Flickr user: Tiz

Is it possible to appreciate the motives of the people on the opposite side of a conflict? In some of the more intractable, compromise-free conflicts of our time—think Republicans vs. Democrats, Israelis vs. Palestinians—there's widespread belief that the opposition has motives that are, put simply, not very nice. There's also a sense that your opponents are generally bad people, which undoubtedly contributes to the conflict.

But according to a new study being released by PNAS, it's possible to get people to think more positively about their opponents. All it takes is a small cash payment to get people to step back and think. And with a more positive understanding of the opposition, people become willing to think that compromise is possible.

While all that sounds fairly simple, its consequences are profound. "Ideological opponents risk the health of their economies and their planet because they are unable to make political compromises," the authors of the new paper write. "Ethnic and religious groups across the world engage in mass acts of violence, rejecting solutions of mutual benefit that involve sharing power, land, or religious sites."

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A screen capture shows the warning of a fake iCloud.com certificate—signed by an official Chinese certificate authority. GreatFire.org

GreatFire.org, a group that monitors censorship by the Chinese government’s national firewall system (often referred to as the “Great Firewall”), reports that China is using the system as part of a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack on users of Apple’s iCloud service within the country. The attacks come as Apple begins the official rollout of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus on the Chinese mainland.

The attack, which uses a fake certificate and Domain Name Service address for the iCloud service, is affecting users nationwide in China. The GreatFire.org team speculates that the attack is an effort to help the government circumvent the improved security features of the new phones by compromising their iCloud credentials and allowing the government to gain access to cloud-stored content such as phone backups.

Chinese iCloud users attempting to log in with Firefox and Chrome browsers would have been alerted to the fraudulent certificate. However, those using Mac OS X’s built-in iCloud login or another browser may not have been aware of the rerouting, and their iCloud credentials would have been immediately compromised. Using two-step verification would prevent the hijacking of compromised accounts.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Apple rode the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus to a record quarter. Andrew Cunningham

Apple has just released the data for the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2014, and the story is the same as it's been for most of the year: iPhone sales are up, iPad sales are down-to-flat, Mac sales are up a little and continue to beat the growth rate of the wider PC market, and iPods have fallen off a cliff. Apple's fourth quarter runs from the beginning of July to the end of September, so it includes the new iPhone launch but not the new iPads and Macs announced last week.

First, some hard numbers: Apple made a record $42.1 billion in revenue and $8.5 billion in profit, and had a gross margin of 38 percent. The revenue numbers beat Apple's guidance from last quarter, which predicted revenue between $37 and $40 billion and a margin between 37 and 38 percent. Last year, the company posted $37.5 billion in revenue and profit of $7.5 billion with gross margins of 37 percent. For the first quarter of fiscal 2015—usually Apple's largest by far, since it encompasses the holidays and several new product launches—the company is predicting between $63.5 and $66.5 billion of revenue and 37.5 to 38.5 precent margins.

Andrew Cunningham Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone continues to be Apple's biggest product both in terms of unit sales and of revenue. The first weeks of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus availability helped Apple sell 39.27 million iPhones, up from 33.78 million last year, and the iPhone lineup accounts for 56.2 percent of the company's revenue.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Apple View Liveblog2014-10-20T16:00:00-05:00

It’s that time again: time for Andrew Cunningham and me to press our headphones tight against our ears and type up the rapid-fire financial chatter of Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri as they walk us through Apple’s latest quarterly earnings. Today, Apple will be releasing the results of the last quarter of its 2014 fiscal year, and pre-call expectations are that the call will feature some big numbers.

Analyst expectations are for Apple to hit just a smidgen under $40 billion in revenue, on the back of guidance for between $37 billion and $40 billion. This will be up about six percent from last quarter’s $37.4 billion and should generate an earnings per share of around $1.30 (which is an increase of about 11 percent year over year).

