The Federal Communications Commission today paused the "180-day informal time clock" in its review of the proposed Comcast/Time Warner Cable and AT&T/DirecTV mergers.

The extension comes in response to a request by Dish Network; Comptel; Monumental Sports and Entertainment; RCN; Grande Communications, Inc.; Choice Cable TV of Puerto Rico; and Writers Guild of America, West. These organizations filed their request for an extension after content companies refused to allow access to confidential carriage agreements, despite the FCC issuing a joint protective order requiring limited disclosure. The content companies that objected to providing confidential information included CBS, Scripps, Disney, Time Warner, Twenty First Century Fox, Univision, Viacom, Discovery, and TV One.

Today's FCC order states:

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:[], collapse: true});iOS 5, 6, and 7 got many minor updates throughout their life cycles, but each received only one "major" update in their year or so as Apple's newest mobile operating system. iOS 5.1, 6.1, and 7.1 were all released several months after the initial release, and each update marked the point where the version became "mature."

Apple is mixing things up with iOS 8. Version 8.1 is here just a month after the initial release, and plentiful evidence shows that both versions 8.2 and 8.3 are already in testing at Cupertino. It's a rapid-fire schedule more in line with iOS 4, a release in which bug fixes and new features were introduced at a steady but more gradual clip.

iOS 8.1 shouldn't be compared to iOS 7.1, which gestated for a full six months and was vetted in five separate beta builds. It still introduces quite a few new features, though, and in the spirit of keeping our comprehensive iOS 8 review up to date, we've taken the most important ones for a test drive. This release doesn't fix all of iOS 8's biggest problems, but it's an important first step toward a more stable and more useful OS.

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An elephant calf has been air rescued after he fell down a well in the remote region of Milgis Lugga in Northern Kenya.

A composite image of the galaxy M82, composed of x-ray images from the NuSTAR telescope (seen in purple) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), and optical images from the NOAO 2.1 meter telescope (gold). X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Toulouse/M.Bachetti et al, Optical: NOAO/AURA/NSF

A new observation of the M82 galaxy has turned up a surprise—a previously discovered, incredibly bright object. was pulsing The object, called M82 X-2, is bright enough to be classified as an ultra-luminous X-ray source, or ULX. It sits close to its previously discovered sibling, M82 X-1, near the core of M82. The discovery, which was made by NASA’s NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, has provided new clues about the nature of that mysterious class of objects.

X-2 turns out to be the brightest pulsar ever discovered—so bright that it challenges current models of how pulsars work.

NuSTAR had initially been pointed toward M82 in the hope of observing a new supernova, and the team of researchers had no idea that they would happen upon this strange behavior in an ULX. To clarify which source was producing the pulsations, the Chandra X-ray Observatory observed the region, successfully separating X-2 from the noise.

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Chris Isherwood

A newly publicized document shows that five local police departments in southeastern Virginia have been secretly and automatically sharing criminal suspects’ telephone metadata and compiling it into a large database for nearly two years.

According to a 2012 memorandum of understanding (MOU) published for the first time Monday by the Center for Investigative Reporting, the police departments from Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Chesapeake, and Suffolk all participate in something called the "Hampton Roads Telephone Analysis Sharing Network," or HRTASN.

The Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement Task Force, or PNETF, "will provide administrative and technical assistance to participating agencies in conducting pen register intercepts as described below."

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A federal judge has dismissed a proposed securities fraud class action lawsuit connected to Electronic Arts' bungled rollout of the popular Battlefield 4 video game.

EA and several top executives were sued in December and were accused of duping investors with their public statements and concealing issues with the first-person shooter game. The suit claimed executives were painting too rosy of a picture surrounding what ultimately would be Battlefield 4's disastrous debut on various gaming consoles beginning last October, including the next-generation Xbox One.

But US District Judge Susan Illston of San Francisco said their comments about EA and the first-person shooter game were essentially protected corporate speak.

