Arstechnica

"Git Haversall" tried to present the Corporate Power Tool Award to USTR Ron Kirk TX Corporate Power Partnership

The scene last week at the Intercontinental Dallas Hotel looked like any generic corporate event held in any generic hotel ballroom—until the protesters crashed the party.

Trade officials from countries scattered around the Pacific Rim mingled in business attire. Ron Kirk, current US Trade Representative and former mayor of Dallas, welcomed everyone to the the latest round of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The crowd applauded, and Kirk stepped down, ready to continue with the festivities, when a man strode confidently to the podium and introduced himself as "Git Haversall," president of the "Texas Corporate Power Partnership."

"I would like to personally thank the negotiators for their relentless efforts," he said into the microphone. "The TPP agreement is shaping up to be a great way for us to maximize our profits regardless of whether the public of this nation, or any other nation, thinks it's right."

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Rep. Walden gives NTIA his "face of skepticism."

At a House Energy and Commerce Committee oversight hearing yesterday, Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) wanted to know why the state of West Virginia bought hundreds of $22,000 enterprise-grade routers from Cisco, only to place some of them into tiny rural libraries with a couple computers. Hundreds more sit in warehouses, still awaiting installation.

The routers, each of which can serve a branch office or campus of more than 500 computers, were purchased as part of a $24 million contract paid for with federal stimulus money doled out by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The state stuck the same Cisco 3945 series router into every public facility on its list, regardless of size. Some needed routers of this size; others could have used models that cost a few hundred dollars.

"It seems pretty disturbing," Walden said.

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Firefox will soon be compatible with Gatekeeper TheRedPanda

Mozilla developer Ben Hearsum wrote a blog post today, describing the status of the effort to integrate code signing into the automated build process for Firefox on Mac OS X. Mozilla aims to turn on code signing for the browser’s nightly builds by next week.

The application needs to be signed so that it will continue to work on Mac OS X 10.8, codenamed Mountain Lion, which is expected to launch later this year. Mountain Lion introduces a new security feature called Gatekeeper that will prevent the platform from executing applications that come from untrusted sources.

Gatekeeper supports several different configurations, but the default setting will only allow users to run software that has been signed with an Apple-supplied developer key or that comes from the Mac App Store. Third-party developers who do not distribute their applications through the Mac App Store will need to register with Apple, obtain a developer ID, and start signing their applications.

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Wired

A select group of people got a private demo of Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 at the Game Developers Conference in March, and Stu Horvath of Ars Technica's sister publication Wired was one of the lucky few. UE4 has many new features that will let it continue to sit on the Throne of Games (Engines), though Wired hints that old console hardware may hinder its crack at progress.

The most recently released version of Epic Games' engine, Unreal Engine 3, powered the game Gears of War released in 2006. Since then, it's been an unstoppable force behind over 150 games, including the Mass Effect trilogy, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Mirror's Edge, and Borderlands.

One of the distinct properties of UE4 is its ability to create and display effects based on the inherent properties of an environment, rather than displaying pre-programmed ones based on anticipated scenarios. For example, light that travels through water would refract, and a character that stands in a mirror would see a reflection of themselves, not a pre-programmed image or pre-rendered character standing on the other side. This natural behavior presumably creates much less work for developers—rather than having to explicitly teach everything how to react to every individual stimulus, objects have inherent behaviors and know what to do.
Ash particles drift through a scene rendered with Unreal Engine 4. Wired
Another one of UE4's desirable new features is its particle effects, or the ability to render hordes of tiny objects and all of their erratic motions. In the demo shown at GDC, onlookers saw the engine's ability to render many pieces of ash floating in the air, and dust particles floating in the light of a flashlight in a dark room. Normally, having to render the odd and easily affected paths of particles brings processors to their knees, but with UE4 running on an NVIDIA Kepler GTX 680, they drifted without effort.

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The CEO of a virtual desktop company who dared Microsoft to sue him by launching a service that would intentionally violate Windows licensing rules said today he is going to back down and issue a public apology.

Guise Bule, CEO of tuCloud, was angry that competitor OnLive offered a free virtual desktop service to iPad users for months without any public intervention from Microsoft, despite the service violating Microsoft’s rules for delivering hosted desktop services. The rules that everyone else has to follow, he said, are harmful to tuCloud because they impose licensing restrictions regarding the deployment of virtual Windows 7 desktops on multi-tenant infrastructure and to customers who haven’t bought Software Assurance and Virtual Desktop Access licenses. Only the biggest customers can afford that, he said.

In protest, Bule launched a new site called Desktops On Demand that promised cheap virtual desktops without following Microsoft licensing rules. Subsequently, OnLive pledged to Microsoft that it would go legit, but even then Bule said he would not back down.

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As police departments around the country are increasingly caught up in tussles with members of the public who record their activities, the U.S. Justice Department has come out with a strong statement supporting the First Amendment right of individuals to record police officers in the public discharge of their duties.

In a surprising letter (PDF) sent on Monday to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department, the Justice Department also strongly asserted that officers who seize and destroy such recordings without a warrant or without due process are in strict violation of the individual’s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

The letter was sent to the police department as it prepares for meetings to discuss a settlement over a civil lawsuit brought by a citizen who sued the department after his camera was seized by police.

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D.C. Atty

In the wake of its decision to suspend its 250GB per month data caps while it considers two plans that would increase them to at least 300GB per month, Comcast execs took questions from journalists today about the move. Here, then, are Comcast's answers to the top questions, in bite-sized form. Unless indicated, all statements were made by Executive Vice President David L. Cohen.

How should journalists headline their stories today? "The headline today should be that there isn't a cap anymore. We're out of the cap business."

How has Comcast "killed" its caps? "Each of these pilot approaches will effectively offer unlimited usage of our services because customers will have the ability to buy as much data as they want."

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The AllWinner A10 Android 4.0 mini PC CNX Software

Chinese retailers have started selling a miniature Linux computer that is housed in a 3.5-inch plastic case slightly larger than a USB thumb drive. Individual units are available online for $74.

The small computer has an AllWinner A10 single-core 1.5GHz ARM CPU, a Mali 400 GPU, and 512MB of RAM. An HDMI port on the exterior allows users to plug the computer into a television. It outputs at 1080p and is said to be capable of playing high-definition video.

The device also has a full-sized USB port with host support for input devices, a conventional micro-USB port, a microSD slot, and an internal 802.11 b/g WiFi antenna. The computer can boot from a microSD card and is capable of running Android 4.0 and other ARM-compatible Linux platforms.

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marya

For something we are all familiar with, life tends to be a remarkably difficult thing to define. Most definitions, however, include the ability to reproduce. Which means that a microbial community that has been discovered on the floor of the Pacific Ocean stretches the definition of what it means to be alive.

Bacteria are detected in the sediments down to the level of at least 20m, and are probably present (if rare) below that. But based on oxygen consumption, the cells are operating at a metabolism that appears to be right at the minimum energy flux needed to simply keep their cellular components operational. With no energy to spare, it's possible that these cells are not even able to reproduce.

The discovery of thriving ecosystems at deep-ocean hydrothermal vents helped revolutionize how we view life. Unlike familiar ecosystems on the surface, these organisms weren't ultimately dependent upon sunlight to power the base of the food chain, instead relying on chemical energy provided by the Earth's internal heat. Since then, other communities have been found that rely on unusual sources of energy. Deep in a mine, organisms appear to rely on radioactive decay to provide a source of hydrogen. Under an Antarctic ice sheet, another community grabs its energy by oxidizing iron exposed by the glaciers.

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Twitter will officially support the Do Not Track feature in browsers, Ed Felten, chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission, announced on Thursday. Twitter itself confirmed its compliance in a tweet shortly after the announcement, meaning those who visit the site will be able to opt out of cookies that collect personal information.

This places Twitter in contrast to services like Facebook, which aggressively collects data on users and non-users alike (a site must actively support Do Not Track in order to prevent information collection; Facebook is not yet one of those sites). By complying with Do Not track, Twitter allows visitors to opt out of cookies that collect personal info, as well as third-party cookies that collect information for the use of advertising networks.

On one hand, this is Twitter continuing its support for user privacy—on May 8, the company fought back against a government subpoena for the tweets of an Occupy Wall Street protester. But this may also show the company's intent to draw a line in the sand with regard to its business model.

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Cable giant Comcast, one of the largest Internet providers in the US, today announced a suspension of its 250GB/month data cap policy while it looks for better alternatives.

The two new approaches it has in mind don't differ radically from the current setup, but they do improve it modestly by increasing data limits for all users. Comcast will trial the scenarios in two different markets this year (to be named later), and it will not enforce the cap at all for customers not in a test market. (Comcast draws a distinction between “enforcing” the 250GB data cap and "contacting the very small number of excessive users about their usage"—which will continue.)

