CERN data center equipment in Geneva. CERN When you're running the world's largest particle accelerator, smashing particles at nearly the speed of light to understand the Universe at its most basic levels, you'd better have a great IT strategy. That's why CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, opened a new data center and is building a cloud network for scientists conducting experiments using data from the Large Hadron Collider at the Franco-Swiss border. CERN's pre-existing data center in Geneva, Switzerland, is limited to about 3.5 megawatts of power. "We can't get any more electricity onto the site because the CERN accelerator itself needs about 120 megawatts," Tim Bell, CERN's infrastructure manager, told Ars. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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"Oh, you're using a DirectX 11 video card? Let me set some innocent civilians on fire for you!" 4A Games “The metro is a living, breathing thing with a heartbeat—a soul and a brain,” the helpful character Khan says while walking through one of Metro: Last Light's many underground passages. This stretch of sewer packs enough revelations to earn the haughty quote, but Metro's designers are also attempting a cheeky declaration with the line. It's one thing for Metro: Last Light to come out swinging as a nearly-next-gen first-person shooter. If you crank it up on a high-end quad-core PC, a DirectX 11 wonderland of light-and-shadows tricks, high-poly landscapes, and gruesome beasts will stretch before you. Watch a gameplay trailer or two and you'll assume that the game is just a silly man-versus-beast romp. At its best, maybe it's a video-card pack-in. But that would ignore the word Metro—as in, the sequel to Metro 2033, a 2010 game that prioritized plot and atmosphere over raw gameplay to earn a cult following in the process. Luckily for the team at Ukrainian studio 4A Games, bankruptcy limbo didn't prevent this follow-up from reaching store shelves—and neither, apparently, did 4A's continued adherence to plot and atmosphere over gameplay. Yet where the prior Metro could be written off as a wonky curio, Metro: Last Light delivers a Hollywood-caliber story, a convincing world, and some must-play moments. It all comes within a game that, while painfully uneven, is certainly playable and absolutely the right step for the first-person shooter genre. Welcome to dystopian Moscow, where the last game's protagonist Artyom (who also stars in the Russian book series of the same name) still dwells in the metro system's tunnels among the other survivors of a nuclear holocaust. This time, his fallout is a little more personal. Namely, Artyom wiped out a seemingly evil race of “dark ones” who—oops—actually wanted peace. A single dark one remains, sending Artyom on a city-spanning chase while contending with Nazis and communists underground—plus frightening beasts above it. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The Google I/O developer conference is finally here. The event will kick off with a keynote on Wednesday, May 15 at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Ars reporters Andrew Cunningham, Sean Gallagher, and Florence Ion will be in attendance to liveblog big announcements during the event. We've recently seen numerous leaks and rumors about the event crop up. We can probably expect the announcement of a dedicated multiplayer gaming service called Google Games as well as an all-inclusive, cross-platform messaging service called Babel (though some outlets are saying this service may just fall under the Google Hangouts umbrella). We're also hearing that Google may only announce incremental updates to its latest Nexus devices, the Asus-manufactured Nexus 7 tablet and LG-manufactured Nexus 4 smartphone. Android Jelly Bean will likely get a minor bump too—up to version 4.3. There are other murmurs too, everything from Android@Home possibilities to replacements for iGoogle. For now we're all just waiting for the keynote to begin (while, of course, taking bets on whether or not we'll see any skydiving antics this year). So join us this Wednesday for the keynote liveblog as we learn what's next from the search engine giant. Be sure to follow along with us throughout the week for more coverage from the rest of the Google I/O conference. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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Michigan.gov Mosquito bites kill an estimated 1-2 million people every year. It is not the mosquitoes’ fault, though—it's the pathogens they transmit that are lethal, not the bites themselves. Nets and insecticides can help, but they can also be costly, logistically difficult to distribute, and not particularly green. So alternative strategies to prevent disease transmission are needed. Wolbachia are bacteria that reside in insect cells and have a very complicated relationship with their hosts. They can render mosquitoes resistant to certain pathogens, and they can reduce mosquitoes' lifespans, which is significant because it is often the older mosquitoes that transmit the pathogens that make us sick. Wolbachia infect up to 76 percent of the 2-5 million insect species on Earth—but not, of course, the mosquito species that carry dengue fever or malaria. That would be far too convenient. So researchers have been trying to infect disease-carrying mosquitoes with Wolbachia in the lab and then let these infected mosquitoes out into the wild to mate with and infect disease-carrying strains in order to reduce disease transmission. This has in fact already happened in northeastern Australia, where researchers spent four years maintaining Wolbachia in mosquito cells in the lab before letting infected mosquitoes loose in January 2011 to infect wild Aedes aegypti, the mosquitoes that transmit dengue fever. The trial is going so well that it is being repeated in Vietnam. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Who would dare to use patents against a fruit ninja? Lodsys. Ho John Lee / flickr The patent-holding company Lodsys became notorious in 2011. It started sending patent threat letters to small developers asking for a bit more than a half-percent (.575) of their revenue. The company claimed it had a patent on in-app purchases. Apple intervened in the case shortly thereafter. The company told the court that it had already licensed the Lodsys patents, so they shouldn't be used against developers working on its platform. It hasn't helped. Lodsys has sued dozens of targets this year, showing it has no compunction about taking on any app maker whether it's a tiny game studio or a global corporation. Late last week, Lodsys fired off its newest round of lawsuits. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Good morning, Arsians, and welcome to our special Tuesday-edition Dealmaster! Our partners at LogicBuy have gathered together some fun goodies to share with you all, so strap on your buyin' pants and let's get started! For our top deal, we've got a Samsung UN40EH6000 LED TV for $649—but it also comes with a $350 gift card that you can turn around and use on some other stuff. If you're already planning on buying a TV of this size, this is a great way to pick up some extra stuff at the same time! If you're itching to drop some more serious coin on a 4K TV, we've got one—an 84-inch LG 84LM9600. At "2160p," with a native resolution of 3840×2160 pixels, this thing has four times the pixels of a "regular" 1080p TV (hence the somewhat-misleading "4K" label). It's $11,999 on sale, so big spenders only! Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Embattled copyright-trolling enterprise Prenda Law is being taken to task in a Los Angeles case, but there's a judge in San Francisco who has a few questions too. In the District of Northern California, Prenda shell AF Holdings brought a lawsuit against a San Jose man named Joe Navasca. Once US District Judge Edward Chen ordered Prenda to put up $50,000 bond to proceed with the case, the anti-piracy law firm lost interest and tried to drop the whole thing. The case is over—dismissed with prejudice. But the judge won't quite let it end until two things happen. First, Navasca's lawyer, Nick Ranallo, has a chance to ask for attorneys' fees from AF Holdings. And AF Holdings' lawyer must explain an unusual signature. Early in the case, AF Holdings signed an "ADR certification" document with the name "Salt Marsh," which was later explained to be a trust owned by Mark Lutz, the official owner of many Prenda shells. That's still somewhat fishy, since "Salt Marsh" claimed to have read certain documents and discussed them with his/her attorney. Chen asked to see the original. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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BlackBerry continues to work at winning back mind- and market share with a handful of announcements on Tuesday at its own Jam conference. The company’s messaging service, BBM, will arrive on iOS and Android this coming summer, BlackBerry OS version 10.1 is now available for the Z10, and the company is releasing a pared-down smartphone named the Q5 for select markets. BBM would have been a highly coveted service a few years ago on the two now-dominant smartphone platforms, when text messages were on the rise. Now iPhones have iMessage to speak to each other and Google is about to release Babel, to say nothing of all the popular third-party cross-platform messaging apps like WhatsApp, GroupMe, and Line. Blackberry 10.1 will be a free software update to BlackBerry 10 as it rolls out over the coming weeks, and it includes customizable notifications (sounds, vibration, LEDs) as well as fine-tuned cursor control that allows users to bring up a blue circle and use taps to pinpoint exactly where they want the cursor to drop. The updated camera app now includes an HDR mode, and support has been added in Blackberry hub for communication between BlackBerrys using their PINs. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Illustration of Microraptor, which is thought to have had iridescent feathers. Mick Ellison/AMNH “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Evolutionarily speaking, it’s a yawn of a conundrum. We know it was the egg, which evolved (with shell to enable a terrestrial lifestyle) some 300 million years ago, long before a chicken first clucked across a patch of open ground. In between the origin of the egg and the domestication of the chicken, however, there are plenty of other interesting features to consider. Take the feather. There were hints of a revolution 150 years ago when part-dinosaur, part-bird archaeopteryx was discovered. Recently, discoveries in China have pulled back the curtain to reveal a varied cast of feathered dinosaurs, and we've found it wasn't just the direct ancestors of birds that were sporting down coats. These discoveries have made the question of evolutionary origins even more interesting. At one point, you could have wondered whether feathers—which are basically made of the same stuff as scales— arose directly to aid flight or had been co-opted for the purpose from some other function. The prevalence of feathers and feather-like structures in flightless organisms points to the latter. So when did they first appear, and what were these other functions? Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Google Fiber's first rollout was in Kansas City, Kansas, and it has since been confirmed for the likes of Austin, TX, and Provo, UT. It's now hitting a new city, Gladstone, MO, which is adjacent to Kansas City. "Recently, we’ve welcomed a handful of new Kansas City-area Google Fiber communities—and tonight we get to welcome yet another. The Gladstone, Missouri City Council just voted to bring Fiber to their city, too," Google Fiber Community Manager Rachel Hack wrote on the project blog yesterday. "As we’ve said before, it takes a while to plan, engineer, and start building our network in new communities, so it will still be some time before we can hook up our Gladstone customers." Google As you can see in the map on the right, Gladstone could be viewed as an expansion of the existing Kansas City deployment. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The update to Windows 8 previously codenamed "Blue" will be officially known as "Windows 8.1," and it will be shipping later this year as a free update distributed via the Windows Store. Windows 8.1 was announced by Windows Division CFO Tami Reller today at JP Morgan's Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference in Boston. A public preview of Windows 8.1 will be available on June 26, which coincides with the start of Microsoft’s Build developer conference in San Francisco. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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Google has released version 1.1 of Go, its open source programming language, bringing significant performance improvements. "We have made optimizations in the compiler and linker, garbage collector, goroutine scheduler, map implementation, and parts of the standard library," Google engineer Andrew Gerrand wrote on the Go blog yesterday. "It is likely that your Go code will run noticeably faster when built with Go 1.1." Go 1.1 is compatible with Go 1.0, so all users should upgrade. Go was unveiled in 2009 after being developed inside Google for a couple of years. It was designed from the start to offer an "expressive type system, fast compilation, good performance, and built-in language features that simplify threaded programming and concurrency," as Ryan Paul wrote for Ars at the time. Google uses Go internally for a few services, including the server that delivers Chrome binaries. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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At today's Lumia 925 launch event, we had a brief opportunity to play with a version of Windows Phone 8 that's newer than the current shipping version. While not a whole lot has changed, we did spot a couple of changes. One of the features is brand new: you will be able to pick a "Lens" app to be run automatically whenever you press the camera button. Lens apps are what Microsoft calls camera-driven applications such as the forthcoming Nokia Smart Camera and Hipstamatic. Currently, to launch a Lens app you have to fire up the built-in camera app and then pick the Lens of your choosing from a list. In the summer release, named GDR2 (for "General Distribution Release"), you'll be able to skip this intermediate step and go straight to the Lens. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The Lumia 925. What a way to make a living. Peter Bright At a sweltering press conference in London today, and hot on the heels of the Lumia 928 introduction, Nokia announced the latest addition to its Windows Phone family: the Lumia 925. After a veritable multitude of polycarbonate and glass designs, Nokia has branched out: the Lumia 925 is polycarbonate, glass, and aluminum. The phone sports a metal strip around the edge, which doubles as the phone's antenna. The company says that while many users are attracted by its strikingly colorful all-plastic phones, some want something a little different. The Lumia 925 is the company's answer. On the inside, the phone is pretty much the same as the Lumia 920 and 928. Dual core Snapdragon S4 at 1.5GHz, 1GB RAM and, for most models, 16GB of nonexpandable storage. There are twin cameras, with Nokia's optical image-stabilized 8.7 MP device on the rear, and a 1.2 MP device on the front. Interestingly, the 925's sensor is identical to that of the older 920, but it has a new lens system; the 928 has the 920's lens and sensor. This makes the 928's rear camera assembly unique. Like the 920, and unlike the 928, the flash is an LED unit, not a Xenon flash. Like the 928, and unlike the 920, the phone has a 4.5-inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 1280×768. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Meet Toshiba's Kirabook, a high-res Ultrabook for the Windows world. Andrew Cunningham High-resolution, high-density screens are expected on most high-end phones and tablets today. Everything from the iPhone 5 to the Samsung Galaxy S 4 to the Nexus 10 is trying to pack as many pixels as it can into a given screen size to increase the sharpness of on-screen text and images. You often hold a phone or tablet pretty close to your face, so the benefits of a high-resolution, high-density display are easy to see. Perhaps it makes sense then that the technology hasn't been picked up as quickly in laptop computers. To date, there have only been a few serious contenders: Apple's 15-inch and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros, Google's Chromebook Pixel, and now Toshiba's Kirabook. We're sure that more high-density Windows laptops are on the way, but the Kirabook is the first to make it to market. The laptop raises some natural questions: Does a computer that is both thinner and lighter than the Pixel and the Pros skimp on battery life to achieve these feats? Is the Kirabook good enough to justify its jaw-dropping $1,599.99 starting price? Most importantly, can Windows support high-density displays as well as OS X, Chrome OS, iOS, Android, and others can? Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Nvidia's Project Shield has become just-plain-Shield, and it's coming next month. Nvidia Nvidia's Project Shield, a portable Android-powered game console, was one of the few true surprises to come out of this year's CES. While Nvidia had a few demo units to show off then and a couple of months later at its GPU Technology Conference, we still didn't have specific information about pricing and availability. The company answered both of these questions in a new Shield-focused blog post this morning: the tablet-turned-console will begin shipping in June for $349 from a variety of online and brick-and-mortar stores, including Newegg, GameStop, Micro Center and Canada Computers. General pre-orders begin on next Monday, May 20th, but if you've signed up to receive Shield updates from Nvidia you can pre-order the device starting today. If you haven't already registered, those who do so between now and the 20th should still be eligible to buy the device before the unwashed masses have the opportunity. At $349, the Shield is definitely more expensive than mid-range, pure Android tablets like the $199 Nexus 7, but compares favorably to the $329 iPad mini or the $399 Nexus 10 if the physical controller appeals to you. Given the form factor, however, the more apt comparison might be to other portable game consoles rather than all-touchscreen tablets. Here, the comparison is less flattering—Sony's PlayStation Vita starts at $249.99, while Nintendo's 3DS and 3DS XL start at $169.99 and $199.99, respectively. Android's versatility makes the Shield a bit more intriguing than either of those consoles in many ways, but you'll definitely have to pay more to get that extra feature. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The long-rumored Nokia Lumia 928 will debut this Thursday when it become available on Verizon as the answer to AT&T’s Lumia 920. This Windows Phone 8 handset is slimmed down compared to its predecessor and has some spec bumps. The Lumia 928 has a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage with no SD card slot. The display is a 4.5-inch PureMotion HD+ OLED WXGA HD display with a 1280x768 resolution. We’re very impressed with the quality of the screen on our initial meeting: it’s crisp and bright with good black levels. The body of the phone is highlighted by a curved white plastic back. The phone is heavy for its size, and a good size bezel on the 4.5-inch screen means it’s not very thin either. While it’s not quite pocket-friendly, the curvature makes it comfortable to hold even if the plastic is a little slippery. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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One of D-Wave's chips. D-Wave Back in 2007, a company called D-Wave made waves by claiming it had built a 16-bit quantum computer at a time where most academic labs could only manage a handful of bits. What they demonstrated, however, wasn't a quantum computer in the sense that most people use the term. The company has since started calling its device a "quantum optimizer." Although it's not a general-purpose quantum computer, the hardware does seem to be capable of tackling some computationally hard challenges. The actual performance of the hardware and the software that controls it (called, somewhat ironically, the Black Box) hasn't really been described in detail. That situation seems to be changing this week, as a pair of academic researchers will be presenting a set of problems tackled both by D-Wave's hardware and by software running on more traditional computers. The results generally show D-Wave's equipment performing well but not always beating the more mundane computers. In a quantum computer, a set of qubits are both entangled and placed in a superposition state where they have a mixture of the two possible values (zero and one). The system is manipulated to perform a calculation, and then the actual values held by the qubits are read in order to provide the solution. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Lynn Gardner / flickr Despite the fact that four of the lawyers linked to porn-trolling enterprise Prenda Law have been forwarded to criminal investigators, the organization is charging full-steam ahead with one of its last cases: LW Systems v. Hubbard. The case is an Illinois state lawsuit making vague allegations over computer hacking against a defendant with a lawyer who some have said is actually in cahoots with Prenda. The case landed Prenda an incredibly broad order that allows it to subpoena subscriber information from practically any ISP in the country. So Prenda lawyer Paul Duffy has used that power to launch a barrage of threat letters telling people to pay up or get sued. In mid-April—just a week after Duffy pled the Fifth to avoid testifying about his actions in Prenda litigation—his law firm was sending out demand letters asking for $2,400. Now, the anti-Prenda blog Fight Copyright Trolls has published a newer version of the letter, which also appears to be signed by Duffy. The new letter has gone out under the name of Anti-Piracy Law Group, and it suggests that letter recipients might have their neighbors or family members contacted about the allegations in the lawsuit. Since those accusations concern adult content, that action seems like a threat that could increase the embarrassment factor for recipients. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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If you've ever been nagged about the weakness of your password while changing account credentials on Google, Facebook, or any number of other sites, you may have wondered: do these things actually make people choose stronger passcodes? A team of scientists has concluded that the meters do work—or at least they have the potential to do so, assuming they're set up correctly. The researchers—from the University of California at Berkeley, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and Microsoft—are among the first to test the effect that the ubiquitous password meters have on real users choosing passwords. They found that meters grading the strength of passwords had a measurable impact in helping users pick stronger passcodes that weren't used on other accounts. But the group also discovered these new, stronger passwords weren't any harder for users to remember than weaker ones. The scientists were quick to point out caveats to their findings. For one, the meters provided little benefit when users were choosing passwords while setting up a new account, as opposed to changing passwords for an already established account. And the meters provided no improvement for accounts people considered unimportant. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Aaron Swartz at the Freedom to Connect Conference, May 2012. Peretz Partensky The federal judge who would have overseen the trial of Aaron Swartz on computer hacking charges has ordered the prosecution to reveal much of the evidence it had against him. However, the government and MIT will be allowed to keep most of the relevant names redacted.  Swartz killed himself in January, not long before he was scheduled to defend himself in a trial that could have resulted in several years of prison time. Swartz famously used MIT's computer network to download millions of academic papers published in the JSTOR archive, and prosecutors said those actions violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). In the wake of Swartz's death, the Internet activist has become a symbol and rallying cry for those who want to reform CFAA. Swartz's attorney accused the prosecutors handling the case of misconduct, and in March family members moved to unseal the evidence against him. Members of Congress have also asked to see documents related to what happened in the Swartz case. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Pichai seems open to Android meaning lots of different things to lots of people and companies. It Came from China An interview with Sundar Pichai over at Wired has settled some questions about suspected Google plans, rivalries, and alliances. Pichai was recently announced as Andy Rubin’s replacement as head of Android, and he expressed cool confidence ahead of Google I/O about the company’s relationships with both Facebook and Samsung. He even felt good about the future of the spotty Android OS update situation. Tensions between Google and Samsung, the overwhelmingly dominant Android handset manufacturer, are reportedly rising. But Pichai expressed nothing but goodwill toward the company. “We work with them on pretty much almost all our important products,” Pichai said while brandishing his own Samsung Galaxy S 4. “Samsung plays a critical role in helping Android be successful.” Pichai noted in particular the need for companies that make “innovation in displays [and] in batteries” a priority. His attitude toward Motorola, which Google bought almost two years ago, was more nonchalant: “For the purposes of the Android ecosystem, Motorola is [just another] partner.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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IITA / flickr A long-lasting court fight over patented soybeans is over, and agribusiness giant Monsanto has won. In a decision issued today, the US Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that Monsanto must be allowed to patent its seeds—and it must be able to punish farmers who try to dodge the patents. Farmers are compelled to sign a patent agreement when they buy Monsanto's Roundup Ready herbicide-resistant soybeans, promising that they won't use the seeds to produce additional crops. A small-time Indiana farmer, Vernon Bowman, tried to avoid signing that agreement by simply buying a batch of undifferentiated "bin grain" from a grain elevator. Bowman went ahead and sprayed his crops with glyphosate, knowing that because Monsanto's genetically altered seed has become ubiquitous in the food supply, around 90 percent of soybeans would have the Roundup Ready trait that provides resistance to that herbicide. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Wikipedia Mobily, a Saudi Arabian telecommunications company with 4.8 million subscribers, is working on a way to intercept encrypted data sent over the Internet by Twitter, Viber, and other mobile apps, a security researcher said Monday. Moxie Marlinspike, the pseudonymous cryptographer who has identified several security bugs in the secure sockets layer protocol used to protect website transactions, said he learned of the project after receiving an e-mail from company officials. Carrying the subject line "Solution for monitoring encrypted data on telecom," it said the project was required by "the regulator." Marlinspike believed this meant the government of Saudi Arabia. In follow-up e-mails, the Mobily officials said they were looking for ways to bypass the protections built into the SSL and Transport Layer Security protocols so telecom workers could monitor messages spreading terrorism. "One of the design documents that they volunteered specifically called out compelling a [certificate authority] in the jurisdiction of the UAE or Saudi Arabia to produce SSL certificates that they could use for interception," Marlinspike wrote in a blog post. "A considerable portion of the document was also dedicated to a discussion of purchasing SSL vulnerabilities or other exploits as possibilities." Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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What will the next Nexus hold? Casey Johnston Google I/O officially kicks off on Wednesday, and the current scuttlebutt is that Google will be announcing a follow-up to the Nexus 7 tablet at its day-one keynote. We still like the original Nexus 7, but last week we put together a list of improvements we wanted to see in the new version. We also asked you what you would liked to see in a new Nexus 7, and you came through with some solid suggestions. Naturally, you have many of the same requests we do: a higher-resolution screen, a faster processor, and a rear-facing camera among them. But you also came up with plenty of things that didn't make our list. With our combined suggestions, Google can create the perfect Nexus 7. Don't touch that bezel! The Nexus 7 has pretty large bezels around the screen in comparison to tablets like the iPad mini, and in our post we suggested that the screen could be made slightly larger (or the device slightly smaller) by shrinking those a bit. Commenter Phil Ta agreed with us in the post's first comment, but most of you disagreed. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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