Images from August 15 at three different wavelengths, and one image from August 29 showing the third eruption. Imke de Pater and Katherine de Kleer, UC Berkeley

Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active body in our solar system, so it’s not a shock that astronomers captured several eruptions while their telescopes were trained on the satellite. However, the three eruptions were uncommonly massive (among the 10 largest seen there) and occurred within the span of a couple of weeks—eruptions of this class are only thought to occur every other year, on average. Researchers may be able to glean enough from these images to help us get to the bottom of a couple of Ionian mysteries.

Io’s prodigious volcanic output is the result of tidal heating—gravitational squeezing as a result of its slightly oblong orbit around Jupiter, along with some tugs by fellow Jovian moons. Though Io is roughly the same size as Earth’s own Moon, the flow of heat from its core toward its surface is roughly 30 times greater than that of Earth. As a result, there’s usually at least one active volcano whenever astronomers observe Io. In fact, a huge lava lake some 200 kilometers across, called Loki Patera, is usually visible to infrared telescopes. On thirteen occasions between 1978 and 2006, unusually large eruptions called outbursts were observed. Three more have now been added to that number.

Jupiter’s magnetic field holds a curious torus (or ring donut if you’re hungry) of plasma believed to originate from Io’s volcanism. A new Japanese space telescope, launched in September, had been scheduled to spend some time studying that plasma torus, and so several ground-based telescopes had begun monitoring Io’s volcanic activity in August. On August 15, a telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii recorded two bright infrared spots in the far south of Io, which hasn’t been known for this kind of activity.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Google Play One week after President Obama signed a phone-unlocking bill into law, T-Mobile has responded by becoming the first American carrier to launch its own unlocking app. Modestly titled Device Unlock, the app debuted on Friday in the Google Play store, though it comes with one major limitation: It only unlocks the Samsung Galaxy Avant, a lower-specced offering that launched in late July exclusively on T-Mobile.

The app offers two unlock options for Avant owners: temporary, for the sake of international GSM use, or permanent. Choosing either option sends a SIM unlock request to T-Mobile, as opposed to automatically unlocking. A glance at T-Mobile's unlock FAQ, which appears unchanged since before last week's bill was signed into law, clarifies that requested phones won't unlock unless they've been paid in full and haven't been reported stolen, among other requirements.

As such, the app merely streamlines a process that T-Mobile had already put into place well before a deadline of February 2015. Confusingly, Google Play advertises the app as compatible with any T-Mobile phone in a user's account, despite the app's current Avant-only status, which leads us to believe it will eventually support other T-Mobile handsets (seeing as it does little more than report a user's phone information to the unlock department). Until that changes, the app will probably continue to be bombed with the kinds of negative reviews it's already receiving from non-Avant users.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Seth Kroll, Wyss Institute

As if a brain-like processing chip weren't bad enough news for us humans, this week's edition of Science also describes a robot that, after being laid out as a flat sheet, can fold itself into the appropriate shape to take its on-board electronics for a walk.

Why would we possibly want self-assembling, flat-packed electronics of this kind? The authors of the Science paper, who are part of a Harvard/MIT collaboration, offer two reasons. First, it's much easier to assemble something as a planar surface. With the right layers in place, it's simple to cut them into the appropriate shapes and then embed the electronics where they're needed, since there's no awkward internal spaces to deal with. The second reason is that it's easy to transport things when they're shaped like a sheet. Since the devices can assemble themselves, they can be shipped to any destination and used without any hassle or high-level technical knowledge.

Of course, having a good idea and actually knowing how to create a self-assembling device are two different things. Fortunately, the ability to construct elaborate three-dimensional items from a flat sheet is a solved problem, thanks to origami. Software like Origamizer can even determine how to cut and fold a sheet in order to produce a specified three-dimensional structure.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Gamma group customer logs found in the leaked trove that was posted online by hackers. Gerald Rich/ProPublica

Software created by the controversial UK-based Gamma Group International was used to spy on computers that appear to be located in the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia, Iran, and Bahrain, according to a leaked trove of documents analyzed by ProPublica.