Here are the two proposed approaches to limiting monthly data use:

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Back in 2006, BT and the British telecom regulator Ofcom reached an agreement which forced the former telco monopoly to make its copper wiring available to independent ISPs, who could then serve individual homes across the United Kingdom. Under this setup, BT's last-mile business became "Openreach" and nearly 400 ISPs and phone companies have taken advantage of this setup.

On Monday, Openreach announced it's ready to upgrade its wholesale offerings with fiber to the premises that will reach as high as 330 megabits per second.

“The 330/20 Mbit/s product is also launched with a special offer to encourage [ISPs] to offer the product variant to their customers and test this high bandwidth in the home environment,” the company said in a statement. At first, the new tier will come at a discount. “The 330/20 Mbit/s special offer will apply to orders raised between 11 June 2012 and 31 January 2013 and represents savings of more than 50 per cent per line per calendar month (based on transition prices).”

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In a potentially embarrassing blow to Yahoo, Facebook has discovered a document that seems to prove Yahoo was wrong in claiming that two patents owned by Facebook were issued under false pretenses.

Yahoo recently alleged that two patents Facebook purchased and then asserted against Yahoo were issued to the original inventor only because crucial information was intentionally withheld from the patent office. But Yahoo just didn't look in the right places. Facebook located a document that contradicts Yahoo's claim, along with evidence that Yahoo never tried to access the document.

As background, Yahoo sued Facebook in March, alleging that the company infringed ten patents held by Yahoo. In response, Facebook countersued Yahoo with ten patents of its own, most of which Facebook acquired from other entities. As part of its defense against these new counterclaims, Yahoo alleged that two of Facebook's patents were obtained fraudulently.

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So far, the CMS detector hasn't found any indications of supersymmetric particles. CMS/CERN

I spent three days last week at the Phenomenology 2012 Symposium in Pittsburgh, known as Pheno 2012. Phenomenology specifically refers to the practice of predicting and analyzing the results of particle physics experiments, and the symposium looked at the possibility of a "new physics"—things not predicted by the Standard Model of particles and interactions—that might show up in experiments like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Particle physics is the study of the particles that make up ordinary matter—quarks, electrons, and so forth—along with their more exotic cousins produced in high-energy collisions. Accelerators bring particles up to high speeds and smash them together for the purposes of probing the internal structure of atomic nuclei and the forces holding matter together. The weak and strong nuclear forces play important roles at high energies—along with potentially interesting new forces and new particles yet undiscovered.

The energies involved are sufficient to access the quarks that are normally locked away inside protons and neutrons. But they also make it possible to create new particles—a process described in part by Albert Einstein's famous formula E = mc2. If you put enough energy into the collisions, some of it will get converted to mass in the form of a particle.

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Someone at Apple appears to have decided that the word "jailbreak" is a dirty word. The term is now being filtered in iTunes Store search results, as originally reported by Shoutpedia.

Apple often filters many of the most common swear words (but curiously, not "bitch"). When returning search results for these terms, the iTunes Store will show the word with most letters replaced with asterisks, e.g. "f**k."

And now, searching for the term "jailbreak" returns numerous results for songs and albums titled "J*******k." Curiously, the filtering doesn't appear to include a handful of TV shows and books with the word "jailbreak" or "jailbreaks" in the title, nor does it filter the word in every single case.

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Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson

Users of Time Warner Cable's iPad app will soon have access to a plethora of Viacom-owned content once again thanks to a settlement between the two companies. Viacom announced the agreement on its blog on Wednesday, saying that the two companies have "agreed to resolve their pending litigations" so that Time Warner subscribers will now have access to shows like the intellectually stimulating Jersey Shore and The Daily Show through the TWC TV iOS apps.

"All of Viacom’s programming will now be available to Time Warner Cable subscribers for in-home viewing via internet protocol-enabled devices such as iPads and Time Warner Cable will continue to carry Viacom’s Country Music Television (CMT) programming," the companies said in a joint statement. "In reaching the settlement agreement, Time Warner Cable and Viacom were also able to resolve other unrelated business matters to their mutual satisfaction. Neither side is conceding its original legal position or will have further comment. "

The dispute goes back to early 2011 when Time Warner rolled out its free iPad app that allowed Time Warner subscribers to stream live TV from dozens of channels. As it turns out, Time Warner had rolled out the app without working out the legal details with Viacom, which owns a handful of cable channels offered through Time Warner (including MTV and Comedy Central). Viacom wasn't the only one, either—Fox also sent a cease-and-desist letter to have its content removed, and Time Warner ended up shedding many of the channels it had originally launched with the app.

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An injunction issued by an Indian court in a copyright infringement case has forced Indian Internet service providers to block access to the video-sharing sites Vimeo and DailyMotion, Bittorrent-tracker The Pirate Bay, text-sharing site Pastebin and a number of other websites. In response, members of Anonymous mounted a denial of service attack on the websites of the Indian Supreme Court and the Indian National Congress political party. As of 2pm GMT, both sites are back up.

The temporary restraining order (PDF) was issued by The High Court of Judicature at Madras in response to a lawsuit by the Chennai, India based company Copyrightlabs (whose site appears to have been taken down for maintenance) over the sharing of the movie "3" online. It orders ISPs to stop sharing of the film "by copying, recording, reproducing, camcording or communicating, or allowing others to to communicate" the contents of the film in any form.

Meanwhile, the denial of service attack on The Pirate Bay Ars examined on May 17—which lasted for over a day—has ended. ZDNet reports that credit for the attack was claimed by a hacker going by the name Nyre. The hacker, who also claims to be a former supporter of Anonymous, posted his displeasure with the quality of porn on The Pirate Bay just before the DDoS attack started.

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Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China Photo by Pedro Vásquez Colmenares

Last year, we had covered a study on the non-trivial contribution of groundwater depletion to sea level rise. It concluded that humans have pumped enough water from underground sources to account for up to 13 percent of the rise in ocean levels that occurred between 2000 and 2008.

A caveat, from a related paper, was that this might be offset by an increased retention of surface water in large reservoirs behind new dams. That would make the net effect of these human activities a wash. In fact, the 2007 IPCC report left out groundwater depletion when projecting sea level rise because of the uncertainty of existing estimates and the presumed balance with reservoir impoundment.

A new estimate, published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, takes a closer look at dam building and projects current trends into the future. While groundwater depletion continues, dam construction is on the decline. The result should be an increasing contribution to sea level rise.

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The website for Washington's Sasquatch Music Festival responds automatically to the width of the browser's window.

When you consider how many different tablets, laptops, Web browsers, and operating systems access the Internet on a day-to-day basis, it's a small miracle that Web designers and developers manage to stay sane. There are, of course, Web standards and entire organizations that exist for the sole purpose of making sure the Internet you see is generally the same Internet that everyone else sees. But the sheer number of devices can pose a bit of a problem when you're attempting to create a site or service that works well for the masses.

In the past, a developer or designer might code a different site for desktop and mobile users, often with some or all of the same functionality. For the most part, in fact, this is still how things are done today. But in some cases, that's beginning to change. A relatively new technique called "responsive design" has been gaining traction over the past few years, and it's promising to change the way we code and interact with the Internet on devices of all shapes and sizes.

Responsive Web design, as the name implies, is a style of Web development where content responds to the device on which it is being rendered. So, while a website viewed from within a traditional desktop browser might be rendered one way, a tablet or smartphone browser will be smart enough to render that same code in a different way—one that takes into account the size and resolution of a smaller screen. Text is reflowed, navigation is simplified, and images are shrunk, or even hidden entirely, and the code to do it all needs only be written once.

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The Iomega px12-450r Iomega

As network-attached storage devices add more powerful processors and more RAM, and as manufacturers add applications and features to differentiate their products from the competition, the line between a NAS and a low-end server continues to blur. Iomega's new px12-450r is a 12-drive, 2U NAS that shares many features with the existing px12-350r, but adds a faster processor, more RAM, support for 4TB hard drives, and support for 10 gigabit Ethernet via PCI Express expansion slots.

The new NAS is powered by a new quad-core Intel Xeon based on Intel's Ivy Bridge architecture, which, like the consumer-focused Core processors, features increased performance and lowered power consumption compared to its predecessors. Using this stronger processor and its 8GB of RAM, the px12-450r can run more applications without the need for an additional server—camera surveillance software is already available from MindTree and Soleratec, and an SDK will be available for anyone who wants to create their own programs for the px12-450r's Linux distribution.

The px12-450r is also the first of Iomega's networked storage products to include a three-year license for McAfee VirusScan Enterprise, which runs directly on the NAS to provide a layer of protection from users and devices not running antivirus software themselves. McAfee will also be included on other Iomega's px-series NAS products when it is available in the third quarter of this year, but the company says it currently has no plans to offer the software to existing customers.

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