Arstechnica

For metaphorical purposes, lets say the big red guy is the ballooning loan payments that 38 Studios (in armor) was fighting to stave off. 38 Studios / EA

For many first-time game developers, selling 1.3 million copies of their first game in 90 days would be a major accomplishment. For Kingdoms of Amalur developer 38 Studios, though, that sales performance wasn't enough to pay back sizable loan guarantees from the state of Rhode Island, or to prevent the company from having to lay off all 379 staffers in the state and at Maryland-based subsidiary Big Huge Games late yesterday.

The layoffs effectively end one of the most prominent experiments in direct state support for game development in the country. Rhode Island had to issue $75 million in bonds to help attract the studio, founded by former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, from its original home in Maynard, Mass., on the promise that the move would create hundreds of jobs in the state.

Signs that the financial arrangement was in trouble first appeared earlier this month, when 38 Studios failed to make a scheduled $1.125 million payment on that loan, prior to asking the state for even more financial assistance. Though the studio was eventually able to scrape together that loan payment, it was reportedly unable to make its payroll last week. Despite these problems, the company was still acting publicly as if it was business as usual, even releasing a trailer for planned MMO Project Copernicus last week.

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mt.gov

For researchers at the UK's Rothamsted research center, the past few weeks must have felt like a train wreck in slow motion. The team engineered a strain of wheat to carry an enzyme, found in many other plant species, that will produce an aphid-repelling chemical. After what was undoubtedly a lot of time in the lab spent preparing the wheat, the Rothamsted staff was finally ready to test whether their modified wheat actually did what it was supposed to in the field.

But starting in early April, they had reason to wonder whether they'd be able to learn anything from their test. In mid-April, a group calling itself 'Take the Flour Back' issued a blunt threat: "Pull up the GM wheat, or we will." Now, their deadline for action is fast approaching, and efforts to defuse the situation have gone nowhere, leaving researchers facing a potential confrontation this Sunday.

In Europe, genetically modified crops have met a very high level of public resistance. Derided as "frankenfoods," the crops have attracted a broad spectrum of fears, from technical concerns like the possible spread of the engineered genetic material, to vague worries about what is "natural" and the role of modern agribusiness. As a result, a number of countries have attempted to ban them outright, and many have strict labeling requirements. In general, consumer demand has kept food derived from genetically modified crops from making it to market.

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Hard drives seized from the Dotcom mansion, pictured here, have been transferred to the United States without New Zealand court approval Winter dies

The US government is trying to "run out the clock" by denying Kim Dotcom's legal team access to the materials it needs to prepare for key court appearances. So says Ira Rothken, a lawyer for the Megaupload founder.

Ars Technica talked to Rothken on Thursday afternoon, shortly after he returned from a trip to New Zealand, where courts are considering whether to extradite Dotcom to the United States to face criminal copyright infringement charges. The latest example of the government's obstructionist tactics, Rothken said, is the handling of data seized from the Dotcom mansion.

Seized data

When law enforcement agents raided Dotcom's mansion in January, they seized dozens of computing devices and hard drives. Rothken says the seized materials include data from surveillance cameras that could shed light on whether excessive force was used in the raid. The hard drives also contain personal files belonging to Dotcom and his family.

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Today, May 25, as anyone with any decency, self-respect, and common sense knows, is Towel Day.

Towel Day celebrates the beloved British author Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, its attendant volumes, and the Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency books.

In the Hitchhiker's books, the towel has a place of pride as a tool both practical and psychological, a baby blanket for the Universe.

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In a move that should surprise approximately no one, Cisco has decided to end development on the Cisco Cius tablet. Actually, the move may be surprising to those of you who never realized that Cisco built a tablet at all.

Trying to ride the wave of tablet popularity, Cisco released the Cius a year ago with a heavily customized version of Android, focusing on the security, collaboration, and videoconferencing needs of businesses. A business-focused app store, AppHQ, was unveiled along with the option for businesses to host their own private app stores. But it's all pretty much over now, as Cisco said yesterday that it will "no longer invest in the Cisco Cius tablet form factor," continuing to offer the device only "in a limited fashion to customers with specific needs or use cases."

Cius wasn't killed by the market-leading iPad and Kindle Fire; it was killed by consumers. While work laptops and desktops are still primarily provisioned to employees by corporate IT shops, mobile devices follow the opposite path, being brought into work environments by employees. Smartphones shifted from a business-driven model dependent on the BlackBerry to a consumer-driven one focused on the iPhone and Android devices, but tablets have never been a business-first device (with the exception of some Windows tablets deployed for industry-specific use cases).

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NASA TV

Flying high above the Pacific, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft scored one giant step for commercial space cargo at 12:02pm ET today as it berthed with the International Space Station (ISS). Over 1800 SpaceX employees will spend the day celebrating the end at the top of a very long climb—that is, before they get back to a very busy schedule.

Dragon made its flight tests look almost too easy, as the spacecraft, controlled from below by the SpaceX team in Hawthorne, California, zipped through its COTS Demo Flight 2 and 3 yesterday. Early today, astronauts aboard the ISS made contact with Dragon and turned on a strobe to begin the transition of control of the spacecraft from ground to orbit if necessary.

This morning at about 8:56am ET, Dragon shut down its thrusters and drifted to about 8 meters from the ISS. NASA astronaut Don Pettit extended the Canadarm2 robotic manipulator and captured Dragon by its grapple fixture. Slowly and carefully moving the spacecraft in, he took about two hours to hang it on the station's Earth-facing Harmony node. Harmony, otherwise known as Node 2, is the core of the ISS and hosts laboratories from both Europe and Japan. Australia passed underneath the two spacecraft as Pettit made the final attachment and allowed the arm to go limp.

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Chris Foresman

Snapping a quick picture on your iPhone is easy, but getting the image on your desktop can sometimes be a chore. Bump, an early iPhone app that made it easy to swap contact info by "bumping" two iPhones together, now lets you bump your iPhone on your computer to send a selection of images straight to your computer's hard drive, or even to Bump's photo-sharing cloud service.

I'll give you a scenario to illustrate how Bump can make the process of using pictures from your iPhone or Android phone a little easier (it's one I've run into personally on numerous occasions). Say you want to list an item on Craigslist: you snap a picture or two of the item using your iPhone, and you need to get the pictures to your computer so you can upload them to Craigslist.

You could connect your iPhone via USB, and use Image Capture or iPhoto syncing to get the images to your Mac. If you use Photo Stream on your iPhone, the photos will eventually sync to iPhoto and you can copy them from there. Because my sync cable is generally at the other end of the house on the nightstand, I usually e-mail the photos to myself.

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Aurich Lawson

In 1999 a pair of researchers published a paper called "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF)." David Dunning and Justin Kruger (both at Cornell University's Department of Psychology at the time) conducted a series of four studies showing that, in certain cases, people who are very bad at something think they are actually pretty good. They showed that to assess your own expertise at something, you need to have a certain amount of expertise already.

Remember the 2008 election campaign? The financial markets were going crazy, and banks that were "too big to fail" were bailed out by the government. Smug EU officials proclaimed that all was well within the EU—even while they were bailing out a number of financial institutions. Fast forward to 2012, and the EU is looking at hard times. Greece can't pay its debt. Italy can, but the markets don't trust it to be able to. Spain and Portugal are teetering around like toddlers just waiting for the market to give them one good push. Members of the public are behaving like teenagers, screaming "F**k you," while flipping the bird. The markets are reacting like drunk parents, and the resulting bruises are going to take a while to heal.

In all of this, uninformed idiots blame the Greeks for being lazy, the Germans for being too strict, and everyone but themselves. Newspapers, blogs, and television are filled with wise commentary hailing the return of the gold standard, the breakup of the Euro, or any number of sensible and not-so-sensible ideas. How are we to parse all this information? Do any of these people know what they are talking about? And if anyone does, how can we know which ones to listen to? The research of Dunning and Kruger may well tell us there is no way to figure out the answers to any of these questions. That is kind of scary.

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Those of you hoping to quit your jobs and make a living selling your Diablo III loot for real money will have to keep flipping burgers a little while longer as Blizzard has announced the game's much-discussed real-money auction house has moved "outside the previously estimated May timeframe."

The real-money auction service was originally planned to launch a week after the game's May 15 release, but the rollout was briefly pushed back to a planned May 29 before this latest delay. Blizzard now says that it "need[s] a bit more time to iron out the existing general stability and gameplay issues" in order to "ensure everyone has the smoothest experience possible" with the service. While the company didn't suggest a new date for the launch, it did promise to have "more information soon."

Meanwhile, many Diablo III forum users have been complaining loudly about hackers breaking into their accounts and stealing accumulated items and gold, a problem that would seem crucial to fix before those items start having a real-world value through the auction house. Blizzard officially responded to these reports today, stressing that its servers have not been compromised. The "extremely small" number of complaints that Blizzard has received about compromised accounts have all boiled down to traditional password-stealing methods, the company said, despite rumors of "session spoofing" and other esoteric attacks.

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Apple's new "Editors' Choice" banner

Apple is trying to help its users sift through the mountains of available apps by adding two new sections to the App Store and Mac App Store: "Free App of the Week" and "Editors' Choice." As expected, the two sections are meant to highlight high-quality apps for iOS and the Mac that users might otherwise miss due the sheer number of other apps being added to the two stores each day. But while the new sections are a welcome addition to the app stores, they still don't do much to improve the app discovery problem when users try to search.

Some current Editors' Choice picks on the iOS App Store include the new Facebook Camera app, Extreme Skater, Sketchbook Ink, and Air Mail. As for the Free App of the Week, the company is highlighting Cut the Rope: Experiments, which is free for a limited time as part of the new promotion. On the Mac App Store, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Cobook are being highlighted as Editors' Choices.

The new sections are helpful to a degree—users are always looking for new apps that rise above the rest in quality, and the new sections will help to promote those apps. But as pointed out by our friends at The Apple Blog, this is largely just a band-aid solution when viewed in the larger scope of app discovery. Even the most specific search terms, when plugged into the App Store, can turn up thousands of hits for other apps that may not even be relevant to what the user wanted. Digging through page after page of results can be tiring, and users are unlikely to have the patience or attention span to spend more than a few minutes trying to find what they want before giving up.

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Earlier this year, HP published the source code of Enyo, the underlying JavaScript framework of the webOS platform. The code was made available under the permissive Apache license as part of a broader plan to open the entire webOS environment. HP intended to continue advancing Enyo, but the extent of the company’s commitment and willingness to invest in ongoing development was questionable.

According to a new report published today by The Verge, developers behind Enyo will soon be leaving HP to join Google. It’s not yet clear, however, how they will be integrated into Google’s workforce. It's also unclear how many developers are moving.

It seems unlikely that Google intends to invest in webOS, but its worth noting that Enyo could potentially be used in a wide range of other environments. The expertise of Enyo developers could be useful if Google is looking to build a Web runtime for Android to serve as an alternative to the platform’s Java-based development stack. Enyo could also help provide a standardized application development framework for Google’s Chrome OS.

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In a statement of bravado that bordered on delusion, the president of French film and production company Gaumont announced that, "between the 15th of May and the 15th of December 2011, not a single French film was downloaded on the Web," due to France's strict anti-piracy law Hadopi. In Gaumont’s financial report (PDF) released this month, Gaumont president Nicolas Seydoux (who also leads France’s ALPA, an association against audiovisual piracy) praised Hadopi and other organizations for significantly reducing all kinds of digital piracy in the second half of 2011.

The statement may not be (read: it's probably not) entirely true. As French site Numerama points out, Seydoux preceeds that proclamation by saying that the ALPA detected 110 million incidents of audiovisual piracy and sent 8.7 million notices to Hadopi, the government office that deals with the law of the same name. "We can hardly believe that in this volume not a single incident involves the pirating of French films," Numerama declared. According to the ALPA and Gaumont, illegal downloads of movies (presumably only international films) saw a 50 percent reduction in the last year.

In his statement, Seydoux said that illegal movie streaming sites have been harder to stifle. He did applaud the delisting of several infringing sites, as well as the arrest and imprisonment of three illegal streaming site administrators and one illegal supplier of movies before their release date.

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Fox and NBCUniversal have both separately sued Dish Network in a Los Angeles federal court over its new service that lets consumers skip TV ads. Dish's AutoHop service, which debuted earlier this month, has “irked” entertainment executives, according to the Associated Press.

Fox attacked Dish in fairly harsh terms in a statement today.

"We were given no choice but to file suit against one of our largest distributors, Dish Network, because of their surprising move to market a product with the clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem," the statement read. “Their wrongheaded decision requires us to take swift action in order to aggressively defend the future of free, over-the-air television."

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Tape storage isn’t what you’d call cutting-edge technology. Most of us make do with disk, and lust after the speeds of SSD. But tape is still useful when massive amounts of storage are needed, in part because of its low cost and power requirements. And it's being put to good use at an extreme scale in a new supercomputer.

According to Computerworld, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is building a storage infrastructure consisting of 380 petabytes of magnetic tape capacity and 25 petabytes of disk storage. It's all to support the petaflop-scale Blue Waters supercomputer. The NCSA says it is building the system to "predict the behavior of complex biological systems, understand how the cosmos evolved after the Big Bang, design new materials at the atomic level, predict the behavior of hurricanes and tornadoes, and simulate complex engineered systems like the power distribution system and airplanes and automobiles."

The 25PB of disk will act as online storage for data that must be rapidly accessed, while the tape library is categorized as nearline, sort of a compromise between online storage and backup systems. With 380,000 AMD Opteron 6200 Series x86 processors (and 3,000 NVIDIA GPUs), the cluster will use 40Gbps Ethernet technology with aggregate throughput of up to a terabyte per second, Computerworld reported. The primary interconnect, however, is Cray's Gemini technology.

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RealNetworks will create a $2 million compensation fund for some of its allegedly unwilling subscribers. The owners of RealPlayer and Rhapsody music streaming are using the funds to settle a complaint filed in Washington state over the company's e-commerce practices.

The complaint stems from allegations that RealNetworks charged customers for services they weren't subscribed to. "Deceptive prechecked boxes and fine print obligated consumers to not-so-free trials for subscription services they didn't want in the first place," said Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna.

RealNetworks said the complaint relates to subscriptions between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2009. In addition to the $2 million fund, the company will pay $400,000 to the attorney general's office for legal costs.

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One of the unfortunate memes that has made repeated appearances in the climate debate is that money isn't just influencing the public debate about science, but it's also influencing the science itself. The government, the argument goes, is paying scientists specifically to demonstrate that carbon dioxide is the major culprit in recent climate change, and the money available to do so is exploding.

Although the argument displays a profound misunderstanding of how science and science funding work, it's just not going away. Just this week, one of the sites where people congregate to criticize mainstream climate science once again repeated it, replete with the graph below. That graph originated in a 2009 report from a think tank called the Science & Public Policy Institute (notable for using the serially confused Christopher Monckton as a policy advisor).

The report, called "Climate Money: The climate industry: $79 billion so far—trillions to come" (PDF) and prepared by Australian journalist Joanne Nova for the Science & Public Policy Institute, claims to show how money has distorted climate science. There are several aspects to this argument, but we'll start with the money itself.

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Just a couple of the many drones that suddenly become our worst enemies in Black Ops 2 Activision / Treyarch

It's hard to look at the basic plot structure for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and not see some sort of overarching political message. This is a game that imagines the year 2025 where autonomous and remote controlled drones have become a ubiquitous part of war. As the lead voice in the game's trailer puts it, "technology got stronger while we got weaker." When antagonist Raul Menendez takes control of our drones and turns them against us, the human side of the formula seems substantially outmatched.

Meanwhile, in the real world of today, drone warfare is coming under increasing attack both from a legal and moral perspective. By limiting the personal risk to remote-operating soldiers, and by giving the military the ability to conduct "targeted killings" from across the globe with limited oversight, drones are already changing the way we think about traditional armed conflict. The obvious message of Black Ops 2 seems to be that these rapid changes to the basic nature of war might not be entirely positive.

Treyarch Studio head Mark Lamia, insists that his team "wasn't going after any sort of political stance" in focusing on drone warfare in Black Ops 2. That said, he sees the game's plot, in part, as a classic, cautionary tale of the unintended consequences of technological advancement.

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Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson

Microsoft wants Windows developers to write Windows 8-specific, Metro-style, touch-friendly applications, and to make sure that they crank these apps out, the company has decided that Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, can produce nothing else.

If you want to develop desktop applications—anything that runs at the command line or on the conventional Windows desktop that remains a fully supported, integral, essential part of Windows 8—you'll have two options: stick with the current Visual C++ 2010 Express and Visual C# 2010 Express products, or pay about $400-500 for Visual Studio 11 Professional. A second version, Visual Studio 11 Express for Web, will be able to produce HTML and JavaScript websites, and nothing more.

Visual Studio 11 is an improvement in many ways over Visual Studio 2010. Its C++ compiler, for example, is a great deal more standards-compliant, especially with the new C++ 11 specification. It has powerful new optimization features, such as the ability to automatically use CPU features like SSE2 to accelerate mathematically intensive programs, and new language features to allow programs to be executed on the GPU. The new version of the C# language makes it easier to write programs that do their work on background threads and avoid making user interfaces unresponsive. The .NET Framework, updated to version 4.5, includes new capabilities for desktop applications, such as a ribbon control for Microsoft's WPF GUI framework.

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Dashboard view of the new data Google

Who complains loudest about Google linking to infringing content in its search results? The movie and music industries, of course, who absolutely delight in taking whacks at the search engine. But thanks to a huge new trove of data released today by Google, we know that the worldwide top takedown requestor—by far—is actually Microsoft.

Anatomizing takedowns

If content owners claim that a Google search result links to infringing material, Google will remove the link. But just how many times does this happen—and who is making all the requests? Google today rolled out an upgrade to its "Transparency Report" that shows private copyright takedown information in addition to the usual government requests for user information or for censorship.

In the last month, Google's search engine has received requests to remove links to 1.13 million URLs hosted on 23,000 distinct domains. (Takedown requests to YouTube and other Google properties are not covered under the current data release.) I spoke to Fred von Lohmann, senior copyright counsel at Google, who said that the company does in fact remove 97 percent of the requested links after running them through both algorithmic and human review to catch mistakes or bad faith notices. The average turnaround time for a takedown is 11 hours, which von Lohmann called "the best in the industry."

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"Outside of South Africa, there is little to no capacity for cloud computing on the continent," wrote Erik Hersman on his blog, White African. "This means that few of the programmers in this region have the skill sets necessary to work and build out this infrastructure. We have a severely limited foundation on which to build future services in an increasingly cloud-based computing world."

Hersman is co-founder of the iHub and the crisis mapping software outfit Ushahidi.

Steps have now been taken that will lead to HPC capability, creating a 24-node cluster that will come online at Kenya's fantastic iHub idea factory this summer.

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