It's not clear whether the surveillance was conducted by governments or private entities. Customer e-mail addresses in the collection appeared to belong to a German surveillance company, an independent consultant in Dubai, the Bosnian and Hungarian Intelligence services, a Dutch law enforcement officer, and the Qatari government.

The leaked files—which were posted online by hackers—are the latest in a series of revelations about how state actors including repressive regimes have used Gamma's software to spy on dissidents, journalists, and activist groups.

Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Warner Bros.

According to a report from TV Wise, Babylon 5 showrunner J. Michael Straczynski will shortly begin work on a rebooted big-screen version of his 1990s sci-fi TV series. Straczynski made the announcement at San Diego Comic-Con last week.

Babylon 5’s pilot episode originally aired in 1993, with the series beginning its regular run almost a year later as a foundational component of the now-defunct Prime Time Entertainment Network. The show lacked the production budget of its contemporary rival Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (which allegedly lifted some or all of its core concepts directly from Straczynski’s original—and rejected—Babylon 5 pitch meeting with Paramount). Still, it attracted enough of an audience to accomplish a noteworthy feat: Babylon 5 became the only non-Star Trek science fiction show on American television to reach its series completion without being cancelled. Not until 2004’s Battlestar Galactica reboot would another non-Star Trek show earn the same distinction.

After Babylon 5 ended in 1998, Straczynski (usually referred to simply by his initials, "JMS") tried multiple times to bring a B5 movie to theaters. The most recent attempt in 2004 came the closest, with a completed script and some preproduction work underway, but without financial backing from Warner Bros. the project had to be abandoned.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games trilogy, has signed the letter condemning Amazon, even though she does not publish with Hachette.

Authors affected by Amazon's contract dispute with publisher Hachette have started to band together against the online retailer, reported The New York Times on Thursday. More than 900 authors have signed a letter condemning Amazon for "using writers as hostages in its negotiations," referring to Amazon's choices to keep low stock of certain Hachette titles and taking weeks to ship them as the two companies battle over e-book prices.

The effort was spearheaded by 58-year-old Douglas Preston, a writer whose thrillers have been published by Hachette. Preston reports to the Times that Amazon has contacted him repeatedly, trying to get him to stop his campaign against the company and to see its side of the argument, but Preston will not be silenced.

Amazon has uncharacteristically tried to defend itself with forum posts over the last few weeks. First, the Books team stated that its decision to keep low Hachette stock is barely affecting its business, then it followed that up with a math-based argument for mandating that Hachette charge a lower cover price overall.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A phalanx in Ryse: Son of Rome

Occasionally, people ask me why Ars sometimes covers the relative sales performance of various consoles. "Who cares which console is 'winning'?" the argument goes. "I just want to play games." And my response is generally that relative sales performance has a direct impact on what games actually get made for the various consoles.

Case in point: troubled Ryse developer Crytek talked to Eurogamer recently about the potential for a sequel to its Xbox One launch exclusive, and the company expressed concern that there just weren't enough sales of the Microsoft console to make a sequel worthwhile.

"We have a good relationship with Microsoft. We are constantly looking at what we can do together," Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli said. "We are not 100 percent happy with Xbox One sales right now. So we want to wait 'till the current-gen and next-gen catches up. For Ryse 2, we aren't saying it's canceled. It's our IP. It just has to wait for the right timing. And the right timing means higher installed base across next-gen."

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Another kind of blackout: the field goes dark during a 2011 NFL game between the 49ers and Steelers. NFL

The National Football League (NFL) is trying to convince the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to preserve 39-year-old blackout rules that prevent games from being televised locally when tickets remain unsold. Last season, two games were blacked out locally in the regular season, while several blackouts were narrowly averted in the playoffs.

The FCC considered a proposal to eliminate its blackout rules last November, with then-acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn saying that the rules are outdated. Today, the rules aren’t actually responsible for the majority of blackouts, and they "have little relevance for sports other than professional football, because the distribution rights for most of the games in these sports are sold by individual teams, rather than the leagues,” the FCC said.

But they do matter to football. Naturally, the NFL wants to keep the rules in place—and argues that they are good for fans. Despite being the richest sports league in the country with more than $9 billion in annual revenue, the NFL said in an FCC filing that sports blackout rules are a “critical contributing factor” to its “ability to maintain its ‘free TV model.’”

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Aurich Lawson August isn’t the top time of year for thinking about tech policy. For many, it’s vacation time, a month when Americans are more focused on hacking a path to the nearest beach than hacking their computers.

Congress just left for vacation too, heading home last week for its traditional August recess. When it returns to Washington, election season will be in full swing, which means that betting on the passage of any bold legislation later this year is a long shot.

In light of that, now (and not December) is when we can look back at what activists, companies, and lawmakers were hoping to accomplish in the 113th Congress—compared to what actually happened. Which is to say "not much."

Read 68 remaining paragraphs | Comments

This screen appears when the City of London police seize your site.

The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has arrested a 20-year-old man in Nottingham on suspicion of copyright infringement for running a proxy server providing access to other sites subject to legal blocking orders.

The man was questioned by police but has been released on bail. The arrest was made after police—with the support of the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT)—found evidence relating to the creation of a proxy server that provided access to 36 other websites that had been blocked for hosting illegal or infringing content.

The proxy server in question is Immunicity, run by the Torrenticity Group—as first highlighted by TorrentFreak—which was designed to unblock both torrent sites and proxies. It required users to make a simple change to their browser settings—adding a Proxy Auto Configuration file (PAC)—which could then instruct your browser to send your Web traffic through different proxies depending on the URL you are looking for. This means that you could access sites that had been blocked by UK ISPs following High Court orders, such as The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, HEET, ExtraTorrent, YiFY, and EZTV. Immunicity and similar services therefore fall foul of anti-circumvention provisions within UK copyright law.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A couple of weeks back, Western Digital updated their NAS-specific drive lineup with 5 and 6 TB Red drives. In addition, 7200 RPM Red Pro models with 2 - 4 TB capacities were also introduced. We have already looked at the performance of the WD Red, and it now time for us to take the WD Red Pro for a spin. In our 4 TB NAS drive roundup from last year, we also indicated that efforts would be taken to add more drives to the mix along with an updated benchmarking scheme involving RAID-5 volumes. The Red Pro gives us an opportunity to keep our word. Read on for our comparison of 10 different 4 TB hard drives (both consumer NAS-specific, as well as nearline units) targeting the NAS market.

While the original SHIELD Tablet review hit most of the critical points in the review, there wasn't enough time to investigate everything. One of the areas where there wasn't enough data was gaming battery life. While the two hour figure gave a good idea of what to expect in terms of the lower bound for battery life, it didn't give a realistic amount of time for battery life

One of the first issues that I attempted to tackle after the review was battery life performance in our T-Rex rundown when capping FPS to ~30, which was still enough to exceed the competition in performance, and avoid any chance of throttling. This also gives a much better idea of real world battery life, as most games shouldn't come close to stressing the Kepler GPU in Tegra K1.

By capping T-Rex to 30 FPS, the SHIELD Tablet actually comes quite close to the battery life delivered by SHIELD Portable with significantly more performance. The SHIELD Portable also needed a larger 28.8 WHr battery and a smaller, lower power 5" display in order to achieve its extra runtime. It's clear that the new Kepler GPU architecture, improved CPU, and 28HPm process are enabling much better experiences compared to what we see on SHIELD Portable with Tegra 4.

The other aspect that I wanted to revisit were temperatures, I mentioned that I noticed skin temperatures were high, but I didn't know what they really were. In order to get a better idea temperatures in the device, Andrei managed to make a tool to log such data from on-device temperature sensors. Of course, the most interesting data is always generated at the extremes, so we'll look at an uncapped T-Rex rundown first.

