Andrew Cunningham

One of the biggest downsides to Android Wear—or (nearly) any smartwatch—is that it requires a tethered smartphone to work. This is fine for day-to-day activities where you have your smartphone anyway, but for activities where you'd rather carry a lighter load, like running, Android Wear doesn't help much.

In an interview with CNET, Android Engineering Director David Singleton and Vice President of Android Engineering Hiroshi Lockheimer talked about the future direction of the platform, including announcing upcoming standalone functionality that doesn't require a smartphone. They revealed that Google will update Android Wear "several" times before the end of the year, with the first update coming this week.

We aren't sure what is coming when, but in the interview, the Googlers mentioned local music storage and playback, as well as A2DP Bluetooth support. In addtion to a pair of Bluetooth headphones, you'd be able to listen to music without a smartphone.

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The Missouri police department that killed an unarmed teen last month is now equipped with body cameras so that officers may record their daily patrols.

The Ferguson Police Department was gifted 50 cameras, and officers on the street began wearing them on their uniforms over the Labor Day weekend.

“They are really enjoying them,” Chief Tom Jackson told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “They are trying to get used to using them.”

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Amid weeks of heated rhetoric and misogyny-charged threats and attacks in the gaming world, many members of the gaming industry have publicly signed on to a petition asking for tolerance and acceptance in the larger community.

"We believe that everyone, no matter what gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion or disability has the right to play games, criticize games and make games without getting harassed or threatened," Spaces of Play's Andreas Zecher wrote in an open letter on Medium.

"It is the diversity of our community that allows games to flourish. If you see threats of violence or harm in comments on Steam, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook or reddit, please take a minute to report them on the respective sites," the letter says. "If you see hateful, harassing speech, take a public stand against it and make the gaming community a more enjoyable space to be in."

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A spokesperson for Apple confirmed that the company is investigating whether an alleged vulnerability in the company’s “Find My iPhone” service and other possible vulnerabilities in its iCloud cloud storage service for Apple devices were used in the hacking of the personal photos of a number of celebrities. The FBI is also investigating whether the accounts of the celebrities were hacked.

Some of the photos, which were leaked through the “/b/” discussion forum on 4chan over the weekend, were apparently taken from iPhones—though it remains unclear when the hacking took place, or even if the same attackers are responsible for all of the leaked images.

“We take user privacy very seriously and are actively investigating this report,” said Apple spokeswoman Nat Kerris in a statement sent to the Wall Street Journal.

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These aren't our illustrious orbiting sex geckos, but they are the experiment's ground-based control sex geckos, and that's almost as good! imbp.ru

Several weeks back, we learned of the harrowing tale of the zero-g sex geckos: blasted into low Earth orbit aboard the Russian Foton-M4 satellite as part of a biological experiment to study reproduction in microgravity, the sex geckos mission was endangered almost from the beginning when Russian space agency Roscosmos lost positive control over the geckos’ spacecraft. Roscosmos was able to receive telemetry, but it couldn't send commands. Without ground control, the Foton-M4 would slowly decay out of orbit and enter the atmosphere uncontrolled.

Fortunately, Roscosmos was able to reestablish its uplink only a few days later, and the experiments continued. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with pioneers who push forward the boundaries of scientific knowledge, all five of the geckos have died.

Their passing was discovered during recovery operations for the Foton-M4 spacecraft, which successfully de-orbited and landed as planned in southern Russia yesterday afternoon. When the intrepid reptiles’ enclosure was examined, it was found to contain five tiny mummified gecko bodies. Preliminary indications are that the geckos all froze to death.

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One of ARM’s most tangible business advantages is its offer of both CPUs and GPUs to SoC designers. Anyone with experience in business to business relationships knows just how complex forming and maintaining a mutually beneficial collaboration can be. Setting up contracts, forming rapport, defining goals, and even just understanding documentation and technical content formatting all takes time. Unless there is significant benefit to investing in two different relationships and technologies, it is simpler (read: cheaper) to single source contributing components of a design. There are down sides of single sourcing (see Boeing 787 battery fiasco), but depending on a business’ capacity for risk, the savings are undeniable. Especially when ARM undoubtedly offers bundle pricing promotions.

The high-end 802.11ac router market has seen two introductions in the recent past. The first was the Netgear Nighthawk X6 which was based on the Broadcom 5G Wi-Fi XStream platform with two discrete 3x3 802.11ac radios. On the other side, we had Asus introduce the first Wave 2 router in the RT-AC87 using the same Broadcom SoC and 2.4 GHz radios as the Nighthawk X6, but choosing the Quantenna Wave 2 solution for the 5 GHz band. In the launch coverage of the RT-AC87, we had mentioned the online leaks of the Netgear Nighthawk X4 router. Today, Netgear is providing us the official details.

Gallery: Netgear R7500 Nighthawk X4

In terms of the configuration of the radios, the Netgear Nighthawk X4 and the Asus RT-AC87 are equivalent. Both of them belong to the AC2350 / AC2400 class, i.e, four 5 GHz (802.11ac) radios (4x 433 Mbps) and three 2.4 GHz (802.11n) radios (3x 200 Mbps) for a net aggregate of 2.333 Gbps. We have already touched upon all the advantages of the Quantenna Wave 2 solution over the current solutions from Broadcom and Qualcomm Atheros. In essence, the 4x4 update (quad-stream Wi-Fi) provides faster Wi-Fi throughput, enables more stable and jitter-free video streaming and provides more robust Wi-Fi connection for a larger number of devices.

There are two internal hardware aspects in which the Nighthawk X4 differs from the Asus RT-AC87:

• Platform SoC (Qualcomm Internet Processor IPQ8064 instead of the Broadcom BCM4709A)
• Interface between the 5 GHz radios and the platform SoC (PCIe instead of RGMII)

Due to the difference in the platform SoC, the external I/O is also different. While the Asus RT-AC87 had a USB 2.0 port and a USB 3.0 port, the Netgear R7500 Nighthawk X4 has two USB 3.0 ports and an eSATA port. The IPQ8064 SoC has two Krait cores running at 1.4 GHz (compared to the two Cortex-A9s running at 1 GHz in the BCM4709A).

While the IPQ8604 does have GMII interfaces, Netgear decided to use the PCIe ports to make sure that they were able to make full use of the radio's capabilities to go beyond 1 Gbps in each direction. The radios also have offloading processors running at 500 MHz to enable the main SoC to devote CPU cycles for other functions (storage, VPN etc.)

Coming back to the R7500, Netgear touts dynamic QoS as one of the main features. The router has a list of devices / apps (which can be updated independent of the firmware) which enables allocation of bandwidth based on the application. The goal is to ensure that latency sensitive apps get the highest priority while also making sure that the lowest priority apps don't get choked off. Netgear also claims to have put in special hooks for video streaming sites to prevent buffering while accessing adaptive bitrate sites (such as Netflix) at the same time as the non-adaptive ones (such as YouTube). Plans are also in-place to support the R7500 on myopenrouter.com.

Netgear plans to carry all three Nighthawk versions in the market for now, as they target different segments. The positioning and key points of the three members are reproduced in the slide below.

The R7500 Nighthawk X4 is priced at $280 which closely tracks the Asus RT-AC87 pricing. It will be an interesting tussle in the market between the two, as Asus will also bring the Broadcom XStream solution demonstrated at Computex to the market soon.

I will be honest, after AMD did not update its FX processor line with the Steamroller architecture, I was not too hopeful for the brand to see anything new in 2014. But since the start of the year the 5 GHz turbo FX-9590 has been rereleased as a consumer part and today AMD is showing it can get four Piledriver modules down to 95W with a few frequency adjustments and cherry picking the dies. This is accompanied with price cuts for the eight-thread FX parts, which AMD is aiming squarely at similarly priced Intel i5 and i3 processors.

David Cameron may have made himself a hostage to fortune when pledging to lead the greenest government ever in 2010.

NDTV

A few days ago, there had been word that Google would launch its Android One initiative in India in early September, and now, it looks like invites have gone out to the Indian press. NDTV, one of the biggest news outlets in India, has an invite for an "exciting new announcement from Google," which can only be Android One.

The event is on September 15th at noon IST (Indian Standard Time), or 2:30am ET/11:30pm PT for those of us in the US.

The goal of Android One is to bring "high-quality, affordable" smartphones to the developing world, starting with India and moving on to other locations if the strategy proves successful.

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Soon, you won't need to be the Flash for quicker Web browsing. Flickr user: Katie Krueger

The Web is going to get faster in the very near future. And sadly, this is rare enough to be news.

The speed bump won't be because our devices are getting faster, but they are. It won't be because some giant company created something great, though they probably have. The Web will be getting faster very soon because a small group of developers saw a problem and decided to solve it for all of us.

That problem is images. As of August 2014, the size of the average page in the top 1,000 sites on the Web is 1.7MB. Images account for almost 1MB of that 1.7MB.

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Jenn Deering Davis

By now, you have probably heard about the digital exposure, so to speak, of nude photos of as many as 100 celebrities, allegedly taken from their Apple iCloud backups (and, it appears, based on the image analysis done by some, from other cloud services). Some of the images were posted to the “b” forum on 4Chan. Over the last day, an alleged perpetrator has been exposed by redditors, although the man has declared his innocence. The mainstream media have leapt on the story and have gotten reactions from affected celebrities including Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and model Kate Upton.

Someone claiming to be the individual responsible for the breach has used 4Chan to offer explicit videos from Lawrence’s phone, as well as more than 60 nude “selfies” of the actress. In fact, it seems multiple "b-tards" claimed they had access to the images, with one providing a Hotmail address associated with a PayPal account, and another seeking contributions to a Bitcoin wallet. Word of the images launched a cascade of Google searches and set Twitter trending. As a result, 4Chan/b—the birthplace of Anonymous—has opened its characteristically hostile arms to a wave of curious onlookers hoping to catch a glimpse of their favorite starlets’ naked bodies. Happy Labor Day!

This breach appears different from other recent celebrity "hacks" in that it used a near-zero-day vulnerability in an Apple cloud interface. Instead of using social engineering or some low-tech research to gain control of the victims' cloud accounts, the attacker basically bashed in the front door—and Apple didn't find out until the attack was over. While an unusual, long, convoluted password may have prevented the attack from being successful, the only real defense against this assault was never to put photos in Apple's cloud in the first place. Even Apple's two-factor authentication would not have helped, if the attack was the one now being investigated.

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An alien world, extraterrestrial exploration, and memory wipes on Mars sound like the makings of a Hollywood movie. Instead, it's a major IT project.

After a decade of exploring, the Opportunity rover's computer system will get a reboot to reformat its flash memory and eliminate its reliance on malfunctioning memory cells. In the last month alone, the rover has had to reset its systems a dozen times, a process that can take a day or two, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

"Worn-out cells in the flash memory are the leading suspect in causing these resets," John Callas, project manager for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project, said in a statement. "The flash reformatting is a low-risk process, as critical sequences and flight software are stored elsewhere in other non-volatile memory on the rover."

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Tavurvur erupting in 2008. Taro Taylor

Last week, the eyes of volcanologists—and presumably a few nervous pilots—were fixed on Iceland. But unexpectedly, the volcanic eruption that made headlines happened on the other side of the world, in Papua New Guinea.

Before dawn on August 29, Tavurvur—a stratovolcano on the island of New Britain, in Papua New Guinea’s eastern archipelago—awoke spectacularly after two decades of dormancy. The eruption shot lava hundreds of meters into the air, while the accompanying ash cloud reached 18km, almost double the cruising altitude of most commercial aircraft. As a precaution, several flights from Australia were rerouted around the volcano.

The explosions at Tavurvur have since died down somewhat, though as of Sunday the volcano was still ejecting material from its crater. The activity may still intensify. Regardless of how the eruption proceeds, this is a volcano worth remembering.

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Satellite view of Southern California and Nevada as of June. NASA/Earth Observatory

In a good year, the management of water resources in the American West is contentious. When a drought hits, most everyone feels it, and this year is certainly no exception. The notion of sustainability in water-strapped places isn’t much more complicated than balancing a checking account. And the budget projections aren’t exactly encouraging.

The last thing this situation needs is a decrease on the supply side. Unfortunately, precipitation in the Southwestern US is projected to decline as a result of anthropogenic climate change. Double unfortunately, the last century isn’t even a very good baseline for the region’s climate without climate change. Records from things like tree rings show drier periods in the past. A recent study led by Cornell’s Toby Ault attempts to pull this all together to improve our understanding of future drought risk in the region.

The worst US droughts of the 20th century were the 1930s “Dust Bowl” in the central US and the 1950s in the Southwest. In the past, the Southwest has averaged one or two of these almost-decade-long droughts per century, but there have also been droughts longer than anything in the historical record—droughts lasting several decades.

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Following on from part one, Wired.co.uk concludes our discussion of all thingsDragon Age: Inquisition  with executive producer Mark Darrah and creative director Mike Laidlaw. Here, the creators cover how players will continue their epic stories across console generations, upping the difficulty while giving gamers more control, and how the critical reception of the last game impacts the team's newest.

With Inquisition making the leap to PS4 and Xbox One, which lack backwards compatibility, how will people's past games be integrated?

Mike Laidlaw: We recognized that a core problem we were going to face is that there will be a big block of people who have jumped from Xbox 360 to Xbox One, or PS3 to PS4. We started some early explorations about how we could do that. What we realized very quickly was that an external solution was the best way to do things. So we built something called the Dragon Age Keep, which is currently in beta. It allows you to build up three-to-five world-states. You craft them to say "this is a world where Alistair is King and the Warden was a Daelish elf, etc," covering the events of Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2. You can build it up either through an interactive story, a bit like Pottermore.

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Gencon bills itself as the world's largest gaming convention. It's four days devoted to RPGs, tabletop games, card games, dice games, miniatures games, foam swords, and cosplay. (But no—well, very few—console or computer games.)

I, along with 50,000 other folks, attended this year's bash located in downtown Indianapolis. It was my first true nerd con, and I spent 4,000 words describing the wonderful weirdness of it, but words alone can't do justice to a spectacle as big as this one.

Without further ado, then, here are the images that best summed up my own Gencon experience. (If you want to see more, including the performers in a has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed nerd burlesque, click over to my feature). Click on any image to enlarge.

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Thomas Hawk

OAKLAND, CA—Documents released last week by the City of Oakland reveal that it is one of a handful of American jurisdictions attempting to upgrade an existing cellular surveillance system, commonly known as a stingray.

The Oakland Police Department, the nearby Fremont Police Department, and the Alameda County District Attorney jointly applied for a grant from the Department of Homeland Security to "obtain a state-of-the-art cell phone tracking system," the records show.

Stingray is a trademark of its manufacturer, publicly traded defense contractor Harris Corporation, but "stingray" has also come to be used as a generic term for similar devices.

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Trinitite specimens. mseery

Four months ago, Ars Technica sent me out to Alamogordo, New Mexico to be present at the unearthing of a landfill that was long-rumored to hold a trove of Atari games, dumped at the site after the video game crash of 1983. As I was preparing for the trip, my coworkers and I chatted about the event in the editors' IRC channel.

”When you’re hanging out in the trash dump be sure to look out for Trinitite,” automotive editor Jonathan Gitlin told me.

”What’s Trinitite?” I asked. He explained that it was a type of radioactive glass that formed during the first test of the first nuclear bomb in 1945. I did a quick Google search and understood (somewhat incorrectly, more on that later) that collecting and selling Trinitite had been made illegal long ago. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for the murky green or red glass when I was in Alamogordo, and I finished booking my motel room.

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ASRock has been one of the few motherboard vendors to focus on mini-PCs targeting the HTPC and portable gaming markets. Starting from the ION-based nettop days, they have consistently refreshed the mini-PC lineup in sync with Intel's product cycle. We have been reviewing members of their CoreHT lineup (rechristened as VisionHT last year) since the Arrandale days, but today, we are focusing on their gamer-targeted mini-PCs. The VisionX lineup marked the departure from NVIDIA to AMD for the discrete GPU component, and their Haswell version, the VisionX 420D combines a Core i5-4200M with an AMD Radeon R9 M270X. Read on to see how the mini-PC fares under both gaming and HTPC workloads.