These would be the highest quarterly earnings in the company’s history, and if accurate, they’re due in no small part to huge initial sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Analysts' feelings on iPhone sales appear to run the entire gamut, with some calling the new iPhone’s launch an excellent sign of increasing iOS adoption worldwide and others saying that competition from cheaper Android-based alternatives will cause iPhone adoption in developing markets to falter in the long term. We’ll hear Apple's own take later today.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A public awareness campaign is being launched to highlight the carrier-bag charge which has come into force in Scotland.

Cable bills have a way of starting out expensive and then getting even more expensive as time goes on. This is especially true when cable companies offer promotional rates that last a year or two without telling customers what they'll actually have to pay once the discounted rate expires.

No cable customer is immune from this phenomenon—even outspoken telecom analysts like Bruce Kushnick are in for bill shock. Kushnick, a frequent critic of Internet service providers, signed up for a Time Warner Cable "Triple Pay" package in 2012 and is now paying more than double the advertised rate.

"When I signed up, less than two years ago, it was advertised at $89.99 and today, less than two years later, the actual price is 110 percent more—now $190.77," Kushnick wrote today in the Huffington Post.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Trey Ratcliff

Google will begin rolling out a change to its search algorithm that the media giant says will "visibly affect" rankings of piracy sites globally.

The Mountain View, California company promised to do this in 2012. But at the time, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, and others said the changes to its search algorithm had "no demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy." Google said the latest global algorithm changes, to roll out this week, will work.

“In August 2012 we first announced that we would downrank sites for which we received a large number of valid DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] notices,” Google’s senior copyright counsel Katherine Oyama wrote in a Friday blog post. “We’ve now refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites."

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ferrari

You don't need a degree in marketing to know that using social media right is an important part of building up any kind of brand these days. And the growing value of fan websites and Facebook fan pages seems to be leading to an increase in legal disputes over who controls them.

The latest example involves Italian sports car manufacturer Ferrari. Last week, a Swiss father and son sued Facebook and Ferrari after control of their popular Ferrari fan page was taken away from them. In their lawsuit (PDF), Olivier and Sammy Wasem claim they controlled "by far the most popular Facebook pages for Ferrari enthusiasts," which they created in 2008. The complaint describes Sammy Wasem as an aspiring Formula One driver whose "passion for racing and Ferrari drew many fellow fans together." By 2009, the Wasem's Ferrari page had more than 500,000 fans.

In February of that year, Olivier Wasem got an e-mail from a Ferrari employee stating that "legal issues force us [Ferrari] in taking over the formal administration of" the Ferrari fan page. The same employee promised "to preserve and even enhance your role in the Ferrari Web Presence and communities."

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Scientists believe they have traced the origin of copulation to fish found in a Scottish lake 385 million years ago.

The history of the semiconductor manufacturing business is both a story of great success and great failure. On the one hand semiconductor manufacturing has allowed the creation of devices that have transformed society, and unusual for most technologies it has remarkably improved at a steady rate for over 40 years now, making Moore’s Law a reality. On the other hand the history of the semiconductor business has been one of a constant weed-out process, as every generation of technology has seen the number of players narrow as the cost and complexity of semiconductor manufacturing continues to grow. Compared to the early days only the richest and most powerful firms have survived, and today the price of progression has claimed another player: IBM.

Today IBM has announced a remarkable, though not entirely unexpected deal. The company is announcing that they are transferring the bulk of their semiconductor business over to GlobalFoundries, essentially divesting themselves of the business entirely and getting out of chip fabricating altogether. But in a deal that is all too indicative of just how brutal the semiconductor manufacturing business is, IBM is not selling the business to GlobalFoundries or even giving it away for free; today’s deal will see IBM pay GlobalFoundries to take the business, with IBM handing over $1.5 billion in cash and working capital to GlobalFoundries in order to entice them to take over the business.