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There are many options in the market for users wanting to interact with HTPCs and media streamers. In this short piece, we review the keyboard / trackball / touchpad options from Adesso and look at how they stack up against the Logitech K400 and some of the options from IOGEAR and SIIG that we have reviewed before.

Sapphire surfaces like those used on TouchID were not used for the screen on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Kārlis Dambrāns

Today, synthetic sapphire manufacturer GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT) and Apple announced their agreement [PDF] to dissolve their partnership amicably after GTAT filed a surprising bankruptcy claim earlier this month. The proceedings threatened to expose information about Apple's dealings with GTAT, something Apple desperately wanted to hide, as evidenced by court filings from Apple asking that its objection to GTAT's Chapter 11 proceedings be submitted in secret.

Now it seems that GTAT and Apple may be able to keep the terms of their relationship private indefinitely. As The Wall Street Journal reported, “GT Advanced and Apple have agreed to file a revised explanation for GT Advanced’s surprise bankruptcy filing as part of the pact and ultimately erase from the public record the court papers that set out what went wrong in the relationship between the two companies.”

Apple and GTAT had partnered to produce ultra-hard sapphire material, which some rumored would replace Corning Glass as the material for Apple's products' screens. Instead, Apple released its last iPhone 6 and 6 Plus with traditional Corning Glass, reserving sapphire surfaces for camera lenses and TouchID buttons. A few weeks after the most recent iPhone announcements, GTAT filed for bankruptcy in a move that seemed to surprise investors, shareholders, and Apple itself.

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The Nexus 9 and Nexus 6.

MOUNTAIN VIEW—Today we were invited up to Google Headquarters to get a very brief sneak preview of the Nexus 6 and 9.

While the two devices mark a bit of a departure from Google's past flagships, the strategy of the Nexus line is still the same: the devices were always Google's way of "showing the way forward" for Android OEMs. For this generation, though, the company has moved on from the lower-priced flagships and onto more "premium" devices.

With the higher-end models comes a higher price tag: $649 unlocked for the Nexus 6, and $399 for the Nexus 9. The price of the Nexus 6 has seen the most discussion after the $350 price tag of the Nexus 5, but consider the Nexus 6's closest competitor: the 5.7-inch Note 4 goes for about $840 unlocked.

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Microsoft used the Windows Blog today to announce the availability of the first update to the Windows 10 Technical Preview, which was announced just three weeks ago. The new build is 9860, and contains several new features as well as bug fixes.

I have been running Windows 10 since it was released. My initial install was into a Virtual Machine, and after using it as a VM for a while I installed it on my primary PC in order to get a good feel for it. I am still working on my initial thoughts for the new Windows, but, being a technical preview, it has a few bugs that made me switch back to Windows 8.1.

In the blog post, Microsoft lays out the fact that there are bugs and features still missing which will be added later. Some of the interfaces have regressed in style and function as the new interfaces are being finished. While this is generally a normal process for software development, we do not normally get such early access to a pre-release version of Windows, so we are also along for the ride. Windows 8, for example, had a very early developer preview, and then a consumer preview came later which added a lot of additional features and functionality. This round, the features will be added to the current preview for all of the people in the Windows Insider program to get a taste of them.

The first big new feature, which debuted on Windows Phone 8.1, is Action Center. The Windows 10 build is adding this as a notification center, but at the moment is only enabling basic functionality. The quick actions, prominent in Windows Phone, will be coming later. Action Center is now available in the System Tray for easy access. One nice feature is that it will be available to desktop apps as well as Universal Apps. I expect it to also carry the Windows Phone customizations so you can select which apps you want to display in the notification list as well, in the event you have an app that likes to steal the show.

Action Center is not the only feature from Windows Phone to come to Windows 10. Battery Saver is also present in the new build. As with Windows Phone, you can set this to be on which reduces background tasks, or you can have it set to come on automatically when the battery is at a certain percentage. Right now, the latter settings are greyed out.

Yet another Windows Phone feature which helps you keep track of data usage is Data Sense, which is also new to this build. Data Sense keeps track of all wireless network data use, and can keep cellular based connections in check by limiting how much data is available and giving the user a graphical listing of how much data is remaining, as well as which apps are consuming the most packets. Hopefully they add the ability to track wired network traffic as well.

Windows 10 focuses a lot on the keyboard and mouse, so Microsoft has added many new keyboard shortcuts for those that like to keep their hands on their typing device:

• Snapping window: WIN + LEFT or RIGHT (can be used with UP or DOWN to get into quadrants)
• Switch to recent window: ALT + TAB (unchanged) – Hold shows new Task view window view, let go and switches to app.
• Task view: WIN + TAB – New Task view opens up and stays open.
• Create new virtual desktop: WIN + CTRL + D
• Close current virtual desktop: WIN + CTRL + F4
• Switch virtual desktop: WIN + CTRL + LEFT or RIGHT
• Move active app to another monitor: WIN + SHIFT + LEFT or RIGHT

Virtual desktops are also new to Windows 10, and based on user feedback, Microsoft has added an animation to make it easier for a user to know when they are switching destkops. This was one suggestion which was added from over 250,000 pieces of feedback already generated by the preview. Microsoft goes into detail about how the process works and explains why some feedback may take longer to add to the build than others.

Windows 10 build 9860 now offers users earlier access to some of the code. In the PC Settings, you can select which line of Preview Builds you want. Some people will want every update as soon as it is available, whereas others may want to hold off and wait for more of the bugs to be worked out first. Windows 10 is accommodating all of these users in the preview builds by allowing you to choose how fast you get the new code.

Windows 10 is certainly a big departure from Windows 8, and not just in desktop use. Having such early access to the previews, and having Microsoft actively requesting and implementing user feedback is a big change from the Steven Sinofsky (former President of the Windows Division) ways. While the technical preview is generally pretty good, it is not as polished as something like Windows 7 or 8.1, but if you want to check it out, visit preview.windows.com and sign up.

My copy of Windows 10 is updating right now to the new build, and once it is completed I hope to have another post with initial thoughts of the new Windows soon.

Source: Windows Blog

Microsoft reportedly scrapped its original plans to ship Master Chief Collection in a "car full of 5.25" disks" format. Lenore Edman

About a year ago, we had to quickly get used to 50 GB download sizes for console games like PS4 launch title Killzone: Shadow Fall. Game size inflation hasn't exactly stopped since then, as evidenced by word that the upcoming Halo: Master Chief Collection will take up a whopping 65 GB on Xbox One hard drives next month.

Buried in Friday's official "gone gold" announcement was word that the Xbox One's remastered edition of the first four Halo games, which is currently available for pre-loading, would actually be bigger than a standard 50GB Blu-ray disc. Rather than splitting the 65GB across two discs for the retail edition, Microsoft has decided to include 45GB of data in the box and require players to download a 20GB day one "content update" to access "some features and multiplayer content." Players will be able to play the bulk of the single-player content while the 20GB content pack is downloading and installing, Microsoft says.

Why make even retail buyers download so much data? "The game is designed to run as a single, unified product," 343 Industries Franchise Development Director Frank O'Connor explained on gaming forum NeoGAF over the weekend. "Digital is seamless obviously, but we also wanted disc users to have the same experience, without swapping discs. Since the bulk of [the download] is [multiplayer] or MP related, the logic is sound." While it may have been feasible to simply install a single, unified game to the Xbox One hard drive from two discs, O'Connor elaborated that such a solution "simply wasn't practical for this product, this year in this timeline."

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On Tuesday, Adobe used its official Twitter account to post a condemnation of Gawker Media over accusations of "bullying." In a confusing move, an Adobe employee tweeted roughly an hour later that the company's original post was "mistaken," but as of press time, the original post in question had yet to be taken down or modified.

