DC Comics

The high-profile "copyright termination" dispute over Superman—arguably the most famous comic character of all time—is finally over. DC Comics defeated the heirs of artist Joe Shuster and writer Jerry Siegel.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court declined (PDF) to hear the petition filed by the heirs' lawyers. That leaves standing a ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, and the heirs won't be allowed to wrest the copyright away.

The litigants in the case included Shuster's sister, Jean Peavy, as well as Siegel's daughter Laura Siegel Larson. They lost their case in Los Angeles federal court in 2012, and lost again on appeal.

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Adobe even logs what you read in Digital Editions' instruction manual.

Adobe’s Digital Editions e-book and PDF reader—an application used by thousands of libraries to give patrons access to electronic lending libraries—actively logs and reports every document readers add to their local “library” along with what users do with those files. Even worse, the logs are transmitted over the Internet in the clear, allowing anyone who can monitor network traffic (such as the National Security Agency, Internet service providers and cable companies, or others sharing a public Wi-Fi network) to follow along over readers’ shoulders.

Ars has independently verified the logging of e-reader activity with the use of a packet capture tool. The exposure of data was first discovered by Nate Hoffelder of The Digital Reader, who reported the issue to Adobe but received no reply.

Digital Editions (DE) has been used by many public libraries as a recommended application for patrons wanting to borrow electronic books (particularly with the Overdrive e-book lending system), because it can enforce digital rights management rules on how long a book may be read for. But DE also reports back data on e-books that have been purchased or self-published. Those logs are transmitted over an unencrypted HTTP connection back to a server at Adobe—a server with the Domain Name Service hostname “adelogs.adobe.com”—as an unencrypted file (the data format of which appears to be JSON).

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Weeks after Facebook deactivated "several hundred" accounts belonging to drag queens and other LGBTQ users, the company has faced continued scrutiny over the reason for those delistings: the site's real name policy, which requires users to identify themselves on the site by using a name on a driver's license or credit card. Last week, the company's course-reversal and lengthy apology over the matter hinted at bigger changes to come, and a report on Tuesday pointed to that change coming in the form of an entirely new app.

According to sources close to The New York Times, Facebook has been developing a "stand-alone mobile application" for "the past year" that doesn't require logging in or interacting with a real name. Those sources claimed the app would launch "in the coming weeks," and its development has been led by a team that joined Facebook in January after the company acquired Branch, whose apps and software revolved around community and conversation services.

The Times' report was unable to clarify how the app would connect to Facebook's services, going so far as to imply that it may not be part of Facebook's content ecosystem at all (though it's hard to imagine Facebook launching an entirely new, anonymous social network that mimics the likes of 4chan). The report's sources hinted that the app may connect specifically to health-community offerings, as well. Ultimately, any such product would have to balance the positives of Facebook's real-name policies, particularly cutting down on anonymous spam and abuse, while still somehow allowing users to engage in "topics of discussion which they may not be comfortable connecting to their real names."

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Brian Bilek

Infotainment systems are often marketed as being distinctly safer to use than picking up a cellphone while you're driving. But two studies released on Tuesday have shown that's just not the case. A handful of in-vehicle systems, as well as Apple's Siri, were tested for cognitive distraction, and the majority of systems were found to be incredibly distracting—more so than having a conversation on a handheld phone.

In one of the studies (PDF), the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and the University of Utah rated six infotainment systems from Ford, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Toyota, Mercedes, and Hyundai (using the MyFordTouch, MyLink, Uconnect, Entune, COMAND, and Blue Link systems, respectively). Five of the cars were 2013 models, and one was a 2012 model.

Study participants drove six different cars on a seven- to nine-minute loop throughout a residential area in Salt Lake City. Participants were allowed to complete a test loop to familiarize themselves with the area, and they were given time to practice using each car's infotainment system while parked until they were ready to begin the test. The participants were periodically instructed to “dial a 10-digit number, call a contact, change the radio station, or play a CD,” according to the paper. “All interactions took place using 'hands-free' voice systems which were activated with the touch of a button on the steering wheel.”

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Criminals are installing fairly sophisticated malicious programs on banks' ATMs, allowing them to control access to the machines and easily steal cash, security firms Kaspersky and Interpol said in a joint statement released on Tuesday.

The malware, which Kaspersky dubbed 'Tyupkin,' allows low-level thieves, known as money mules, access to the machines at certain times of day using an intermittently changing code, similar to the six-digit electronic tokens used for security in the financial industry. More than 50 ATMs in Eastern Europe and Russia were found to have been infected with the malware to date, leading to the theft of currency equivalent to millions of dollars, according to the statement.

The attack shows that criminals are improving their tactics and appear to be able to gain enough access to ATMs to install code, Vicente Diaz, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, said.

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Rosaura Ochoa

Twitter sued the Justice Department on Tuesday, saying the agency's virtual ban of detailing the scope of US surveillance on the microblogging site is an unconstitutional "prior restraint" of speech protected by the First Amendment.

The San Francisco-based company's federal lawsuit concerns the broad limits the government has placed on Twitter over how it may characterize national security surveillance of Twitter's users—like National Security Letters and FISA court orders. The same is true for other companies, too.

Twitter attorney Eric Miller wrote: [PDF]

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A CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth profiler) is lowered into the water. This is the standard tool for oceanographers making measurements from a ship. Andrew Meijers/BAS

Of the energy added to the climate system by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases, more than 90 percent has gone into the ocean. The monitoring of ocean temperatures has improved drastically over the last decade with the deployment of a vast fleet of Argo floats that drift around being our eyes and thermometers. Even so, they don’t yet cover depths greater than 2,000 meters, and their presence today doesn’t make up for their absence in decades past.

Fortunately, time travel with gadgets from the future isn’t the only way to improve our knowledge of what’s gone on in the deeps. Ocean warming also manifests itself in another way—as rising sea level. Seawater expands ever so slightly with increasing temperature. And given how absolutely massive the world ocean is, “ever so slightly” adds up. In fact, thermal expansion and melting ice have made roughly equal contributions to sea level rise so far.

Going deep

There’s been a lot of interest in recent years in quantifying the warming of the deep ocean, but not much is currently known about what's going on below 2,000 meters. In a new study published in Nature Climate Change, a group led by William Llovel at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory combines sea level rise measurements with Argo data to look for the effect of warming in the deeps.

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GT's stock rode high on the iPhone rumors for months, but it dropped when the new iPhones launched without sapphire and fell down a hole when it announced the bankruptcy filing.

GT Advanced Technologies, the company Apple currently relies on for sapphire in its iOS devices, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy yesterday. The filing came just a few weeks after Apple announced its new iPhones on September 10—both the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were widely expected to use sapphire instead of glass to protect their screens from scratches. This didn't happen, though, and it sent GT's stock price sliding downward even before yesterday's bankruptcy filing pushed it off a cliff.

Now The Wall Street Journal reports that GT CEO Thomas Gutierrez has sold over $10 million in stock since February of 2014, including 9,000 shares worth about $160,000 on September 8. This was two days before the iPhone announcement. The stock closed at $17.15 on the 8th, but had fallen to $12.78 on the 10th following Apple's event.

A GT filing says that the stock sale was merely coincidental, and that the stocks were being sold according to a schedule set in March of 2014. The WSJ reports "no obvious pattern to his sales."

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Owners of Belkin routers around the world are finding themselves unable to get online today. Outages appear to be affecting many different models of Belkin router, and they're hitting customers on any ISP, with Time Warner Cable and Comcast among those affected. ISPs, inundated with support calls by unhappy users, are directing complaints to Belkin's support line, which appears to have gone into meltdown in response.

The reason for the massive outages is currently unknown. Initial speculation was that Belkin pushed a buggy firmware update overnight, but on a reddit thread about the problem, even users who claim to have disabled automatic updates have found their Internet connectivity disrupted.

Others suggest that there is some kind of DNS problem at work. Although the routers are correctly picking up their DNS settings from DHCP, they're apparently unable to resolve domain names correctly. Connecting to the Internet using IP addresses alone does, in fact, appear to work, but with most of us dependent on DNS, this is of little value.

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Samsung Electronics issued guidance today for its upcoming Q3 2014 earnings, and it isn't pretty.

The company says it expects an operating profit of 4.1 trillion won ($3.8 billion) for the quarter, a 60 percent drop over the same quarter last year, when it made 10.2 trillion won. Overall sales are down, too. Samsung expects to sell 47 trillion won ($44 billion) worth of product, which is down 20 percent from the 59.10 trillion won it brought in the door this time last year.

Over 50 percent of Samsung Electronics' sales last year were from the smartphone and IT division. This year it's probably even higher. Samsung Sustainability Report, 2014

Of course, last year Samsung was regularly turning in record quarters, and that couldn't last forever. While Samsung Electronics makes everything from TVs to refrigerators, the "Mobile and IT" division (read: smartphones) has become over 50 percent of the company's sales. Samsung was the first Android OEM with large enough sales, distribution, and branding to become a rival to Apple, and it rode that combination to record profits.

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The Android Hangouts app, seen here translating an MMS message from a Sprint account.

On Monday, Google announced that its free Google Voice service received a long-awaited service upgrade in the form of Multimedia Message Service (MMS) support across nearly every major cellular carrier in North America.

Senior software engineer Alex Wiesen took to his personal Google Plus page to post a statement on Google's behalf, declaring that the company worked with "nearly 100 different North American carriers," including AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile, to ensure that MMS texts received on Google Voice would display correctly starting this week.

Up until this week, Google Voice users didn't see MMS messages as intended; instead, they arrived as SMS messages. Depending on the carrier, they'd either come with a link to the originally attached image or no indication that an image was ever attached. Now, while outbound Google Voice MMS attachments still appear on most carriers as a link, inbound MMS messages render images natively within Google Voice.

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Nobel Prize Committee

Each year, roughly a quarter of the electricity we generate goes to lighting. For decades, that lighting came in the form of an incandescent light bulb, which produced 16 lumens for every Watt it was fed. Fluorescent bulbs are roughly five times as efficient, but recent LEDs do nearly 19 times better than incandescents, producing 300 lumens for each Watt.

The first LEDs date back to 1907, but it's only recently that their incredible efficiency has been brought to bear on the lighting market. One of the key holdups was our inability to generate a broad spectrum of colors. Specifically, we couldn't make white light because we lacked the ability to produce blue LEDs. Now, the Nobel Prize in Physics is being given to three materials scientists who overcame this roadblock.

The people receiving the honor are Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, both faculty at Nagoya University in Japan, and Shuji Nakamura, now of UC Santa Barbara, who did much of his key work while at Nichia Chemicals, a small company in Japan.

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When Google+ head Vic Gundotra abruptly left Google earlier this year, it quickly led to rumors that Google would be scaling back its ambitions for the social network and cutting the division's resources. In an interview with Re/code today, new head of social media Dave Besbris said that the Google+ team is still going strong, and the service won't be going anywhere anytime soon.

“We’re the largest we’ve ever been,” Besbris told Re/code. "We’re actually very happy with the progress of Google+, [Larry Page] said this at the time that Vic transitioned that he’s going to continue working on building this stuff, that he’s very happy with it. The company is behind it."

The full interview is worth a read—while Besbris didn't give surprising answers to any of the questions asked, he did talk about Google+'s ad policy and the challenges of battling peoples' "pre-conceived notions" about the social network. He also attempted to reassure those who feel they have been forced into signing up for Google+ just because they want to use another Google service.

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Davide Restivo

The US government may hack into servers outside the country without a warrant, the Justice Department said in a new legal filling in the ongoing prosecution of Ross Ulbricht. The government believes that Ulbricht is the operator of the Silk Road illicit drug website.

Monday's filing in New York federal court centers on the legal brouhaha of how the government found the Silk Road servers in Iceland. Ulbricht said last week that the government's position—that a leaky CAPTCHA on the site's login led them to the IP address—was "implausible" and that the government (perhaps the National Security Agency) may have unlawfully hacked into the site to discover its whereabouts.

Assistant US Attorney Serrin Turner countered (PDF).

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The BBC's Claire Marshall takes a closer look at how you go about injecting a tree with a prototype fungicide, derived from garlic, as part of the fight against ash dieback.

With the launch of NVIDIA’s Maxwell-powered GeForce GTX 900 series last month, it was immediately obvious that NVIDIA had been able to deal a swift blow to AMD’s product lineup by surpassing AMD’s performance while significantly undercutting their pricing. At the time we were expecting AMD to quickly respond with the necessary price cuts to keep the R9 290 series competitive with the GTX 900 series, but surprisingly even a week later this had yet to happen.

Now a bit over two and a half weeks after the GTX 900 series launch, we’re finally seeing Radeon R9 290 series pricing fall in response to NVIDIA’s launch. AMD has not announced an official price cut at this time – and admittedly neither AMD nor NVIDIA tend to announce reactive price cuts – so it’s not clear whether this is AMD’s doing, board partner’s, retailers, or most likely all three. But regardless, retail video card prices at Newegg and other etailers have seen some substantial drops that help bring back at least some balance between AMD and NVIDIA’s high end video card lineups.

A number of Radeon R9 290 cards can now be found for around $300 after rebate, with a couple more factory overclocked models at $310. With HIS, Sapphire, PowerColor, Asus, and XFX represented, this is a broad selection of vendors with a bit less than half of Newegg’s stock now at or around $300. Meanwhile R9 290X can be found for $399, again with a wide selection of vendors and roughly half of Newegg’s stock at or near that price. The remainder of Newegg’s stock in turn generally consists of heavily overclocked or otherwise premium cards that carried their own price premium before these latest cuts.

Speaking of AMD card prices, it should also be noted that AMD’s Never Settle Forever bundle is still active even after this round of price cuts. AMD and their partners will be continuing to try to influence the value proposition of their products by including free games.

For AMD these price cuts don’t come a moment too soon, and while they are going to help the competitive landscape I’m not convinced this is the last time we’re going to see AMD cut prices. As we discussed in our review of the GTX 970, comparing stock-to-stock, the $329 GTX 970 is every bit as fast as the now $400 R9 290X. If AMD wants to be price/performance competitive with NVIDIA then there’s still an additional $70 price difference between the two cards, a gap further muddied by AMD’s game bundle and NVIDIA’s superior energy efficiency. Strictly speaking $400 may not be low enough for the R9 290X, but no doubt AMD wants to see what sales are like at $400 before cutting prices on their single-GPU flagship any further.

The R9 290 on the other hand is in an interesting spot. At resolutions below 2160p it trails the GTX 970 by around 10%, but then again at $300 it’s also priced about 10% lower.  Since it ships at a lower clockspeed than R9 290X a lot of AMD’s partners also goose the core clock on R9 290, which improves performance a bit but isn’t enough to close that 10% gap. What it does mean however is that at least so long as energy efficiency is not a concern, R9 290 is appropriately priced for its performance. However if energy efficiency is a concern, then AMD doesn’t have any kind of counter to GM204 at this time.

If anything the one wildcard at this point is the availability of the new GeForce cards. Despite stock more-or-less holding up immediately post launch, we’ve seen both the GTX 980 and GTX 970 go out of stock in the last week. As of the time of this writing it looks like Newegg has received their Tuesday shipment, so there is stock available, but it’s a thin selection of just a few different cards (including a model or two at MSRP). For prospective buyers this means either playing inventory games or grabbing the AMD alternative, and for AMD this is all the more reason not to cut prices too drastically while GeForce availability is still limited. As for NVIDIA it’s been a while since we’ve seen them capacity constrained on the high end, so while it’s solid evidence that they’ve done everything right with the GTX 900 series launch, it does mean that they’re also going to be leaving sales on the table until supply and demand level out.

Fall 2014 GPU Pricing Comparison AMD Price NVIDIA Radeon R9 295X2 $1000     $550 GeForce GTX 980 Radeon R9 290X $400     $330 GeForce GTX 970 Radeon R9 290 $300   Radeon R9 280X
Radeon R9 285 $250   Radeon R9 280 $200 GeForce GTX 760

Corona del Mar High School in Newport Beach, California. D. Ramey Logan

Timothy Lance Lai, a Southern California tutor accused of orchestrating a group of Corona del Mar High School students to install keyloggers on their teachers’ computers, has finally been arrested after more than eight months of being on the lam. Lai's keylogging ring aimed to alter student grades at the school, but he is now being held at the Santa Ana Jail in Orange County.

Lai was arrested late Monday after arriving at Los Angeles International Airport, and he was promptly charged with one felony count of second degree commercial burglary and four felony counts of computer access and fraud, according to the Newport Beach Police Department. The police also noted that if Lai is convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of five years and eight months in jail.

Previously, Lai was wanted as a person of interest by local police but had not been formally charged with a crime. There also wasn't a warrant for his arrest. The police did execute a search on Lai's home in December 2013, seizing a number of items, including hard drives, flash drives, and school materials.

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The above controller/adapter bundle will set you back nearly $100 when Smash Bros. finally hits the Wii U on Nov. 21.

Nintendo certainly took its sweet time to announce the release date for the last undated major console release of the year, but our long wait is finally over. The game officially known as Super Smash Bros. for Wii U will be coming to North America on November 21, just in time for the holiday sales rush to start on Black Friday, November 27. Europe will be getting the game on December 5, followed by Australia and Japan on December 6.

For the record, only four of the 58 Nintendo-published games on the Wii or Wii U had their release dates announced less than 46 days before their eventual release (there are currently 45 days until November 21), meaning Nintendo waited almost as long as possible to confirm the release date. On its release, Smash fans will have waited 1,263 days since Super Smash Bros. for Wii U was first publicly announced on June 7, 2011, by far the largest such gap in Nintendo history.

The release date announcement follows the release of the 3DS version of the game over the weekend in Europe and North America, and that first portable Smash is already a huge success. Nintendo announced sales of more than 2.8 million copies worldwide. To put that number in context, Nintendo had sold just over three million Wii U hardware units in the Americas as of June 30, and best-seller Mario Kart 8 hit two million worldwide sales on the Wii U after about a month on sale.

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The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope NASA

As we've recently discussed at length, dark matter is likely to be a WIMP: a weakly interacting massive particle. Weakly interacting doesn't mean no interactions, though, and there's always the chance that dark matter particles will collide with something else. Since dark matter is also the most common matter in the Universe, there's a good chance that the "something else" will be another dark matter particle. And if the collision results in the destruction of dark matter particles, it should produce a spray of things we can see, like energetic particles and photons.

On its own, these collisions will be too rare to detect. But summed over large regions of the sky, we might be able to detect the collective output of many collisions. This has led to a number of astronomical dark matter searches, some of which have claimed to observe puzzling excesses of high-energy photons. Yet for each one of these results, there have been other researchers who have suggested that the champagne bottles reserved for the discovery must be quietly put back to chill longer.

Why so many on-again, off-again discoveries? A review published in PNAS explains why looking at high-energy photons has been so difficult, and it describes what our prospects are for making one of these discoveries stick.

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A single week of Soylent contains seven meal pouches and seven oil containers. Total weight is just about 10 lbs (4.5 kg). Lee Hutchinson

Soylent, the slushy slightly sweet meal supplement/replacement from California engineer Rob Rhinehart and his company Rosa Labs, has by most accounts been a smashing success story. We tried it and liked it a year ago. While we wrote more about why folks might (or might not) want to drink it once it hit its official release, the Rosa Labs development team has continued work even as shipments of the powder leave the factory by the truckload. In an update e-mail yesterday morning, Rosa Labs announced two major milestones: first, that shipments have (finally) been completed to everyone who backed the Soylent crowdfunding project prior to its closure, and secondly, that Soylent is getting its first major update to version 1.1.

It seems a little weird that food (or "food") has a version number, but Rhinehart always intended Soylent to be a product that changed over time based on feedback and market forces. In a quick post on the official Soylent blog, Rhinehart explains that the bump to 1.1 brings with it a decrease in the product’s sucralose level, dialing down the release version’s vague sweetness to a more truly neutral taste. The logic here, explains the post, is that it’s easier to add sweetness than to take it away, and many Soylent 1.0 users have expressed a desire to flavor the product with add-ons (peanut butter is a popular one, as is blended fruit).

The second change deals with my biggest issue with Soylent—what can be politely termed as "a bit of gas." Regular Soylent use eliminates the gas, but using Soylent as an occasional substitute for a missed meal—which is my preferred usage of the stuff—can introduce some thunderous gut activity (which I referred to in my original Soylent review as "horse-killing farts").

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