Liveblog: Apple's October 4 "Let's talk iPhone" event
Apple's latest media event is taking place a little later than usual this year, but the day is nearly upon us. On Tuesday, October 4, Apple CEO Tim Cook plans to discuss the iPhone, as evidenced by the invitation sent to the press. Whether the company also plans to talk about its iPod, Apple TV, and iTunes offerings still remains unanswered, but it seems likely that Apple will try to roll those traditional fall announcements into this event.
Senior Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng will be on the scene to bring you the updates as they happen. The event is set to take place at 10am PST (GMT-0800) on Tuesday, October 4 (see it in your timezone).
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Report: no LTE, WiMax for iPhone 5
Don't expect any 4G surprises at today's Apple media event, where the company is expected to reveal its next generation iPhone hardware. According to the Wall Street Journal, the new iPhone definitely won't be packing any compatibility with either LTE or WiMax 4G wireless networking standards.
According to WSJ sources, the new iPhone will work on 3G networks, including AT&T's HSPA+ network, which the carrier has been advertising as "4G." But it won't be compatible with AT&T's newly launched LTE network nor Verizon's already growing LTE network. It also won't be compatible with Sprint's nationwide WiMax 4G network, despite the fact that Sprint has reportedly made a commitment to sell over 25 million iPhones over the next few years.
Though several Android-based smartphones have been released with support for nascent 4G networks, Apple has so far been reluctant to add it to its popular iPhone. Despite rumors to the contrary, CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly said that "LTE would force design compromises we're not willing to make," including increased size and decreased battery life.
Ars will be on hand with live coverage from Cupertino starting today at 12pm CT (1pm ET, 11am MT, 10am PT).
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HTC acknowledges security hole in its phones, promises a patch
HTC has confirmed the existence of a sizable security flaw in some of its phones, originally found on Sunday by Android Police. While the company says the hole shouldn’t present a problem if users steer clear of shady apps, the company is working on a patch to close the vulnerability, and will push it out to affected owners.
The security hole comes from an application package titled HTCLoggers.apk, which is part of HTC’s Sense UI. That app tracks information, including GPS location, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers, on high-profile phones including the HTC Thunderbolt and EVO 4G. Android Police discovered that any application that had Internet permissions (that is, any application that needs to connect to the Internet for any reason) could access this log, and even forward the data it contains to their own remote servers.
The team that discovered the flaw contacted HTC September 24, but the company didn’t acknowledge the problem until October 3. After investigating, HTC has decided the flaw does need fixing, stating that a "third party malware app" could exploit it, though doing so could violate civil and criminal laws.
HTC states that it wants all customers to be "aware of this potential vulnerability," though it doesn’t know of any customers who have been affected by it as of yet. A patch will be released soon following a "short testing period" by carrier partners, though HTC gives no specific time frame or details on the fix. When ready, the patch will be pushed over-the-air to customers. In the meantime, if you are concerned about your phone’s well being, rooting it and deleting HTCLoggers can solve the problem.
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Physics Nobel goes to the dark side of the Universe
Dark matter, as we've recently seen, is necessary to get our models of the Universe to work. There's also extensive observational evidence for its existence, and various evidence indicates that it takes the form of heavy particles. In contrast, the evidence for dark energy comes from a single type of observation, and we have little or no idea what it might actually be. Nevertheless, the evidence for its existence has been so compelling, and so completely changed the way we view the Universe, that the Nobel Prizes in Physics this year went to members of the teams that first developed a compelling case for dark energy.
So, how do you develop evidence for something you can't understand? The answer goes back to Einstein's publication of general relativity and the first efforts to use it to analyze the structure of the Universe. At the time, the Universe was thought to be static, but relativity suggested that it might end up expanding instead. To balance things out, Einstein added a cosmological constant, representing the energy of empty space, which he set to a value that would ensure the Universe remained static. A few years later, Hubble and others discovered that distant objects were moving away from the Earth at higher rates than ones nearby (as measured by greater redshifts in the light they emit). This indicated that the Universe was expanding, so Einstein removed his constant, calling it a blunder.
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New Voxatron trailer shows off voxels, level editor, joy
We took a look at Voxatron eight months ago, but a new trailer has been released that shows off the current version of the game, including a very slick looking editor. Why just play in a game that uses voxels when you can help to create a game that uses voxels?
The voxel-based graphics gave Joseph White of Lexaloffle Games the freedom to play with a world. "If anything, I think having retro visuals removes expectations in a good way," White told Ars. "If there is no literal interpretation of the game world, you're more free to design things without worrying about agreeing with thematic constraints."
Take a look at the results.
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Five years later, Zune's troubled journey comes to an end
As of today, Zunes are no longer corporeal beings, Microsoft announced on zune.net. After five years of struggling uphill against a flood of Apple’s iPod products, Zune hardware is being discontinued, although the brand name will live on as the name of Microsoft’s media services.
Microsoft launched the Zune back in 2006, when Ars’ Nate Anderson called it “quite a compelling product,” though it showed “a strange schizophrenia of spirit” and its basic functionality was “crippled or poorly implemented”. Later versions of the Zune continued to improve but always seemed to fall short of a complete package.
The Zune branding was pushed through to Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace, where it eventually permeated XBox Live and Windows Phone. Microsoft says that, in the future, Windows Phone will be the center of its mobile music and video strategy; as a result, the company "will no longer be producing Zune players."
With the Zune gone, Microsoft has lost the potential to extend the Windows Phone platform to devices where consumers wouldn't face recurring costs or contracts, which Apple has in the iPod touch. Microsoft could still extend its mobile platform to non-phones, though the Windows Phone branding will make that a bit difficult.
The death of the hardware has been a long time coming, but Microsoft promises that current Zune owners will be able to continue their interactions with Zune services just as they do today. Likewise, any lucky patrons who recently placed an order for a Zune player through the Zune Originals website will still receive their shipment.
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Adobe announces new tablet apps and cloud service
Adobe has announced a new suite of mobile applications for content creators that will allow users to do graphical work on tablet devices like the iPad. Adobe is also launching a new Web service called Adobe Creative Cloud that can be used to sync and share content between devices.
The Adobe Touch suite consists of six tablet applications, including a photo editor, a collage toool, a Creative Suite file presenter, a vector drawing program, a social color palette manager, and software for designing wireframes. Although the flagship mobile photo editing application is called Adobe Photoshop Touch, it's not a fully-featured port of its namesake—it's a lightweight tool that offers a selection of "core" Photoshop features with a finger-friendly user interface.
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RAGE is creatively and mechanically bankrupt, but it sure is pretty
RAGE does a few things right. The game runs on the id Tech 5 engine, and it's absolutely beautiful. PC copies of the game haven't been unlocked yet—we'll have coverage later—but on the 360 the game is an absolute stunner. The engine handles internal and wide open areas with ease, with a solid frame rate and only a little texture pop-in after we installed the game on the 360's hard drive. The racing sections and minigames are fun. We've now reached the end of the rosy section of this post.
Many reviewers went to an event where they had two days to sit down and play the game straight through. I can't imagine being put in that position; forced to play this airless, inert experience for long stretches. The story doesn't matter, and the world mixes Fallout with Borderlands for something that feels both routine and bland. Your character wakes up in a dystopian future, and then another character hands you a gun and tells you to start killing. You go from realizing everyone you love is dead to shooting bad guys in about 30 seconds. Of course, your mute character is just fine with all this.
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Part of placebo effect ascribed to cannabinoids
In clinical trials, new drugs are often compared to older treatments, but sometimes they're also compared to placebos—inert treatments that ought to have no effect. Except that's not what happens. The placebo effect can actually be pretty strong, and even more strangely, placebos can work even when the patient knows they're being given one.
Most of what we know about placebos results from studies on how we process pain, since it's more ethical to give someone a placebo instead of a painkiller than it would be to replace an anti-cancer drug or insulin. Some of the analgesic (painkilling) effect of placebo treatment is due to endogenous opioids, ones made by the body. Now, evidence has emerged that suggests an additional effect results from the cannabinoid pathway, according to a publication in Nature Medicine.
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PhoneGap to become an Apache project as Adobe acquires Nitobi
Adobe has entered an agreement to acquire Nitobi, the startup behind PhoneGap. Alongside news of the acquisition, Adobe and Nitobi have jointly announced plans to donate the PhoneGap project to the Apache Software Foundation.
PhoneGap is an open source mobile development framework for building applications with standards-based Web technologies. The project provides a cross-platform Web runtime that allows application developers to reach multiple mobile operating systems with a single code base. It includes a custom API stack that enables platform integration and exposes device capabilities.
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Sprint goes all in on iPhone, commits to 30.5 million handsets
Sprint has committed to buying 30.5 million iPhones over the next four years, The Wall Street Journal reports. The company, which has not had a profitable year since 2006, is likely to initially lose money on the deal, which requires it to subsidize the cost of iPhones to Apple at $500 a pop. The hope is that it will help produce subscriber growth.
According to the WSJ’s article, Dan Hesse, Sprint’s CEO, described the plan to the company’s board in August. It will involve a long-term contract with Apple for its smartphones—a contract worth $20 billion at the phone’s current valuation. That will constitute a huge hit to the company’s operating revenue, an anonymous source said.
Hesse’s proclamation unnerved the board, but they agreed the company has few other options if it is to remain competitive with carriers that already offer the iPhone. Hesse stated at a conference last month that the iPhone is “the number one reason customers leave or switch” from Sprint.
While the company’s decision to buy iPhones that have not yet been invented seems risky, other carriers may be engaging in similar deals and successfully moving the phones. Even as the iPhone 4 and 3G S grew long in the tooth in the first half of this year, Verizon and AT&T sold 12 million of the handsets between them, and 128 million of the phones have been sold worldwide since 2007.
Selling 30.5 million iPhones in four years may be an optimistic goal, but it’s not impossible, particularly in light of Sprint’s service offerings. The company finished second to Verizon in customer satisfaction (though many of its customers only have pay-as-you-go service), and is the only remaining carrier that still offers unlimited data use. Its growing 4G network can serve that data at a fast pace.
Apple is expected to unveil the first handset that will fill out Sprint’s commitment at an event tomorrow. Stay tuned for Ars’ live coverage tomorrow at 10AM PDT.
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Report: iTunes beta suggests app rentals may be in iOS's future
A handful of code in iTunes 10.5 beta 9 suggests that Apple may soon start allowing customers to rent apps from the App store, according to The Tech Erra. If a rental system were put into place, it could cut down on money spent on apps that customers never use, which could reduce resentment customers feel toward developers when an app doesn’t work the way they thought it would.
A few strings in the iTunes beta code appear to be pop-up messages to notify customers about the state of rented apps: "Apps are automatically removed from your iTunes library at the end of the rental period" and "This app will be deleted from your computer" are a couple of the included statements.
A rental system through the App Store would be similar to the try-before-you-buy program that Amazon currently offers in its own Android Appstore. None of the language uncovered in the iTunes beta indicates whether rentals would carry a price or be free for their limited run.
The text does suggest that Apple will favor the consumer in rental transactions, in that customers won’t default into an app purchase at the end of a rental period; instead, the app will be removed from their devices. When so many negative reviews focus on an app not doing what a buyer expected it to (through either misdirection or misunderstanding), rentals could create a more positive app shopping experience.
But even with fewer negative reviews, developers could still lose out. Most iPhone users never use an app after the first download, according to a (now aging) study, so customers could dip in and out of apps they only need once without any monetary consequences.
The report is unconfirmed by Apple, as the company did not respond to Ars' requests for comment. If Apple plans to launch a rental program, we’ll likely hear about it at the iPhone event scheduled this week. Ars will be reporting live from the event Tuesday at 10AM PDT.
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Nobel Prizes honor immune work, but include recently deceased winner
This year's Noble Prizes in Physiology or Medicine honor researchers who helped identify and characterize previously unknown arms of the immune system. When we think of the immune system, the focus is often on what's called adaptive immunity: the antibodies and cells that are specific to a single pathogen and generate long-term protection. The researchers who were honored with the announcement of the prizes today helped identify a previously unknown system for activating this adaptive response, and discovered what's now termed the innate immune response, a system that's so ancient that it's present in organisms that don't even produce antibodies.
Tragically, it's not clear whether everyone honored in the announcement will eventually be honored with the Prize. The Nobel rules dictate that the award must be granted to a living individual, and one of the intended recipients died three days ago. This is an unprecedented situation, but the organization's board has decided that the Prize will be awarded.
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Kindle Touch 3G can't touch most of Internet without WiFi
Amazon has clarified that the next generation of its 3G Kindle, the Kindle Touch 3G, will not be able to browse the Internet without a WiFi connection. Users will still be able to use 3G to sync book and document purchases, but anything beyond Wikipedia will be off-limits.
Browsing was (and still is) an experimental feature on the last iteration of the Kindle, now known as the Kindle Keyboard 3G. The experiment appears to have failed as far as Amazon is concerned, as it will restrict the 3G access of the Kindle Touch 3G to browsing Wikipedia and downloading books and periodicals. The Kindle Touch 3G’s webpage does not directly note this restriction, stating only that it has "free 3G wireless" that "works globally," but a post in the official Amazon forums states that "experimental web browsing (outside of Wikipedia) on Kindle Touch 3G is only available over WiFi."
Since Amazon subsidizes all Kindle owners’ 3G use, the company may have determined the model isn’t cost-effective enough to support the use of the entire Internet. The 3G version of the Kindle Touch with special offers costs $149, 50 percent more than the $99 WiFi version, so this restriction may make the jump from WiFi to 3G much harder for customers to justify when both models become available November 21.
The announcement doesn’t affect the new Kindle Fire announced last week and due for launch November 15, since it is WiFi-only. The Kindle Keyboard 3G, while it is still available, will continue to have unfettered Internet access through the experimental browser.
We asked Amazon for confirmation of this policy, but have not received a response as of yet.
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Making a photonic crystal with a couple of light beams
We're experimenting with a slightly different article format. The meat of the story will appear first; links within it can take you to a more detailed explanation that appears at the end. Please let us know how you like it in the comments
Photonic crystals have been one of the hottest topics in optics in the last 10 years. This research is born out of a desire to have precise control over light—similar to the semiconductor industry's control over electrons. The current favorite way to do this is to construct devices that have a refractive index that varies on the scale of the wavelength of light.
These metamaterials are made by combining two different materials in a very precise way, leading to all sorts of fabrication headaches. This may change in the near future because a pair of researchers have shown that you might be able to create temporary photonic crystals in a single material simply by shining a couple of light fields on it.
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From Doom to RAGE: 20 years of id development
Both Tim Willits and Matt Hooper got their start in game design as fans, creating maps for id Software games like Doom and Quake. Now, as the studio celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, both are working on the studio's upcoming post-apocalyptic shooter Rage. It's a game that not only represents id's first new IP in quite some time, but is a culmination of two decades of FPS design.
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IBM rises again as its stock passes a declining Microsoft
Hot on the heels of Apple passing Exxon Mobil to become the most valuable business in the world, there's another shakeup at a slightly lower level. IBM is the second-largest tech company by market cap last week, behind Apple and just a hair ahead of Microsoft. It's the first time in 15 years that Big Blue looks larger than Redmond.
Around the turn of the millennium, Microsoft's market cap was three times the size of IBM's, topping out at $600 billion during the peak of Microsoft's powers. That was also the pinnacle of the dot-com bubble. As you might imagine, things have changed since then.
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Uncharted 3 MP launches early, given away for the cost of a soda
The best way to enhance the branding of one of your most popular franchises is to add content from mediocre fast food sandwich operations, which is why Sony and Naughty Dog have launched an advertising campaign for Uncharted 3 with Subway. If you buy a 30 ounce drink, you'll be given a code to unlock the competitive multiplayer from the game a month early. You'll also be able to unlock Subway-based perks and clothing, because you need to tell the world that you find Panera a bit too classy for your tastes.
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Available Tags:iPhone 5 , iPhone , HTC , security , Adobe , tablet , Kindle , IBM , Microsoft ,
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