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Ars Technica (30 unread)

May 15, 2012
16:45
General Motors pulls annual $10 million worth of ads from Facebook

General Motors has announced that it would be pulling its paid advertising from Facebook, saying that it had too little impact. The announcement could not come at a worse time for the social media giant, which is expected to file its initial public offering on Friday.

The newspaper reported that GM spends $40 million annually to maintain a presence on Facebook, with a quarter of that in paid advertising.

Industry analysts have recently reported that companies are beginning to re-evaluate social media-based advertising.
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17:15
Sheets of virus generate electricity when squished

Pressing a virus-filled device can generate power. (The gloves protect the virus, which only infects bacteria, from us.) lbl.gov
Squishing a stack of virus sheets generates enough electricity to power a small liquid crystal display. With increased power output, these virus films might one day use the beating of your heart to power a pacemaker, the researchers behind them say.

Piezoelectric materials build up charge when pushed or squeezed. These materials may be familiar to you: they generate the spark in a gas lighter, and motors powered by such materials vibrate some cell phones. Piezoelectric materials made of metals or polymers require large inputs of energy to build up a charge. Bone, DNA, and protein fibers are weakly piezoelectric, but it’s hard to efficiently organize these materials on a large scale to yield electricity.

To handle this organizational issue, Seung-Wuk Lee, of the University of California in Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and his colleagues looked for a biomaterial that had intrinsic order and was easy to make. They settled on the M13 bacteriophage, a rod-shaped virus that only infects bacteria. One bacterium can produce one million copies of the virus within four hours, so starting material isn't a problem. And the virus neatly arranges itself in stacked rows when spread on a surface.
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17:25
Oracle tells jury "clean room" not enough to avoid patent infringement
Scott Jones Oracle v. Google
The Oracle v. Google patent case is now in the hands of a jury, as lawyers for the two tech giants presented their closing arguments this morning. The closings were fairly technical diatribes about how Android's Dalvik virtual machine works: the talk was about "symbolic references" versus "numeric references," field resolution, and static arrays.

For Oracle especially, a great deal is on the line now. Oracle is unlikely to get much from the mixed verdict that came in the copyright phase, and if it can't convince these jurors that Android infringes the two Java-related patents it has presented to them in a San Francisco courtroom over the last week, what was recently being called the "World Series of IP Trials" is going to end with a whimper.
Oracle: "Clean Room," "Open Source," "Fair Use" are irrelevant
Oracle's lead lawyer, Michael Jacobs, started out by reminding jurors that many of the defenses that would have applied in the copyright phase don't apply in the patent phase. If Oracle describes something in its patent that Google does—it infringes, period.
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17:35
Google Docs' new sidebar makes research faster

Enlarge / Sadly, Google's new research sidebar has no information on the planned Matlock Expressway.
If you're the type that has an unfortunate tendency of mangling popular Simpsons quotes or the words of English literary greats, Google is here to make your life a little easier.

Our friends at The Verge noticed a new feature in Google Docs today called Research—a sidebar that appears alongside a document for quick access to "web results, images, quotations, maps, reviews, and more." The feature can be invoked from Docs' Tools menu, by keyboard shortcut, or perhaps in the most useful way, by right-clicking on any word in the document area. A search bar produces similar results to a traditional query, but with the added ability to immediately embed found text or objects into the document area, along with appropriate citations wherever possible.

For example, an image search for "volcanoes" produces both diagrams of active volcanoes and traditional photographic images. But what's impressive is how the Research tab leverages Google search to provide recent information, alongside historical information or general knowledge data. For instance, a quote search for US President Barack Obama will not only return popular snippets from his 2008 election campaign, but more recent quotes from news reports as well—some mere hours old.
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18:08
Was Righthaven right to sue an Ars author?

This guy is skeptical, too. Flickr user gdudg
Eriq Gardner, who writes most often for The Hollywood Reporter, did a single piece for us. It was on Righthaven, the infamous copyright lawsuit outfit from Las Vegas which crashed and burned so badly that its principals are being investigated by the Nevada State Bar. And it got him sued, by Righthaven, in federal court.

