posted about 8 hours ago on ars technica
Today Google announced it would be leading a campaign to notify users whose PCs were infected by the DNSChanger malware. The malware was part of a scam that came to light last November when the U.S. Department of Justice accused seven Estonian and Russian men of orchestrating several different kinds of Internet fraud schemes. Users were infected with DNSChanger after they clicked malicious links or downloaded tainted software. The malware sent infected computers to DNS servers that redirected millions of victims to websites they had never intended to visit. Once the faulty DNS servers were discovered, a non-profit called the Internet Systems Consortium replaced the servers with the help of a court order. Paul Vixie, founder of the ISC, estimated that 500,000 devices were still connecting to the temporary servers. When the court order expires on July 9th, those temporary servers will be shut down, leaving hundreds of thousands without Internet, unable to have their Web page requests translated by a DNS server.Read more | Comments
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posted about 10 hours ago on ars technica
If you're in Chicago and were listening to Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ) at around 3:15pm today (Tuesday), you may have heard me speaking with Steve Edwards on the Afternoon Shift about how to keep yourself safe when using your smartphone. But if you're not in Chicago—or you aren't one of those weird people who listens to the radio at work—you can still listen. WBEZ has posted a streaming version of the show to its website, and I appear during the second hour of the show (starting roughly 16 minutes in). The topic was sparked by our feature series here at Ars on how to harden your smartphone against stalkers. We wrote an edition for iPhone and Android with the goal of educating those who might need a little help when it comes to managing their own smartphone settings—especially if they are at risk of being stalked by someone close to them. The response to the two features has been great, and I've received tons of feedback from people who had no idea of some of the hidden ways in which their phones are giving away where they are. So if you're interested, take a listen to hear some of the basic points, and send it to your friends and family who could use the wake-up call on how to manage their privacy. And if you haven't caught up on the features yet, you can find more details there about everything Steve and I discussed. Happy listening!Read more | Comments
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posted about 11 hours ago on ars technica
An administrative law judge for the International Trade Commission issued a recommendation that the commission ban 4GB and 250 GB Xbox gaming consoles from import to the United States. The recommendation(PDF) was released to the public on Monday, and would punish Microsoft for infringing against some of Motorola’s patents. The patents permit video transmission and compression on the console and between the console and its controllers. Not all import bans are created equal though. In Judge David Shaw’s statement, he suggested a cease and desist order be placed against Microsoft. It would, "require the respondent to submit an annual report to the Commission regarding the number and value of infringing goods in its domestic inventory," according to the authors of ITC Remedial Orders in the Real World(PDF). "Failing to do so, or providing false information in the report, may lead to criminal prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 1001." The cease-and-desist order is more strict than a standard exclusion order, which would simply require US customs agents to keep tabs on Microsoft’s activities. Judge Shaw also ordered "that Microsoft post a bond equal to 7 percent of the declared value of unsold Xbox inventory already in the country," according to Courthouse News.Read more | Comments
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posted about 13 hours ago on ars technica
Albany Water, Gas, & Light Building Mike Sussman A tiny Georgia telecommunications firm has filed the first formal complaint under the Federal Communications Commission's new network neutrality rules. L2Networks charges that the Albany Water, Gas, and Light Commission (WG&L) has violated network neutrality principles by interfering with L2Networks's efforts to provide customers with VoIP service over Albany WG&L's fiber optic network. L2Networks did not make its filing available to Ars Technica, but in a press release the telecom firm stated that Albany WG&L initially filed a criminal complaint against L2Networks alleging theft of service. Albany WG&L reportedly believes that L2Networks "should have compensated the utility for use of their fiber-optic internet infrastructure whilst delivering Voice over IP (VoIP) services over the utilities' 'internet backbone' to existing internet customers of the utility." But according to L2Networks, the customer whose VoIP service gave rise to the criminal complaint "currently compensates The City of Albany Water, Gas, & Light Commission's telecommunications department for use of their fiber-optic based Internet access." L2Networks believes it is entitled to provide VoIP service to this customer without additional payments to Albany WG&L.Read more | Comments
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posted about 13 hours ago on ars technica
