When Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's home was raided in January 2012, US authorities were hoping they'd see him stateside, in court, pretty quickly. It hasn't worked out that way. Dotcom has been smiling on magazine covers and throwing unusual parties to herald his new cloud storage service, Mega. The legal action moves ahead, however, with the US keeping Megaupload under indictment wit its assets frozen, as arguments over Dotcom's extradition move forward. Last word on the extradition trial was that it had been delayed until August 2013. In order to mount what they call a proper defense to the extradition claims, Dotcom's lawyers have been asking to see the US evidence against their client. So far, they've been denied; New Zealand government lawyers have been arguing, on behalf of the US, that he should not be given the right to see those documents and that the extradition issue should be decided without lengthy discovery. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Over half of Americans believe that there’s considerable disagreement among climate scientists about human-caused climate change—perhaps because they've heard that from industry advocacy campaigns and politicians. With so much controversy in the media many assume that the same controversy must exist in the scientific community. In most situations people agree that it’s sensible to go with the majority of relevant experts whether that's in accepting that protons are real or a given medical treatment is effective. Those decisions depend critically on an accurate understanding of expert consensus. Several attempts have been made to shine a light on expert opinions relating to global warming. One such study surveyed about 1,000 active climate scientists, finding that 97 percent of them accepted the evidence for the consensus position that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are largely responsible for the warming observed over the last century. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Bell Labs shut down in 2006. Today, Alcatel-Lucent uses patents that originated at the labs to file lawsuits. Lawrence Aberle / Wikipedia In 2011, Alcatel-Lucent had American e-commerce on the ropes. The French telecom had sued eight big retailers and Intuit, saying that their e-commerce operations infringed Alcatel patents; one by one, they were folding. Kmart, QVC, Lands' End, and Intuit paid up at various stages of the litigation. Just before trial began, Zappos, Sears, and Amazon also settled. That left two companies holding the bag: Overstock.com, and Newegg, a company whose top lawyer had vowed not to ever settle with patent trolls.  Then things started going badly for the plaintiff. Very badly. Instead of convincing the East Texas jury to hand Alcatel the tens of millions they were asking for—$12 million from Newegg alone—they got a verdict of non-infringement. And as for the one patent they had argued throughout trial was so key to modern e-commerce, US Patent No. 5,649,131—the jury invalidated its claims. Alcatel-Lucent was scrambling. The company's patent-licensing operations were contentious but lucrative, and it surely had plans to move on from those eight heavyweights to sue many more retailers. The '131 patent, titled simply "Communications Protocol" and related to "object identifiers," was its crown jewel. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Riot Games founders and League of Legends creators Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill have encountered bad behavior in massively multiplayer online games since the days of Ultima Online and EverQuest. In all that time, the typical moderator response to the all-too-common racial epithets, homophobic remarks, and bullying that borders on psychological abuse in MMOs has been to simply ban the players and move on. League of Legends definitely could have afforded to go the same route, bleeding off a few bad apples from its 12 million daily players and 32 million active monthly players (as of late 2012) without really affecting the bottom line. But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn’t an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference. Prior to the launch of the formal initiative, Riot introduced "the Tribunal" to League of Legends in May of 2011. The Tribunal is basically a community-based court system where the defendants are players who have a large number of reports filed against them by other players. League players can log in to the Tribunal and see the cases that have been created against those players, viewing evidence in the form of sample chat logs and commentary from the players who filed the reports. Read 30 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Google wants your applications and data on its servers. At the Google I/O conference today, Google's Cloud Platform team introduced new public services and tweaks to existing services based on the compute and data storage infrastructure that supports Google's search engine and other applications. Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president of technical infrastructure, unveiled the changes during a developer session on the Google Cloud Platform. The change that got the most applause from the developer audience was the expansion of Google's App Engine service to support applications written in the PHP scripting language. Google's announcement that it would be opening up its Cloud Datastore to applications running anywhere—not just in Google's cloud—got love from the audience too. All of the changes make Google's public services much more competitive and directly comparable to Amazon Web Services and other public cloud infrastructure providers, and open up Google's infrastructure to a much larger audience. With tight integration into Android development tools and the rest of Google's ecosystem, the services could help Google become more of a one-stop shop for mobile and web app developers. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Wikipedia Hackers have compromised accounts belonging to maintainers of the open-source ZPanel after a team member supporting the Web hosting control panel called a critic a "fucken little know it all." The ZPanel site went completely down after the incident and remained down at time of writing. ZPanel support member Nigel Caldwell made the comment in the site's official forums and it was directed at a user named joepie91. Shortly beforehand, the Netherlands-based software developer—whose real name is Sven Slootweg—claimed that websites using ZPanel in combination with certain modules were vulnerable to exploits that allowed attackers to remotely execute malicious code. Slootweg directed his statement at Caldwell, aka PS2Guy, after the support member left a comment saying ZPanel "is more secure than panels that you pay good money for." Caldwell also said users have "got more chance of someone hacking your Operating System than the control panel that sits on it." In his response, Slootweg claimed there was an "arbitrary code execution and root escalation vulnerability in the current version of ZPanel." To support this, Slootweg provided an example line of code he said could be inserted into a main ZPanel template to trigger the vulnerability. Last month, Slootweg disclosed a ZPanel vulnerability here. Two weeks ago, he stepped up his criticism after claiming the vulnerability had gone unfixed. "I find it shameful that I even have to post here to point this out, to prevent someone from putting themselves at risk," Slootweg wrote in Wednesday's post on the ZPanel forum. "This should be the responsibility of the ZPanel team." Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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A profile decked out with the spoils of a trading card collection. Cool, but go back to the part about coupons? Steam Steam will release a new beta feature within its service called Steam Trading Cards according to an announcement from the company. The trading cards integrate with a handful of classic Valve titles at launch, and players that collect the cards will be able to use them to earn coupons as well as profile backgrounds and other items to augment their Steam experience. The launch titles that will generate trading cards to collect include Don't Starve, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Team Fortress 2, Portal 2 and Half-Life 2. When players get a particular set of cards they can craft them into a game badge to get “marketable items” like emoticons, profile backgrounds, and coupons for things like game discounts or DLC. The badges can then be upgraded, or “leveled up,” by collecting the same set again. The info page states that half of any card set is dropped during game play while the other half is “earned through collecting prowess.” Badges contribute to a player’s “Steam Level,” and as that number rises, players get account-bound items including extra friend list slots. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Last week, Microsoft released a YouTube client for Windows Phone that gave users of Redmond's smartphone platform a rich, capable YouTube experience that didn't depend on using the YouTube Mobile site. Though the app included account support, playlists, commenting, and most other aspects of YouTube, there's one thing it was missing—advertising. It also had two features it shouldn't have had—the ability to download videos and the ability to play videos that the creators have blocked from mobile devices. As a result, Google sent Microsoft a cease-and-desist demand ordering the company to stop distributing the application by May 22nd. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Very few experiments have changed the way we perceive our Universe, but the Kepler exoplanet survey telescope is one such experiment. Simply by monitoring a single patch of the sky continuously, it provided a new understanding of how many planets exist in the galaxy. Since its launch in 2009, Kepler identified 115 exoplanets with over 2,700 other potential planet candidates—including a number that are comparable in size to Earth, or orbiting within the habitable zone where liquid water might exist. However, Kepler is an orbiting telescope, unreachable by spacecraft for repairs. Today, NASA announced that a reaction wheel—required to keep the telescope pointed steadily in one direction—ceased functioning. This is the second reaction wheel failure, meaning Kepler can't continue to monitor the same stars and their exoplanets it has watched since 2009. The Kepler engineering team had been anticipating this problem for some months, so this news was not unexpected. NASA associate administrator John Grunsfeld mentioned hope that engineers could restore communication with the control system managing the reaction wheel, but the fact that that this state of failure has persisted for some days indicates how faint the hope is. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The business end of a bladderwort, ready to suck in prey. Enrique Ibarra-Laclette, Claudia Anahí Pérez-Torres and Paulina Lozano-Sotomayor. Over the weekend Nature released a paper that describes the genome of a fascinating creature with a rather unglamorous name: the bladderwort. These plants live in swampy or liquid environments and find it hard to get sufficient nutrients there, so in order to survive the plants have turned carnivorous. The bladders that give the group of related species its name are actually feeding organs. When an organism brushes up against their triggers, the bladders swell by sucking in the surrounding water, along with any organisms it carries. They then seal off, allowing the plant to digest its prey. The oddities continue at the molecular level. The genome of this bladderwort, Utricularia gibba, contains more genes than are found in the human genome (something common in plants). But it carries them all in a compact genome that's only a bit over 2 percent of the size of the human version. It does this largely by getting rid of just about everything that could possibly be considered superfluous—which may tell us important things about whether most of the DNA we carry really is superfluous. First, the details, then some perspective. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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A false-color Hubble image of Neptune, showing the strong band structure in the atmosphere, where winds may exceed 300 meters per second. Lawrence A. Sromovsky (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and NASA/ESA The icy giant worlds Uranus and Neptune are the least studied planets in the Solar System. Of all the space probes, only Voyager 2 visited them, and their great distance from the Sun (and therefore Earth) makes them difficult to study with ground-based telescopes. As a result, many aspects of the planets are mysterious, including the strong winds in their atmospheres. A new study of data from Voyager 2 and the Hubble Space Telescope may have demonstrated that the weather on Uranus and Neptune is confined to a relatively thin layer of atmosphere. Yohai Kaspi and colleagues analyzed variations in the planets' gravitational fields, which are affected in a small way by atmospheric fluctuations. They compared various models of both the atmosphere and interior, and determined the region containing the strong winds comprised a very tiny fraction of the planets' mass: 0.2 percent or less. However, they stressed that the ultimate cause of the winds probably lies in the planets' warm interiors, especially on Neptune. As with Jupiter and Saturn, the atmospheres on Uranus and Neptune separate into zones, wide bands where the prevailing winds blow in the same direction. On all four worlds, the zones alternate directions, with the winds blowing the same direction as the planets' rotation in one zone and in the opposite direction in the neighboring zone. Neptune's measured wind velocities can top -300 meters/second (-670 mph, where the negative indicates a direction opposite to the planet's rotation) in the equatorial zone, while Uranus achieves the still-impressive but more sedate 200 m/s at tropical latitudes. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Google has announced a new version of its Maps application for mobile, as well as new ways of filling out its Google Maps. At the Google I/O conference Wednesday, Google outlined several improvements to both the desktop and mobile versions of its Maps app and a new user-contribution feature called Map Maker. Map Maker will allow users to add their own data, which Google may then incorporate. The new version of Google Maps will allow users to zoom in on maps and see 3D renderings of buildings, in addition to searching for locations they may want to travel to. Users will now be able to see whether their friends have rated places using a new five-point rating scale that will be introduced across all Google Maps incarnations. The partnership with Zagat ratings and reviews will persist into the new version alongside the five-point ratings. Google Offers will now be integrated within Maps, offering users discounts from within the app, but at launch it will only be integrated with partner brands. The new Maps will also use live coverage of "incidents from around the world" that will allow users to see news updates in context in real time. Dynamic rerouting in traffic view will help users avoid traffic snafus. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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During its Keynote today, Google announced new features coming to its flagship search function—you know, that thing we all started using Google for. VP Amit Singhal spent some time discussing what Google's search functionality will eventually morph into. Google's strategy is summarized by three words: answer, converse, and anticipate. Singhal explained that many of the pieces of these upcoming changes can already be seen in products that Google has recently introduced—namely, Google Knowledge Graph and Google Now, with perhaps a splash of Google Glass, too. Answer: Knowledge Graph Last year, Google launched Knowledge Graph. The intent was to let Google move beyond simply locating keywords to begin understanding real-world entities (people, places, and things) and the relationship between them. Two example questions Singhal cited as questions Knowledge Graph was designed to answer are "What are the movies by J.J. Abrams?" and "What's the release date of Star Trek: Into Darkness?" Google has over 570 million connected entities in its Knowledge Graph right now. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Today Google removed the mystery surrounding “Babel,” the possibly ironically codenamed software and cloud service that integrates many of the chat and communications applications spread across Google’s various app and service families. BabeI, now officially branded as part of Hangouts, integrates the Hangout video chat service of Google+ and Messenger text-based chat with Google’s “legacy” Google Talk chat tool and the Gmail inbox. Until now, the Google+ communications tools have stood alone from Google Talk, creating a schism between new adopters and those using Google's older platform. Messenger, the chat tool of the Google+ mobile app, has had no connection to the much larger universe of Google Talk users. And Google has lagged behind other messaging tools, such as Apple's iMessage platform, in its integration of photo sharing in chat. Hangouts will now allow users to archive chats as they have been able to do with Google Talk. Google described the conversations as "long-lasting" and compared them to being in the same room with your conversation partners. Hangouts includes photo sharing and a new extended collection of emoticons and other graphic message elements, elements that will be archived alongside text. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Rejoice, PS3 racing fans, Polyphony Digital has some news for you. That’s right—there’s a new installment of Gran Turismo, the world’s most popular console-racing franchise, and it’s (allegedly) coming in time for the holidays. Earlier today at the UK’s Silverstone race circuit, Sony held a "15 years of Gran Turismo” event where it announced Gran Turismo 6 is on its way, and despite speculation that it might be a PS4 title, it’s going to be a PS3 game. All the existing cars and tracks in GT5 will carry over to GT6, which gains another seven new locations (including Silverstone), as well as roughly 200 more cars. Polyphony Digital has also partnered with the tire company Yokohama and suspension makers KW Automotive to create a new physics engine, something that the game sorely needed after its Xbox rival, Forza Motorsport, did the same with Pirelli. The game will also feature "connectivity with… smartphones and tablets for social and community functions," although there appear to be scant few details on what that actually means in practice. Sony also promises monthly DLC updates with new cars and tracks, although you'll forgive me if I’m somewhat skeptical based on past performance. I’ll also admit that I'm not sure if I believe the promised 2013 launch date, given that we waited six long years for the underwhelming GT5, which has improved over time but still, in my opinion, remains the second-best console racer on the market. That said, I’m also very much looking forward to getting my hands on the new game to see how one of the most iconic gaming franchises has responded to no longer being top dog. If the graphics in the trailer are anything to go by, it’s going to be even more visually stunning than GT5 (check out the rendering of the KTM X-bow at ~1:05). So come on, Polyphony Digital, knock my socks off! Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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Apple's iBooks app. Apple Apple was the "ringmaster" in a conspiracy to fix the prices of e-books at rates higher than those charged by Amazon, US officials said yesterday in court documents. The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed suit last year against Apple and six e-book publishers: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, Pearson, and Simon & Schuster. The trial is scheduled to begin June 3 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Apple has denied being part of any conspiracy, but the government's proposed conclusions of law (PDF) include an e-mail Steve Jobs sent to James Murdoch of HarperCollins' owner News Corp., in which Jobs said HarperCollins should "[t]hrow in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream e-books market at $12.99 and $14.99.” The government also noted that Jobs "admitted to his biographer that Apple 'told the publishers "We’ll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30%, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that is what you want anyway. But we also asked for a guarantee that if anybody else is selling the books cheaper than we are, then we can sell them at the lower price too.'" Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Google showed off a Samsung Galaxy S 4 running stock Android 4.2 this morning at the Google I/O keynote. Stripped of the extra Samsung interface bits, the S 4 drew applause from the developer-heavy audience; they applauded even harder when Google VP Hugo Barra announced that the device would deliver to users the same software experience as a Nexus device, including timely Android updates. The Google-ified S 4 will ship unlocked, with the capability to function in the US on AT&T and T-Mobile's cellular networks with full LTE support. It will include 16GB of flash and an SD card slot to expand its on-board storage. The smartphone will be available directly from Google via the Google Play store starting on June 26 for $649. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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Google announced a handful of new developer tools at its I/O conference Wednesday in San Francisco. Among the handy new tools are Android Studio, which allows developers to view and tinker with their app rendered at different screen sizes and resolutions; new dev console features like app performance analysis; and Google Play game services, which provide a multiplayer experience and player matching within apps. Android Studio, which is a new IDE based on IntelliJ, will give developers a bit more flexibility in how they create their apps. At the I/O keynote, the Android Studio demo showed the interface’s ability to render apps at various screen sizes (only Nexus devices were used) and view what the app looks like in different (spoken) languages. In addition to Android Studio, Google also added five new features to the dev console announced last year. The dev console can now provide optimization tips, including how the app is performing in the Google Play store and ways to improve its performance. The dev console will also add an option for professional translation services, referral tracking to see what types of ads are the most effective within the app, and revenue graphs that can break numbers down by country. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Google announced a new music subscription service that integrates with Google Play at its Google I/O conference Wednesday. The service, called Google Play Music All Access, is offered on demand with a catalog of content that users can play and organize as they choose, similar in offering to popular streaming services Rdio and Spotify. The service can show personalized recommendations and will also offer featured playlists curated by "music editors." Chris Yerga, the engineering director for Android, noted that anything the user can see, they can "immediately start playing," and if the user likes the song, they can start a radio station based off of the track. The My Library section of the app includes personal music (presumably local tracks and those not acquired via the Google Play store) as well as anything discovered and added from All Access. Yerga emphasized the app's ability to make music recommendations, and will offer top albums by genre as well as "expert power recommendations." Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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One of the first things announced today during the Google I/O conference's keynote was a bump to Google Play Services, the SDK that lets developers take advantage of Google services in their apps. The service gained a number of updated and new APIs. First up is version 2 of the Google Maps Android, which lets developers build Google Maps functionality directly into apps. Next are three location-related APIs: Fused Location Provider, Geofencing, and Activity Recognition. Fused Location Provider takes advantage of an Android device's extra sensors to quickly figure out the phone's location. According to Google, it's faster to acquire location, it's more accurate, and it uses less power than previous location services (Google says the new mode uses less than 1 percent of battery per hour). Geofencing gives app developers a standardized method to define up to 100 "fences" around areas and trigger actions when the device enters or leaves the area. Finally, Activity Recognition uses the device's accelerometer data and a number of machine-learning classifiers to let developers understand whether a user is walking, driving, or cycling with the Android device. It does not use GPS. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Wikipedia For years, the Linux operating system has contained a high-severity vulnerability that gives untrusted users with restricted accounts nearly unfettered "root" access over machines, including servers running in shared Web hosting facilities and other sensitive environments. Surprisingly, most users remain wide open even now, more than a month after maintainers of the open-source OS quietly released an update that patched the gaping hole. The severity of the bug, which resides in the Linux kernel's "perf," or performance counters subsystem, didn't become clear until Tuesday, when attack code exploiting the vulnerability became publicly available (note: some content on this site is not considered appropriate in many work environments). The new script can be used to take control of servers operated by many shared Web hosting providers, where dozens or hundreds of people have unprivileged accounts on the same machine. Hackers who already have limited control over a Linux machine—for instance, by exploiting a vulnerability in a desktop browser or a Web application—can also use the bug to escalate their privileges to root. The flaw affects versions of the Linux kernel from 2.6.37 to 3.8.8 that have been compiled with the CONFIG_PERF_EVENTS kernel configuration option. "Because there's a public exploit already available, an attacker would simply need to download and run this exploit on a target machine," Dan Rosenberg, a senior security researcher at Azimuth Security, told Ars in an e-mail. "The exploit may not work out-of-the-box on every affected machine, in which case it would require some fairly straightforward tweaks (for someone with exploit development experience) to work properly." Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Zach Copley The Department of Homeland Security is investigating Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, for violating laws on US money exchange and money transfers—and it's grabbing the exchange's money in the process. DHS officials refused to comment on the ongoing investigation, but they did provide a copy of the warrant that was used yesterday to seize funds that Mt. Gox had in Dwolla, a money transfer service. Dwolla is a Des Moines, Iowa company that provides one of the most popular ways to move US dollars to Mt. Gox, where they can be used to buy bitcoins. In the warrant, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), states that there's probable cause to believe Mt. Gox is engaging in "money transmitting" without a license, a crime punishable by a fine or up to five years in prison. The warrant goes on to demand that Dwolla hand over the keys to account number 812-649-1010, which is owned by Mt. Gox subsidiary Mutum Sigillum LLC. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Et tu, power button? Casey Johnston Apple has been hit with a class action lawsuit over the power button on its iPhone 4, per a report from GigaOm Wednesday. California resident Debra Hilton alleges that Apple knew about the defective power button in “thousands” of iPhone 4s sold to customers, but the company neglected to do anything about the defect. The lawsuit describes a problem that begins with a “wiggly” power button, described on Apple’s discussion forums. After about a year of ownership (around when the phone’s warranty expires), the lawsuit states that eventually the button becomes unresponsive, failing to lock or turn off the phone when pressed. Hilton claims that Apple knew that the source of the defect was in a flex cable connected to the button, but the company continued to sell the phones regardless. GigaOm reports that Hilton is suing Apple under the RICO statute, a racketeering law commonly employed in class action suits. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Speculation and rumor are flying as we count down the minutes until the Google I/O keynote at 9:00am PDT/12:00pm EDT this morning. It's widely expected that Google will announce the release of a new version of the Android operating system during its multihour presentation, but it looks like Google gave The Verge a quick accidental peek behind the curtain this morning. The Verge is reporting that a concrete reference to Android 4.3 made a brief appearance in their search results when they were poking through Google's Android developer site: The Verge We'll know the whole story later this morning—we have Florence Ion, Andrew Cunningham, and Sean Gallagher on the scene at I/O and waiting for the keynote. Our intrepid team will be liveblogging the whole thing shortly. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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The first two phones to run VMware's dual-persona software. VMware At long last, VMware's dual-persona software for smartphones is available on actual devices. Today, VMware and Verizon Wireless announced that the Android-based LG Intuition and Motorola Razr M can now be purchased with VMware's Horizon Mobile software, which separates the device into isolated partitions that keep a user's work applications and data separate from personal stuff. VMware began promising virtualized smartphones in 2010, claiming they would be available for sale in 2011. Samsung promised to support VMware's virtualized phone vision in September 2011, and VMware started promising virtualization for iPhones and iPads in August 2012. We called it "vaporware." Samsung and Apple devices still aren't running the dual-persona software, but it's nice to see VMware phones finally materialize. VMware and Verizon said the Intuition and Razr M are immediately available for sale with Horizon Mobile software. Perpetual licenses to Horizon Mobile start at $125 per user and "can be purchased through local resellers of VMware and Verizon Wireless," the companies said. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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