The lawsuit was obviously bogus. Gardner had used a black-and-white image from one of Righthaven's own court filings in a news article about the company—textbook fair use—and they came to him seeking statutory damages up of to $150,000. When I called Righthaven to ask what was going on, I was told that the company had suffered some "confusion" about the photo and that "an internal error" or a "clerical mistake" of some (unspecified) kind had led to the suit. They dismissed the case.

But Gardner now wonders if Righthaven wasn't on to something. In a new ABA Journal cover story called "The Righthaven Experiment: A Journalist Wonders If a Copyright Troll Was Right to Sue Him," Gardner explores the idea of mass copyright litigation.
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18:11
Android fragmentation: one developer encounters 3,997 devices

A map of all the thousands of separate device models that downloaded OpenSignalMaps in a six month period. OpenSignalMaps
One developer can do business with nearly 4,000 distinct Android ROMs, according to data posted by the creators of OpenSignalMaps on Tuesday. While the Android platform provides a lot of flexibility to consumers, OpenSignalMaps' data drives home the point that the small army of device variations can be staggering. Market developers can miss out on a lot by not supporting less popular or older devices.

It's no secret that the Android umbrella covers many makes and models of devices, and that fragmentation is an occasionally daunting problem for developers. To see how wide a net they cast, OpenSignalMaps logged the specs of devices that downloaded the app over the course of six months. This collected info on over 680,000 devices—a significant sample, even if small compared to the many millions of Android users and devices in the world.
The Hungarian Concorde Tab
The developers logged 3,997 distinct devices, the most popular of which was the Samsung Galaxy S II. This figure was inflated quite a bit by custom ROMs, which overwrite the android.build.MODEL variable and cause those phones to be logged as separate devices. 1,363 types were logged only once, and while some were custom ROMs bucking the numbers, a good few were just massively unpopular devices—for example, the Hungarian 10.1-inch Concorde Tab.
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18:20
Pro rugby club enlists IBM to predict when players will be injured

Leicester Tigers in action against Worcester Warriors Sam Dredge
One of the world’s leading rugby teams is about to learn whether the sport, once described as “a ruffian’s game played by gentlemen,” can benefit from the genteel field of science.

The Leicester Tigers are the most successful English rugby union club of the past 25 years, winning the Premiership title a record nine times and twice capturing the European championship. Later this month, they’ll play in their eighth consecutive league final. In an effort to maintain that impressive success, the club is working with IBM to use statistical analysis software in assessing the likelihood of injury.

In the past, Big Blue has used its SPSS Modeler predictive analytics software to help clients like Coinstar find the most profitable location for its coin-conversion machines and show the Memphis Police Department where to deploy officers to reduce crime. It believes the same analytical approach can help the Tigers optimize training and keep the best players on the field.
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19:05
Apple TV could make ESPN another trick in its bag

ESPN's network executive Sean Bratches said on Tuesday that the sports network would be interested in working with Apple to bring a version of the WatchESPN app to ESPN subscribers with the Apple TV. ESPN is the most-watched sports network in America, and a deal with the company could bring more users to one of Apple's more timid products.

ESPN already allows users of Microsoft's Xbox to stream WatchESPN content if they subscribe to a participating television package that includes the sports network. Today, Bratches declared that ESPN (which is owned by the Walt Disney company), is "platform agnostic."

“To the extent that in the future there’s an opportunity with Apple to authenticate through the pay-TV food chain as we’re doing with Microsoft, that’s something that we will participate in,” Bratches told Bloomberg.
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20:00
Judge: Ample evidence that Apple "knowingly joined" e-book conspiracy

Aurich Lawson
Apple is not officially on the hook yet for allegedly colluding with publishers to fix e-book prices, but US District Judge Denise Cote had some harsh words about the company's actions. Cote denied Apple and five publishers their request to have a class-action suit over the alleged price fixing thrown out on Tuesday, writing (PDF) that it certainly appears as if Apple and the publishers did not act as innocently as they claim when it came time to sell e-books on the iBookstore.