Charles Nutter and Tom Enebo, key developers behind the JRuby project, are joining Red Hat. The news was announced at JRubyConf 2012 this morning and later confirmed by Nutter on Twitter. JRuby is an open source implementation of the Ruby programming language that targets the Java virtual machine (JVM). It allows the popular Ruby on Rails framework to be used in a Java environment and interoperate with Java code. JRuby offers better performance than the standard C-based Ruby reference implementation in some cases. Nutter and Enebo were hired by Sun in 2006 to work on JRuby full-time. When Oracle’s acquisition of Sun created uncertainty about the future of JRuby in 2009, they left the company and went to work for Ruby hosting provider Engine Yard. The two remained with Engine Yard until now. Alongside the revelation that Nutter and Enebo are joining Red Hat, Engine Yard announced that it has partnered with the Linux vendor and will continue to support the advancement of JRuby.Read more | Comments
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posted about 13 hours ago on ars technica
Don't worry, guy... Bioshock Infinite will still sell well despite being delayed into 2013. 2K Games / Irrational Take Two's revenues were down to 27 percent for the fiscal year that ended March 31. Net profits of over $48 million in the 2011 fiscal year turned into losses of over $108 million for 2012. But to hear the publisher tell it, such performance is, in a way, all part of the long term plan. During a conference call accompanying today's earnings report, Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick attributed the company's inability to reach its revenue and profit goals last year to "slippage"—what you or I might simply call "delaying games." He insisted multiple times that putting off marquee titles until they're really fully ready is the best way for the company to ensure long-term growth, even though such delays might sometimes lead to disappointing-looking numbers in the short term. Zelnick said Take Two has been pursuing a strategy of releasing a smaller number of higher quality releases for five years now, and that he's been extremely happy with how that plan has been going so far. "There's no question the market is not accepting low quality releases," he said by way of justifying the legendarily long development times for many Take Two franchises (for instance: compare the number of Grand Theft Auto games in the past six years to the number of Call of Duty games in the same period). Executive VP and COO Karl Slatoff suggested Take Two was ahead of the game in this regard, and that "the number of titles that are out in the market is going to be reduced" as other publishers realize that consumers won't tolerate rushed, low quality games anymore.Read more | Comments
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posted about 14 hours ago on ars technica
After exploiting six different Chrome vulnerabilities, a hacker named Pinkie Pie was able to display this image on his target machine. Dan Goodin An exploit that fetched a teenage hacker a $60,000 bounty targeted six different security bugs to break out of the security sandbox fortifying Google's Chrome browser. The extreme lengths taken in March by a hacker identified only as Pinkie Pie underscore the difficulty of piercing this safety perimeter. Google developers have erected their sandbox to separate Web content from sensitive operating-system functions, such as the ability to read and write files to a hard drive. Such sandboxes are designed to minimize the damage that can be done when attackers identify and exploit buffer overflows and other types of software bugs that inevitably find their way into complex bodies of code. Pinkie Pie's attack came during Pwnium, a contest that awarded $60,000 prizes to hackers who successfully broke out of the protective barrier by exploiting only vulnerabilities residing in code that is native to the Google browser. The teenager was one of only two contestants to win the top prize. He did it after executing a custom-written Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface directly on a Dell Inspiron laptop. It ran a fully patched version of Chrome on a fully patched version of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system. Google patched the severest of the vulnerabilities within 24 hours of them being exploited.Read more | Comments
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posted about 15 hours ago on ars technica
A prototype of the Raspberry Pi camera component Raspberry Pi Foundation A blog post published by the Raspberry Pi foundation offers the first look at an experimental camera module that is designed to plug into the organization’s popular $35 Linux computer. The camera component, which will likely be available for purchase later this year, is relatively small. The foundation says that it is “ideal for some robotics and home automation applications people have been wanting to build.” The Raspberry Pi foundation was originally established to produce a low-cost Linux computer that students can use to learn computer programming. The $35 computer, which is a bare board with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM, has attracted the interest of Linux enthusiasts and embedded computing hobbyists. The foundation partnered with two manufacturers who are struggling to meet the high demand. The first units began shipping last month. The camera component is a small extension board with a ribbon cable that connects to pins on the Raspberry Pi board. The prototype version of the camera has a 14-megapixel optical sensor, but the foundation says that the final version might be less powerful in order to keep the price down. They haven’t said yet how much it will cost to purchase.Read more | Comments
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posted about 15 hours ago on ars technica
elPadawan Did you hear the one about New York state lawmakers who forgot about the First Amendment in the name of combating cyberbullying and “baseless political attacks?" Proposed legislation in both chambers would require New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.” No votes on the measures have been taken. But unless the First Amendment is repealed, they stand no chance of surviving any constitutional scrutiny even if they were approved.Read more | Comments
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posted about 16 hours ago on ars technica
Enlarge / An excerpt from the e-mails unearthed by the L.A. Times. Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson Anyone who has followed the acrimonious breakup between former members of Modern Warfare developer Infinity Ward and publisher Activision knows there has been no love lost between the two companies. Now, internal Activision e-mails revealed through court documents published by the L.A. Times present a clearer picture of exactly how the relationship between developer and publisher broke down. Though they weren't fired until March of 2010, Activision was apparently discussing the possibility of excising Infinity Ward co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella as early as January 2009. An e-mail from that time shows Activision executive Dave Stohl discussing with Activision Publishing President Mike Griffith whether Treyarch could be counted on to quickly take over the development of Modern Warfare 2 as a "Plan B" if West and Zampella reacted badly to an unspecified "proposal." "Is everyone ready for the big, negative PR story this is going to turn into if we kick them out?" Stohl asks in the e-mail. "Just want to make sure we know what we're getting into. Freaking me out a little."Read more | Comments
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posted about 17 hours ago on ars technica
Google cofounder Sergey Brin wears a prototype pair of Google Glasses Thomas Hawk Google is bulking up on patents to protect its new augmented reality glasses project from legal attack, with at least nine new patents issued in the past week to cover various aspects of the futuristic devices. The patents provide a glimpse into what a heads-up display from Google could provide to real-life users beyond what we learned when Google unveiled Project Glass last month. Perhaps most interestingly, one patent shows Google is working on a system to help hard-of-hearing and deaf users detect and interpret nearby sounds. The glasses' heads-up display would show arrows and flashing lights to indicate the direction and intensity level of the sound, and even display the words nearby people are speaking. The patent, #8,183,997, was issued to Google today and is titled "Displaying sound indications on a wearable computing system." The system would integrate a speech-to-text feature that determines the text of speech and displays it for the wearer of the glasses.Read more | Comments
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posted about 17 hours ago on ars technica
Is that an Android computer in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? APC Taiwanese hardware manufacturer VIA has announced a new product called the Android PC System (APC), a seven-inch ARM board that ships with a custom version of the Android mobile operating system. The device will be available in July for $49. The APC includes a VIA ARM11 SoC, 512MB of RAM, 2GB of flash storage, VGA and HDMI video outputs, speaker and microphone jacks, a microSD slot, an ethernet port, and four USB ports. It also reportedly supports hardware-accelerated video decoding. According to VIA, the board consumes only 4 watts when idle and 13.5 watts under maximum load. The Raspberry Pi foundation’s $35 computer, which launched earlier this year, attracted considerable interest from Linux hobbyists and embedded computing enthusiasts. The foundation partnered with two manufacturers, but has struggled to meet demand for the product. VIA could help fill the unmet demand for a low-cost ARM system that is suitable for the hobbyist market.Read more | Comments
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posted about 17 hours ago on ars technica
When covering the world of science, it's quite common to come across press releases with eye-catching titles that don't really hold up when you look at the underlying work. It's quite a bit less common to see that in the title of the research paper itself. But that seems to be the case with a recent paper in PLoS Computational Biology, which starts off with the words "Google Goes Cancer." There's an element of truth to that title but, unfortunately, it's likely to confuse matters more than anything else. The paper itself is an attempt to personalize medicine. Currently, we have a set of treatments that typically work well in only a percentage of the patients of a given disease. The hope of personalized medicine is that, by knowing something about the biology of an individual patient, we'd be able to pick those therapies that are most likely to work for them specifically, rather than just based on overall probabilities. Most of these efforts have focused on cancers. Cancer is a very diverse disease, but it's possible to break specific types of cancer into categories based on the genes they express. For example, some breast cancers express the estrogen receptor and can be targeted by drugs specific for estrogen signaling. If we know that a patient has a tumor that doesn't express this receptor, however, we can move on to consider other therapies.Read more | Comments
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posted about 17 hours ago on ars technica
Ready to hit the beach with Lord Vader. Aurich Lawson Nearly every time I travel—whether it's for vacation or for work—people crawl out of the woodwork to ask me which iOS apps I use when on the road. And yes, there is a certain group of apps that I only use when I travel, but they are quickly becoming essential to managing a smooth trip. When you search for travel apps in the App Store, however, the sheer magnitude of the selection can be overwhelming. Which ones are good and which ones suck? Luckily, I've built up a menagerie of handy apps I rely on. Add a few recommendations from my friends on the Ars staff, and we've put together a short list of apps that we think are useful to have on your iOS device when getting ready to jet. Booking/searching Hipmunk on the left, Kayak on the right I have two favorite services I use when it comes to searching for flights (and to a lesser degree, hotels): Hipmunk and Kayak. I use these on the Web all the time, but they both also have great, usable iOS apps that I access on my iPhone when I'm preparing for a trip and might not be in front of a computer. Both apps allow you to search by all the same parameters as you would on the Web, but the Hipmunk app has the added benefit of including its "sort by agony" feature once you perform the search (this takes into account price, flight duration, number of stopovers, etc.). Kayak, on the other hand, makes it very simple to filter by which airlines you like best.Read more | Comments
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posted about 18 hours ago on ars technica
Sprint has changed its mobile hotspot tethering offerings, dropping one current plan and adding two new ones with higher per-gigabyte monthly charges. Phandroid picked up on the updates in a Sprint community forum thread. The company will no longer offer its $30 per month plan with 5GB of data ($6 per GB), but customers who currently have this plan will be able to keep it. Sprint's two new plans include a $20 per month with only 2GB of data ($10 per GB) and a $50 per month plan with 6GB ($8.33 per GB). In addition to the new rates, Sprint said it will start helping users track their data usage. Customers can enroll with the company to receive notices when they reach 75, 90, and 100 percent of their monthly limit. As GigaOM notes however, it's a bit murky as to when Sprint considers the mobile hotspot feature turned on (based on their statement)—"both MHS and phone data usage pull from the MHS monthly data allowance.” Seems like unlimited data offered on the phone during hotspot usage counts against the cap.Read more | Comments
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posted about 21 hours ago on ars technica
The next-generation iPhone—supposedly packing a 4-inch screen, up from 3.5 inches—is now expected to sport a resolution of 640x1136, according to 9to5Mac. In fact, the site claims to have information on multiple next-gen iPhones, though not all of them may see the light of day. The two prototypes in question are reportedly codenamed N41AP (iPhone 5,1) and N42AP (iPhone 5,2), and both phones have a display that measures 3.95 inches diagonally. (This seems to once again corroborate previous rumors about a 4-inch iPhone—one that Steve Jobs supposedly "worked closely" on before his death in October of 2011.) As some have suspected, 9to5Mac claims the larger-sized screen won't make the device any wider than it already is. Instead, the display will grow in length, from the current resolution of 640x960 to 640x1136. That would leave the display 1.94 inches wide while lengthening it to 3.45 inches, shifting the aspect ratio from the old 3:2 to 16:9. There has been some debate as to whether iOS developers would welcome 16:9 displays. Reports circulated Monday claiming that some devs were excited about the change, but the ones we spoke to expressed caution about screen ratios changing. Would Apple want every single app in the App Store updated for a 16:9 screen, and would developers have to continue supporting 3:2 apps for older iPhones? Several developers pointed out that apps are already supposed to be able to handle display resolution changes, but some have issues dealing with things at the top of the screen (such as the Personal Hotspot bar), so there is potential for complications. How do you think Apple will handle it, assuming the rumor is true?Read more | Comments
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posted about 21 hours ago on ars technica
Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson Coolest Jobs in Tech Coolest jobs in tech: from the pits of Le Mans to the dugouts of Fenway Park Coolest jobs in tech (literally): running a South Pole data center Coolest jobs in tech: hackers for hire Managing hardware and storage needs; building custom, in-house applications; making information accessible via the Web—such tasks are the mainstays of IT work, so mundane that they're generally not worth talking about. But science gives these routine tasks a fascinating twist. The hardware purchases support a compute cluster on the Caltech campus, while storage questions deal with the flood of data from genome sequencing. The in-house software reconstructs the text of ancient manuscripts. And the Web app helps people around the world follow our solar system and the hardware we've sent out to explore it. For the people we've talked to, "working in IT" means working with some of the best minds on the planet on some of the hardest problems anywhere.Read more | Comments
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posted about 23 hours ago on ars technica
NASA After fixing a check valve that caused an abort for the Falcon 9/Dragon launch on Saturday morning, SpaceX successfully launched the combination at 3:44 am Eastern Time today. SpaceX employees were heard cheering on the webcast as Dragon's solar panels deployed, and the spacecraft is now orbiting the Earth on its second mission. Should all go well, Dragon will attempt to become the first commercially developed spacecraft to berth with the International Space Station. As the panels deployed, SpaceX's Elon Musk tweeted, "Dragon spaceship opens the navigation pod bay door without hesitation. So much nicer than HAL9000 #DragonLaunch." The second flight of the Dragon spacecraft has been delayed a few times now, sometimes to fix teething pains and sometimes to accommodate range scheduling. Saturday's launch was aborted with a half second to go; as the engines came up, an overpressure sensor revealed the faulty check valve. This morning's launch went very smoothly.Read more | Comments
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posted about 24 hours ago on ars technica
Oran Viriyincy Recently, a few bloggers conducted tests that seem to show Comcast’s traffic to its Xbox 360 running Xfinity TV On Demand, which does not count against a user’s usage cap (as announced in March), uses a different type of traffic routing. The effect is that the Xfinity TV service has its own dedicated channel on a given Internet connection, through what Comcast calls a “separate service flow.” At the time, Comcast claimed it was serving its Xfinity TV service through a “private IP network” rather than the public Internet. But it's claim that appears to not actually be true. Many argued this means Comcast is prioritizing traffic, a charge the company denies. So what exactly is Comcast doing? Who’s right, and why does it matter? The short answer: Comcast is doing some type of traffic management. It comes down to how “prioritization” is defined—if the company would be found to be favoring one type of traffic over another that would be violation of federal regulations.Read more | Comments
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posted 1 day ago on ars technica
GitHub uses the git distributed version control system originally created by Linus Torvalds to help manage Linux's development as its backbone. It provides project hosting, bug tracking, and more, all wrapped up in a powerful Web interface. GitHub's most important feature is perhaps its trivial ability to fork projects. It takes just a few clicks to create your own version of a project to hack on and develop. Thanks to these features, GitHub has become the go-to place for collaborative open source software development. It's the home of projects such as Ruby on Rails and Node.js. However, one developer community has found GitHub harder to use than others. Though the situation has improved, git and Windows are not the best of friends. After all, git was developed for Linux; Windows isn't anything like Linux. But that's where GitHub's new application, GitHub for Windows, comes in. GitHub for Windows provides a simple way to install and start using git on Windows, along with neat integration with GitHub's hosting and forking infrastructure. The application, released on Monday, is an attractive, Metro-styled application. In addition to the GitHub for Windows application itself, it includes a self-contained version of git, the bash command-line shell, and the posh-git extension for PowerShell. You don't even have to manage any of these individual pieces yourself. The application uses a ClickOnce installer so it keeps all the bits and pieces up-to-date automatically.Read more | Comments
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posted 1 day ago on ars technica
The US International Trade Commission has again sided with Apple and Research In Motion in their patent disputes with Kodak. ITC administrative law judge Thomas Pender posted his initial determination (PDF) today. In the document, Pender states the two companies did infringe on one claim within the patent, but that this should be considered invalid "for obviousness." Overall, Pender's determination supported the ITC's decision from last year, stating neither company infringed on a Kodak patent related to mobile devices. Kodak's original lawsuit against Apple and RIM was filed in January 2010. The company claimed that iPhones and BlackBerrys violated a number of both hardware and software patents. At the time, Kodak went as far as to file a complaint with the ITC to block the import and sale of iPhones and BlackBerrys believed to be infringing on its imaging patents. The company's claim included "Electronic Camera for Initiating Capture of Still Images while Previewing Motion Images" (US Patent #6,292,218)—the specific patent Judge Pender commented on today. In January 2011, an ITC administrative law judge found no violation of the patent. The ITC's commission later opted to review that decision however, and the situation was drawn out further by the retirement of the ITC's chief administrative law judge (and then the corresponding transfer of the case to Pender). Today's ruling is only preliminary and approval from the full ITC commission is still to come. Final ruling in the case is due by September 21, 2012.Read more | Comments
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posted 1 day ago on ars technica
A cloned SecurID software token created by computer, security consultant Behrang Fouladi. Behrang Fouladi A researcher has devised a method attackers with control over a victim's computer can use to clone the secret software token that RSA's SecurID uses to generate one-time passwords. The technique, described on Thursday by a senior security analyst at a firm called SensePost, has important implications for the safekeeping of the tokens. An estimated 40 million people use these to access confidential data belonging to government agencies, military contractors, and corporations. Scrutiny of the widely used two-factor authentication system has grown since last year, when RSA revealed that intruders on its networks stole sensitive SecurID information that could be used to reduce its security. Defense contractor Lockheed Martin later confirmed that a separate attack on its systems was aided by the theft of the RSA data. Last week's blog post by SensePost's Behrang Fouladi demonstrated another way determined attackers could in certain cases circumvent protections built into SecurID. By reverse engineering software used to manage the cryptographic software tokens on computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system, he found that the secret "seed" was easy for people with control over the machines to deduce and copy. He provided step-by-step instructions for others to follow in order to demonstrate how easy it is to create clones that mimic verbatim the output of a targeted SecurID token.Read more | Comments
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posted 1 day ago on ars technica
Jhaymesisviphotography A startup called Uppidy has unveiled a service that backs up SMS services to the cloud, making it easier for individuals, parents, or even your employer to read your text messages. Uppidy was founded by entrepreneur Joshua Konowe, who came up with the idea after dropping his cell phone in the toilet and going through a difficult process to retrieve his text messages from AT&T. The small startup in Washington, DC launched almost a year ago with a free service for consumers. In the past few weeks, the company started selling to the corporate world. So far, a few unnamed businesses are testing Uppidy on corporate phones, Konowe told Ars. One customer is backing up and monitoring text messages from 500 phones, and another is doing so on 200. Konowe said he was initially just going to sell to consumers (including parents who want to monitor their kids’ messaging), but interest from corporations led him to develop a business-focused service as well.Read more | Comments
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posted 1 day ago on ars technica
Interference patterns produced by double-slit experiments. mit.edu The subtlest experiment in quantum mechanics is also one of the simplest: send a stream of particles through two openings in a barrier, and you'll produce an interference pattern because the particles act as waves. Amazingly, this also works if you send the particles through one at a time—the interference pattern builds up slowly as more particles go through. The double-slit experiment has been replicated with photons, electrons, atoms, and even entire molecules. Typically, the particle nature and the wave nature have to be observed separately; if you track the particles through a single slit, the interference pattern vanishes. However, Ralf Menzel, Dirk Puhlmann, Axel Heuer, and Wolfgang P. Schleich entangled two photons and allowed one to pass through a barrier with two slits. The entanglement enabled them to determine which opening the photon went through, but a detector on the other side still picked up an interference pattern, demonstrating light's wave- and particle-like characteristics simultaneously. The key to the experiment is the particular state in which the photons were produced. The researchers started with a laser in a configuration known as TEM01 mode, which means the electric (E) and magnetic (M) fields are perpendicular (or transverse, T) to the direction the photons travel. The "01" means there are two distinct points of maximum intensity.Read more | Comments
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posted 1 day ago on ars technica
The United States Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether a coalition of human rights groups and journalists has standing to challenge the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. The Obama administration has argued that because none of the plaintiffs can prove that their communications were intercepted by any of the government's secret surveillance programs, they lack standing to challenge the legislation that authorizes them. A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected that argument last year, holding that it was reasonable to assume the government would use the new powers Congress had granted it. The plaintiffs regularly communicate with overseas individuals who fear surveillance by the US government and say they've been forced to spend money arranging face-to-face meetings because their sources no longer feel comfortable communicating electronically. A majority of the Second Circuit ruled that these costs were sufficient to give the plaintiffs standing to challenge the legislation. But not everyone agreed. Indeed, the court was evenly divided on the government's request for the case to be re-heard by all 12 judges of the Second Circuit. Chief Judge Dennis G. Jacobs ridiculed the plaintiffs' case, comparing it to a "plaintiff’s allegation that the CIA is controlling him through a radio embedded in his molar." He argued that "the only purpose of this litigation is for counsel and plaintiffs to act out their fantasy of persecution, to validate their pretensions to policy expertise, to make themselves consequential rather than marginal, and to raise funds for self-sustaining litigation."Read more | Comments
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