A deal of some time in the making, IBM’s divestment of its semiconductor manufacturing business comes as a result of the business’s continued technological and financial troubles. The business has lost money for quite some time now as IBM has struggled to attract business to keep their fabs at capacity, as IBM’s POWER chip manufacturing volume isn’t enough to sustain the business on its own. Compounding matters, IBM has been behind the curve in process technology development, which has seen competitors and partners alike such as TSMC and Samsung take the lead in rolling out new manufacturing nodes and securing the lucrative contracts that come with being the leader.

IBM East Fishkill (Image Courtesy Dutchess County Economic Development Corporation)

By divesting themselves of their semiconductor manufacturing business, IBM is cutting loose a business that is losing them money, but it is also a necessary step to enable the consolidation of manufacturing rather than a dissolution of the business entirely. Though in better shape than IBM’s business, GlobalFoundries has their own struggles with technology and volume, so taking on IBM’s business will allow the two businesses to be consolidated and ideally a larger, stronger semiconductor manufacturer to emerge.

Overall then, the deal sees GlobalFoundries taking on everything related to semiconductor manufacturing from IBM except for IBM’s semiconductor R&D division, which IBM will hold on to. This means GlobalFoundries is acquiring IBM’s existing fabs in Fishkill and Essex Junction, IBM’s engineers and other technical experts outside of their retained R&D division, IBM’s extensive semiconductor patent pool, and their commercial microelectronics (contract manufacturing) business. The importance of IBM’s manufacturing expertise in particular should not be understated, as while IBM hasn’t been a cutting-edge foundry, their expertise will be an important factor in helping GlobalFoundries narrow the gap with its competition and prosper. Meanwhile to cap things off, GlobalFoundries will also be acquiring IBM’s foundry patronage, with IBM signing up to use GlobalFoundries for their 22nm, 14nm, and 10nm chips for the next 10 years.

Finally, this acquisition also calls into question the future of the Common Platform alliance, the manufacturing alliance between IBM, GlobalFoundries, and Samsung. With IBM essentially bowing out of everything other than R&D and GlobalFoundries licensing Samsung’s 14nm process rather than licensing IBM’s or developing their own, Samsung is now the strongest member in a party of 2. How GlobalFoundries and Samsung continue this relationship – and more importantly GlobalFoundries’ role as a developer versus a customer/licensee – remains to be seen.

Wait, what happened at this thing?! Microsoft

SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Executive Vice President for Cloud and Enterprise Scott Guthrie talked all things cloud today, and we were on the scene to hear what they had to say. Below is the liveblog in total for your browsing pleasure, and check back soon for a recap of any important announcements.

View Liveblog

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

RGB variants of mechanical keyboards are very popular nowadays, but what about those users that want to stick with a classic membrane keyboard and gamers on a budget? SteelSeries' Apex Gaming keyboard might be what they are looking for, as this membrane-based keyboard comes with a fully programmable layout, numerous macro keys and RGB backlighting. 

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) today called on Comcast to make a long-term pledge that it won't charge content providers for faster access to its subscribers.

Comcast already agreed to follow network neutrality provisions until September 2018 as part of its 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal. While the agreement with the US government doesn't specifically prevent Comcast from signing paid prioritization deals, the company has said it has no plans to do so. Comcast has been touting its net neutrality commitments while making the case that it should be allowed to purchase Time Warner Cable, the second biggest cable company in the US after itself.

Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Comcast Executive VP David Cohen today, saying he worries about "the risk of paid prioritization agreements through which websites could be charged for priority access over the Internet." Leahy wants "meaningful pledges from our Nation's broadband providers that they share the American public's commitment to an Internet that remains open and equally accessible to all."

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Jade Raymond's former profile photo at Ubisoft, which was deleted on Monday following the announcement of her departure. Ubisoft Toronto

On Monday, Ubisoft Toronto announced that its managing director, Jade Raymond, was parting ways with the game-making company to "pursue future opportunities separately." The co-creator of the Assassin's Creed series and executive producer of its first two games offered a statement within the company's announcement, calling the exit "one of the hardest decisions of my career" while asking fans to "stay tuned for more on what's next for me."

During her ten-year tenure at Ubisoft, complete with production credits on titles like Watch Dogs and Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Raymond rose within the company's leadership ranks. She was tasked in particular with growing the game studio's Toronto division "to 800 employees by 2020," according to her Ubisoft profile (already deleted by Monday morning). She talked openly about efforts to bring Ubisoft series like Assassin's Creed to the big screen.

Long before a recent rash of anonymous backlash against women in the games industry, Raymond attracted negative attention for her efforts as a game maker, in spite of rarely making public comments about her gender affecting her work. (That continued on Monday, with Raymond's Twitter feed mostly talking about her departure.) While she offered no hints about new games or companies, she responded to questions about her games-industry future by saying, "rest assured, I'm a lifer."

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Today Apple released iOS 8.1, the first major update to iOS 8 which launched in September alongside the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Prior to 8.1 we got a small bug fixing update in the form of iOS 8.0.1, which was quickly followed by iOS 8.0.2 due to a major bug that broke Touch ID and cellular connectivity on the newly released iPhones. Since then, Apple has been working on implementing some features that were not finished in time for the original launch, as well as making changes based on user feedback.

The first such change is the re-addition of the camera roll. The camera roll was part of iOS since its early releases, and with iOS 8 it was removed in favor of a recently added photos album. This solution was more accurately named than the camera roll which was really an album that held every photo on the device, but it was not as familiar to users and did not display every single photo. Users have been very vocal about their dislike of this change and with iOS 8.1 the camera roll returns with the same behaviour as previous versions.

The update also brings features that were shown early this year at WWDC but not included with the initial iOS 8 release. iCloud Photo Library is finally available for all users, albeit as a public beta. SMS Relay is finally enabled, which allows users with supported Macs and iPads to send and receive SMS messages using the phone number associated with their iPhone. 

The last major feature included with 8.1 is Apple Pay on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Apple's new payment solution makes use of NFC and Touch ID for making and authorizing credit card purchases using their iPhone. While Apple Pay with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus can be used to make purchases in stores, on the recently launched iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 it is limited to online purchases due to the omission of NFC.

In addition to new features, iOS 8.1 includes fixes issues with connections to Bluetooth hands-free devices, poor WiFi performance with certain routers, and various other bug fixes, security fixes, and small changes. A list of security patches in the update can be found here on Apple's support website. The update is rolling out now to the iPad 2 and later, iPhone 4s and later, and the iPod Touch 5. The size of the OTA update will vary based on your device but on an iPhone 6 running iOS 8.0.2 it weighs in at 126MB.

 

Andrew Cunningham

As it promised at its iPad event last week, Apple has just released the iOS 8.1 update to the public. The update isn't as far-reaching as iOS 7.1, but it enables a number of previously announced features.

Chief among these is Apple Pay, Apple's new contactless payments system. For the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Apple Pay enables wireless NFC payments using credit cards scanned into Passbook. For those phones plus the new iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3, Apple Pay also enables in-app purchases using those stored credit cards—but without using the actual credit card information. The card data is instead stored locally on your device in a "Secure Element" and is never sent directly to Apple or to any vendors; randomly generated numbers are used instead to confirm each transaction.

Version 8.1 also completes the Continuity features Apple first announced at WWDC. Passthrough of SMS messages and the Personal Hotspot feature join Handoff, AirDrop, and phone call support to link iDevices and Macs running OS X Yosemite more closely to one another.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

camknows

A 39-year-old UK man has been convicted of possessing illegal cartoon drawings of young girls exposing themselves in school uniforms and engaging in sex acts. The case is believed to be the UK's first prosecution of illegal manga and anime images.

Local media said that Robul Hoque was sentenced last week to nine months' imprisonment, though the sentence is suspended so long as the defendant does not break the law again.

