FDA sidesteps safety concerns over TSA body scanners
The United States Transportation Security Administration has recently come under scrutiny for, among other things, its use of X-ray full-body scanners in airports to see through clothes and to detect non-metallic explosives. But are they safe? A group of UC-San Francisco professors recently raised a number of safety concerns regarding these scanners. While the Obama administration attempted to address these worries, its assertion that the scanners are safe appears to fall short.The TSA has slowly been implementing the use of X-ray scanners in airports (so far, 38 airports have 206 of the machines) in order to see through passengers' clothes and check them for explosive devices. Officials have asserted that the machines are okay to use on the basis of the everyday use of X-rays in medical offices. However, a group of four UCSF professors pinpointed several important differences between the medical X-ray machines and those used in airports. They described the issues in a letter to Dr. John P. Holdren, the assistant to the president for science and technology.
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A console Diablo 3? Blizzard hiring talent, looking at possibility
The original Diablo made its way to the PlayStation back in 1998, and it looks like the upcoming Diablo III may be doing the same. At least, that's what a trio of job listings on Blizzard's website suggest. It appears that the developer is looking for a lead designer, lead programmer, and a senior producer for console games to join the Diablo III team, though whether or not this means that the game is coming to the Xbox or PlayStation is very much an open question.Read the comments on this post
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Beatles For Sale... on iTunes
Apple made a big announcement this morning, as promised yesterday: The Beatles have officially been introduced on the iTunes Store. Their music is available as a complete box set, as well as by individual albums and songs.
Those who were predicting the release of The Beatles' music on iTunes as the 10am EST announcement on Tuesday turned out to be correct. Around 9:40 this morning, the entire discography in a box set showed up on the iTunes Store, as well as individual albums like, fittingly, Beatles For Sale.
The Beatles box set costs $149, roughly the same as the physical incarnation as sold on Amazon, and includes 256 items, mostly songs. Each of the albums also includes a mini documentary video, but they aren't sold separately—only as part of the album box set purchase.
The availability of Beatles music legally online exclusively through the iTunes Store is no doubt a coup for Apple. But who—aside from Apple and a handful of industry pundits—has been holding off on acquiring The Beatles' catalog until they could purchase it via digital download? Most of us ripped our Beatles CD collections ages ago.
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US to free some federal spectrum for wireless broadband use
In its zeal to provide more spectrum to the mobile broadband sector, the United States government will tap into its own considerable spectrum holdings, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced on Monday. "Without public action to free up both Federal and non-Federal spectrum for emerging wireless uses, there is a risk that America may fall behind other countries in the wireless broadband revolution," a new report from the NTIA warns.
NTIA spectrum boss Larry Strickling released a sneak preview about this move several weeks ago. Government spectrum transfers will include some of the regions licensed to guide weather balloons, altimeters, and Defense Department military testing sites.
But that just totals about 115MHz of bandwidth—plenty shy of the 500MHz the government thinks the wireless industry needs to serve the huge demand for data-hungry smartphones.
This new report spotlights more than 2200MHz of Federal and non-Federal spectrum that NTIA and the Federal Communications Commission think could conceivably be transferred over to broadband use.
The FCC recently published a new white paper which projects mobile use and growth over the next half decade. The agency expects 2009 mobile data traffic to grow by a factor of five by 2011, by a factor of 20 by 2013, and by 35 by 2014.
To put it in more concrete terms:
- 42 percent of consumers are estimated to own a smartphone; that's up from 16 percent three years ago
- PC aircard users consume 1.4GB per month—56 times the amount of data used by a regular cell phone
- AT&T, the exclusive US carrier of the iPhone (for now), has seen mobile network traffic increase 5,000 percent over the past three years
- Clearwire's fourth generation (4G) WiMAX service subscribers gobble up 7GB per month—280 times the amount of data used by a regular cell phone.
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From China to Amazon, NVIDIA's Tesla is on a roll
This week brings two major pieces of news for NVIDIA, both of which are evidence that the GPU maker is killin' it in the high-performance computing (HPC) space. First is the latest Top 500 Supercomputer List, which sees China's NVIDIA-powered Tianhe-1A vault past the US Department of Energy's Jaguar machine to the top of the list. China's 2.57-petaflop beast is powered by a combination of Intel Xeon (Westmere-EP) CPUs and over 7,000 NVIDIA GPUs. It runs Linux, and uses a proprietary interconnect to glue the nodes together. The DOE's Opteron-based Jaguar isn't too far behind, though, at 2.33 petaflops; if the DOE added GPU coprocessors to the system, it could easily retake the top spot. The Chinese also hold the number 3 spot on the list, with another Westmere-EP-based system that uses an earlier version of NVIDIA's Tesla for a coprocessor. Japan comes in fourth with another Westmere-EP/NVIDIA combo, followed by another GPU-less, Opteron-based Cray system at the DOE.
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Clues suggest Stuxnet Virus was built for subtle nuclear sabotage
New and important evidence found in the sophisticated “Stuxnet” malware targeting industrial control systems provides strong hints that the code was designed to sabotage nuclear plants, and that it employs a subtle sabotage strategy that involves briefly speeding up and slowing down physical machinery at a plant over a span of weeks.“It indicates that [Stuxnet's creators] wanted to get on the system and not be discovered and stay there for a long time and change the process subtly, but not break it,” says Liam O Murchu, researcher with Symantec Security Response, which published the new information in an updated paper (.pdf) on Friday.
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Feature: Windows Phone 7: The 10 features Microsoft should add ASAP
I've been using Windows Phone 7 full-time for about a month now, and I like it a great deal. It's a very livable operating system that's been thoughtfully designed and well put-together. So much so that it's almost a surprise that it came from Microsoft.But perfect it ain't, and there's a lot Microsoft could do to make using Windows Phone 7 even better.
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Super Meat Boy devs: why sale came first
Super Meat Boy has been a runaway success, partially due to the $10 sale price. Soon it will be $15; the e-mail describing the change was delightfully forward. "Super Meat Boy is on sale for seven more days, and we want to make sure all the fans are aware of the sale ending so they don't feel screwed over when the price goes back up to $15 on the 21st of November," we were told. "Anything you can do to get this information out to the public would be greatly appreciated."
Super Meat Boy
"We personally decided to do the sale because there were already talks about a sale during Christmas that would bring the price down 33 percent," McMillen told Ars. "It seemed like a shitty thing to do to fans who bought the game 2 months early so we just decided to take the risk and do the sale now." Sometimes, in this business, logic is explained to you in a way that you simply can't argue with it. This was one of those wonderful times.
Going into the black was a simple thing for the game. "We are two guys, and the cost of development was covered in the first few hours of the first day of launch," McMillen said. "The fans have always been very supportive, even donating $10,000 to help me pay for emergency surgery when I was hospitalized in the middle of development without insurance, basically saving the game and our asses." The sale was an easy way to give back.
You can read our thoughts on the game, or look up any number of glowing reviews. This is one worth playing if you're a fan of classic, hard-as-hell platforming, so save yourself $5 and buy soon.
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AMD joins MeeGo mobile Linux project alongside rival Intel
AMD is the latest chipmaker to join the MeeGo project, a collaborative effort to produce a standardized mobile Linux platform. The move is a sign of growing acceptance for MeeGo in the hardware industry and also demonstrates the project's ability to foster collaboration between competing vendors. The news was announced by Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin during a panel on Monday at the MeeGo Conference in which an AMD representative was a surprise participant.The MeeGo project launched earlier this year when Intel and Nokia brought together their existing mobile Linux platforms under a single banner. They invited the Linux Foundation to take over stewardship of the project and help establish a vendor-neutral governance model with the aim of attracting other contributors. Although we haven't seen many MeeGo-powered devices reach the market yet, a growing number of mobile device and component manufacturers are backing the effort.
The fact that AMD is adopting a mobile platform that was cofounded by its arch-rival Intel shows that the MeeGo project is living up to its goal of encouraging cooperation around a vendor-neutral software stack. During the panel at the MeeGo Conference, AMD committed to contributing technical resources to MeeGo. MeeGo's emphasis on upstream development was cited as one of the major factors that attracted AMD to the effort. The company stressed that it intends to be an active participant and isn't just adding its name to the platform's roster of supporters.
"MeeGo represents an exciting, open-source mobile operating system we expect to be adopted by mobile and embedded device makers over time," said AMD VP of software development Ben Bar-Haim in a statement. "We are glad to provide engineering resources to joint industry efforts like MeeGo and expect that this operating system will help drive our embedded plans and create expanded market opportunities for our forthcoming Accelerated Processing Units."
AMD's announcement was a bit surprising and seemed almost impromptu in the sense that it didn't feel like a planned part of the MeeGo Conference. It was introduced almost like an afterthought with little fanfare during a panel discussion that followed after the opening keynotes. Despite the informal manner in which the news was presented during the conference, it was arguably the most significant revelation of the day.
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Report: mystery iTunes announcement a Beatles deal
The Beatles might finally be coming to iTunes after all, putting to rest one of the longest and most dragged out Apple rumors to date. The Wall Street Journal now has a report, citing unnamed people familiar with the situation, that Apple is indeed planning to make this announcement on Tuesday, though there's still some possibility that things could change at the last minute. If that happens, we hope Apple has an interesting backup plan.The Journal says that Apple and the Beatles' current record label, EMI Group, were in talks as recently as last week. A deal has allegedly been made already, making us wonder why there's still a possibility of something changing before Tuesday morning. Regardless, the publication generally has a solid track record when it comes to inside information on Apple, so the report is worth noting.
If tomorrow is just about the Beatles, it will undoubtedly be a disappointment for those wanting something more exciting out of Apple. As of publication, our reader poll reveals that most people expect to hear about a streaming movie, music, and TV service from Apple, with only 11 percent or so expecting the Beatles to come to iTunes (and 22 percent expecting something much more boring).
A quick poll among the Ars staff reveals that we collectively think the Beatles news by itself would be pretty yawn-worthy. What do you think?
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Hollywood studios sue over "bowdlerized" DVDs
The big studios are on the warpath against the Family Friendly Edited DVDs company, which deletes the risque content from Hollywood fare for resale online. A small truckload of movie makers have sued the outfit in an Arizona federal district court. The plaintiffs include Paramount, Warner Brothers, Sony, Disney, Universal, and Fox. "Defendants are in the business of preparing, copying and distributing bowdlerized versions of movies, including the Motion Pictures, to which Defendants do not own the copyrights. This constitutes willful copyright infringement," their complaint charges.
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Is your ISP throttling you? Just switch—if you live in the EU
Europe doesn't have a net neutrality problem. If you don't believe me, just ask the Internet providers."There appears to be consensus among network operators, internet service providers (ISPs) and infrastructure manufacturers that there are currently no problems with the openness of the internet and net neutrality in the EU," is how the European Commission sums up a recent round of comments (PDF) on net neutrality. "Indeed, some contend that traffic management actually enables the development of services at lower cost. They maintain that there is no evidence that operators are engaging in unfair discrimination in a way that harms consumers or competition."
Regulators and consumer groups don't see it that way. A group of regulators found instances of:
i) throttling of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing or video streaming in France, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and the United Kingdom; and ii) blocking, or charging extra for, voice over internet protocol (VoIP) services in mobile networks by certain mobile operators in Austria, Croatia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Romania. BEREC's analysis is supported by VoIP providers which allege blocking of VoIP and P2P applications or their being subjected to unjustified tariffs.Sounds like a problem! Fortunately, the EU has an answer: just switch to another ISP or carrier. But can you?
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Researchers extract energy from information (if you ignore the hardware)
Maxwell's demon has haunted thermodynamics for well over a century, since James Clerk Maxwell first suggested that a small demon might be able to selectively allow only hot atoms through a small gate, gradually extracting heat from a gas without expending much in the way of energy. But there's no such thing as a free lunch, and the demon feeds on information: it needs to know which atoms are hot. Eventually, it was recognized that information was being exchanged for energy, and an equivalence between the two was calculated based on theoretical considerations. Until now, however, nobody has managed to build a demon that could help see how well real-world behavior matched the theory. A team of scientists in Tokyo has now made a real-world demon. Their contraption acts a bit like a ratchet, identifying when random motion pushes a system to a higher energy state, and preventing it from sliding back down into a lower energy one. In doing so, it extracts potential energy from the information involved in knowing when to click the barrier to the lower energy into place. Thermodynamics is satisfied by the fact that all sorts of energy gets burned running the microscope and computers that watch for changes and put the barrier in place.
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Poll Technica: what iTunes-y thing will Apple announce?
What could Apple be announcing at 10am Eastern Time tomorrow? iOS 4.2? The Beatles coming to iTunes? A Verizon iPhone? A long-awaited music streaming service? Speculation has been going at a healthy clip since Apple put up its cryptic website message on Monday morning, but now there appears to be evidence that it could be a streaming service.
Summarized nicely by MacRumors, the recent release of iTunes 10.1 contains references to "iTunes Live Stream." This reference is new to iTunes in the latest release, and it appears to be able to handle an "itls" URI scheme. The purpose of the iTunes Live Stream, however, is unclear, with some people speculating that it could even go so far as to allow for user-generated content.
We're not quite so quick to hop on that bandwagon, though—Apple's not exactly the go-to company for social media. It's more likely that iTunes Live stream is somehow related to Apple's 2009 acquisition of music streaming service Lala, and we will eventually see some sort of tie-in with iTunes.
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Facebook's new messaging system mashes up SMS, e-mail, IM
"This is not an e-mail killer. This is a messaging system that has e-mail as part of it."
That's how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the company's revamped messaging system, introduced at a special press event in San Francisco today. The more-than-just-e-mail system is meant to consolidate all of a user's interactions with other people—whether it's via SMS, Facebook messages, or e-mail—into one spot. Of course, Facebook wants it all to live on its own servers.
Zuckerberg started out by saying that teenagers don't use e-mail because it's too slow, but older folks still depend on e-mail to communicate with friends and family. Someone stuck in the middle might find it difficult to manage communications with different people on different mediums—I might have to text my 16-year-old cousin to get any kind of response, but e-mail my 90 year old grandfather.
"I'm always keeping a lookup table in my head of who I need to reach out to and how to get ahold of them, and it should just be two things: a person and a message," said Facebook director of Engineering Andrew Bosworth.
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Google: 'Net censorship amounts to undeclared trade war
Back in 2007, when one of the perennial Greek/Turk spats flared up again online, some hothead had a terrific idea: why not create a home video claiming that modern Turkey's founder, Kemal Ataturk, was gay—and that everyone else in Turkey is gay, too? The result was uploaded to YouTube. Similar videos followed. One might have hoped that such grade-school taunting would seem so ridiculous that it would simply be ignored. But here's how Google described what happened next:"An individual public prosecutor in Ankara was able to block YouTube access for all Turkish users for over two years after YouTube rejected his demand that they remove a number of videos from the site globally because they were deemed to be breaching a Turkish law that protects the reputation of its founder Kemal Ataturk. An offer to restrict viewing for objectionable videos within Turkey was deemed inadequate by the Prosecutor—only the worldwide application of the Turkish law would have seen the ban reversed. Recently, the videos at the heart of the ban were automatically removed as the result of the copyright claim. These were reinstated (though restricted based on IP address for Turkey) when the claim was not upheld. As a result, YouTube is newly accessible from Turkey but the power to ban again in the same way remains until the law is clarified."
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GPS-enabled smartphones putting squeeze on GPS makers
"Would you like to upgrade your car with a GPS?" "No thanks, I have my phone."
That was the exchange I had while renting a car recently (right after I declined an upgrade to a Hummer). It made me wonder whether sales of dedicated navigation devices were suffering thanks to smartphones with GPS capabilities. According to a new report from industry research firm Berg Insight, that is exactly what's happening—separate GPS devices may soon become a thing of the past as smartphones and in-dash systems take over.
According to Berg Insight, the penetration of Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) is already quite high in Europe and North America, and sales increases in new areas aren't likely to be enough to offset the future decline in these larger markets. (In fact, Europe is already on the decline, though North America is still growing.) The firm expects global shipments of PNDs to hit 42 million in 2011 and 2012, and then decline to 34 million in 2015.
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