The class-action suit in question is the one brought by a number of US states, filed on the same day as the Department of Justice's own action against the companies. (The number of states involved in the class has since ballooned from 16 to 31.) An amended version of the complaint released last week revealed new details in the case, such as an e-mail from former Apple CEO Steve Jobs that implies that he was personally involved in the decision to push the "agency model" on e-book publishers. The e-mail doesn't explicitly show illegal actions, but does show that Jobs was thinking about many of the details that are now being argued in various lawsuits.

Cote apparently took note of it. In her opinion, she points out that Jobs' comment at the 2010 iPad launch—that e-book prices would all "be the same"—implies that publishers had indeed colluded to "raise eBooks' prices and that Apple intentionally and knowingly joined that conspiracy." She noted elsewhere that although Apple may not have had the same motivations to join the alleged conspiracy as the publishers, that doesn't mean Apple wasn't a participant.
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20:55
Cambrian shutter of doom becomes sucker of worms

A sculpture of Peytoia, showing off the ring-shaped mouth. Model created by Espen Horn, image via Wikipedia.
I have a soft spot for Anomalocaris. Of all the Cambrian oddballs, this segmented invertebrate was one of the strangest. The prehistoric creature’s stalked eyes, swim flaps, spiked grasping appendages, and plated mouth gave this predator an exceptionally alien appearance. Anomalocaris was so weird, in fact, that paleontologists only recently assembled a complete picture of what this animal looked like. For years, the various parts of Anomalocaris were believed to be parts of various other creatures. What was eventually recognized as the neo-predator’s mouth was especially perplexing.

The mouth of Anomalocaris started off as a jellyfish. That’s a historical quirk, not a biological one. A century ago, as he was cataloging 505-million-year-old fossils from the exceptional Burgess Shale site, paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott puzzled over what seemed to be a flattened ring. Walcott called the animal Peytoia, and suggested that it was a strange form of archaic jellyfish.

Walcott’s interpretation stayed in place for decades. When paleontologists Harry Whittington and Simon Conway Morris wrote an article about Cambrian life for Scientific American in 1979, they included the odd jelly in a reconstructed Burgess Shale habitat. As Stephen Jay Gould later commented in his book Wonderful Life, the artistically-reinvigorated Peytoia looked like “a kind of Frisbee cum flying saucer cum pineapple slice.”
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21:45
Turn Your PlayStation Vita into a cell phone

Enlarge / Wait—this looks cool, right? Kyle Orland
Ever since rumors of the PlayStation Phone first started circulating years ago, consumers have been eager for Sony to add mobile phone service to a full-fledged portable gaming system. The Xperia Play from Sony Ericsson proved a decent compromise, adding slide-out, PlayStation-style buttons to a full-featured Android Phone, but the phone’s software library remains a mish-mash of hastily adapted mobile titles and dated PlayStation “classics.”

The PlayStation Vita, on the other hand, has a software library that offers plenty of console-quality experiences, but the handheld device has relatively limited mobile connectivity. The 3G version of the Vita lets players use a contract-free cellular connection for everything from Web browsing to multiplayer gaming, but doesn't include a voice calling option that would make the unit into a true PlayStation Phone.

So when Sony finally released a Skype App for the Vita last month, it seemed like a sanctioned workaround to turn the system into a true PlayStation Phone, complete with its own phone number. Read on to find out how to modify your Skype account and Vita to turn the system into a VitaPhone—and for some impressions of why I found the whole process to be more hassle than it was worth in the end.
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23:15
AMD ships Trinity processor, aims for a piece of Intel's ultrabook market

Enlarge / AMD's silde introducing the Trinity CPU/GPU architecture. AMD
On May 15, AMD officially unveiled Trinity, the company’s successor to its Llano line of "Fusion" processors that combine CPU and GPU into a single part. The company announced five models of the new processor: three for "mainstream" notebook computers, desktops, and "all-in-one" systems; and two targeted at what AMD calls the "ultrathin" notebook market.

With a 17-watt version available for "ultrathin" notebooks, AMD can offer up an alternative to Intel’s trademarked Ultrabook. "In theory, AMD has something that can work there, but we'll have to see how it plays out in the real world," said David Kanter, Manager and Editor of Real World Technologies, in an interview with Ars.

And there’s one other wrinkle to deal with: Intel’s pending delivery of its low-voltage Ivy Bridge processor this summer. "The big question is, from a power and performance standpoint, how does the 17-watt Trinity play out relative to Ivy Bridge?" Kanter said. "We haven’t seen the Ivy Bridge parts for Ultrabook yet."
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May 16, 2012
0:00
NVIDIA virtualizes the GPU for streamed desktops and cloud gaming

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiling next-generation GPUs. NVIDIA
NVIDIA this week unveiled an ambitious plan to solidify the GPU's place in high-performance computing, while bringing the blazingly fast graphics processing units to the worlds of virtualized desktops and streaming video games.

NVIDIA has tripled the performance-per-watt of its HPC-focused graphics processors and made them capable of running many more workloads simultaneously. NVIDIA also claims to have developed the "world's first virtualized GPU" with a virtualization layer that integrates with commercial hypervisors to build a virtual desktop platform similar to the ones businesses already use today. The difference, according to NVIDIA and its partner Citrix, is that GPU-based desktops can be streamed from data centers to devices faster and with much better quality.

To top it all off, NVIDIA said it has developed a system for powering cloud services with GPUs, which in the gaming world will let consumers play games on just about any device without bothering to download any actual games. NVIDIA made all these announcements Tuesday at its GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, bringing various partners on stage to show the world just how excited everyone is about the new technologies.
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9:14
Hands on with the new tab synchronization feature in Chrome 19

Google has rolled out a new release of Chrome in the stable channel. The update, version 19, uses the Chrome synchronization framework to introduce support for sharing open tabs between instances of the browser. The update also brings a number of security fixes and other minor improvements.

Google first lifted the curtain on its plans for browser synchronization in 2009. The feature was implemented on top of the XMPP protocol, enabling real-time propagation of synchronized data. Chrome presently supports synchronizing form autofill data, passwords, autocompletion history, extensions, and settings. The new version expands the lineup by adding support for tabs.

The tab support is implemented differently than some of the other synchronization features. Instead of trying to keep the same set of tabs open and active across all instances, Chrome instead provides a convenient menu for launching tabs that are open in other instances of the browser. This behavior is similar to how tab synchronization is implemented in Firefox. The menu for accessing remote tabs, which is titled Other Devices, is integrated into the browser’s new tab page next to the recently closed tab menu.
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10:20
East coast wind grid gets a go ahead

The Thanet Wind Farm 7 miles off the coast of Kent, UK. Wessex Archaeology
Research journals are filled with clever ideas that never quite come to fruition in the form of a successful commercial venture. Technical glitches, a failure to scale, or some sort of unforeseen limitation keep some of the best research from ever having the impact that it might. That's why it was a pleasant surprise to see that one of the more compelling ideas of the last few years is inching its way toward reality.

Back in 2010, a group of researchers proposed an intriguing scheme that would take an intermittent source of power—wind energy—and convert it into something closer to baseline power. The goal would be to wire up wind farms off the East Coast of the US into one giant generating system that, given the region's prevailing wind pattern, would almost always be guaranteed to be producing a minimum amount of power.

It seemed like a brilliant idea that would almost certainly languish in obscurity. So the fact that the Department of the Interior has taken the first step toward approving it this week was a bit of a pleasant surprise.
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10:35
FCC to Verizon: what's wrong with that spectrum you never built out?

The Federal Communications Commission wants Verizon Wireless to explain why it never deployed cellular services in spectrum that it acquired four years ago and is now trying to sell off in order to get a better chunk of spectrum for its 4G-LTE network.

Verizon is trying to buy $3.6 billion worth of spectrum in the Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) band from a consortium of cable companies in a deal that requires FCC approval and has drawn antitrust concerns from competitors. To make that purchase more palatable to regulators, Verizon is proposing to sell off many of the Lower 700MHz licenses it bought in an FCC auction in 2008, and has made the sale contingent on approval of its new purchase.

The FCC sent Verizon Wireless a letter (PDF) yesterday noting that Verizon has yet to deploy services in the Lower 700MHz band, and asked what steps, if any, Verizon took to build out the spectrum. The FCC also asked Verizon to describe what challenges it faces in the 700MHz band and explain the relevance of the 700 MHz sale to its pending purchase of AWS spectrum. "What steps to date, if any, has Verizon Wireless taken to deploy mobile services using the Lower 700 MHz A or B Block licenses (either of both)?" the FCC asked. "Would Verizon Wireless abandon its plans to sell its Lower 700 MHz licenses if the Commission does not consent to the sale of all of the AWS licenses at issue to Verizon Wireless?"
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10:47
American consumers prepared to pay more for clean energy

The average US consumer is prepared to pay 13 percent more for clean electricity, new research suggests. Callum Hampson But is there the political will to match?
The average US consumer is prepared to pay $162 more for a national clean energy standard (NCES) that would require 80 percent clean energy by 2035, according to researchers at Yale and the George Mason University. This equates to a 13 percent increase in the 2009 average annual household energy bill of $1,250. However, for such a bill to pass through Congress, the increase would have to be restricted to about $50, the researchers found.

In a survey of 1010 US citizens, respondents were asked, among other questions, whether they would support or oppose a national clean energy standard that would require 80 percent of the US's electricity to be generated from clean sources by 2035. At random, respondents received one of three "technological treatments" or definitions of clean energy that included renewable energy sources alone, renewable sources plus natural gas, and renewable sources plus nuclear power. (President Obama's 2011 "80 percent by 2035" NCES proposal allowed for natural gas as a clean energy source.)

Respondents were also presented with differing amounts by which the NCES would increase their energy bill—amounts dubbed "bids" by the research team. These bid amounts fell on incremental values between $5 and $155 inclusive, and were presented to respondents at random.
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10:53
Google's bots learn to read interactive webpages more like humans

Google feeds its search engine's index with site data from a virtual army of "bots"—Web-crawling applications that scour sites for content. But in the past, Google's bots hit a wall when they ran into interactive content that was loaded through JavaScript—especially on pages that use Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) to allow users access to additional content without reloading pages. But now, according to Vancouver-based developer Alex Pankratov, it appears Google's bots have been trained to act more like humans to mine interactive site content, running the JavaScript on pages they crawl to see what gets coughed up.
Google has in the past offered up proposals to make AJAX content more searchable, but this put the burden on Web developers rather than on Google's bots—and the proposals didn't gain as much traction as Google had hoped. During the last quarter of 2011, Google finally started to figure out how to efficiently solve the problem from its end, and began to roll out bots that could explore the dynamic content of pages in a limited fashion—crawling through the JavaScript within a page and finding URLs within them to add to the crawl. This required Google to allow its crawlers to send POST requests to websites in some cases, depending on how the JavaScript code was written, rather than the GET request usually used to fetch content. As a result, Google was able to start indexing Facebook comments, for example, as well as other "dynamic comment" systems. Now, based on the logs Pankratov has shown, it appears that rather than just mining for URLs within scripts, the bots are crawling even deeper than comments, processing JavaScript functions in a way that mimics how they run when users click on the objects that activate them. That would give Google search even better access to the "deep Web"—content hidden in databases and other sources that generally hasn't been indexable before.
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11:00
Say hello to the real real-time Web

Real-time technologies are making Web apps faster—and in some cases, indistinguishable from desktop apps. Garret Voight
It started with a simple idea—an online version of the classic arcade game Asteroids, but on a massively multiplayer scale.

It would support hundreds of players at once, thanks to a scalable network backend. It would be real-time, meaning that every player would see every shot and every movement simultaneously without delay.

