks. Commanders will still have the ability to cut down on the use of Twitter or Facebook if they feel the need to protect against malicious activity and preserve bandwidth.
According to the memorandum, members of military departments and all authorized users of the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNET) can now use the publicly accessible capabilities of various social networking and user-generated content sites, instant messaging, forums, and e-mail. This includes YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and others. Access to porn, gambling, or hate crime sites will remain restricted, however, and commanders can cut down on social media use if they feel the need to "preserve operations security."
In August of 2009, the US Marine Corps issued a policy of its own that banned the use of social media on the Marine Corps Enterprise Network (MCEN) due to malware concerns and "information exposure" to adversaries. It wasn't much of a surprise, either: security exploits are sprinkled throughout social networking sites, not to mention that fact that people just plain share too much. If IT admins are uneasy about the totally careless behavior of workers on social networking sites, the Marines undoubtedly had that much and more to worry about.
Of course, NIPRNET is separate from MCEN, but the Army’s Chief of Public Affairs advisor Lindy Kyzer told the New York Times that the new policy will indeed override the Marine Corps' current ban, as well as the Army's older ban on YouTube. All military units will need to open up access to social media sites, and any bans that take place must be temporary. "DoD is moving away from the silly notion of having ‘blacklisted’ social media sites and saying, ‘We’re not going to lay down the hammer and tell you where you can and cannot go, we’re going to mitigate risk as it comes,'" she said.
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Dancing tot prevails over UMG in YouTube fair use case
The mother of a dancing toddler is dancing after winning a closely watched copyright case. US District Judge Jeremy Fogel granted partial summary judgment to Stephanie Lenz last week in her battle against Universal Music Group, putting a halt to Universal's attempts to paint Lenz as having "bad faith" and "unclean hands" in her lawsuit. As a result, the doors have been opened for Lenz to collect attorneys' fees in her case, though other damages aren't likely to come Lenz's way.
Universal, the world's largest music label, had sent a takedown notice to YouTube in 2007 over a video clip of Lenz's child bouncing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy." Watching the (now re-uploaded) clip, it's clear that the music is merely blasting in the background while the video was being recorded and, in some places, the song is barely even recognizable. The initial takedown appears to have been the typical DMCA notice that the labels fire off when they detect a video they believe is infringing, but Lenz pushed back with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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Why the Nintendo DSi XL will be a hit
Is it really time for another version of the Nintendo DS hardware? Nintendo showed off the DSi XL to the press at a media summit in San Francisco, and everyone agreed... it was large. At $190, it's also one of the most expensive pieces of portable gaming the company has ever released.
It's easy to be cynical about the system. It's expensive, it doesn't bring anything new to the table outside of the obvious hardware enlargement, and it's coming out near the end of March. Are people really in the market for a new DS right now? Our prediction: the Nintendo DSi XL is going to be a hit. Here's why.
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Windows XP downgrade lawsuit dismissed
US District Court Judge Marsha Pechman has dismissed a year-old lawsuit against Microsoft over alleged antitrust violations for the downgrade rules it set for Windows Vista and XP. Pechman said the plaintiff had not proved Microsoft benefited from the downgrade practices that it created and that OEMs implemented. Since the plaintiff did not pay to downgrade to XP after buying a Vista PC, there was no evidence shown that Microsoft retained a benefit without giving value, he ruled. "We're pleased the Court agreed that Plaintiff's complaint failed to state a viable claim and dismissed it in its entirety," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars.
The decision puts an end to the lawsuit filed in February 2009 by Emma Alvarado, a Los Angeles resident who accused Microsoft of pushing OEMs to force consumers who wanted to run Windows XP to first buy Windows Vista (or later, Windows 7) before they were allowed to downgrade their operating systems. Alvarado claimed that she had paid a $59.25 fee in mid-2008 to downgrade her new Lenovo laptop from Vista to XP, but Microsoft denied it had profited since it does not charge or receive any additional royalty if a customer exercises its downgrade rights. Instead, it is the computer makers that charge users the additional fees for downgrading (Alvarado did not name Lenovo in her lawsuit).
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Greed Corp: capitalism gone delightfully awry
Gamers have been getting lucky lately when it comes to quirky downloadable titles. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom was delightful, and now we have the entertainingly strange strategy game Greed Corp to play with. The game's plot tells a tale of a beautiful world that is being ravaged by four major corporations ("Corps"). Essentially, the world's resources have become so scarce that these companies are waging war with each other, as anyone in a Corp's way is seen as an enemy in need of extermination. It's a simple story, and it's a little weird when you realize that you have to tear apart the planet in order to win the game.
That said, destroying the world has never been so pleasantly presented. The game's graphics are lovely, featuring cartoon-like units that carry definite steampunk aesthetics; not only that, but the maps are strikingly vibrant as you work to take them over. However, the best part of the game is easily its soundtrack, which features a some excellent New Orleans-esque jazz.
The single-player campaign is divided up over a series of seven maps and a tutorial, and takes quite some time to complete. These maps are divided up into hexagonal tiles set at varying heights. Player-controlled territory surrounding harvester units sinks down, bit by bit, into the mist below at the start of each turn. When a tile sinks too low, it breaks apart and falls away from the map. This mechanic doesn't allow players to sit complacently by while they accumulate resources, instead it forces you to stay on the move and vie for fresh tiles.
Player actions and attacks can change the landscape, too; an easy tactic early on is to employ a cannon strike on an unguarded piece of territory, thereby causing a chain reaction of collapsing tiles nearby. It's a neat mechanic, because it means nothing about the game is predictable, thanks to how the levels change all the time.
Overall, Greed Corp is fast-paced, but it takes a while to get the hang of it. It's got some great production values, and is definitely enjoyable for hardcore fans of strategy warfare. If you're not a fan of such games (or aren't ready to shell out $10 without trying it first) you might want to check out the demo just to enjoy the stellar production values. If strategy warfare is your cup of tea, the game is an easy purchase to make for Xbox 360 and PS3 owners.
Verdict: Buy
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