(As this back-and-forth involves the latest wave of activity attached to the #GamerGate hashtag, you'll want to study up if you've missed out on the hashtag's rise in recent months.)

On Tuesday morning, a user tweeted at Adobe with #GamerGate hashtags and accusations that Gawker "endorses bullying and hate speech," along with a call for the company to remove its advertising from Gawker's network. The tweet didn't specify where that "endorsement" came from, but another post from that user's Twitter account pointed to tweets made by Valleywag editor Sam Biddle last week, including statements such as "bring back bullying" and "I'm getting a raise because I made gamers cry."

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The iPad Air 2 in profile. Its new A8X chip is stacking up pretty well. Andrew Cunningham

Apple's iPad Air 2 contains a new chip called the A8X, an SoC that's faster than the A7 in the original iPad Air or the iPad Mini 2 and 3 and the A8 in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Apple would only say that the chip's CPU is about 40 percent faster than the A7 and that it has a GPU that's 2.5 times faster.

We haven't gotten our hands on an iPad Air 2 review unit yet, so we haven't been able to test out these claims. A test from Primate Labs' Geekbench Results Browser sheds an interesting light on the subject, though: the result in question shows a three-core processor with 2GB of RAM, double the memory of any previous iOS device. Assuming the scores are accurate, the A8X could outdo the A7 in some tasks by as much as 66 percent.

2 more images in gallery

Primate Labs' John Poole seems fairly confident in the results' authenticity, telling us that "if [the result is spoofed], it's the best spoof I've ever seen." They do seem suspiciously high to us at this point—Apple's broad percentage claims have generally tracked pretty well with Geekbench scores in the past. If they're accurate, the iPad Air 2 is getting a much bigger generation-to-generation performance boost than the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus did.

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Office supply retailer Staples is investigating a possible breach of its systems following reports from the banking industry of fraudulent credit and debit card transactions at stores in the northeastern United States.

On Tuesday, the company acknowledged that a breach may have occurred and that it had contacted the appropriate law enforcement agencies. The retailer declined to provide further details.

“Staples is in the process of investigating a potential issue involving credit card data and has contacted law enforcement,” a spokesperson said in a statement sent to Ars. “If Staples discovers an issue, it is important to note that customers are not responsible for any fraudulent activity on their credit cards that is reported on a timely basis.”

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Monica Lewinsky addressing the Forbes Under 30 Summit in Philadelphia, PA. Forbes Under 30 Summit

In a speech given at the Forbes Under 30 Summit Monday entitled "Monica Lewinsky and the Internet's Reputation Shredder," Monica Lewinsky announced her intent to draw attention to the "compassion deficit" and "empathy crisis" that have arisen from the way people are treated on the Internet. Over the course of her 25-minute address, Lewinsky recapped her own treatment online following her affair with President Clinton and how it is linked to modern online abuse.

News of her affair was first posted to the Drudge Report in 1998, and Lewinsky called herself "Patient Zero" for having her reputation "destroyed on the Internet." Lewinsky recounted how, among the news articles, comments, and e-mails traded at the time of the scandal, "there was a rotation of worsening name calling… people referring to me as tramp, slut, whore, tart, bimbo, floozy." She said repeatedly that at the time of the scandal, she wished she could die, and she namechecked a number of musical artists who now use her name as shorthand for sexual indiscretion.

But worse than the damaging language was its limitless potential for circulation, Lewinsky said. "The experience of shame and humiliation online is different than offline. There is no way to wrap your mind around where the humiliation ends. There are no borders. It honestly feels like the whole world is laughing at you." She tied the inner workings of online abuse to Tyler Clementi, an 18-year old student who committed suicide after his roommate covertly filmed and posted video of Clementi kissing another man.

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The Invizbox Tor router hardware—the same as Anonabox, but with truth in advertising. Invizbox

Last week, Ars reported on the story of Anonabox, an effort by a California developer to create an affordable privacy-protecting device based on the open source OpenWRT wireless router software and the Tor Project’s eponymous Internet traffic encryption and anonymization software. Anonabox was pulled from Kickstarter after accusations that the project misrepresented its product and failed to meet some basic security concerns—though its developers still plan to release their project for sale through their own website.

But Anonabox’s brief campaign on Kickstarter has demonstrated demand for a simple, inexpensive way to hide Internet traffic from prying eyes. And there are a number of other projects attempting to do what Anonabox promised. On Kickstarter competitor Indiegogo there’s a project called Invizbox that looks almost identical to Anonabox—except for the approach its team is taking to building and marketing the device.

Based on the Chinese-built WT 3020A—a small wireless router that appears identical to the box that was the basis for the Anonabox—the Invizbox will have similar specs to the cancelled Kickstarter: 64 megabytes of RAM, 16 megabytes of Flash storage, and the Linux-based OpenWRT embedded OS. The main difference, according to the Dublin, Ireland-based team behind Invizbox (Elizabeth Canavan, Paul Canavan, and Chris Monks) is that their Tor router will be locked down better—and they won’t pretend that they’re using custom-built hardware.

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Broadcom today unveiled DSL chips that use the new G.fast standard to deliver up to 1Gbps broadband over copper phone lines.

That doesn't mean everyone who has DSL will suddenly get a huge speed upgrade. G.fast, a standard from the International Telecommunication Union, is intended for fiber-and-copper networks in which fiber delivers data close to homes and copper takes it the rest of the way. These networks are cheaper to build than fiber-to-the-home because they reuse existing copper, but thus far they haven't been able to match the gigabit speeds of fiber-only service.

Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs and the British telecom company BT are both testing G.fast, with the latter using Huawei technology. Broadcom is now joining the party with technology it plans to sell to Internet service providers, who would then roll it out to their customers. The chips will power both the back-end technology needed to deliver high speeds as well as home gateway systems for Internet users.

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We've written before about Windows 10's new updating policy, and today we're seeing the real-world result for the first time. The Windows 10 Technical Preview, build 9849, is being updated to build 9860. That update will roll out automatically to members of the Windows Insider program, and it will be delivered through Windows Update.

The operating system upgrade is a little more heavyweight than a regular hotfix; systems will need to reboot to finish installation, and Microsoft says that the reboot will take longer than normal.

The major feature of the new build is that it contains the first iteration of Windows 10's notification center. At the moment, it's a simple collection of historic notifications. Microsoft says that future builds will add more capabilities to the notification center, such as the ability to take actions in response to notifications.

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Neil R

The Supreme Court is weighing in on another Fourth Amendment privacy case, this one concerning a Los Angeles ordinance requiring hotels to surrender guest registries to the police upon request without a warrant.

The justices agreed (PDF) Monday to hear Los Angeles' appeal of a lower court that ruled 7-4 that the law—meant to combat prostitution, gambling, and even terrorism—was unconstitutional. The law (PDF) requires hotels to provide the information—including guests' credit card number, home address, driver's license information, and vehicle license number—at a moment's notice. Several dozen cities, from Atlanta to Seattle, have similar ordinances.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) welcomed the high court's intervention in Los Angeles v. Patel. 

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A class action lawsuit against Google, Apple, and other tech companies that struck deals to not "cold call" each other's employees may be on the verge of wrapping up. Similar cases against Oracle and Microsoft have just been filed.

The suit against Microsoft (PDF) says that in 2007, the company struck a deal with several other tech companies not to pursue employees who were at "manager level or above," even if the candidate reached out.

Such behavior is considered illegal by the Department of Justice. In 2010, the DOJ reached settlements with Google, Apple, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar, under which they had to stop abiding by such agreements. Later, a class-action civil suit was filed, claiming that more than 60,000 engineers working for those companies had their wages suppressed by the agreements. The defendant companies agreed to pay $324 million to settle that case, but the judge rejected the settlement as insufficient. Rather than make a larger offer, the defendant companies have appealed her decision.

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