Comcast

Remember Comcast's Streampix service? Launched in February 2012, it was created to help Comcast compete against streaming video services such as Netflix.

But it never caught on—and thus regulators examining the Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger should reject claims that Comcast has an incentive to discriminate against online video distributors [OVDs] like Netflix, Comcast told the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week.

The tidbit was buried in Comcast's 324-page filing with the FCC and was pointed out yesterday by Karl Bode of DSLReports. Comcast still offers Streampix as a $5-per-month add-on to its Xfinity TV service but has given up on making it a standalone offering. The Streampix mobile app is still available on Apple and Android devices but will eventually be "decommissioned." The filing says:

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You know you want to flip these toggles. Just look at them. Lee Hutchinson

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I think I have a problem. I am not attracted to that many gadgets, but I lack anything even remotely resembling impulse control when it comes to those I do want. We don’t keep review hardware at Ars, so while I can often scratch an itch by requesting that companies send me the toys I lust after, I end up simply buying the things I want most—to hell with budget and consequences.

It was in mid-May when I stumbled across this fan-made video of the complex and sprawling spaceship simulator Elite: Dangerous showing off the new features added to the crowdfunded game’s alpha build. Ninety seconds into the ten minute video, I scraped my jaw off the floor and bought into Elite’s premium beta (you can read my thoughts on the game in this long-form review with video). Immediately I knew my current control set-up just wouldn’t cut the mustard in a game as complex as Elite: Dangerous. On top of that, Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen was also due to release a playable module in the near future. With two huge space sims on the horizon, I needed to step up my game. Substantially.

And that’s how a YouTube video convinced me to head over to Amazon and drop $463.53 on a joystick and throttle combination. As the price may indicate, this was not just any joystick and throttle—I aimed as high as I could reasonably aim. I bought a Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog.

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I don't think we're on Earth anymore, Toto.

While selecting my colonists' Earth-bound origins for the first time in Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, I could take a guess as to what the Polystralia or the African Union were meant to represent. I couldn't, however, give you a single clue regarding what they meant in a gameplay context. Ask me anything about the ARC or the Kavithan Protectorate, and I'll offer you the same, slow blinks I gave to my monitor when it first showed them to me. Right from the opening of my time with an extensive preview build of Beyond Earth, the game presented a series of jargon-heavy sci-fi moments that were a potent taste of what was to come.

In previous Civilization games, I could use my knowledge of real-world history to guide my initial choice of the dozen or so societies on offer and know that their attributes at least loosely reflect their real-life counterparts (sometimes very loosely; see: Brigadier General Gandhi).

Civilization has always benefited from history: the history of lessons learned by the developers over time, sure, but also the benefit of foreknowledge. I know that muskets are better than spears. I know what benefits researching the assembly line is likely to provide. I know what Mr. Anderson's sixth grade history class taught me about conquistadors and the Industrial Revolution. What I don't remember Mr. Anderson telling me about is the effect of Genetic Mapping on my Purity Affinity.

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Apple has responded to concerns about “Shellshock,” a pair of vulnerabilities in versions of the GNU Bourne-Again Shell (bash), issuing a statement that the company is “working to quickly provide a fix” to the vulnerability. However, a company spokesperson said that most Mac OS X users have nothing to fear.

In an email to Ars Technica, an Apple spokesperson provided the following statement from the company:

"The vast majority of OS X users are not at risk to recently reported bash vulnerabilities. Bash, a UNIX command shell and language included in OS X, has a weakness that could allow unauthorized users to remotely gain control of vulnerable systems. With OS X, systems are safe by default and not exposed to remote exploits of bash unless users configure advanced UNIX services. We are working to quickly provide a software update for our advanced UNIX users.”

Update: Chet Ramey, the maintainer of bash, said in a post to Twitter that he had notified Apple of the vulnerability several times before it was made public, "and sent a patch they can apply. Several messages." So it's not certain why Apple hasn't already packaged that fix for release, other than

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DirecTV stockholders have voted in favor of AT&T's $48.5 billion acquisition of the company.

"The final voting results indicate more than 99 percent of votes cast were in favor of the adoption of the merger agreement, representing 77 percent of all outstanding shares," DirecTV said in an announcement yesterday.

Announced in May, the AT&T/DirecTV merger is still subject to regulatory review by the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice. AT&T has said it needs to buy DirecTV because its limited pay-TV customer base has left the company lagging behind rivals Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which are attempting to merge as well. AT&T said it expects to complete its merger in the first half of 2015.

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Last week we took a look at NVIDIA’s newest consumer flagship video card, the GeForce GTX 980. Today in the second part of our series on the GTX 900 series we're taking a look at its lower-tier, lower priced counterpart, the GeForce GTX 970. With a price of just $329, GTX 970 is just as interesting (if not more interesting overall) than its bigger sibling. The performance decrease from the reduced clock speeds and fewer SMMs that comes with being a GTX x70 part is going to be tangible, but then so is a $220 savings to the pocketbook. With GTX 980 already topping our charts, if GTX 970 can stay relatively close then it would be a very tantalizing value proposition for enthusiast gamers who want to buy in to GM204 at a lower price.

This isn't the cave in Destiny that once spawned endless, loot-heavy mobs. Activision / Bungie

In the two and a half weeks since the launch of Destiny, Bungie's first major post-Halo game, the developer has been gathering user data and using it to inform a news post that lays out a series of major gameplay changes to come.

Thursday's post indicates that players of the always-online shooter can expect the updates within "the next month or two," with some going live as early as today. Most notably, the game's biggest exploit, a "loot cave" in the Old Russia area that spawned endless, easily killable cretins, has been patched; it will no longer allow players to spit gunfire for hours in the hopes of nabbing "legendary" and "exotic" weapons and gear. "Shooting at a black hole for hours on end isn't our dream for how Destiny is played," Bungie wrote.

In reviewing Destiny, one of our biggest issues with the game was that it descended into grinding for loot in redundant environments far too quickly. Bungie acknowledged that criticism (if only slightly) by saying it would fine tune the game's "strike" missions, which it said are currently too "grindy."

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A Philips Hue bulb, strutting its purple stuff.

I owe Ars alum and Wirecutter Editor-in-Chief Jacqui Cheng a debt of gratitude for forwarding me an e-mail from Philips PR representatives back in October 2012. Philips had approached Jacqui about reviewing the just-launched devices, but Jacqui’s schedule at the time was filled to bursting with Apple topics, and so I volunteered to step up and play with the fancy wirelessly controlled color-changing lights—and I fell in love with them.

In spite of their high price—$199.95 for a starter kit with three bulbs and $59 for each additional bulb after that—it wasn’t long before I found my house festooned with dozens of the things, scattered through every room. My wife and I wake up to them in the bedroom at 6:30am, and the set in my office shifts tones throughout the day, brightening to task lighting levels at mid-morning and shifting to a golden sunset color at five o’clock when it’s time to start wrapping up work. I am an unabashed fan, and after two years it’s impossible to imagine working at home without them.

Hue isn’t the only fancy wirelessly controlled light—there’s Lifx, Lümen, Insteon bulbs, and others as well. They all form a subcategory in the Internet of Things pantheon called "connected lighting." But though competitors are multiplying, Hue was the first color-changing app-controlled system to make it to market, and thanks to an open and easily accessible API it remains one of the most feature-complete. Out of all of them, it’s the one I’ve chosen to live with, and so far it’s been a rewarding product to own.

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How builders and architects in Chichester are embracing new technology to make houses greener and more attractive to buyers.

Patch notes! We considered rewriting them in Comic Sans for funsies, but cooler heads prevailed.

On Thursday evening, Apple gave its first major iOS 8 update another shot—only this time without the major bugs in yesterday's attempt. Upon installation, iOS 8.0.1 left many iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users with non-functioning cellular service and TouchID buttons. Apple told CNBC that 40,000 people were affected by the problems, and the update was quickly pulled.

iOS 8.0.2 is now available for all compatible iDevices, and its patch notes look remarkably like those from 8.0.1, with one major update: "Fixes an issue in iOS 8.0.1 that impacted cellular network connectivity and Touch ID on iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus." Otherwise, the good stuff we'd hoped for yesterday, including HealthKit fixes, a third-party keyboard update, and photo-library access for third-party apps, is now ready to rock on your favorite, compatible iDevice.

Our own Andrew Cunningham reported a smooth update on his latest iPhones; that, plus positive chatter on Twitter feeds, has us convinced that this should be a safer update to accept.

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Ministerio del Interior 2014 James Comey, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, said Thursday he was "concerned" over Apple and Google marketing smart phones that can't be searched by law enforcement.

"What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law," Comey told reporters. He said the bureau has reached out to Apple and Google "to understand what they're thinking and why they think it makes sense."

The move to encryption is among the latest aftershocks in the wake of NSA leaker Edward Snowden's revelations about massive US government surveillance.

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Yuneec Technology had this sleek-looking drone, called Flying Eyes, at the National Broadcasters Association conference in Spring 2014. It comes fully assembled for those who just need aerial images, not a weekend project. Megan Geuss

On Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration granted six aerial photo and video companies exemptions from rules that make it difficult to use drones for commercial purposes in the United States. US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx determined that drones used by these companies would not threaten other aircraft or pose a national security threat.

Law enforcement agencies, fire departments, and the military have thus far been the primary drone operators in the US. Commercial drones, especially those that are intended to make deliveries like the one that will be launched by DHL in Germany this week or the ones proposed by Amazon and others, have generally not been allowed since 2007. (Of course, people can use non-commercial drones, and potentially crash them, with certain caveats.)

The six firms, which include Astraeus Aerial, Aerial MOB, HeliVideo Productions, Pictorvision Inc., RC Pro Productions Consulting, and Snaproll Media, will certainly pave the way for other commercial drone companies seeking to deploy their own drones in agriculture, oil and gas, logistics, and other sectors as well.

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BoingBoing

As reports and videos about the bendability of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus continue to accumulate, Apple issued a response on Thursday that detailed the stress-test rigors its phones endure before shipping to market. Additionally, the company announced that in the new iPhones' first six days on the market, "only nine customers" had reported bent phone issues directly to Apple.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple called the bending cases "extremely rare," then described the five-step testing process that its newest models, made of "a custom grade of anodized aluminum" along with "stainless steel and titanium inserts," had to endure. The WSJ described two of those tests in detail: the "pressure point cycling test," which applies force all over an iPhone's screen and body, and the "sit test," which simulates a situation in which someone sits on a hard surface while wearing tight pants. (We'd love to see a crash-test dummy mock-up of the latter.)

Apple's response didn't include any concession of design fault, and its specific count of nine complaining customers certainly didn't include videos and other social-media complaints that have gone live since last weekend—particularly this hard-to-watch bending of an iPhone 6 Plus posted by BoingBoing (posted next to a video of other smartphones bending back into place for comparison's sake, which their iPhone 6 Plus was unable to do).

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Samsung loves "big." Its phones are big, its advertising budget is big, and as you'll see below, its employee headcount is really big, too. Samsung has more employees than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined. We dug through everyone's 10-K (or equivalent) SEC filings and came up with this:

Samsung Electronics vs the headcounts of other companies. Ron Amadeo

At 275,000 employees, Samsung (just Samsung Electronics) is the size of five Googles! This explains Samsung's machine-gun-style device output; the company has released around 46 smartphones and 27 tablets just in 2014.

If we wanted to, we could cut these numbers down some more. Google is going to shed 3,894 employees once it finally gets rid of Motorola. Over half of Apple's headcount—42,800 employees—is from the retail division, putting the non-retail part of the company at only 37,500 employees. The "Sony" on this chart only means "Sony Electronics," the part of the company that is most comparable to Samsung Electronics. Sony Group has a massive media arm consisting of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, and Sony Financial Services.

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Amazon has started warning customers of its EC2 cloud computing platform that it's going to start rebooting their instances en masse over the next few days.

Not all EC2 instance types will need rebooting; the fast storage (HS1) and large memory (R3) virtual machines are unaffected. But the reboots will nonetheless be widespread, with all regions and all availability zones affected. Rebooting is due to start this evening and finish next Tuesday.

Amazon hasn't explained why the bulk reboot is needed, but a source speaking to ITNews has said that it's due to an embargoed flaw in the Xen hypervisor. That bug, XSA-108, is due to be publicly disclosed on October 1, by which time Amazon's reboot should be complete.

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Oculus

Over the last few years, I've tried a number of virtual reality "solutions" that involve popping a smartphone into some sort of mask that straps to your face. On the surface, it seems like a natural fit to use a phone as a combination virtual reality display, head-tilt sensor, and processor that avoids the need to tether to a bulky PC tower.

Unfortunately, every one of the prototype phone-based VR devices I'd tried delivered an on-the-cheap virtual reality experience that ranged from awful to mediocre. Issues with optics, frame rate, and accurate head tracking have plagued all of these efforts to the extent that I began to think modern cell phones just weren't up to the task of driving convincing virtual reality.

Thus, I was a bit skeptical of Gear VR, Samsung's recently announced hardware effort that turns the upcoming Galaxy Note 4 smartphone into a VR headset using a holster powered by Rift maker Oculus. The middling hands-on experience with Gear VR reported by our own Ron Amadeo earlier this month didn't really change my impressions, either.

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Misterbnb

If you were gay and a recent passenger on American Airlines, you might have used in-flight Wi-Fi provided by Gogo just like any other customer. In the course of finding somewhere to stay before you land, you might have navigated to misterbnb.com, a version of Airbnb where customers looking for a place to stay can be guaranteed the hosts are gay-friendly. Rather than getting the site's homepage, however, your browser would have kicked you to an interstitial page telling you the site had been censored by Gogo. The given reason would have been the site had been categorized as "adult-and-pornography."

Looking at Misterbnb, there is nothing to trigger a pornography-centric filter on the homepage. The word "gay" appears a handful of times, but there is no salacious language, no risque photos, no video, not even any wild-card advertising space that could turn up a rogue Flash ad, photo, or video that runs counter to the tone of the site. "Travel gay friendly," "build the gay travel community," or "attend the next gay events" is about as hot as the site's narrative gets. In total, the word "gay" appears 11 times in text on the site's homepage.

Gogo and American Airlines are not the first Wi-Fi providers to be touchy about LGBT content; over the last year, a handful of businesses, including Au Bon Pain, Tim Horton's, and McDonald's, made minor news for not allowing their customers to view innocuous LGBT-centric websites, like GLAAD's homepage.

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DHL

Tomorrow, German logistics company DHL is expected to launch a small drone which will fly approximately 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) from Norddeich, a village in northern Germany, to the island of Juist, a small island community off the north coast of Germany. DHL has dubbed the drone the “parcelcopter,” and it will be used to regularly deliver medications and other necessities, marking a noted advancement in the commercial use of drones worldwide.

DHL says that its parcelcopter is the first drone to fly in Europe outside of the field of vision of the pilot in a real-life mission. The company and two of its research partners worked with the German Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure to establish “a restricted flight area exclusively for this research project,” thus bypassing the kinds of regulations that have made it difficult for commercial drone use to take off elsewhere in the world (pardon the pun).

The parcelcopter's flight will also be fully automated. “This means that a pilot does not have to take any action at all during any phase of the flight,” a DHL press release explains. However, for safety reasons, and in order to comply with government requirements, “the DHL parcelcopter will be constantly monitored during the flight by a mobile ground station in Norddeich so that manual action can be immediately taken in real time if a malfunction or emergency occurs. The ground station will also maintain constant contact with air traffic controllers,” the press release says.

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Farmers warn oil seed rape crops are being destroyed because of a ban on a pesticide brought in to protect bees.

The South Carolina incident.
A South Carolina highway trooper was charged Wednesday over accusations of assault and battery in connection to the unprovoked shooting of a motorist pulled over for a seatbelt violation—an incident that was videotaped by the officer's dashcam.

And on the same day South Carolina patrolman Sean Groubert, 31, was charged with wrongful shooting, California officials agreed to pay a woman $1.5 million after a motorist captured video with a mobile phone of a California highway patrolman repeatedly punching a woman on the side of a Los Angeles freeway.

That officer, Daniel Andrew, agreed to resign and could still be charged in connection to the July pummeling of a homeless woman. The video of Andrew repeatedly punching Marlene Pinnock in the face invoked images of the Rodney King beating while garnering millions of hits on YouTube and elsewhere. An off-duty policeman helped subdue the officer.

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