Unfortunately for the Hacker News community—where an MMO Asteroids "prototype" would eventually make the front page—it all turned out to be fake. April Fools.
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11:09
WSJ: production of 4-inch iPhone beginning in June

Apple is indeed planning to introduce an iPhone with a larger screen, according to sources speaking to the Wall Street Journal. The company has reportedly ordered 4-inch screens from its suppliers, a bump from the currently standard 3.5-inch screen size that Apple has been using since the original iPhone appeared in 2007.

Rumors of a larger-screened iPhone have been floating around for some time now—especially since comparable Android phones gotten bigger and bigger, like the Galaxy Note and it's monster 5.3-inch screen. But many observers—including those of us at Ars' Infinite Loop—have not bought into those rumors. You can count me as a critic of this rumor, but there may be more to the large-screened iPhone rumors than we originally thought.

We're not likely to find out the truth anytime soon, though—the report says production is slated to begin next month, and Apple isn't expected to roll out new iPhones until the fall.
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11:24
Massive DDoS attack keeps The Pirate Bay offline for over a day

The Pirate Bay has been down for about the past 24 hours, and says it has been hit by a "quite big" distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The controversial website for torrent downloaders confirmed the attack on its Facebook page, saying "We don't know who's behind it but we have our suspicions."

Just last week, the Pirate Bay criticized the Anonymous hacking group for running a DDoS campaign against Virgin Media. "We do NOT encourage these actions," the Pirate Bay said, also on its Facebook page. "We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us. So don't fight them using their ugly methods. DDOS and blocks are both forms of censorship."

The Pirate Bay, of course, is also under a very different kind of attack from copyright holders, who won a UK ruling last month ordering Internet service providers to block access to the site. But where legal means couldn't shut the Pirate Bay down worldwide, a DDoS attack has succeeded, at least temporarily.
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11:38
Microsoft will remove the bloatware from your PC, for a price

Preinstalled trial versions of useless software have been slowing down new PCs for years, and Microsoft is finally offering a solution: bring your PC into a Microsoft Store and pay them $99 to install a clean copy of Windows.

The new program is an outgrowth of Microsoft's "Signature" PC initiative, which sells bloatware-free versions of PCs from Microsoft's partners in Microsoft stores. AllThingsD reports that Microsoft is now offering to change any computer into a Signature PC if customers bring it into the store and pay the requisite fee. Signature PCs also include Microsoft's Windows Live Essentials programs; the ad-supported, Word and Excel-only Microsoft Office Starter edition; the Microsoft Security Essentials antivirus package; and the Zune media player software. Users can choose not to have these programs installed, and can also specify if they would like other third-party browsers or programs installed. Ninety days of free phone support is also included.

It's nice that this new arm of the Signature program will do for regular users what power users have been doing themselves for years, but it's hard not to see this as a solution to a problem that Microsoft had a hand in creating. Installing bloatware and trialware is one way for PC makers to keep costs down—a goal many consumers appreciate—but by not enforcing stronger restrictions on what OEMs can and can't preinstall on their PCs, Microsoft and its partners have created a situation where the default Windows experience on new computers can be pretty terrible. It's nice that the Signature program offers a way around that, but it would be even nicer if the Signature program didn't need to exist in the first place.
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13:00
Timing quantum tunneling to attosecond precision

It's possible to make real-world depictions of an electron's wavefunctions, even though the math involves imaginary numbers. UCSB.edu
Quantum tunneling is the process by which particles—electrons and so forth—can exit a system even though they appear to be trapped. Tunneling is responsible for a number of phenomena, including the radioactive decay of some nuclei and certain ionization processes. All of these begin with a confined particle and end with it freed to go somewhere else.

Measuring the rate of tunneling is a challenge, as responses in these quantum systems may occur on the order of 10^-16 seconds (hundreds of attoseconds). However, knowing this information is essential for precision ultrafast physics experiments.

As they report in Nature, Dror Shafir et al. manipulated helium atoms and carbon dioxide molecules with a fast laser pulse to lower the barrier to ionization, so that one of the electrons could tunnel out easily. Once free, the electron interacted directly with the laser. This allowed the researchers to guide it back toward the ion, where it recombined, emitting a new photon at a higher energy than the original laser light; this process is known as high-harmonic generation. Observing the whole process allowed them to determine the actual tunneling time. Additionally, the researchers showed a difference in tunneling time between different initial and final quantum states in the carbon dioxide, demonstrating the high sensitivity of their measurements.
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13:30
Apple ITC win leads to HTC One X, Evo 4G LTE import holdup

HTC, AT&T, and Sprint are all feeling the effects of Apple's import ban win against HTC last December. The One X and Evo 4G LTE, both Android handsets, may be delayed from their May 18 launch date as the devices are currently being held by US Customs officials. Officials are examining both devices for compliance with an International Trade Commission ban on the import of HTC devices violating an Apple patent.

Apple's "thermonuclear" assault on Android began in earnest in 2010 when Apple sued HTC for patent infringement. Along with a federal lawsuit, Apple also filed a parallel complaint with the ITC seeking the import ban. Filing ITC complaints has become a common tactic in patent infringement disputes, as the ITC tends to rule on cases quicker than federal district courts. US import bans are also potentially quite effective since nearly all smartphones and other electronic devices are produced in China.

Though Apple originally claimed HTC infringed 10 of its patents, the ITC ultimately ruled that HTC's Android smartphones ran afoul of a patent related to a feature Apple first debuted on the Mac as "Data Detectors." This is the technology that automatically recognizes certain data types—such as addresses or phone numbers— and turns them into clickable links that perform a map lookup or dial a phone number.
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14:05
ACTA deathwatch: profs call process unconstitutional, Europe revolts

ACTA protestors send a message in Paris this past February. Roberto Pasini
Just when you thought that everyone was content to let debates about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) simmer down, a group of American legal scholars has now submitted an open letter to the United States Senate, challenging the lack of a Congressional approval process for ACTA.

The letter, published Wednesday, argues that Congress needs to review and approve ACTA, and that the Obama Administration lacks the executive authority to ratify the agreement on behalf of the United States without explicit congressional approval. (This is a position that Harold Koh, a legal advisor to the United States Department of State, has previously taken, though Koh argues the authority was granted by 2008's PRO-IP Act). Normally, the United States Constitution delegates authority to ratify treaties to Congress, which can also give that authority to the White House through either an “ex ante” or an “ex post” Congressional-Executive Agreement.

“The reason Congressional approval is important is that it provides the public process so sorely lacking from the negotiation of the agreement itself,” wrote S ean Flynn, an intellectual property lecturer at American University and one of the letter’s organizers, in an e-mail to Ars. “There has not been a single public hearing on the ACTA text and its impact on US law, for example. As the EU, Australian, and other parliaments provide public processes on ACTA for their own citizens, now is the time for our government to provide the same.”
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14:25
Prosecutors: "pedodave69" was former top FBI agent
Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson Law enforcement v. Internet sex criminals
Logging in to file-sharing networks has become a routine part of online child pornography investigations—so routine that multiple agencies sometimes target the same person without knowing it. Case in point: an undercover FBI agent was using the GigaTribe P2P program back in September 2010 in order to observe the material being shared by “pedodad36569."

The case didn't look to be a difficult one. "Pedodad36569" had hundreds of child pornography images in his share folder, and he had a publicly viewable IP address that resolved to a home on Fig Tree Lane in Roscoe, Illinois. But before a search warrant could even be obtained, a separate law enforcement agency gave the same information to the Illinois Internet Crimes Against Children task force, which got a warrant and conducted a search. (Including any variant of "pedo" in your online user name no doubt invites this sort of extra attention from law enforcement, but people just keep doing it.)

But police found nothing—except, we imagine, one terrified homeowner. All computers at the residence were examined, but no child pornography was discovered. Investigators finally realized that the home had an open wireless router and that anyone in the nearby area could have been responsible.
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15:45
Halo 4 Limited Edition, Spartan Ops mode announced

The Halo 4 box art, revealed after many fans pieced a puzzle together
Microsoft unveiled the Halo 4 Limited Edition on Wednesday, which will include several features geared toward broadening the multiplayer experience. The company also announced that the game will feature weekly, limited edition episodic multiplayer experiences called "Spartan Ops."

Spartan Ops, featuring the new Majestic squad, will take place on the USNC Infinity freighter, and will provide weekly single-player or four-player co-op missions. The Spartan Ops mode contrasts with the "War Games" mode, where players can engage in regular competitive matches à la every other Halo game in the series.

The Limited Edition will include a War Games map pack, vouchers for three future map DLCs, and early access to six multiplayer specializations that the general audience will see "released over time." The set will also include a 90-minute extended edition of "Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn," a live-action digital series set to launch before the game itself.
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16:45
Money! That's what Flashback's creators want (but they can't get it)

A Flashback botnet of Macs could bring in up to $10,000 per day, but it doesn't. Symantec has published a new report after having followed OSX.Flashback's advertising component for a few weeks, concluding that the creators have only garnered about $14,000 in three weeks and have yet to figure out how to get the money into their bank accounts.

Symantec's original report from the end of April said that Flashback was capable of generating up to $10,000 per day in ad clicks, primarily impacting Google and bringing in "untold sums of money for the Flashback gang." The ad-clicking component works by monitoring Web searches being performed in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. It then bypasses Google's own advertising on the results page by substituting ads from various pay-per-click (PPC) services. When clicked, the PPC services would then pay fees to the Flashback team.

In its latest report, Symantec says that during a three-week period in April, the Flashback botnet managed to generate around 400,000 ad clicks out of roughly 10 million being displayed. That 4-percent conversion rate resulted in about $14,000 worth of payouts to the Flashback creators—if the PPCs would actually pay them, that is. In a twist of schadenfreude, Symantec points out that collecting the money has been a problem.
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17:25
Paralyzed woman controls robotic arm, sips coffee

Performing even a simple movement is a rather complicated process. First, the brain has to signal its intent to perform an action, which then gets translated into the specific motions that are required to achieve that intention. Those motions require a series of muscle contractions; the signals for these need to be sent out of the brain, through the spinal cord, and to the appropriate destination.

For most people who suffer from paralysis, it's really these later steps that are affected—most of the setup can still go on in the brain, but damage keeps the signals from making their way to the muscles. If there were a way to eavesdrop on the brain, it might be possible to identify an individual's intent and translate that into some form of useful action.

This may sound like science fiction, but significant progress has been made in the area. As far back as 2006, researchers were already reporting that electrodes placed in a person's motor cortex would allow them to manipulate an on-screen object in a three-dimensional environment. More recently, monkeys with a similar implant were hooked up to a robotic arm, which they learned to use to perform some simple tasks.
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18:14
Best Buy's surprisingly insecure approach to new PC setup

Enlarge / Want Geek Squad to set up your PC? Just write your e-mail and password in that box on the left
A basic rule of password-based security is "don't write down your password." A second rule might be "don't train people to write down passwords." And a third rule, which few follow, is "don't adopt password policies that lead to people writing their passwords down" (over-aggressive change requirements often have this effect, for instance).

Best Buy hasn't received the memo, apparently. This past Friday I came in contact with a surprisingly bad password policy in action as I shopped with my brother for his new computer in Scottsdale, Arizona. He had settled on an HP Windows 7 machine and was in the process of paying for it when a Best Buy employee handed him an 8.5” by 11” sheet of paper labeled “PC Recommendation Worksheet.”

Emblazoned with the familiar Best Buy and Geek Squad logos, one side contained a “new computer setup” form, where you can select antivirus software, Geek Squad tech support, data transfer services, Microsoft Office, and so forth. The other side had more of the same—along with a request for my brother’s e-mail and password, right below the fields for name, address, and phone number. Anyone reading this form would interpret it as a request for your e-mail address and e-mail password. And less-sophisticated users will fill it in, no questions asked. But we balked.
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