An area of crustal spreading, similar to a mid-ocean ridge, is at the center of this image. If the crust spreads there, it must compress elsewhere. NASA/JPL

The Solar System is ancient. Many of the bodies in it show their age with impacts that date back to the violent early days of the Late Heavy Bombardment and craters embedded in craters. Earth is different in that plate tectonics and other geological processes constantly remake its surface. But even the Earth looks pretty old compared to Jupiter's moon Europa. Based on the number of impacts present, Europa looks to be less than 100 million years old.

A variety of evidence indicates that Europa's dynamic surface comes from the fact that the moon has a thin crust of ice above a large sub-surface ocean. Geysers and other features also suggest that the moon is geologically active. But the precise mechanism that drive the surface remodeling have remained uncertain. Now, two researchers are proposing that the mechanism is the same as it is on Earth: plate tectonics.

The proposal is put forth by the University of Idaho's Simon Kattenhorn and Johns Hopkins' Louise Prockter, and it was released by Nature Geoscience yesterday. The authors note the clear evidence of remodeling and point out that we've already identified a source of new ice reaching the surface: some features on the moon's surface appear to be sites of spreading, analogous to a mid-ocean ridge. But assuming the moon hasn't been growing larger, there must be some process that removes old ice from the surface.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Despite widespread support, a bill that would put limits on widespread surveillance is unlikely to get a vote before the elections—or even after them.

According to National Journal, the USA Freedom Act, which would essentially stop the government's bulk collection of telephone call data, is flailing. The bill is struggling despite the fact that it won a stunning new supporter last week: Director of Intelligence James Clapper, one of the top defenders of the surveillance programs.

A Senate staffer told NJ that it was "extremely unlikely" the bill would be considered in September. It was originally introduced in July by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and it has co-sponsors ranging from liberal senators like Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA) to Tea Party favorite Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

MSN—known to millions as "the site that Internet Explorer insists on going to after a fresh install"—is getting a new look as part of a broader rebranding effort.

The venerable portal site is Internet Explorer's default homepage and boasts millions of visitors. Its new, stylish makeover brings back memories of iGoogle and so many other portal-type sites before it. The different news sections can be personalized to favor your interests, and there's also integration with Outlook.com, Facebook, and Twitter.

The site aggregates news from a wide range of sources spanning wire services, online publications, and local news outlets. The news partnerships will vary on a country-by-country basis: in the US, partners include The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The Guardian and Telegraph are those chosen in the UK.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Activision's MMO-styled shooter Destiny is the kind of release that would usually see a wave of launch-day reviews when it hits stores and download services on all major consoles tomorrow, especially given the interest over whether the Halo creators at Bungie have any life left in them after parting ways with Microsoft four years ago.

That interest won't be met with much critical reaction tomorrow, however. Bungie has decided to let reviewers wait to experience the game with the public this time around.

"Typically, games receive their report cards before they become available to the public," Bungie community manager David "DeeJ" Dague wrote at the company's official blog on Friday, before adding that Destiny is not "a typical shooter." After listing some of the in-game activities that could be accomplished by a group of two-to-four players (a standard group size for a review), Dague described those activities as merely "a foundation for so much more."

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Nokia has once again refreshed its Windows Phone lineup with the release of the Lumia 930, which is the spiritual successor to the Lumia 920 which first launched with Windows Phone 8.0 way back in November 2012. But like the Lumia 630, it takes cues from more than just the Lumia with the closest model number. The Lumia 930 is an interesting combination of many of the other Nokia Windows Phone designs from over the years all wrapped up into a striking package that certainly gives it a new take on the polycarbonate bodies of all of the higher end Lumia devices over the years.

No thanks, 4Mbps is fast enough for me. Comcast

AT&T and Verizon have asked the Federal Communications Commission not to change its definition of broadband from 4Mbps to 10Mbps, saying many Internet users get by just fine at the lower speeds.

"Given the pace at which the industry is investing in advanced capabilities, there is no present need to redefine 'advanced' capabilities," AT&T wrote in a filing made public Friday after the FCC’s comment deadline (see FCC proceeding 14-126). "Consumer behavior strongly reinforces the conclusion that a 10Mbps service exceeds what many Americans need today to enable basic, high-quality transmissions," AT&T wrote later in its filing. Verizon made similar arguments.