Police seized Hoque's computer in 2012 and said they found nearly 400 such images on it, none of which depicted real people but were illegal nonetheless because of their similarity to child pornography. Hoque was initially charged with 20 counts of illegal possession but eventually pled guilty to just 10 counts.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The on/off switch from an IBM 26. Marcin Wichary

IBM announced today that GlobalFoundries will acquire its chip manufacturing business in a deal expected to close in 2015. IBM will pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion over the next three years to complete the transfer but will presumably save more than that over the long haul by offloading a costly chipmaking operation.

IBM designs the chips for its Power servers and mainframe computers and will continue to invest in chip research even after outsourcing manufacturing to GlobalFoundries. IBM is continuing a previously announced $3 billion investment over five years in semiconductor technology research, and the company said that "GlobalFoundries will have primary access to the research that results from this investment through joint collaboration at the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE), SUNY Polytechnic Institute, in Albany, NY." Additionally, GlobalFoundries will become "IBM's exclusive server processor semiconductor technology provider for 22 nanometer (nm), 14nm and 10nm semiconductors for the next 10 years."

GlobalFoundries will take over IBM manufacturing facilities in New York and Vermont, and the company "plans to provide employment opportunities for substantially all IBM employees at the two facilities who are part of the transferred businesses, except for a team of semiconductor server group employees who will remain with IBM." GlobalFoundries will also acquire thousands of patents and IBM's commercial microelectronics business.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Sandia National Lab

Reducing our emissions of carbon dioxide quickly enough to minimize the effects of climate change may require more than just phasing out the use of fossil fuels. During the phase-out, we may need to keep the CO2 we're emitting from reaching the atmosphere—a process called carbon capture and sequestration. The biggest obstacle preventing us from using CCS is the lack of economic motivation to do it. But that doesn't mean it's free from technological constraints and scientific unknowns.

One unknown relates to exactly what will happen to the CO2 we pump deep underground. As a free gas, CO2 would obviously be buoyant, fueling concerns about leakage. But CO2 dissolves into the briny water found in saline aquifers at these depths. Once the gas dissolves, the result is actually more dense than the brine, meaning it will settle downward. With time, much of that dissolved CO2 may precipitate as carbonate minerals.

But how quickly does any of this happen? Having answers will be key to understanding how well we really sequester the carbon.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The Kindle Voyage is an excellent (but expensive) e-reader. Andrew Cunningham

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:[], collapse: true});Most of the time, I’m not sorry that all my dedicated, single-use devices are dead and gone. If you’re carrying a modern smartphone around, why would you miss your Discman, or your portable DVD player, or your dumbphone, or your tape recorder, or your point-and-shoot camera, or your PalmPilot? Not only can one device replace all of them, but that one device is usually better at all of that stuff than most dedicated devices ever were.

Yet there’s something pure about hardware that’s only designed to do one thing, at least when it’s designed well. A gadget that only wants to do a couple of things can tailor itself better to those specific uses while ignoring everything else. Maybe you could get better battery life out of your camera if it didn’t need to be a portable game console and full-featured computer all wrapped up into one.

Specs at a glance: Amazon Kindle Voyage Screen 1448×1072 6" (300 PPI) E-Ink Carta OS Kindle OS 5.5.0 Storage 4GB (non-upgradeable) Networking 802.11b/g/n, optional 3G Ports Micro-USB Size 6.4" x 4.5" x 0.30" (162 x 115 x 7.6 mm) Weight 6.3 oz (180 g) Wi-Fi, 6.6 oz (188 g) 3G Battery Unknown capacity; Amazon claims 6 weeks of life if used for 30 minutes a day with wireless disabled and brightness set to 10 Starting price $199 with Special Offers, $219 without; $269 for 3G with Special Offers, $289 for 3G without Price as reviewed $289

That’s the strongest argument there is for the Kindle line of e-readers, which continue to soldier on even though Amazon has branched out into full-on Android tablets, phones, and set-top boxes. The company's e-reader lineup changes only occasionally and very gradually; the biggest change was probably back in 2011 when Amazon switched out the physical keyboard for a software keyboard with navigation buttons and rudimentary touchscreens. The Kindle Paperwhite’s front-lit screen is a close second.

Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments