The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora operating system has a bit of a checkered history with the Raspberry Pi. It was originally the recommended operating system for the device before being stripped from the Raspberry Pi Foundation's downloads page, replaced by a version of Debian optimized for the Pi's ARMv6 chip. But Fedora is back on the Pi in the form of a new build developed by the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology in Toronto. It's called "Pidora." "It is based on a brand new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture with greater speed and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set," the Pidora team said today. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Quantenna today announced an 802.11ac Wi-Fi chipset that pushes 1.7Gbps of data over four wireless streams. The first chips based on the 802.11ac standard hit 1.3Gbps last year by creating three streams of 433Mbps each. (With the older 802.11n standard, the maximum throughput for a single stream is 150Mbps.) Quantenna's QSR1000 chips based on 802.11ac are thus a minor evolution over what was already available, using Multi-user MIMO technology with four spatial streams to hit 1.7Gbps. The new Quantenna chips will be available to manufacturers in Q3 2013, but there's no word on availability of wireless routers using the chips. "The chip is designed for home routers as well as for enterprises in need of wire-like reliability," a Quantenna spokesperson told Ars. Quantenna's announcement said the chips will be "equally at home in access points, set-top boxes, and consumer electronics." Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Google released an update today for its Drive application that adds a new user interface and categorizes items in the company’s signature card-style. A sidebar pops in for navigation. Documents are splayed out in tile form. Get a preview of your documents and view them, one-by-one, in the Drive application. Users can swipe between files to see quick previews and download a copy for offline viewing. The update also includes a “scan” function, which uses the camera to snap photos of receipts and important documents and then converts them into PDFs. After you snap the photo, you can adjust the crop or select whether or not you want to leave it as a color document or convert it to black or white. Drive can also recognize the text in scanned documents with Optical Character Recognition, so you can search for keywords and phrases within those files. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The Recording Industry Association of America gave up on its plan to sue piracy out of existence years ago. Instead of mass-copyright lawsuits, the group is embracing a mass-takedown strategy, sending notices to both infringing sites and the sites that link to them, such as Google. These notices are issued constantly and involve thousands of URLs that the RIAA wants taken down. It's become a giant-sized game of whack-a-mole and the record industry group is seriously tired of it. The RIAA put a blog post up today complaining that it sent 20 million takedown notices to Google last year. The group has sent almost the same number to the infringing sites themselves. Nevertheless, pirated content keeps appearing in Google searches, often on the same websites. Brad Buckles, an RIAA VP, writes in today's post: Every day produces more results and there is no end in sight. Importantly, the targets of our notices don’t even pretend to be innovators constructing new and better ways to legally enjoy music—they have simply created business models that allow them to profit from giving someone else’s property away for free. So while 20 million might sound impressive, the problem we face with illegal downloading on the Internet is immeasurably larger.  And that is just for music. Buckles goes on to suggest that Google doesn't do anything to punish pirate sites, even when it receives hundreds of notices about a site. He even considers the idea that the RIAA needs to send a full URL a "controversial interpretation" of copyright law by a tech company. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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(video link) If you read yesterday's hands-on report from Microsoft's Xbox One reveal event, you already know about what the new Kinect sensor is bringing to the table over its predecessor. But reading about it is one thing and seeing it in action is another. With that in mind, here's a quick five-minute video that outlines how all of the new Kinect's major features work in the real world. Things to look out for: Revolutionary shirt-button-detection technology Revolutionary awful-lamp-accommodation technology Revolutionary ignore-the-game-sound technology Revolutionary head-tilting technology Revolutionary shoulder-shrugging technology Revolutionary punch-force technology Big thanks to Game Informer's Andy McNamara for an assist on the camera work. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Amazon plans to start selling fan-written fiction based on the works of other authors and franchise creators, according to a press release sent out on Wednesday. Kindle Worlds will be a platform heavily regulated by Amazon itself and will only sell fan-fiction for which it has the rights-holders' explicit permission to do so. Fan fiction has long existed at a murky copyright cross-section, where even fanfic-like works that have the strongest case for originality seem to anger rights-holders (see: The Wind Done Gone, a spinoff of Gone With the Wind that was targeted for copyright violation). There do exist cases where fan-fiction is legal, such as when it is sufficiently transformative or a parody. Even so, those arguments do little to settle the temper of authors who feel their creations are being tread upon. Amazon plans to circumvent this issue by having a cadre of “World Licensors,” rights-holders who effectively give permission to Amazon and other writers to create and profit from fanfic. The launch list of licensors includes those of Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and Vampire Diaries. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Google has updated the stable version of Chrome to version 27. On top of the usual bug and security flaw fixes, the new version is claimed to load webpages about 5 percent faster on average. Finding a 5 percent improvement in a browser that's already fast is no mean feat. The better performance comes from making Chrome smarter about the way it uses the network: being more aggressive to download things in some instances and being less aggressive in others. HTML pages generally include references to many other files that the browser needs to download before it can show a complete page to the user: CSS, JavaScript, and images. These can themselves have dependencies; HTML files can embed other HTML files, CSS files can reference images or other CSS files, and scripts can cause other scripts to be loaded, for example. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock Late last year, a vigorous and secretive patent troll began sending out thousands of letters to small businesses all around the country, insisting that they owed between $900 and $1,200 per worker just for using scanners. The brazen patent-trolling scheme, carried out by a company called MPHJ technologies and dozens of shell companies with six-letter names, has caught the attention of politicians. MPHJ and its principals may have gone too far. They're now the subject of a government lawsuit targeting patent trolling—the first ever such case. Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell has filed suit in his home state, saying that MPHJ is violating Vermont consumer-protection laws. Going after small businesses has raised the ire of many. In Vermont, the lawyers behind MPHJ may have seriously over-shot: they went after two small nonprofits who are named in the Vermont complaint—Lincoln Street, a Springfield nonprofit that gives home care to developmentally disabled Vermonters, and ARIS Solutions, a non-profit that helps the disabled and their caregivers with various fiscal and payroll services. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Relatives of the Norway spruce are some of the oldest living things on the planet. They haven't used all that time to tidy up their genomes, though. National Park Service Last week we heard about the genome of a plant that pushed the limits of compacting its DNA: the bladderwort seems to have done away with of most of the genetic material that typically makes plant and animal genomes so large without any apparent ill effects. This week, the genome of a different plant is in the spotlight: the Norway spruce (Picea abies), which also seems to suffer no ill effects, even though it has picked up an enormous amount of DNA. Each one of its chromosomes is nearly the size of the entire human genome—and it has a dozen of them. When researchers looked at what all that extra DNA might be doing, they came up with a simple answer: probably not anything useful. If you're aware of the Norway spruce, it's probably because you have been shopping for a Christmas tree. But conifers (technically Gymnosperms, although the group includes gingkoes and a few other species) are some of the most phenomenally successful organisms on Earth. They've dominated forests for over 200 million years, and members of the group include the tallest, heaviest, and oldest things currently alive. All of them seem to have managed this despite having a staggeringly inefficient genome management style. Unlike many groups that vary widely in the number of chromosomes their species carry, pretty much all the Gymnosperms have a dozen pairs of chromosomes. And pretty much all of these chromosomes are up in the area of two billion bases long, or a bit smaller than the human genome. That size is so consistent, in fact, that the authors think the trees might be pushing up against the limits of how much stuff you can put in a chromosome and still get it copied and shared between two cells when they divide. In other words, if firs wanted to carry any more DNA than they already do, they'd have to start making new chromosomes. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The elliptical galaxy NGC 4150. Observation of a merger between two galaxies early in the life of the Universe could explain the origin of large elliptical galaxies. NASA, ESA, R.M. Crockett (University of Oxford, U.K.), S. Kaviraj (Imperial College London and University of Oxford, U.K.), J. Silk (University of Oxford), M. Mutchler (Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore), R. O'Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the WFC3 Scientific Oversight Committee The largest galaxies in the Universe aren't beautiful spirals like our Milky Way; they are enormous egg-shaped structures known as giant elliptical galaxies. We don't know how they formed, but observations of very distant and bright galaxies revealed information about the formation of smaller elliptical galaxies. The giants remained mysterious. Where one galaxy is insufficient, two may do instead. A new set of observations caught two bright elliptical galaxies right before the act of merging into one that would have a combined mass large enough to make the equivalent of 400 billion Suns. Hai Fu and colleagues determined that these galaxies collided more than 10 billion years ago and that the merger was driving extremely rapid star formation, at least ten times the rate seen in ordinary galaxies. Based on these observations, the researchers concluded that such collisions could be responsible for the birth of the largest galaxies, allowing for most of them to finish forming by 9.5 billion years ago. Nearby elliptical galaxies contain virtually no young stars and are poor in the raw ingredients of star formation—gas and dust. However, based on observation, those stars must have formed fairly rapidly as a group about 10 billion years ago. Such aggressive star formation would pump a lot of light out, leading to extremely bright galaxies. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Duke University A Congressional survey of utility companies has revealed that the country's electric grid faces constant assault from hackers, with one power company reporting a whopping 10,000 attempted cyberattacks per month. US Reps. Edward Markey (D-MA) and Henry Waxman (D-CA) sent 15 questions to more than 150 utilities and received replies from 112 of them. Only 53 of those actually answered all the questions—the others provided incomplete responses or only "a few paragraphs containing non-specific information" without answering any of the questions. Results from those who did answer show utilities are under continuous assault: Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The HTC One is good. Some employees appear to think it's not good enough, soon enough. Casey Johnston HTC appears to have shed several key team members following the launch of its HTC One and HTC First phones, per a report from The Verge. The most recent departure is the company’s chief product officer, Kouji Kodera, who left HTC last week. The Verge notes that Kodera is only the latest in a slate of exits, which, over the last three months, have included a product strategy manager, global retail marketing manager, and director of digital marketing. The first two former employees are now at Microsoft, while former digital marketing head John Starkweather is now at AT&T. The HTC One launched mostly to rave reviews. But the flagship HTC phone found itself, yet again, in the shadow of Samsung’s high-profile Galaxy S 4 launch, just like the HTC One X with the Galaxy S III. While reviewers have praised the design and camera on the HTC One, it appears to not be enough to overcome Samsung’s Android market dominance—the S 4 was on track to hit 10 million units in sales, despite having been on the market only a few weeks. It doesn't help that HTC's golden phone has been hamstrung by manufacturing shortages. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Apple is looking to bring even more Mac production back to the states. Andrew Cunningham Last week, we learned that Apple was looking to devote about $100 million to bring the manufacturing of one of its Mac product lines back to the United States. At yesterday's Senate hearings on the company's untaxed overseas pile of cash, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that the new Mac would be manufactured in Texas. The computer will also "include components made in Illinois and Florida and rely on equipment produced in Kentucky and Michigan.” Moving away from solid facts and into informed speculation, AllThingsD notes that longtime Apple manufacturing partner Foxconn has facilities in Texas that may be used to build the new Mac. Apple is also building a campus in Austin, Texas, indicating that the company may continue to expand in the state. The new Mac is likely to be an updated version of one of Apple's existing product lines—a new MacBook Air refresh looks possible for the company's Worldwide Developer Conference next month—but we don't know which just yet. If Apple were to move production of any of its product lines back into the country's borders, it makes sense to start with Macs—they still sell well, but compared to the iPhone and iPad they make up a relatively small portion of Apple's sales, and Apple has less to lose if there are hiccups. The company has been testing the waters with domestic production since at least the launch of the 2012 iMac. Some of these computers (including our 21.5-inch review unit but not our 27-inch review unit) are (or were) already being made domestically, most likely nearer to Apple's California headquarters. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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After three days of sessions at Google I/O in San Francisco, I headed south to San Mateo to catch another, even larger meeting of creative minds: the Bay Area Maker Faire. Hardware hackers, inventors, open-source enthusiasts, and creators of all manner of DIY hardware and software were on hand, and there was a line of people waiting to see them that wrapped around the San Mateo County Events Center's parking lot well before the gates opened at 10am on a Saturday morning. With only a few hours to hit the highlights before my flight, I took an express tour of Maker Faire to find products and projects that represent the collision of DIY and IT best. Aside from Arduino's big presence on the exhibition floor, the biggest growth industry on hand was the collection of computer-driven manufacturing tools makers, who are bringing computer-aided design into the real world. And based on some of the projects I saw, DIY computing projects are going to even greater heights—and into orbit. R2-D2 X2 A pair of remote-controlled full-size RD-D2 bots patrol the grounds of Maker Faire at the San Mateo County Events Center just before it opens to the masses. Sean Gallagher 23 more images in gallery .related-stories { display: none !important; } Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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jsmjr / flickr Effingo Wireless, a San Antonio company without much more than a website and a patent, decided to sue Motorola [PDF] for patent infringement on Aug. 11, 2011. Four days later, Google announced it would be acquiring Motorola, lawsuits and all. That was probably bad news for Effingo, because even with patent lawsuits sprouting up right and left and the cost of defense in the millions, Google doesn't settle many cases. So it suddenly became quite difficult for the founder of Effingo—a Texas patent lawyer named William Ryann—to get Motorola to pay him for his patents. Instead, the case went to trial in San Antonio last week, and Google destroyed Effingo's patent. A jury found it invalid [PDF] after a three-day trial. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The Xbox One is full of technology and after its big reveal, Microsoft talked a little about what's going into the console, giving some tidbits of info about what makes it tick. Microsoft says that the Xbox One has five custom-designed pieces of silicon spread between the console and its Kinect sensor. It didn't elaborate on what these are. There's a system-on-chip combining the CPU and GPU, which we presume to be a single piece of silicon, and there's at least one sensor chip in the Kinect, perhaps replacing the PrimeSense processor used in the Xbox 360 Kinect, but what the others might be isn't immediately clear. Possibilities include audio processors, on-chip memory, and USB controllers. One of the key questions about the AMD-built, 64-bit, 8-core SoC is "how fast is it?" At the moment, that's unknown. Microsoft claims that the new console has "eight times" the graphics power of the old one, though some aspects of the new system are even more improved; for example, it has 16 times the amount of RAM. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Engadget There have been rumors of Qualcomm's MEMS-based Mirasol display for years now. Once advertised as the "future" of e-reader displays, the company is now showcasing its proofs-of-concept. Engadget snagged a preview of both a 5.2-inch panel display with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution and 577 ppi embedded into the chassis of a common smartphone body, as well as 1.5-inch panel on what looks like a smartwatch. A representative at SID Display Week, where the prototype was being shown, told the site that the displays were merely mock-ups, but that the screen will likely show up in other third-party devices. The Mirasol display is touted for its energy-efficiency. It offers a six-times-over power advantage compared to both LCD and OLED displays, which means it would be the kind of display that a smartphone would make great use of. It's made with a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) based on Interferometric Modulation (IMOD) technology, which Qualcomm says "offer[s] users a convergent display experience with paper-like readability in almost any ambient condition, while consuming significantly less power than any other display available today." Ars Technica alumni Jon Stokes explained why the Mirasol display is so energy efficient in 2009: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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REDMOND, WA—The schedule for today's Xbox event on Microsoft's Redmond campus included time for what was billed as a half-hour "interactive experience." That experience unfortunately did not include a chance to sample any actual gameplay running on Xbox One hardware, but it did include an opportunity to get some time with the new Xbox One handheld controller and revamped Kinect camera. A group of journalists and I were first taken to one of Microsoft's testing labs to check out the new controller. The main point of this demo was to show off what Microsoft is calling impulse triggers, a term that refers to magnetic motors in both the left and right triggers that add a highly variable rumble directly to your fingertips (which are much more sensitive than the palms of your hands). This is in addition to two more traditional and more powerful rumble motors in both sides of the base of the controller. These new triggers were shown off in six simple demos that coordinated force feedback with animation on the screen. The demos encompassed an impressive range of rumbling power for the triggers, from the subtle lub-dub of a heartbeat and a gentle laser gun shot to the rat-a-tat of helicopter blades and a powerful car ignition. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The four lawyers linked to the Prenda Law copyright-trolling organization were slapped with an $81,000 sanctions order, which as of today, they have missed the deadline to pay. They did make time to file a last-minute motion to delay the sanctions, which only got referred back to the judge who's angry at them in the first place: US District Judge Otis Wright. Today Wright issued an order, predictably, denying the request by the Prenda crew for more time. The order [PDF] asks them to explain "why they have contravened the Court's order to pay the attorney's-fee award," which, to be precise, is $81,319.72. It also orders them to pay $1,000 "per day, per person or entity, until this attorney's-fee award is paid or a bond for the same amount is posted... Failure to comply will result in additional sanctions." The four Prenda-linked lawyers who are in trouble are John Steele and Paul Hansmeier, as well as Paul Duffy (officially counsel for Prenda Law and other related law firms) and Brett Gibbs, a California lawyer who worked for Prenda but has since distanced himself from the group. Also sanctioned are Prenda-linked shell companies Ingenuity 13 and AF Holdings, which, as John Steele explained in a recent interview, are officially owned by Mark Lutz, his former paralegal. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Opera users on Android have been able to download a next-generation version of the browser in beta for some time, but today the company finally introduced those changes to the "stable" version of its mobile browser. The new Opera comes with big changes both to its user interface and its engine. We'll start with the engine: this is the first version of Opera for Android to swap Opera's old rendering engine for one based in Chromium 26, the current stable version. In case you didn't know, Chromium is the open-source project from which Google Chrome draws the majority of its code, so both Opera and Chrome for Android should enjoy substantially similar performance and page rendering. For now, this means Opera has become Webkit-based, though the browser will make the jump to Google's new Blink engine when Blink becomes a part of Chromium's stable channel later this summer. A quick look at a couple of Javascript benchmarks confirm that the browsers now share rendering engines—in both Sunspider and Google Octane, both browsers score within the same range when run on the same hardware. Page loading times and scrolling performance seem more or less identical on my Nexus 4. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Virtual reality is sorta like virtualization, right? Plus, this picture has clouds. No, we couldn't come up with a better image for virtualization and cloud computing. Sorry about that. Ruslan Rugoals VMware today unveiled its first public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud product, putting the virtualization software vendor into direct competition with Amazon Web Services. When combined with its in-house software, VMware's cloud provides an alternative to the virtualization/cloud synergy Microsoft is trying to achieve with Hyper-V, Windows Server, and Windows Azure. Like Amazon and other IaaS providers, VMware's public cloud will offer access to virtual computing resources hosted in data centers in four US regions (with non-US data centers coming next year). VMware's biggest opportunity probably isn't in stealing customers away from Amazon or Microsoft, however. Rather, the VMware cloud will likely appeal the most to businesses with big VMware deployments—this is a strategy to wring more money out of customers already paying a premium for virtualization software. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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As our planet warms from excess carbon in the atmosphere, some of that heat is absorbed by the ocean. Fish and invertebrates are responding to warming waters by moving to higher latitudes or deeper waters where the water is cooler, and it was expected that these shifts would eventually affect availability of some commercially harvested species. "Eventually" may be now. Ocean warming has already affected global fisheries in the past four decades, according to a new study published in Nature. By looking at catch statistics, scientists discovered that the composition of species in fisheries around the world is already shifting and changing our menu. Scientists compared the temperature preferences of 698 commercial fish species with the size of catches to develop an index known as the “mean temperature of the catch," and this index was used to evaluate the potential effects of climate change on fisheries. They found that water temperatures rose steadily every decade between 1970 and 2006 and that the mean temperature of the catch rose significantly in 52 large marine ecosystems, which cover the majority of the world’s coastal and shelf areas. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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TerraCom's website offers free cell phones to low income customers; its call center company gave customers' personal data away. Call it security through absurdity: a pair of telecom firms have branded reporters for Scripps News as "hackers" after they discovered the personal data of over 170,000 customers—including social security numbers and other identifying data that could be used for identity theft—sitting on a publicly-accessible server. While the reporters claim to have discovered the data with a simple Google search, the firms' lawyer claims they used "automated" means to gain access to the company's confidential data, and that in doing so the reporters violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act with their leet hacker skills. The files were records of applicants for the Federal Communications Commission's Lifeline subsidized cell phone program for low-income consumers. The applicants' information was collected for the telecom providers YourTel and TerraCom by Vcare, an India-based call center service contracted to verify applicants' eligibility. To qualify for the program, customers need to submit proof that they are enrolled in a federal or state assistance program such as Supplemental Security Income, food stamp programs, and the federally-funded free school lunch program. Vcare and the telecom providers are explicitly required to not retain this data under the regulations of the FCC program. However, the data was retained on Vcare's servers and posted to an open file-sharing area—and apparently indexed by Google's search engines in the process. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Microsoft has at long last provided confirmation that its next generation console, the Xbox One, will not require an always-on Internet connection. The company says that it will require an Internet connection at least some of the time, however. The console will use its mostly-on Internet connection to perform system management tasks such as downloading updates in the background, backing up game saves to cloud storage, and synchronizing things like the TV shows or movies that you're watching between consoles so that you can start watching a film on one device and pick up where you left off on another. Games will also be required to be installed to the hard disk and won't need optical media to play. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Apple CEO Tim Cook Chris Foresman There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International (AOI), which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), who chairs the Senate subcommittee where Cook testified, opened the proceedings today by suggesting that Apple has avoided paying $9 billion in taxes with strategies like those seen at the Irish subsidiaries. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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