Individual cable companies did not submit comments to the FCC, but their representative, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), agrees with AT&T and Verizon.

Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

When the Fire Phone came out, it was criticized for its poor app ecosystem, high price, and not-very-good 3D feature. Amazon usually undercuts the competition on pricing, but the Fire Phone was $200 on contract, the same price as much better smartphones from other companies. Now that the Fire Phone is out in the market and apparently not doing very well, Amazon is fixing the one thing it can fix: the price.

Amazon has announced that the (still) AT&T-exclusive device will now be going for 99 cents on a two-year contract. The off-contract price got a $200 price cut, too, going from $649.99 to $449.99 for the 32GB version. Buying a Fire Phone also gets you 12 months of Amazon Prime.

$449.99 off-contract is a little closer to competitive, but it's still a tough sell compared to the 32GB Nexus 5, which is $399.99. Google's device has a much better (and bigger) screen and the full suite of Google Play apps. On-contract, it has to fight other under-a-dollar devices, like the one cent AT&T Moto X.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Abby Sletten, 20. Police Handout A 20-year-old North Dakota woman is being charged with negligent homicide after the car she allegedly was driving at 85 mph slammed into another vehicle, killing an 89-year-old Minnesota woman.

Prosecutors say the incident took place on May 27 in daylight on Interstate 29 outside Grand Forks, North Dakota. Police said Sletten was surfing photos on Facebook and texting before she plowed into a SUV, killing its front-seat passenger, Phyllis Gordon, 89.

"Sletten had also sent and received several text messages since she departed from Fargo," the complaint read, according to the Star-Tribune. Witnesses said the vehicle Gordon was traveling in had slowed to make an unauthorized U-turn before the collision. The criminal complaint said that "several people" unsuccessfully tried to revive Gordon at the scene.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The iPhone 5S (left) compared to what is allegedly the front glass from the next iPhone. Marques Brownlee

After a year of minimalistic updates and the resurrection of old products, Apple is finally ready to make its first big hardware announcements of 2014 tomorrow at the Flint Center for the Performing Arts in Cupertino, CA.

The event is laden with symbolic significance, not least because Apple used the Flint Center to introduce the original Macintosh over 30 years ago (it normally holds events on its campus in Cupertino or in downtown San Francisco). We're all but certain to hear about new iPhones tomorrow, along with a new version of the operating system that powers them.

But while iPhone sales continue to grow and now account for well over half of Apple's revenue, in the eyes of certain analysts and investors it's old news. The last decade-plus of Apple's growth has been fueled not just by maintaining existing product lines but by introducing new ones. A brand-new product type is what those Apple watchers want to see, and by all reports they'll be getting one tomorrow.

Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments

We had the big consumer Haswell-E CPU launch just over a week ago, and today marks the release of the Xeon counterparts. Johan’s large deep-dive into what makes Haswell-EP tick is well worth a read. Alongside the CPUs come the motherboards, and the GIGABYTE Server division sent us over some info regarding their entrants into this category.  As GIGABYTE Server now sells direct to the end-user via retailers like Newegg, their hardware and packaging is coming under more scrutiny and we are getting one or two of these models in for review.

The two main features GIGABYTE is promoting with its launch starts with DDR4-2133 support in 1 DIMM per channel, 2 DPC and 3 DPC configurations.  This makes sense given that the CPUs have DDR4-2133 support, however GIGABYTE is claiming that other motherboards will have reduced limits at higher DPC counts.  The second aspect is almost a transfer of IP from the consumer group – updating the BIOS without a CPU or DRAM installed. This can be done over the IPMI 2.0 management interface or via the command line over the network.

Unfortunately I have no clue how to decipher the motherboard names, but on release will be a single workstation motherboard, the MW50-SV0:

Perhaps surprisingly we still see an mSATA here rather than an M.2 port. Also, the TPM header is slap bang in the middle of the first two PCIe slots, making any GPU + TPM user lose that first PCIe slot.

The server motherboards are all 2P, and GIGABYTE Server’s rep indicated to me that this generation is going to have extensive use of the mezzanine type-T slot for the add-in cards. Due to the ATX dimensions of this MD30-RS0, we are limited to 1 DPC in a stacked arrangement, but all 10 SATA 6 Gbps ports are here. Note that if a user wants to equip both SAS drives and a double slot PCIe device here, they will be out of luck.