In order to understand the results I'm about to show, this graph is critical. As ambient temperatures were lower (15-18C vs 20-24C) when I ran this variant of the test, we don't see much throttling until the end of the test where there's a dramatic drop to 46 FPS.

As we can see, the GPU clock graph almost perfectly mirrors the downward trend that is presented in the FPS graph. It's also notable that relatively little time is spent at the full 852 MHz that the graphics processor is capable of. The vast majority of the time is spent at around 750 MHz, which suggests that this test isn't pushing the GPU to the limit, although looking at the FPS graph would also confirm this as it's sitting quite close to 60 FPS throughout the run.

While I was unable to quantify skin temperature measurements in the initial review, battery temperature is often quite close to skin temperature. Here, we can see that battery temperatures (which is usually the charger IC temperature) hit a maximum of around 45C as I predicted. While this is perfectly acceptable to the touch, I was definitely concerned about how hot the SoC would get under such conditions.

Internally, it seems that the temperatures are much higher than the 45C battery temperature might suggest. We see max temperatures of around 85C, which is edging quite close to the maximum safe temperature for most CMOS logic. The RAM is also quite close to maximum safe temperatures. It definitely seems that NVIDIA is pushing their SoC to the limit here, and such temperatures would be seriously concerning in a desktop PC, although not out of line for a laptop.

On the other hand, it's a bit unrealistic for games not developed for Tegra K1 to push the GPU to the limit like this. Keeping this in mind, I did another run with the maximum frame rate capped to 30 FPS. As even the end of run FPS is over 30 FPS, showing the FPS vs time graph would be rather boring as it's a completely flat line pegged at 30 FPS. Therefore, it'll be much more interesting to start with the other data I've gathered.

As one can see, despite performance near that of the Adreno 330, the GPU in Tegra K1 sits at around 450 MHz for the majority of this test. There is a bit of a bump towards the end, but that may be due to the low battery overlay as this test was unattended until the end.

In addition to the low GPU clocks, we see that the skin temperatures never exceed 34C, which is completely acceptable. This bodes especially well for the internals, which should be much cooler in comparison to previous runs.

Here, we see surprisingly low temperatures. Peak temperatures are around 50C and no higher, with no real chance of throttling. Overall, this seems to bode quite well for Tegra K1, even if the peak temperatures are a bit concerning. After all, Tegra K1 delivers immense amounts of performance when necessary, but manages to sustain low temperatures and long battery life when it it isn't. More importantly, it's important to keep in mind that the Kepler GPU in Tegra K1 was designed for desktop and laptop use first. The Maxwell GPU in NVIDIA's Erista SoC is the first to be designed to target mobile devices first. That's when things get really interesting.

The summer months are usually some of the quietest in the tech world, however motherboard manufacturers seem to be keen to release preview images of the upcoming X99 platform. Next in line is GIGABYTE with its X99 Gaming G1 WIFI. As GIGABYTE’s new gaming line is still gaining a foothold, synchronizing the GPU and Motherboard gaming ranges, the color scheme is a combination of red, black, white, grey and some green for audio.

The X99 Gaming G1 WIFI looks like it comes in at the top end of the range, featuring a full 4-way PCIe layout with 8 DIMM slots. We see 10 SATA 6 Gbps ports, two of the SATA with SATA Express which is complemented by the M.2 slot in the middle of the PCIe slots. The M.2 area also houses a mini-PCIe slot which contains the WiFi module, with the antenna connected via the rear panel next to the rear audio. It looks like that the M.2 and WiFi modules can be used at the same time along with GPUs however we might test if we get the motherboard in. The heatsinks are all connected via heat-pipes low to the motherboard to avoid conflict with other devices.

While we cannot see the rear IO, the bottom of the motherboard contains two USB 3.0 headers, two USB 2.0 headers and a thunderbolt header. The audio looks like a Sound Core 3D combined with filter caps, PCB separation, an EMI shield on the codec, an audio gain switch and a switchable op-amp. The top right of the motherboard houses several buttons and switches for dual BIOS/selectable BIOS functionality, along with voltage read points, a power switch and a two-digit debug. The extra power for the PCIe slots is provided by SATA power next to the SATA ports.

I would imagine the Gaming G1 WIFI to be nearer the top of GIGABYTE’s X99 launch range, but we will have to wait until launch day to see some full specifications and pricing.

Source: GIGABYTE Tech Daily

Ancient Japanese art inspires researchers to design self-folding robots that behave like "real-life transformers".

Roads outside Bearsden Academy in Glasgow have become so busy that the children have been resorted to checking-up on their parents.

After game streaming site Twitch's surprise announcement yesterday that it would be muting the sound on all historic videos that contained unlicensed audio, its CEO, Emmett Shear, had an "Ask Me Anything" session on reddit. In the immediate wake of such an unpopular change, it was no surprise that there were quite a few questions for him.

The AMA wasn't universally well-received, with many of Shear's answers being bombarded by a barrage of downvotes. The juicy question of whether Twitch is being bought by Google was also deemed off-limits. However, he revealed some good news for Twitch users.

The audio muting system isn't going to go away, but Shear said that it is going to get better. It currently blocks audio in half-hour chunks. Twitch videos are internally divided into half-hour segments, and the audio matching system appears only to identify entire segments, so if any part of a segment has licensed music in it, the entire thing is silenced. Shear wrote that this is something that Twitch hopes to fix, working with Audible Magic (the company that provides the music matching service) to allow finer-grained muting.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

BBC News tells the story of the construction of one of the seven wonders of the modern world.

Reed Hastings' Facebook update boasting about Netflix's (possibly temporary) victory over its unwilling adversary.

Netflix has surpassed HBO in subscriber revenue, according to a status update from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Wednesday. The company is now pulling in $1.146 billion compared to HBO's $1.141 billion, and it boasts 50.05 million subscribers, according to its second-quarter earnings reported in July.

Netflix has long seen HBO as a competitor in terms of audience and, more recently, in produced content. While HBO has slowly started to come down from the ivory cable tower and be more flexible about how it offers its subscriptions, Netflix has been making gains.

Hastings acknowledged that HBO still surpasses Netflix "in profits and Emmy's [sic], but we are making progress." Hastings has said many times before that he considers HBO to be a media company that is well-positioned in the changing distribution landscape, where power is shifting away from cable providers and toward Internet streaming.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Hundreds of thousands of websites running a popular WordPress plugin are at risk of hacks that give attackers full administrative control, a security firm warned Thursday.

The vulnerability affects Custom Contacts Form, a plugin with more than 621,000 downloads, according to a blog post by researchers from Sucuri. It allows attackers to take unauthorized control of vulnerable websites. It stems from a bug affecting a function known as adminInit(). Hackers can exploit it to create new administrative users or modify database contents.

"The vulnerability was disclosed to the plugin developer a few weeks ago, they were unresponsive," Sucuri researcher Marc-Alexandre Montpas wrote. "The developers were unresponsive so we engaged the WordPress Security team. They were able to close the loops with the developer and get a patch released, you might have missed it."

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Yahoo Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos announced today at Black Hat 2014 that starting in the fall of this year, the purple-hued company will begin giving users the option of seamlessly wrapping their e-mails in PGP encryption. According to Kashmir Hill at Forbes, the encryption capability will be offered through a modified version of the same End-to-End browser plug-in that Google uses for PGP in Gmail.

The announcement was tweeted by Yan Zhu, who has reportedly been hired by Yahoo to adapt End-to-End for use with Yahoo Mail. Zhu formerly worked as an engineer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that has consistently been outspoken in its call for the widespread use of encryption throughout the Web and the Internet in general.

@bcrypt

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Stamos acknowledged that the introduction of encryption will require some amount of education for users to make sure their privacy expectations are set appropriately. For example, he explained that PGP encryption won’t cloak the destination of your e-mail. "We have to make it clear to people it is not [a] secret you’re emailing your priest, but the content of what you’re e-mailing him is secret," Stamos said.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments