The new Typo 2 keyboard case. It now looks kind of like a BlackBerry instead of exactly like a BlackBerry. Typo

Remember Typo, the company co-founded by entertainer and tech luminary Ryan Seacrest that began selling a suspiciously BlackBerry-like keyboard case for the iPhone earlier this year? Typo is back with a new iteration called the Typo 2, which takes the same idea and implements it in a way that hopefully won't make a certain Canadian smartphone manufacturer feel litigious.

The original Typo keyboard looked so much like BlackBerry's that BlackBerry sued in January, and by March it had won a preliminary injunction banning Typo from selling the accessory. Looking at the original Typo keyboard, it's not hard to see why:

The first Typo keyboard accessory. Typo

And here's the keyboard BlackBerry is using on its Q10 smartphone.

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Dennis Redfield

One of Google's mysterious party/showroom barges has reportedly been sold and will be shipping out of its location in Portland, according to a report from the Portland Press Herald. The barge was transferred to a new terminal Wednesday, and the terminal's owner states that it's preparing to ship out to a new owner shortly.

When the four Google barges first turned up on both the East and West coasts, reports indicated that Google intended them to be a show floor for projects in work, such as Google Glass and the company's self-driving car technology. Onboard two of the barges were structures made of 40-foot shipping containers that could be put together, rearranged, and transported as needed. The structures also reportedly included a "party deck" and various amenities for receiving clients, business partners, and VIPs.

As of fall 2013, little work had been done on the two barges parked in Portland and San Francisco Bay, and the two others in San Francisco's Treasure Island and New London, CT didn't even have superstructures to support future development. Portland collected property taxes on the barge parked there to the tune of $400,000. In February, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission told Google it needed to move its barge out.

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Flickr user: Carlos Martinez

Chronic pain, defined as disabling pain that persists despite attempts at treatment and often without obvious cause, has become a serious challenge for health professionals. It is not surprising that someone suffering from this level of pain might become depressed, but most studies consider depression a "comorbidity"—an associated disorder—or suggest that the pain is "somatization" of the depression. That is, it may be a mental disorder’s effect on the body.

These ideas ignore both the impact of pain on people and 50 years of understanding in pain science. A new study by Neil Schwartz at Stanford University and colleagues, just published in Science, has helped clarify the relationship between pain and depression. The researchers identify the underpinnings of loss of motivation in mice with chronic pain and depression.

For the study, they induced chronic pain in mice through injury. Before the injury, the mice were tested for their motivation to search for and work to get food. After the injury, they were just as interested in food they could obtain with minimal effort. But those with pain gave up much sooner when getting food required more work per pellet. This shows that chronic pain can reduce motivation.

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The Intel NUC has created a very successful niche for itself in the SFF PC market. While Gigabyte has released the BRIX lineup (with more options compared to the Intel NUC line, including AMD-based ones and NVIDIA GPU-equipped units), most offerings we have seen (such as the Logic Supply ML320) just build upon Intel's motherboard. In this situation, we have Zotac come out with the ZBOX O-series (Sphere lineup). A motherboard tracing its origins (like the Intel-based BRIX units) to the Intel NUC, it differentiates itself mainly in its aesthetics. How does it perform in our mini-PC evaluation? Read on to find out.

While Mt. Gox owner Mark Karpeles was growing what would become the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, he should have been serving time in his home country of France. He was sentenced to a year in custody in 2010 on fraud accusations.

A newly obtained French court document shows that Karpeles has a civil and non-civil judgment pending where, in addition to custody, he also owes €45,000 ($60,000). The document is being published jointly for the first time by Ars Technica and the French publication Le Monde. (Read the French original here and an English translation here.)

The case was brought by a former employer who accused Karpeles of stealing customer user names, customer passwords, and a domain name, among other grievances. Under French law, Karpeles is not considered a criminal but rather “un délinquant,” a delinquent offender. It's a lesser label than “criminal,” because that word is reserved only for very serious crimes within the country.

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Only yesterday Microsoft officially announced the Windows Phone 8.1 Update and today some more details emerged about what is coming as part of the update. Internet Explorer was bumped to version 11 with the release of Windows Phone 8.1 which brought a lot more compatibility and speed over its predecessor IE 10. However this didn’t solve all issues for all users. With the small market share of Windows Phone, many web sites have not tested against the mobile IE browser, nor do many even attempt to detect it. This has resulted in a mobile browsing experience that is quite different than one you would get on Android or iOS.

On the IEBlog, Microsoft outlined some of the changes they are going to begin to implement as part of the 8.1 Update to address the inconsistent mobile web. They outlined the top issues affecting mobile browsing in IE as:

• Faulty browser detection not recognising IE as a mobile browser and giving the desktop experience
• Using only old webkit-prefixed features that have been replaced by standards
• Using proprietary webkit-prefixed features for which there is no standard
• Using features that IE does not support with no graceful fall-back
• Running into interoperability bugs and implementation differences in IE

The first change they are implementing is changing the User Agent string. For those unfamiliar, browsers send a text string to the web server when connecting, and this string lets the web server know what browser type is connecting, and which features the browser would support. The idea is that if a browser connects that doesn’t support a certain part of the page, it can gracefully fall back to other code. A big issue the IE team found was that web servers were not detecting IE on Windows Phone as a mobile browser, and were therefore offering up the desktop version of the page. This results in a pretty poor browsing experience on a small screened device. While not saying exactly what the new string will be (though it will be trivial to found out once the update ships) they did say that they added “like Gecko” to the desktop IE 11 when it shipped, so it will probably be something similar to this.

Twitter after changing the User Agent String - WP 8.1 (left), WP 8.1 Update (center), iPhone (right)

The next solution is that the IE team is now adding a mapping for some webkit-prefixed APIs to the standards based APIs that already exist in IE 11. This way, when a website creates content and uses the non-standard webkit prefix, IE 11 will now be able to use that code to provide a page that more correctly portrays what the developer intended. They gave the example of www.macys.com to show how the gradients were not drawn correctly in IE 11 because the web code was not standards compliant.

Macys.com gradients WP 8.1 (left), WP 8.1 Update (center), iPhone (right)

The IE team also worked to add non-standard features to the mobile IE 11. With the popularity of the iOS ecosystem, many sites have used proprietary APIs provided by Safari. With this update, Microsoft is going to do the right thing and support these, even though they are not a part of web standards. Most users don’t want to know why a site doesn’t work perfectly, they just expect it to. By adding these non-standard features, users will get a better experience.

IE 11 on the desktop went a long way towards being more standards compliant, though it still lags behind other browsers. The time the team did spend on adding standards based features though were based on ones used more on the desktop. Many HTML5 features are seldom used on sites presented as a desktop experience, but they are used on the mobile versions of the site. With this update, the IE team has added more feature compliance to help with mobile site rendering.

New York Times mobile site WP 8.1 (left), WP 8.1 Update (center), iPhone (right)

Finally, they examined some of the markup used on real pages and found there was some that was coded incorrectly or the documentation for implementation is unclear. Clear or not, they found that other browsers handled this the way the developer intended, so they’ve made changes to Trident to help with some of this as well. They also fixed several bugs within Trident that were more of a sore spot with mobile sites such as location.hash and CSS layout issues.

The irony of these changes is painfully obvious to anyone who lived through the IE6 monopoly days. At that time, many sites coded directly to features that were not part of the HTML standards and were only available in IE6 or even as ActiveX controls. It can still be an issue with business if their internal line of business web apps were written for IE6. However the web in general has moved away from that, but with the dominance of Safari as a mobile browser, a similar situation has occurred where mobile sites are being written to non-standard HTML. Microsoft has worked hard to bring their browsers into standards compliance, and now they are forced to add non-standard features in order to not degrade the user experience. It would be best if all sites were 100% standards compliant, but that day will likely never come so it is encouraging to see the work being done here to provide the end user with an experience more on-par with other mobile browsers. There is of course always more work to do. One of the often requested features that wasn’t mentioned in this blog post is text reflow. We will have to wait until next week to see if this has been added. Windows Phone 8.1 Update will be available to people in the developer preview starting next week.

Historically, the biggest class-action lawsuits filed against video game companies have stemmed from antitrust and monopoly accusations, such as Nintendo's alleged price-fixing in 1991 or EA's football-series monopolies in the mid-'00s. But in some cases, like a filing over the 2013 shooter Aliens: Colonial Marines, the suit's terms boiled down to little more than "the game stinks."

That's what happened when two fans sued producer Sega and developer Gearbox in May 2013 over that disastrous Aliens game, alleging that the game's previews were so different from the retail release that they "misled" shoppers. On Thursday, over a year after the suit was filed, Gearbox finally responded with a motion for dismissal—and revealed more of the game's woes in the process.

One section of the motion, penned by Gearbox Marketing Director Steve Gibson, recounted the game's development timeline in order to distance itself from any financial obligation should the lawsuit turn out in the plaintiffs' favor. In particular, Gibson alleged that "Gearbox supplemented Sega’s development budget with its own money" to the tune of millions, "none of which was ever repaid."

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Linksys and ZyXEL recently updated their product portfolio for SMB (small and medium business) networking gear. The updates came in the managed switches category for both companies. In addition, ZyXEL also introduced two new gateways.

Linksys

Linksys had recently lost ground as a SMB market leader, but, after Cisco's sale of the business unit to Belkin, things have been improving rapidly. Last month, they announced the Pro series wireless access point (LAPAC1750PRO) with support for cluster managment (handling multiple access points from a single interface) and a customizable branding portal. It also had dual GbE ports for increased throughput as well as redundancy. As with any AP in this market segment, the unit could be powered by PoE (Power over Ethernet). This 3x3 802.11ac AP was priced at $500.

However, the standout announcement came this month for their managed network switches. Usually, we see vendors putting out 24 and 48-port switches, but Linksys is introducing 28 and 52-port ones. There are four models: LGS528, LGS552, LGS528P and LGS552P. The P models come with PoE+ support (802.3at) and have a 30W power budget per port. The 52 port models come with two 10 GbE uplink ports (SFP+). The non-PoE+ models are priced at $550 and $850 for the 28 port and the 52 port versions,
while the PoE+ models are priced at $950 and $1300. Note that these switches support Layer 3 static routing also.

ZyXEL

ZyXEL announced an update to the venerable GS2200 layer 2 managed switches yesterday in the GS2210 series. The updated internals reflect in lower maximum power consumption. The GS2210 also has a larger packet buffer. The lineup consists of 24-port and 48-port models with PoE (HP models) and without PoE support. Pricing for GS2210-24 comes in at $499 while the HP variant will come in at $799. The 48-port versions are priced at $1099 (GS2210-48) and $1349 (GS2210-48HP). I have been using the GS2200-24 24x7 at home for the last three years (not just as part of a testbed), and I have to say that the unit has been silent and reliable all through after initial setup.

A couple of Internet Access Gateways were also announced, targeting the hospitality market. The UAG5100 supports up to 800 concurrent devices with dual WAN capabilities and an integrated WLAN controller for managing up to 32 Wi-Fi APs. The UAG2100 supports up to 200 devices, has a built-in 802.11n AP and an integrated WLAN controller to manage up to 8 Wi-Fi APs. The firmware features of both units are geared towards monetization of Internet services as well as recording of user access information for auditing and security purposes.
 

This is Curiosity, but physically, Mars 2020 will look quite similar. NASA

When NASA announced its plans for future explorations of Mars, there was a sense of disappointment in some quarters, since it featured a rover much like Curiosity. But NASA made clear that it was only using the proven technology of the vehicle itself; the instruments it carried would be all new and shaped by both the advancement of technology and the experience of past missions.

Today NASA announced exactly what instruments the mission—currently called Mars 2020—will carry. They included hardware capable of making a more directed search for organic chemicals on the red planet, which could be evidence that life existed there in the past. And it will also carry an experiment designed to test our ability to produce oxygen for future manned explorations of Mars. The rover will also gather and cache samples to be picked up and returned to Earth by a future mission.

NASA had received nearly 60 proposals for instruments to fly on the Mars 2020 mission. From that list, it has selected seven, which it expects will cost a total of roughly $130 million to develop and build. Once again, the rover will be equipped with a mastcam (Mastcam-Z in this iteration) that includes panoramic and stereo imaging. The rover will also carry an instrument to track the wind, temperature, and the properties of Mars' persistent dust.

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US Computer Emergency Response Team, in cooperation with the Secret Service and researchers at Trustwave’s Spiderlabs, have issued an alert about a newly identified variant of malware installed on point-of-sale (POS) systems that was used in a series of recent attacks by cyber criminals. Called “Backoff,” the malware shares characteristics with the one used to attack Target’s point of sale systems last year: it scrapes credit card data out of the infected computer’s memory. Until now, it was undetected by antivirus software; testing by researchers found it had a "zero percent detection rate" on commercial antivirus products.

POS machines are a big target for hackers, who use malware like Backoff to collect data from credit cards and other transaction information to either create fraudulent credit cards or sell the data. In many ways, the Backoff-based attacks were similar to the attack in 2011 on Subway franchises—hackers used remote desktop software left active on the machines to gain entry, either by brute-force password attacks or by taking advantage of a default password, and then installing the malware on the hacked system.

According to US-CERT, Backoff—which is Windows-specific malware—runs in the background watching memory for the “track” data from credit card swipes, which can be used to both obtain the account number on the card and to create fraudulent cards that can be used in ATMs and other point-of-sale systems. Backoff also has a keylogger function that records the key-presses on the infected computer. The malware installs a malicious stub in Windows Explorer that can reload the in-memory component if it crashes and communicates with the criminals’ command and control network—sending home captured credit card data and checking for malware updates.

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Exporting to PDF from Excel for iPad. All four Office apps can do this now. Andrew Cunningham

Microsoft at long last released Office for the iPad in March, in keeping with CEO Satya Nadella's "cloud first, mobile first" approach to competitors' platforms. OneNote had already been available for some time, but it was the first time Word, Excel, or PowerPoint had been available as native iPad apps. Today Microsoft updated all four applications, following the hasty addition of printer support about a month after the initial release.

All four apps can now export files as PDFs, crop pictures inline, and reset changes made to pictures. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint can also use third-party fonts, presumably in addition to the Microsoft- and Apple-supplied fonts that come with iOS and the Office apps themselves. Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote pick up more features that will be appreciated by heavier users of the desktop Office apps. From the release notes:

Excel

• Flick to select: flick a cell’s selection handle in any direction to quickly and easily select all the data in a row or column.
• External keyboard support: using an external keyboard is even easier. Use the same keys to input data and move around a worksheet as you would on your PC or Mac.
• PivotTables: interact with PivotTables that have source data in the same workbook.
• Print options: more paper sizes and scaling options give you more control over the layout when printing your workbooks.

PowerPoint

• Presenter view: view and edit speaker notes, see your next slide, or jump to other slides while presenting.
• Play media: play videos, sound effects, and background music while presenting.
• Insert video: insert videos from your Camera Roll.
• Presenter tools: now you can erase highlights and drawings on your presentation.
• Hyperlinks: add links to your presentation or edit existing ones.

OneNote

• Protected sections: now you can lock or unlock password-protected sections created in OneNote for Windows.
• Organize notebooks: now you can move and reorder pages and sections and manage subpages.
• Formatted text: copy and paste formatted text between applications—whether it's an article from Safari or a document in Word, any content you paste into OneNote will look great!
• Creating notebooks: now you can create notebooks and save them to OneDrive for business. Have multiple accounts? No problem! It's easy to select exactly where you want to store your new notebook.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote are all available in the App Store for any iPad running iOS 7. A Microsoft account is required to view files in all of the applications. A current Office365 subscription is required to edit files in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

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One of the hot topics in computer upgrades for the next couple of years is going to be the move to DDR4.  Intel has already announced that the Haswell-E / X99 platform will be based on DDR4, and we can only assume that other future platforms will use it as well.  The shift from DDR3 to DDR4 is a the big jump for DRAM manufacturers as well, shifting gears to the new product and maintaining stocks of both for the meantime.  ADATA is one of the first to officially launch their consumer memory, their Premier line of DDR4.

JEDEC specifications have the DDR4 base frequency at 2133 MHz with sub-timing latencies of 15-15-15 at 1.2 volts.  This is where ADATA will be positioning their first DDR4 modules in the market, and we can assume that others will as well until higher frequency parts are binned.  Compare this to the rate of DDR3-2133, which is often at 10-12-12 timings or similar, but uses 1.65 volts, and typically comes with heatsinks.

Because we are far from the launch of a consumer platform for DDR4, as one might expect this comes across more as a paper launch.  ADATA in the past typically publishes a PR about new memory about two weeks before it goes on the market, and I am asking about pricing which was not mentioned.  Given the pictures we received with the modules, it would seem that 4GB and 8GB modules will be first to market for DDR4 unless another DRAM manufacturer has something up its sleeve.

Source: ADATA

Gallery: ADATA Formally Announces DDR4-2133 CL15 UDIMMs

Today, the World Health Organization announced that it will begin coordinating a $100-million effort to contain the Ebola virus outbreak that's currently killing people in West Africa. The 120 staff WHO has directed to combat the disease are turning out to be insufficient, even when combined with local health workers and a collection of NGOs. The organization has called the scale of the outbreak "unprecedented."

The launch will officially take place tomorrow in Guinea, one of the countries that has been hit the hardest by Ebola. An Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak Response Plan in West Africa has already been developed. The plan calls for several hundred additional workers, primarily "clinical doctors and nurses, epidemiologists, social mobilization experts, logisticians and data managers." Their goal will be two-fold: strengthen surveillance and response capabilities in surrounding countries to limit the spread of the virus and cut down on transmission in affected areas by scaling up existing outbreak control measures.

Ebola is part of a family of viruses that causes what are termed "hemorrhagic fevers." The results are exactly what the name implies: failure of blood vessel integrity and blood clotting, leading to widespread internal and external bleeding. Since the virus is present in these fluids, the bleeding puts anyone who comes in contact with a symptomatic individual or the body of anyone killed by Ebola at risk of infection. Health care workers can easily become infected during routine care.

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The Hoboken School District said in a statement that it is not throwing away its student laptops, despite a headline from public radio station WNYC that stated: "Why Hoboken Is Throwing Away All its Student Laptops."

That story was a reprint of The Hechinger Report's original story, under the headline: "Why a New Jersey school district decided giving laptops to students is a terrible idea." The original story noted that the school district was abandoning the essential goal of providing one laptop to each 7th and 8th grader.

In a letter “to the Hoboken Community” posted on the district website on Thursday, Interim Superintendent Richard Brockel wrote that the district’s program purchased 300 laptops “with the intent to provide technology for all students regardless of their relative personal economic situation.”

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A number of the profiles created on Reaganbook and cached by Google before the site was closed to the public, some of them NSFW.

The launch of ReaganBook, a conservative-oriented social network, was overrun by trolls Thursday despite its attempt at a soft launch meant specifically to avoid trolls. RawStory reports that the site was flooded with several fake accounts, including ones for Vladimir Putin, Sarah Palin, and Manuel Noriega. Eventually the whole site was taken offline.

ReaganBook is the work of Janet Porter, an Ohio Republican and founder of "pro-life, pro-advocacy" group Faith 2Action, according to The Daily Beast. The site, pitched as "Facebook for patriots," officially opened Tuesday and attracted such personalities as "Ben Ghazi, "Al Zheimers," "Ayn Randy," "Zombie Reagan," and "Ronald Reagan" himself. Users also created group pages for the band Slayer, "Cut Dicks for Christ," and various types of pornographic content, wrote The Daily Beast.

As of Thursday, the site is nothing but a boilerplate message thanking those who (attempted to) participate in the soft launch. "Your participation is helping us build a more secure site. Thank you!" the message reads. "Please be patient while we make the necessary changes to keep the site free from obscenity, pornography, and those intent on the destruction of life, liberty, and the family… As Reagan taught us, trust, but verify." The post is signed "Management." Ayn Randy could not be reached for comment.

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Microsoft, Sandyford, Co. Dublin. Red Agenda A federal judge ruled Thursday that Microsoft must hand over e-mails stored on an overseas server to US authorities. The case gives the Obama administration approval to reach into servers abroad.

"It is a question of control, not a question of the location of that information," US District Judge Loretta Preska ruled in a closely followed legal flap. The bench order from the New York judge was stayed pending appeal.

The judge sided with the Obama Administration claims that any company with operations in the United States must comply with valid warrants for data, even if the content is stored overseas—in this case Dublin, Ireland. It's a position Microsoft and companies like Apple contended was wrong, arguing that the enforcement of US law stops at the border.

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FTC

It's no secret that mobile cramming has cost cell phone users lots of money. A Senate Commerce Committee report released yesterday says the unauthorized charges crammed into customer bills have "likely cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars."

The report further says that industry self-regulation has "left gaps in consumer protection." The carriers promised last November to stop these charges, given that previous attempts at self-regulation failed, but much damage was already done and Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) says the risks to consumers are not entirely gone.

The committee staff report, requested by Rockefeller, says, "For several decades, phone companies have allowed third-party vendors to charge consumers on their phone bills for goods and services unrelated to phone service, such as photo storage, voicemail, and faxes. This practice began with landline phone bills and continued on wireless phone bills as consumer use of mobile phones increased. Throughout this period, the industry has assured the public that its self-regulatory system is effective at protecting consumers from fraudulent third-party billing on their phone bills."

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Greetings, Arsians! Our partners at LogicBuy are back with a ton of deals for this week. We've got a back to school special today only: a Dell Inspiron 15 laptop with a Core i7 Haswell processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive for just $749.99. There's also a lower-specced Inspiron 15 for $499.99. Either one will save you a ton of cash and get you ready for school.

Featured deal

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Laptops, desktops, and tablets

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Davide Bonnadonna

We tend to think of feathers as one of the defining features of birds. But in recent years, it's become apparent that the lineage of dinosaurs that gave rise to birds (the Theropods) had feathers millions of years before anything remotely bird-like existed. Just last week, feathers were also found on a dinosaur outside the theropod lineage, raising questions about what made the theropods special (aside from, well, all sorts of cool dinosaur species).

Previous attempts to detect any global trends in bird-like traits among the theropods haven't come up with anything definitive. But today, scientists are releasing a new computer analysis of thousands of traits from theropod dinosaur fossils. The results show that the lineage that gave rise to birds has been getting smaller for 50 million years, and it underwent a huge burst of adding novel anatomical features. Both of these revelations are in sharp contrast to the rest of the theropod lineage.

The first theropods appear in the fossil record after the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction event. During the early part of their history, they were notable for being rather large and static. Some groups appeared in the fossil record 180 million years ago, persisting right up to the mass extinction event that ended the non-avian dinosaurs. And one of the earliest groups to split off the lineage that led to birds were the Megalosaurids—which, as their name implies, were rather large.

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The head of the Central Intelligence Agency has apologized to leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee after determining that his officers improperly accessed computers that were supposed to be available only to committee investigators, according to multiple reports on Thursday.

The mea culpa from CIA Director John O. Brennan was in sharp contrast to a defiant statement he made in March. After US Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the agency of breaching long-recognized separations between employees of the legislative and executive branches, Brennan maintained that there had been no inappropriate monitoring of Senate staffers' computer activity.

"When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong," he said at the time.

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