The MU70-SU0 is a single socket workstation motherboard, using the ATX standard but also a narrow LGA2011-3 socket to allow for 3DPC. The arrangement should allow two large PCIe devices along with mSATA and full storage capabilities. This motherboard also has four GbE ports based on Intel’s I210 line of controllers.

The MD50-LS0 aims more to be a storage board unless riser cables are used, because in this configuration of CPUs and PCIe slots it will be impossible to add in large compute cards.  We move up to the larger SSI EEB form factor here, with onboard ports for the Type-T slot. Note there are no extra power connectors for the PCIe slots, perhaps suggesting a non-compute nature.

We actually have the MD60-SC0 in for testing, showing a dual narrow socket combined with 2 DPC memory. The CPU sockets are inline rather than staggered, and the board comes with a 10GbE QSFP+ port supporting dual output via a splitter cable. When setting up this board the other day the power connector placement is a little odd, and the PCIe arrangement again is not conducive to large PCIe devices, but the arrangement does allow for directed airflow in a server over the hot components (including that chipset and QSFP+).

The MD70-HB0 is a bit more of a rearrangement of the MD60-SC0, with the larger version of the LGA2011-3 sockets now inline top to bottom and 2 DPC channel support. The networking is provided by an Intel X540 instead, giving two 10GbE Base-T LAN ports. I have been wondering about the consumer adoption of 10GbE Base-T on motherboards and given the heatsink here to cool it, I am not surprised that it has not made it over yet.

The last motherboard in the list, aside from supporting 3DPC and 10GbE Base-T, breaks the pattern by supporting an M.2 slot. It looks here that only 2280 type devices are supported, and it is unclear if this is PCIe 2.0 x2, x4, or PCIe 3.0 x4.  The MD80-TM0 is also an odd size, using a proprietary 305x395mm form factor.

We have no official confirmation on pricing and exact release dates as of yet, although GIGABYTE is sampling to review. We have the MD60-SC0 on hand with some Xeons, so keep your eyes for that article.

Intel's new Xeon is here, and once again it has impressive specs. The 662 mm² die supports up to eighteen cores, contains two integrated memory controllers, and comes with up to 45MB of L3 cache. We have four different SKUs to test and compare, with each other as well as with the previous generation. We've also added some new real world application testing, so join us for one of our biggest server CPU reviews ever.

TiVo

This morning, great-grand-daddy DVR manufacturer TiVo announced that the company is aiming big with its next DVR, the TiVo Mega. With a release date currently scheduled for the first quarter of 2015, the Mega will come in a 10-bay, 19" rack-mount enclosure that appears to be 4U tall, judging from the PR images. The Mega's bays will be filled with hard drives in a RAID5 array, yielding 24TB of storage.

The press release doesn’t say what drive types or capacities are used, but some quick RAID math shows that if all 10 bays are populated, the Mega likely uses 3TB drives, which would give it roughly 25TB of usable space before TiVo’s software is loaded.

The Mega does everything TiVo’s flagship Roamio DVR does—it just does a lot more of it. The device has six tuners and can send content to TiVo Mini devices to send content to multiple rooms; it also comes with a lifetime subscription to TiVo’s service.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Researchers working at the site of a recent ice core (designated NEEM) in northern Greenland. Christian Morel

Any interesting field of science (read: all of them) has its little mysteries—things that don’t quite make sense. They're the currency of a research scientist, since they provide interesting questions. One of these little stumpers is found in Greenland ice cores.

Ice cores, with their annual layering, have provided a revolutionary window into Earth’s climate history. By analyzing two isotopes of oxygen in the water molecules, researchers found a record of changing climate. In warmer times, the heavier 18O atoms become a little more common. In colder times, they are less so. This revealed all kinds of information about the last few glacial cycles, which are controlled by subtle changes in Earth’s orbit and amplified by positive feedbacks like CO2.

There are, however, complications. The oxygen isotope ratio can also shift for reasons other than temperature, like changing snowfall patterns. The complications gave researchers reason to be skeptical of a strange detail at the end of the last ice age.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Nearly a week after female celebrities’ nude photos were stolen and shared across the Internet, reddit has banned the subreddit that helped to distribute them.

