Arstechnica

Google I/O didn't give us the Android update we were expecting—or did it?? Andrew Cunningham

Google covered a lot of ground in its three-and-a-half-hour opening keynote at Google I/O yesterday, but one thing it didn't announce was the oft-rumored next version of Android. However, persistent rumors insist that the elusive Android 4.3 is still coming next month—if that's true, why not announce it at I/O in front of all of your most enthusiastic developers?

The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem.

Consider the full breadth of yesterday's Android-related improvements: you've got an update to the Android version of Google Maps, due this summer, that incorporates some of the features of the iOS version and the new desktop version. There's a WebGL-capable version of Chrome for Android and an entirely new gaming API. A shotgun blast of improvements are coming to the Google Play Services APIs. And that's to say nothing of the products that affect Google's services across all supported platforms: Google Play Music All Access (say that five times fast), Hangouts, and Search improvements.

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Yesterday, Google announced its new, beefier Hangouts app for Android phones. The newest iteration integrates video chatting, Gmail, and Google's late “Google Talk” app all into one. Hangouts is available for free on all Android devices running Android 2.3 or higher, but if you pay phone bills to AT&T, you can forget about that video chat for now.

Slashgear reports that customers trying to access video chat on AT&T are met with a message saying “You must be connected to a Wi-Fi network to join a video call.”

The message is reminiscent of news from a year earlier, when AT&T decreed that customers would not be able to use Apple's new FaceTime video chatting over its networks. The company later sort of relented and said it would make the service free to customers on 3G networks—but only if they were on a shared data plan. (We polled Ars readers last July and 89 percent said they'd never pay extra just to use FaceTime). Amid genuine customer outrage and rumors that it was violating network neutrality rules, AT&T eventually saw a formal FCC complaint filed against it. The company then started independently loosening its restrictions on FaceTime.

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Welcome to your new Hangout.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Yesterday Google released Hangouts, the company's new video, voice, and text chat application. Previously known internally to Google by the codename "Babel," Hangouts consolidates the previously disconnected Google+ video Hangouts, the Google+ Messenger chat application, and the Gmail-connected Google Talk platform into a single app and architecture. Hangouts isn’t just an app—it's an entire real-time communications architecture overhaul with deep hooks into Gmail and Google Drive. And while it doesn't yet span all the real-time communications options—SMS support is reportedly in the works, while support for Google Voice has not been discussed—Hangouts poses a significant challenge both to Apple's iMessage and Microsoft's Skype because of its cross-platform support and relative openness.

The extent of that openness wasn't exactly clear from Google's presentation of Hangouts during yesterday's marathon Google I/O keynote presentation. Nothing was said at the time about what the changes would mean for developers and users of software that had previously connected to Google Talk. As it turns out there's good news and bad news.

During a "fireside chat" with the Google + Platform team today, Vice President of Engineering Chee Chew cleared the air over questions about how the consolidation of Google's chat applications under Hangouts would affect users of third-party chat tools like Pidgin and Adium. Chew also addressed the matter of businesses which used the Extended Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) to connect their private IM systems to Google Talk users in the past.

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The Password Minder

Passwords are a constant headache, a headache that will one day grow so bad that—if infomercials can be believed—your grandmother will pound a table in frustration. How to manage them? Early this year, one of the largest as-seen-on-TV companies produced its innovative answer: the Password Minder.

Despite the grandiose name, the Password Minder is a blank notebook. It has a black cover. You write all your passwords in it. It costs $10 (plus shipping and handling).

“Who can remember all those tricky combinations?” the infomercial asks. “You’ll never lose critical computer settings again!” it exclaims as a green “Safe Computer Guarantee” appears on the screen.

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A white Nexus 4 spotted in the wild. It missed the keynote, but it's apparently still coming. Android and Me

It's fair to say that we didn't get everything we wanted to out of Google's marathon opening-day keynote yesterday. Persistent rumors pointed to a possible refresh for last year's Nexus 7 tablet and small tweaks to the Nexus 4. And Android 4.3 was very briefly outed on one of Google's own product pages yesterday.

None of this actually happened—yet some rumors die hard. Android and Me reports that it was able to lay hands on a white version of the Nexus 4 at Google I/O and that the phone would be available in the Google Play store on June 10. The phone's hardware is otherwise identical to the black Nexus 4 that has been available (or not available) from Google Play since last November, but the new version of the phone will also apparently bring us the Android 4.3 update that we missed yesterday.

Specifics about the next version of Android have been hard to come by. Speculation points to the inclusion of some new Bluetooth features and support for OpenGL ES 3.0 but otherwise we haven't heard much. Even the low-key Android 4.2 update came with plenty of small features and tweaks, though. In the event that the new operating system actually comes to pass this time, expect us to take an in-depth look at it as soon we can.

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Metadata librarian Jeffrey Beall runs the popular industry blog Scholarly Open Access. The site maintains a list of open-access journals and publishers that Beall believes engage in predatory practices. For journals and publishers these acts include things like spamming scholars or charging faulty fees for content. The site is known simply as "Beall's list" to followers and its notoriety has earned Beall ink in places like The New York Times. (And yes, now he even receives pseudo-spammer journals who request to be featured on the site without really understanding.)

Today The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a less amusing letter Beall received Tuesday. An Indian intellectual property management firm called IP Markets informed Beall that they would be suing for $1 billion in damages and that he could face up to three years in prison for his "deliberate attempt to defame our client." That client is OMICS Publishing Group, an India-based operation profiled several times on the blog. The group requested that Beall remove the posts and e-mail updates to anyone who published his work, yet IP Markets still intends to go through with the suit either way.

"All the allegation [sic] that you have mentioned in your blog are nothing more than fantastic figment of your imagination by you," the six-page letter reads according to The Chronicle. "Our client perceive the blog as mindless rattle of a incoherent person and please be assured that our client has taken a very serious note of the language, tone, and tenure adopted by you as well as the criminal acts of putting the same on the Internet."

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A greenhouse in winter, with the rest of the tundra frozen around it. Josh Schimel

Although the climate changes that are being driven by human carbon emissions are likely to cause serious disruptions on their own, one of the additional worries is that the initial warming will set off events that keep changing the planet even if humanity gets its carbon emissions under control. So, for example, warming the oceans could heat up the clathrates that exist there, releasing methane that greatly enhances the greenhouse warming.

The other place that scientists have been watching nervously is the Arctic. About half the carbon stored in the Earth's soil is in the Arctic, where it's locked in place by permafrost and low metabolic activity caused by the cold. As those regions melt, the worry is that bacteria in the soil will start feeding on the carbon trapped there, releasing it into the atmosphere as CO2 that causes further warming.

A new study that looks at 20 years of changes in Alaska, however, suggests that this won't necessarily take place. In the area being studied, the warming temperatures rearranged the ecosystem and redistributed the carbon. But, in the end, there was just as much carbon stored in the soil. What needs to be determined now is just how well this experience will translate to other areas of the Arctic.

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Explosion photo by gynti_46 (remixed)

LONDON, UK—The four British Lulzsec hackers—Mustafa "tflow" al-Bassam, Ryan "kayla" Ackroyd, Jake "topiary" Davis, and Ryan "ViraL" Cleary—were sentenced today to between 20 and 32 months in jail for crimes committed during Lulzsec's 50 day hacking spree in 2011. Prosecutors described the men as being at the "cutting edge of contemporary and emerging criminal offending known as cybercrime" and as "latter-day pirates."

At previous hearings, al-Bassam, 18, of Peckham, London, and Davis, 20, of the Shetland Islands, entered guilty pleas to charges of conspiracy to commit DDoS attacks against targets including Westboro Baptist Church, Sony, Bethesda, and EVE Online. They also pled to conspiracy to hack targets including Nintendo, Sony (again), PBS, and HBGary. Ackroyd, 26, of Yorkshire, pled guilty only to the hacking charge.

For these crimes, al-Bassam was sentenced to 20 months, suspended for two years and received 300 hours of community service. Davis was sentenced to 24 months in a young offender's institute, of which 12 months must be served. Time served on bail with an electronic tag counts towards this, leaving Davis with 38 days remaining on his sentence. Ackroyd was sentenced to 30 months.

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Mobile gaming can be a finicky thing. Not only does any title have to account for varying screen resolutions and multiplayer play, but with such a saturated device market, being able to take a game cross-platform entices both the developer and the player. For example, switching back and forth between iOS and Android can be difficult for some mobile gamers, especially if there are in-app purchases and achievements worth hoarding. As mobile ecosystems grow so do the users’ needs.

Google apparently realizes this since the company is making big strides to ensure that game developers are on board with its mobile ecosystem. It’s introduced a suite of APIs that will enable cloud saves, leaderboards, multiplayer game play, and achievements—all things that will benefit mobile gamers. “The opportunity that exists here is phenomenal for both developers and players looking for interesting and entertaining games,” said Greg Hartell, product manager for Google Play game services. “What it’s really about is creating a cross-platform environment that allows you to build a community of players across different screens.”

At first glance, Google’s Play game services appear to be a response to Apple’s Game Center functionality. On iOS the Game Center is featured as a standalone application for players to check on achievements and hook up with friends to play a game. Game Center is also integrated into the games that support it. The Play game services work similarly: users log in with their Google Plus account on the titles that support it.

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The D-Wave Two. D-Wave

D-Wave's quantum optimizer has found a new customer in the form of a partnership created by Google, NASA, and a consortium of research universities. The group is forming what it's calling the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab and will locate the computer at NASA's Ames Research Center. Academics will get involved via the Universities Space Research Association.

Although the D-Wave Two isn't a true quantum computer in the sense the term is typically used, D-Wave's system uses quantum effects to solve computational problems in a way that can be faster than traditional computers. How much faster? We just covered some results that indicated a certain class of problems may be sped up by as much as 10,000 times. Those algorithms are typically used in what's termed machine learning. And machine learning gets mentioned several times in Google's announcement of the new hardware.

Machine learning is typically used to allow computers to classify features, like whether or not an e-mail is spam (to use Google's example) or whether or not an image contains a specific feature, like a cat. You simply feed a machine learning system enough known images with and without cats and it will identify features that are shared among the cat set. When you feed it unknown images, it can determine whether enough of those features are present and make an accurate guess as to whether there's a cat in it. In more serious applications machine learning has been used to identify patterns of brain activity that are associated with different visual inputs, like viewing different letters.

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So far this year's Google I/O has been very developer-centric—perhaps not surprising given that I/O is, at the end of the day, a developer's conference. Especially compared to last year's skydiving, Glass-revealing, Nexus-introducing keynote, yesterday's three-and-a-half-hour keynote presentation focused overwhelmingly on back-end technologies rather than concrete products aimed at consumers.

There's still plenty to see. All this year we've been taking photos to show you just what it's like to cover these shows—we've shown you things as large as CES and as small as Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference. Our pictures from the first day of Google I/O should give you some idea of what it's like to attend a developer conference for one of tech's most influential companies.

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I/O is held in the west hall of the Moscone Center, and between the giant Google signs and this real-life Google Maps pin you'd be hard-pressed to miss it.

Andrew Cunningham

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Victor Perez

The same judge who handed Viacom another defeat in its copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube last month has denied class-action status to a huge population of video copyright owners whose works were posted on YouTube without their permission.

In a case running parallel to the infamous Viacom v. YouTube suit the English Premier League, French Tennis Federation, and various music publishers sued the Google-owned YouTube in 2007 "on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated," and in 2010 formally asked to be certified as a class. The proposed class would contain people or entities whose copyrighted work was posted on YouTube on or after April 15, 2005 without their permission.

To be eligible for the class victims of infringement must fall into one of two subclasses. One subclass would include victims of repeat infringers such as people who asked YouTube to take videos down but said videos either remained on the site or were taken down and then posted again. A second subclass would include just music publishers who were victims of copyright infringement on YouTube when the service "knew or should have known" about the infringement because of a notification from the copyright holder, "or because [YouTube] otherwise identified, tracked or monitored it, or could have identified it, including through tools offered to owners of sound recordings of musical compositions."

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When Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's home was raided in January 2012, US authorities were hoping they'd see him stateside, in court, pretty quickly. It hasn't worked out that way. Dotcom has been smiling on magazine covers and throwing unusual parties to herald his new cloud storage service, Mega.

The legal action moves ahead, however, with the US keeping Megaupload under indictment wit its assets frozen, as arguments over Dotcom's extradition move forward. Last word on the extradition trial was that it had been delayed until August 2013.

In order to mount what they call a proper defense to the extradition claims, Dotcom's lawyers have been asking to see the US evidence against their client. So far, they've been denied; New Zealand government lawyers have been arguing, on behalf of the US, that he should not be given the right to see those documents and that the extradition issue should be decided without lengthy discovery.

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Over half of Americans believe that there’s considerable disagreement among climate scientists about human-caused climate change—perhaps because they've heard that from industry advocacy campaigns and politicians. With so much controversy in the media many assume that the same controversy must exist in the scientific community.

In most situations people agree that it’s sensible to go with the majority of relevant experts whether that's in accepting that protons are real or a given medical treatment is effective. Those decisions depend critically on an accurate understanding of expert consensus.

Several attempts have been made to shine a light on expert opinions relating to global warming. One such study surveyed about 1,000 active climate scientists, finding that 97 percent of them accepted the evidence for the consensus position that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are largely responsible for the warming observed over the last century.

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Bell Labs shut down in 2006. Today, Alcatel-Lucent uses patents that originated at the labs to file lawsuits. Lawrence Aberle / Wikipedia

In 2011, Alcatel-Lucent had American e-commerce on the ropes. The French telecom had sued eight big retailers and Intuit saying that their e-commerce operations infringed Alcatel patents; one by one they were folding. Kmart, QVC, Lands' End, and Intuit paid up at various stages of the litigation. Just before trial began Zappos, Sears, and Amazon also settled. That left two companies holding the bag: Overstock.com and Newegg, a company whose top lawyer had vowed not to ever settle with patent trolls. 

Then things started going badly for the plaintiff. Very badly. Instead of convincing the East Texas jury to hand Alcatel the tens of millions it was asking for—$12 million from Newegg alone—the company got a verdict of non-infringement. And as for the one patent Alcatel had argued throughout trial was so key to modern e-commerce—US Patent No. 5,649,131—the jury invalidated its claims.

Alcatel-Lucent was scrambling. The company's patent-licensing operations were contentious but lucrative and Alcatel surely had plans to move on from those eight heavyweights to sue many more retailers. The '131 patent, titled simply "Communications Protocol" and related to "object identifiers," was its crown jewel.

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Riot Games founders and League of Legends creators Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill have encountered bad behavior in massively multiplayer online games since the days of Ultima Online and EverQuest. In all that time, the typical moderator response to the all-too-common racial epithets, homophobic remarks, and bullying that borders on psychological abuse in MMOs has been to simply ban the players and move on. League of Legends definitely could have afforded to go the same route, bleeding off a few bad apples from its 12 million daily players and 32 million active monthly players (as of late 2012) without really affecting the bottom line.

But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn’t an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference.

Prior to the launch of the formal initiative, Riot introduced "the Tribunal" to League of Legends in May of 2011. The Tribunal is basically a community-based court system where the defendants are players who have a large number of reports filed against them by other players. League players can log in to the Tribunal and see the cases that have been created against those players, viewing evidence in the form of sample chat logs and commentary from the players who filed the reports.

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Google wants your applications and data on its servers. At the Google I/O conference today, Google's Cloud Platform team introduced new public services and tweaks to existing services based on the compute and data storage infrastructure that supports Google's search engine and other applications.

Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president of technical infrastructure, unveiled the changes during a developer session on the Google Cloud Platform. The change that got the most applause from the developer audience was the expansion of Google's App Engine service to support applications written in the PHP scripting language. Google's announcement that it would be opening up its Cloud Datastore to applications running anywhere—not just in Google's cloud—got love from the audience too.

All of the changes make Google's public services much more competitive and directly comparable to Amazon Web Services and other public cloud infrastructure providers, and open up Google's infrastructure to a much larger audience. With tight integration into Android development tools and the rest of Google's ecosystem, the services could help Google become more of a one-stop shop for mobile and web app developers.

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Wikipedia

Hackers compromised accounts belonging to maintainers of the open-source ZPanel after a team member supporting the Web hosting control panel called a critic a "fucken little know it all." The ZPanel site went completely down after the incident and remained down at time of writing.

ZPanel support member Nigel Caldwell made the comment in the site's official forums and it was directed at a user named joepie91. Shortly beforehand, the Netherlands-based software developer—whose real name is Sven Slootweg—claimed that websites using ZPanel in combination with certain modules were vulnerable to exploits that allowed attackers to remotely execute malicious code. Slootweg directed his statement at Caldwell, aka PS2Guy, after the support member left a comment saying ZPanel "is more secure than panels that you pay good money for." Caldwell also said users have "got more chance of someone hacking your Operating System than the control panel that sits on it."

In his response, Slootweg claimed there was an "arbitrary code execution and root escalation vulnerability in the current version of ZPanel." To support this, Slootweg provided an example line of code he said could be inserted into a main ZPanel template to trigger the vulnerability. Last month, Slootweg disclosed a ZPanel vulnerability here. Two weeks ago, he stepped up his criticism after claiming the vulnerability had gone unfixed. "I find it shameful that I even have to post here to point this out, to prevent someone from putting themselves at risk," Slootweg wrote in Wednesday's post on the ZPanel forum. "This should be the responsibility of the ZPanel team."

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A profile decked out with the spoils of a trading card collection. Cool, but go back to the part about coupons? Steam

Steam will release a new beta feature within its service called Steam Trading Cards according to an announcement from the company. The trading cards integrate with a handful of Valve titles at launch, and players that collect the cards will be able to use them to earn coupons as well as profile backgrounds and other items to augment their Steam experience.

The launch titles that will generate trading cards to collect include Don't Starve, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Team Fortress 2, Portal 2 and Half-Life 2. When players get a particular set of cards they can craft them into a game badge to get “marketable items” like emoticons, profile backgrounds, and coupons for things like game discounts or DLC. The badges can then be upgraded, or “leveled up,” by collecting the same set again.

The info page states that half of any card set is dropped during game play while the other half is “earned through collecting prowess.” Badges contribute to a player’s “Steam Level,” and as that number rises players get account-bound items including extra friend list slots.

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Last week, Microsoft released a YouTube client for Windows Phone that gave users of Redmond's smartphone platform a rich, capable YouTube experience that didn't depend on using the YouTube Mobile site.

Though the app included account support, playlists, commenting, and most other aspects of YouTube, there's one thing it was missing—advertising. It also had two features it shouldn't have had—the ability to download videos and the ability to play videos that the creators have blocked from mobile devices.

As a result, Google sent Microsoft a cease-and-desist demand ordering the company to stop distributing the application by May 22nd.

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