- Why Sony's PSP Go speed boost won't up the eye candy
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:34:12 -0000
SonyInsider dug up an FCC filing that indicates that the forthcoming PSP Go will have a significantly faster top processor speed than than current PSP models. Specifically, the Go's CPU can clock up to 480MHz, compared to the 333MHz speed of the existing models.
The site ends the post by asking the obvious question: "What will a 480MHz PSP Go bring to the table?" I suspect the answer to this is, "Nothing that hasn't already been announced." Let me explain.
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- Are "deleted" photos really gone from Facebook? Not always
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:32:25 -0000
In an age where your boss, coworkers, parents, and even (*gasp*) grandparents are finally joining social networks, we are all more aware than ever that we had better keep things relatively clean. And if you were someone who joined MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, or a number of other sites years ago, you may have more cleaning up to do than usual—after all, back then, you were probably young(er) and dumb(er), posting silly pics of your drunken escapades or questionable updates regarding your unusual interest in English cucumbers.
If you delete questionable images of yourself, you may be in the clear—or you may not, depending on the social network. As it turns out, some social networks delete your images right away while others hold onto them even after claiming they've been deleted. This was the discovery made by researchers at Cambridge University last month when they found that images deleted from social media sites are often left on the server, ripe for anyone to embed elsewhere or link up.
We put this finding to the test and found that some of the most popular sites on the Internet do, in fact, keep images on their servers after you delete them. On May 21, 2009, we deleted photos from four of the networks most used by the Ars staff and readership and monitored them for six weeks. The four networks we checked were Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.
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- Game publisher Midway joins Time Warner empire for $33M
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:32:14 -0000
There's no denying that gaming publisher Midway has had a rough time in the past year. After an insane saga of strange twists, turns, accusations, and increasingly dire news, most of us weren't entirely certain that the beleaguered publisher would actually survive to see 2010. Despite our doubts, it turns out that Midway is living to see another day, having just been acquired by Time Warner for $33 million.
For those of you new to the situation: after the company's much-hyped Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe earned lukewarm reviews and reasonable (though not amazing) sales numbers, Sumner Redstone sold his controlling interest in Midway for $100,000, and the publisher wound up laying off roughly 25 percent of its workforce and killed many games that were currently in development. It was then revealed that, even though employees weren't getting paid what was owed to them and the publisher was filing for bankruptcy, executives were still raking in a great deal of cash during all this.
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- Snowfall on Mars? NASA's Phoenix Lander recorded it
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:05:25 -0000
NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander, which spent the summer in Mars' northern polar regions performing a variety of science experiments, caused quite a stir when rumors circulated that it had discovered signs of life on the Red Planet. NASA eventually held a press conference to dispel the rumors, promising that more details would eventually be revealed when scientists got around to publishing papers that would describe the experiments in detail. That day has finally arrived; today's issue of Science contains four papers that describe various findings from the mission. There's no sign of alien life, but the studies do reveal an active water cycle on Mars—including night-time snowfall.
The papers rely on evidence from a variety of the instruments on the lander, and the description of the data provides an impressive catalog of the various ways that Phoenix could prod and query the Martian pole. In the months before Martian winter shut the lander down, it managed to dig a dozen trenches, taking soil samples from each. These samples went into wet and dry chemistry labs, had their conductivity tested, and were even examined using an atomic force microscope. Meanwhile, cameras and a LIDAR system (a laser-based range detector) scanned the surroundings.
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- Phone ringtones a "public performance"? EFF, AT&T say no
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:49:45 -0000
It isn't often that you find AT&T and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in agreement, but consensus has been reached on one matter: ASCAP's demand that wireless companies pay it license fees for ringtones is, well, ridiculous.
On Wednesday EFF called the move "outlandish" and "a ploy to squeeze more money out of the mobile phone companies." The advocacy group filed a friend of the court brief with the United States District Court for the Southern District New York this week, which is hearing the dispute between ASCAP, AT&T, and Verizon over whether the telcos have to pay the music licensing body royalties for wireless ringtones. Joining the amicus brief are Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology. Meanwhile CTIA - The Wireless Association, to which the big telcos belong, has also filed an amicus brief in the case.
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- "MySpace mom" Lori Drew's conviction thrown out
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:31:01 -0000
"MySpace mom" Lori Drew has had her misdemeanor guilty verdict overturned by the federal judge handling the case, the LA Times reports. Violating a website's terms of use is not, it seems, a federal crime after all.
Horrible things aren't always crimes
The guilty verdict against Lori Drew, prosecutors crowed, would send an "overwhelming message" to online bullies. Though she escaped conviction on felony charges, the 49-year-old Missouri mom could have still faced three years in prison or fines of up to $300,000 for launching an online harassment campaign that ended in the suicide of a teenage neighbor. Drew was due to be sentenced today.
But the "message," legal observers worried, may be that anyone who uses a website without paying close attention to those ubiquitous Terms of Service risks committing a federal crime. The judge shared those concerns.
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- Windows 7 Home Premium to get Family Pack deal
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:48:21 -0000
One of the recently leaked builds of Windows 7 has more juice in it than just a new default wallpaper. In the Windows 7 Home Premium edition—as noticed by Kristan Kenney—, the Microsoft Software License Terms has an additional clause that mentions a Family Pack licensing plan that would cover up to three computers in a household. This is no accident: other editions like Professional and Ultimate do not contain the Family Pack wording.
Here's the whole clause:
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- Behavioral advertisers discover the self-regulation gospel
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:13:02 -0000
Behavioral advertising, in which users are fed ads based on the interests revealed by their Web browsing habits, has an obvious appeal to advertisers, as it will ostensibly allow them to serve ads to the most relevant audiences. It also raises a host of privacy concerns—to work effectively, the Web surfing histories of consumers have to be aggregated and analyzed by those providing the ads.
Both the Federal Trade Commission and Congress have asked questions about whether advertisers were doing enough to protect and inform consumers, raising the prospect that regulation of behavioral advertising was only a matter of time. In an attempt to head off the government, a coalition of advertising groups that includes Google has now issued a series of principles that will guide their self-regulation.
The industry didn't need to look far to see the downsides of a failure to respond to public concerns. One of the more aggressive approaches to behavioral advertising, the deep packet inspection used by NebuAd, saw the company's CEO dragged before Congress, and the resulting bad publicity turned the company into a pariah. It ultimately closed its doors last month.
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- Assaulted by someone you met online? Don't sue the website
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:44:20 -0000
Social networks like MySpace still cannot be held responsible for assaults that happen offline, according to California's Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles. The court was asked to review the case of four underage girls (referred to as Julie Does) who, along with their parents, had sued MySpace for gross negligence and strict product liability after they were all sexually assaulted by older men whom they met on the service.
Despite the scary circumstances in which these events took place, the judge said that MySpace was protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and could not be held liable.
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- Universal to bring Asteroids to theaters
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:51:18 -0000
Once again, news has arrived from the land of Hollywood that another major video game franchise is being adapted for the silver screen. Last week, it was announced that Uncharted would get a celluloid makeover; this week, it's a much older franchise that's being adapted. It turns out that Asteroids, the Atari game from 1979 (thus making it older than many in the current generation of gamers) will be coming to theaters sometime in the future.
Astonishingly, not only is Asteroids being made into a movie, but there was an actual bidding war between four major studios for the rights. Universal Studios has emerged the winner.
As a result, Matthew Lopez is set to write the script and it will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Lopez has written the screenplays for the recent Disney films Escape to Witch Mountain and Bedtime Stories, as well as for the upcoming The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Meanwhile, di Bonaventura's latest ventures include Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and the soon-to-be-released G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
While there are some big Hollywood players involved with this project, the inherent problem with making a movie out of Asteroids is that it doesn't have a plot, or characters, just a triangular spaceship blowing up some oddly-shaped polygons.
On the other hand, one could look at this with the perspective that it's pretty much impossible to screw up the game's story. However, this news implies something much larger and much more unsettling: Hollywood may officially be out of original movie ideas.
- Apple patching critical SMS vulnerability in iPhone OS
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:26:19 -0600
Security researcher Charlie Miller has revealed that Apple is working on a patch for a security flaw he identified in the iPhone's SMS implementation. The flaw can actually lead to arbitrary code execution, as he explained to Ars last month. Miller hasn't yet detailed the flaw, citing an agreement with Apple, though he and partner Vincenzo Iozzo plan to detail their discovery later this month at the Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas.
During a presentation at the SyScan security conference in Singapore, Miller explained that a vulnerability in the iPhone's handling of SMS messages makes it possible to send code instead of strictly text. Despite SMS's 140 byte size limitation, the iPhone can reassemble larger messages that are broken up to fit the limitation, which allows larger programs to be sent. The iPhone can be instructed to execute SMS data as code instead of text, and when it executes the code it does so with root privileges and without any interaction from the user.
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- Apple Stores now fixing cracked iPhone screens in-house (Updated)
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:59:25 -0600
An iPhone falls to the ground in slow motion and makes its first impact on a corner. You watch as the cracks branch out over the screen like a spiderweb. If it hasn't happened to you, it has happened to someone you know—and now, Apple can fix it on the spot at one of its retail locations.
Jim Dalrymple at The Loop has confirmed that Apple retail stores have begun performing this in-house repair with what amounts to a big suction cup in the back. The machine separates the broken glass from the rest of your precious iPhone, letting the technician install a shiny new one.
This is one of the only in-house repairs being done on iPhones. Not only that, but in the past, owners with broken screens either got a full phone replacement or nothing at all. Still, knowing all the people we know who have shattered their screens, this is certainly welcome news for clumsy and not-so-clumsy iPhone owners alike.
Update: We have been infused with many more details that were not available at the time of writing. The cost of the repairs will be $199 and is not covered under warranty or AppleCare. We are told that the service is not available for original iPhones.
- Apple may be dumping NVIDIA graphics for next-gen Macs (Updated)
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:47:58 -0600
Apple has nearly turned its entire line of computers over to NVIDIA-based GPUs, thanks mainly to the vastly improved graphics performance of its GeForce 9400M chipset over comparable chipsets from Intel. However, rumors suggest that recent negotiations between the two companies over next-gen hardware have soured to the point that Apple may give NVIDIA a complete cold shoulder.
According to SemiAccurate (the irony of the site's name isn't lost on us), Apple is supposedly done with the "arrogance and bluster" that NVIDIA showed in its proposals concerning chipsets for Apple's next-gen hardware, which should include Nehalem-based Intel CPUs. According to the site's sources, the language used in Apple's rebuke was forceful and unfriendly, and amounted to Apple telling NVIDIA to "get lost" for three or four years.
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- Apple tweaks MobileMe with a few improvements
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:45:20 -0600
Apple has added a number of tweaks to its MobileMe Web services this week. Mail, Gallery, iDisk, account settings, push contacts and calenders, and Back to My Mac all got improved, and a new version of the MobileMe Control Panel for Windows enables syncing through a proxy.
In Mail, forwarding or replying to an HTML or rich text message with now retain that format instead of converting to plain text—while a number of people probably prefer this behavior, I can imagine there are some who won't be happy with the change. Unread message counts are displayed next to the inbox as well as each separate folder if you have them set up, just like Mail on Mac OS X. There's a tweak for e-mail aliases that on occasion did not show up properly in Mac OS X Mail, and those using iPhone OS 3.0 can search messages on the MobileMe server as well as those stored locally on the phone.
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- Maine negotiates to provide MacBooks to all 7–12 graders
Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:06:38 -0600
Many school districts have initiated programs to put MacBooks in the hands of students to engage them in technology and incorporate it in the learning process. But no program is as big or as inclusive as the state of Maine's—the Maine Learning Technology Initiative has just negotiated a deal with Apple to provide MacBooks to every middle- and high-schooler in the state.
The MLTI program began earlier this decade with a program to supply every 7th and 8th grader in Maine with an iBook. The success of the program prompted the state to expand it to include all Maine high school students as well. That expansion includes a deal with Apple to supply another 64,000 MacBooks to the roughly 37,000 already in circulation—with another 7,000 expected to be ordered within the next few weeks. Apple will include educational software, professional development for educators, and technical support in exchange for approximately $25 million per year for a total of four years.
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- New iPhone 3GS TV spots highlight Voice Control, copy/paste
Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:30:31 -0600
If Apple does one thing well, it's to tout features that other companies have had for years and pass them off as life-changing. Since Apple can't tout speed as an improvement on the new iPhone (as the company did that last time around), Apple instead chose to highlight functionality that other products have had for years. Apple has begun airing two new commercials doing exactly that in Copy and Paste and Voice Control.
In Copy and Paste, the narrator introduces copy and paste functionality that allows a user to do some "pretty incredible things." Of course, implementations of copy and paste in other phones are usually somewhat bad and unintuitive. However, the claims made in Apple's commercial would be comical if they weren't so serious.
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- iPhoto update fixes crash, MBA firmware for new batteries
Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:54:53 -0600
If you haven't fired up Software Update yet this week, iLife '09 and MacBook Air owners should take note of the latest updates for iPhoto '09 and the MacBook Air's firmware.
The just-released iPhoto 8.0.4 fixes a "rare" issue that could cause iPhoto 8.0.3 to crash after updating images imported into previous versions of iPhoto '09. Additionally, it corrects some flawed points of interest and location names included as part of the "Places" geotagging features.
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- iPhone OS 3.1 beta enables Voice Control via Bluetooth, more
Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:14:26 -0600
As you may have heard, Apple released an update to the iPhone OS beta to registered developers last night. iPhone OS 3.1 already appears to have a handful of fixes that should please some users, and there are surely more hidden beneath the surface.
According to numerous sources, many items got some love in this beta, including Voice Control now working over Bluetooth (for iPhone 3GS users, that is). The AT&T profile has been updated to 4.2 (enabling MMS to work), the iPhone now vibrates when moving icons around, third-party apps now having APIs to access and edit videos, and the baseband firmware is now version 5.08.01. Additionally, editing video no longer saves over the original by default, allowing you to save a copy and preserve the original for transferring later. Finally, several improvements have been made to OpenGL and Quartz.
As noted by the quickpwn developers, users of the ultrasn0w software unlock should be extra cautious of updating to the 3.1 beta (as in, don't do it at all) unless they like turning their phones into shiny paperweights. This likely doesn't apply to most of you reading this, but we know a number of you are using your US iPhones on T-Mobile, so keep an ear out for when you can update after 3.1 becomes available to the public.
- NVIDIA offers up GPU-accelerated plug-ins for Quadro FX 4800 (Updated)
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:32:36 -0600
Imagine you have a top-of-the-line Mac Pro, NVIDIA's obscenely expensive Quadro FX 4800 workstation GPU, dual 30" Cinema Displays, and you're editing your next masterpiece in Premiere Pro, After Effects, or Final Cut Pro (or maybe all three!). You might be dying for Snow Leopard and OpenCL to unlock the computing potential inside that powerful GPU, but luckily, there are a selection of plug-ins that can take advantage of that power right now.
NVIDIA has a page that lists several video effects plug-ins from Elemental Technologies, BorisFX, and Red Giant Software that are designed to leverage NVIDIA's CUDA GPGPU technology. Premiere Pro CS4 users will definitely want to check out Elemental Accelerator 1.2 for Mac, which effectively halves the time it takes to encode video in H.264/MPEG-4 for either Blu-ray or online use. Leveraging your GPU to do the encoding work can also make your system more responsive while an encoding job is running, meaning you can get more work done faster.
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- WebKit 3D CSS transforms coming to Snow Leopard, not Leopard
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:34:13 -0600
Apple plans to bring support for its proposed 3D CSS Transforms—already a W3C working draft—to Snow Leopard, but may be leaving Leopard in the dust. Apple already has support for the proposed standard in WebKit, though currently it is only enabled in Mobile Safari, the browser included on Apple's mobile devices.
Earlier this year, we told you about the rather clever CSS-based, three-dimensional perspective transforms that Apple added to WebKit, extending an earlier two-dimensional concept that enables some rudimentary animation when controlled via JavaScript. The transforms include skewing, scaling, rotating, and positioning of 2D objects within three-dimensional space, and take advantage of 3D hardware acceleration. Using CSS as the basis for defining the transforms makes it relatively easy for Web designers and developers to take advantage of the effects without complicated 3D programming.
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