The reddit group /r/TheFappening and related subreddits were banned on Saturday night after reddit CEO Yishan Wong posted a blog titled “Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul.” The blog explained why the company is unlikely to make changes to its policies because of one incident.

In an update to the blog post, Wong wrote that the subreddit was banned because it violated rules unrelated to being a center for people to access stolen nude photos of female celebrities. He wrote that he disagrees with the distribution of stolen images, yet believes that reddit is a place for people to distribute media (and in this case, stolen nude photos):

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Mike Mozart

Comcast has begun serving Comcast ads to devices connected to one of its 3.5 million publicly accessible Wi-Fi hotspots across the US. Comcast's decision to inject data into websites raises security concerns and arguably cuts to the core of the ongoing net neutrality debate.

A Comcast spokesman told Ars the program began months ago. One facet of it is designed to alert consumers that they are connected to Comcast's Xfinity service. Other ads remind Web surfers to download Xfinity apps, Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas told Ars in telephone interviews.

The advertisements may appear about every seven minutes or so, he said, and they last for just seconds before trailing away. Douglas said the advertising campaign only applies to Xfinity's publicly available Wi-Fi hot spots that dot the landscape. Comcast customers connected to their own Xfinity Wi-Fi routers when they're at home are not affected, he said.

Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A meteorite that landed near the Nicaraguan capital Managua on Sunday could have come from the 2014 RC asteroid which was passing the earth at the time, experts have said.

Scientists are exploring why it is so difficult at accurately measure the Newtonian constant of gravity.

The Moto 360 (center) could almost pass for a real watch. Ron Amadeo

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});After what seems like an eternity, the most promising Android Wear hardware has finally hit the market. While the LG G Watch and the Samsung Gear Live were first to market, the Moto 360 has always felt like the flagship device for Android Wear.

While the software seems like it's headed in the right direction, the hardware for smartwatches has felt like a live experiment being carried out in the marketplace. Pebble has aimed for maximum battery life with a black-and-white e-paper screen, and Samsung's hardware machine gun has been in full effect, releasing everything from a wrist-mounted smartphone to a skinny, curved OLED device focused on fitness.

Spend a few minutes with the 360 and you'll quickly realize that the square, plastic designs other manufacturers are pushing are dead-on-arrival. The Moto 360 design is a huge step forward for smartwatches. It's round, it's comfortable to wear, and it looks like a normal watch.

Read 46 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Peter Hartree

The Bárðarbunga (or Bardarbunga) volcano has erupted, evoking memories of the 2010 Icelandic ash cloud that caused chaos across European and North American air routes. 

What has been happening?

The ice-covered Bárðarbunga volcano has a magma chamber beneath it, and measurements indicate that magma from this chamber has been escaping into a vertical underground crack. In total, the magma has migrated some 40 km northeast of the chamber. We call this process a dyke intrusion. Escape of magma from the chamber has removed support from the chamber roof, which has collapsed to trigger earthquakes in the area.

At the far northeast tip of the dyke intrusion, the magma managed to find a route to the surface on August 29, producing a small eruption at the Holuhraun lava field. After a pause, a larger eruption started in the same place on August 31—that eruption continues at the time of writing. Both of these events occurred along an ancient fissure that had erupted in 1797. So it looks like the magma in the new dyke intrusion met the old and cold 1797 dyke intrusion and followed its path to the surface. Had this not happened, the new dyke intrusion might have kept moving to the northeast.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

In late May, an international law enforcement effort disrupted the Gameover Zeus (GoZ) botnet, a network of compromised computers used for banking fraud.

The operation also hobbled a secondary, but equally important cyber-criminal operation: the Cryptolocker ransomware campaign, which used a program distributed by the GoZ botnet to encrypt victims' sensitive files, holding them hostage until the victim paid a fee, typically hundreds of dollars. The crackdown, and the subsequent discovery by security firms of the digital keys needed to decrypt affected data, effectively eliminated the threat from Cryptolocker.

Yet, ransomware is not dead, two recent analyses have found. Within a week of the takedown of Gameover Zeus and Cryptolocker, a surge of spam with links to a Cryptolocker copycat, known as Cryptowall, resulted in a jump in ransomware infections, states a report released last week by security-services firm Dell Secureworks. Cryptowall first appeared in November 2013, and spread slowly, but the group behind the program were ready to take advantage of the vacuum left by the downfall of its predecessor.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments