Today, the European Space Agency announced that its Rosetta mission successfully arrived at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after a 10-year journey. As the probe approached over the past several weeks, it provided greater detail on the oddly shaped comet, which was venting water as its orbit drew it closer to the Sun. Now, at just 100km from the comet's surface, Rosetta is providing detailed images of a truly otherworldly landscape.

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko occupies an elliptical orbit that takes it from areas beyond Jupiter to somewhere in between Earth and Mars (currently, it's midway between Jupiter and Mars). That presents a significant challenge, since any probe intended to track the comet must roughly match its orbit before approaching—or it would need a prohibitive volume of propellant to slow down. This explains Rosetta's 10-year journey, which included four orbital flybys of Earth and Mars to put it in place for a gradual approach.

Earlier this year, Rosetta successfully woke from hibernation, and it's been imaging the comet during its approach. Early images indicated that 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has a two-lobed structure that some have compared to a rubber duck, albeit one with an unusually large head. The second lobe, corresponding to the duck's body, is broader and more oblong.

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The latest procurement list used by the Chinese government has dropped Apple's products, including the iPad, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro, reports Bloomberg. Public money can no longer be used to buy Apple hardware due to "security concerns."

The procurement list, created by the National Development and Reform Commission and Ministry of Finance, limits the purchasing of all government departments, ministries, and local governments in China. A draft created in June included the Apple products, but the final version from July omits them.

Apple is in good company. Prior drafts of the list have dropped Symantec and Kaspersky antivirus software, and Microsoft's Windows 8 has been excluded because of "energy efficiency" concerns. The removal is consistent with growing antagonism between the Chinese government and non-Chinese companies. Microsoft and Qualcomm are being investigated for antitrust issues, and the state television broadcaster has claimed that certain iPhone features could be used to leak state secrets.

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Wikipedia page of "Italian mobster," Renato Vallanzasca, removed in Europe. Wikipedia

Wikipedia unveiled a page Wednesday that describes which pages from the online encyclopedia won't be displayed in some online search results, due to Europe's recent "right to be forgotten" court ruling.

The new page from the world's sixth-most trafficked site lists dozens of Wikipedia links that Google has been required to remove from its European search results.

"We do not know who requested the removal. People should not assume that a subject of an article made the request, since others may have the opportunity to make such a demand for removal," the page reads.

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Mister Gadget

The Moto360 in its charging dock. The left side of the screen (normally the bottom) is dead space.

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Let this serve as your monthly reminder that the Moto360 is still planned as a real product that will eventually go on sale. The Italian site Mister Gadget has gotten ahold of a pre-release version of the smartwatch and sheds new light on just how the wearable works and what it can do.

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});The biggest new component is the charging dock, an upright wireless charger that displays the watch as a bedside clock. Being wireless means the Moto360 has no ports, plugs, or pogo pins, just like a normal watch. While on the dock, the charge progress is displayed as a blue ring around the screen perimeter, and the center can display either the time or the battery level.

Keen observers will note that the charge progress ring is cut off on the left side in the pictures, because, yes, the Moto 360 screen still isn't a perfect circle. The bottom of the screen is "dead space" that houses the components that normally go into the bezel of a phone. Internally, it provides space for things like the display cable; externally, it provides space for components like the auto-brightness sensor.

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It must be one of these... Joseph No

Whitehat hackers have struck back at the operators of the pernicious CryptoLocker ransom trojan that has held hundreds of thousands of hard drives hostage.

Through a partnership that included researchers from FOX-IT and FireEye, researchers managed to recover the private encryption keys that CryptoLocker uses to lock victims' personal computer files until they pay a $300 ransom. They also reverse engineered the binary code at the heart of the malicious program. The result: a website that allows victims to recover the key for their individual content.

To use the free service, victims must upload one of the files encrypted by CryptoLocker along with the e-mail address where they want the secret key delivered. Both FOX-IT and FireEye are reputable security companies, but readers are nonetheless advised to upload only non-sensitive files that contain no personal information.

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It hardly seems like it’s been a year since the iPhone 5S was released, but word on the street is that Apple is planning to reveal its next-generation iPhone on September 9. That’s just over a month from now, and the rumor mill has been in full swing all summer, churning out speculation about what Apple will introduce. Since 2008’s iPhone 3G, iPhones released in even-numbered years get a new design while phones in odd-numbered years are just and sped up and tweaked. Since this is a redesign year, people are especially interested in seeing how Apple moves the platform forward.

This close to a new iPhone’s launch, rumors firm up a bit and begin to agree on specific aspects of the new hardware. Apple has a big supply chain and sells tens of millions of phones a quarter—given the sheer scale of the operation, it’s inevitable that details will leak. We knew most of the particulars about the iPhone 5S and 5C well before they were officially announced, and there’s no reason to believe that this year will be any different.

Now that we have a probable date for the announcement, we’ve rounded up the most credible and plausible rumors (combined with a few educated guesses) to make a rough sketch of what the next-generation iPhone will probably look like. We tried to stick to sources that have been relatively reliable in the past. Some of the better reporting from rumor sites and prominent Apple watchers, assertions from major publications like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, and clear, not-obviously-faked pictures of individual components form the basis of our information here. In aggregate, everything we’ve heard so far gives us a pretty good idea of what we can expect next month.

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Because we’re big fans of the LED-powered Philips Hue lights at Ars, Philips recently sent over a review sample of their new Hue Tap, a four-function clickable remote control that can be used to send commands to the wirelessly controlled lights. Manually changing the lights’ colors or turning them on or off generally requires either fumbling out your smartphone and starting the app or taking advantage of the Hue API (personally, I use my Leap Motion and BetterTouchTool to fire scripts based on gestures, but I’m… kind of a nerdy outlier).

That's no longer the case. Armed with the Hue Tap, you get one-click access to up to four different functions. You can turn some or all of the lights on or off, change their brightness, change colors, or set the lights to a Hue "scene" (Hue app shorthand for a preset configuration of light colors and brightness levels). The Tap has an adhesive backing, or you can mount it to a wall or other surface, or you can simply set it down somewhere.

The interesting bit is the wireless, battery-less design. On disassembly, we found that the core component of the Tap is an EnOcean PTM 215Z rolling-code switch module, which uses an energy converter to turn the mechanical action of the user’s clicks into a small amount of current (between 120-210 microjoules at 2V) to power the device’s electronics. The link above actually points to the PTM 215, which operates at 868MHz; the "Z" version in the Hue Tap uses the same 2.5GHz Zigbee 802.15.4 bands as the rest of the Philips Hue systems.

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Scientists from the University of Zurich and the Natural History Museum have discovered a previously unknown species of dinosaur.

You get the feeling there's some vital organ damage in a torso of that shape. Randy Queen

Update: Randy Queen has apologized and says he will no longer attack critics of his work. You can read about it here.

Original Story: Comic book artist Randy Queen has reportedly sent Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests to Tumblr, asking that posts that reproduce his illustrations and comment on them in a negative light be taken down. Queen's requests were directed at the blog Escher Girls, which lobs criticism at illustrators who draw female characters in contorted, overly stylized, and anatomically impossible ways.

The drawings Queen wanted taken off Escher Girls' Tumblr were taken from his Darkchylde series of comics, which saw success in the late '90s after the first issue was released in 1996. On Escher Girls, Queen's drawings are occasionally posted with a “redraw,” where the submitter redraws the scene in their own style, generally to reflect a more realistic human anatomy. When Queen first submitted the takedown requests, Tumblr complied and even removed some of the user-drawn art, it seems.

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Apple and Samsung have agreed to drop their patent lawsuits against each other in every jurisdiction but one: the US. The two companies have sued each other in Australia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Netherlands, the UK, France, and Italy; and all these cases are being dropped without being settled and without any cross-licensing agreements being negotiated. The companies disclosed the change in legal strategy in a joint e-mail.

This leaves the US as the sole battleground between the smartphone giants. Juries in the US awarded Apple $120 million in May this year and $900 million in 2013 (reducing a $1.05 billion award from the previous year).

This move is the latest de-escalation in the smartphone patent wars. Apple and Google settled in May this year, ending all smartphone patent litigation between those companies. Apple and Samsung also dropped their appeals of an International Trade Commission case in June.

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Waterfalls: picturesque in nature, less so in development. Flickr user: Dina Eric CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});

SEATTLE—For the longest time, Microsoft had something of a poor reputation as a software developer. The issue wasn't so much the quality of the company's software but the way it was developed and delivered. The company's traditional model involved cranking out a new major version of Office, Windows, SQL Server, Exchange, and so on every three or so years.

The releases may have been infrequent, but delays, or at least perceived delays, were not. Microsoft's reputation in this regard never quite matched the reality—the company tended to shy away from making any official announcements of when something would ship until such a point as the company knew it would hit the date—but leaks, assumptions, and speculation were routine. Windows 95 was late. Windows 2000 was late. Windows Vista was very late and only came out after the original software was scrapped.

In spite of this, Microsoft became tremendously successful. After all, many of its competitors worked in more or less the same way, releasing paid software upgrades every few years. Microsoft didn't do anything particularly different. Even the delays weren't that unusual, with both Microsoft's competitors and all manner of custom software development projects suffering the same.

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Short Introduction to CPUs and Terminology

There are many elements that go into any modern computer: the CPU/APU, motherboard, memory, (optional) GPU, storage, case, and power supply. While some items like the case and power supply don't usually have an impact on performance, the CPU is one of the core elements and should be carefully selected. The goal today is to give a short overview of the level of performance you can expect across a large selection of CPUs/APUs.

Of course the choice of CPU also limits your choice of motherboard and potentially other components, but that's a topic for another day. Briefly, both AMD and Intel have several current platforms, and each CPU/APU requires a specific class of platform (i.e. a certain CPU/APU socket). AMD currently has the FM2/FM2+ platforms for APUs, with the AM3+ platform being used for CPUs (though AM3+ is mostly being phased out at this stage); Intel has platforms for sockets LGA1150 and LGA2011, with the latter being a higher performance/higher cost "Extreme" platform that borrows quite a bit from Intel's workstation platform (and LGA2011 is set to be replaced by a new platform next month).

Before we go any further, let's take a step back and quickly cover some of the terms we'll be throwing around. CPU stands for Central Processing Unit, and broadly speaking it handles most of the calculations that a modern PC performs in order to do useful work. APU stands for Accelerated Processing Unit, and it's AMD's marketing term for a CPU that also includes a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), with the distinction being that the GPU portion must be able to perform at a minimum a certain subset of calculations. AMD's APUs all have at least DirectX 11 capabilities, and while Intel now includes DX11 GPUs (called "processor graphics") in most of their CPUs, in general AMD's APUs have faster/better graphics than Intel's CPUs.

Then we come to the processor model numbers. It would be great if higher numbers were universally better, but these days all CPUs/APUs use model numbers that are similar to what you'll find with many other products (e.g. cars). A higher number can mean many things – better performance, more features, lower power, a newer part, etc. – and both AMD and Intel have several families of processors. There are also differences between generations of processors that can have an impact on performance and features, but again this is a topic to address in greater detail elsewhere.

The short summary is that on the Intel side, in order of increasing performance/features the processor families include the Celeron, Pentium, Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7. For AMD, things are a bit easier as their processor models consist of the A4, A6, A8, and A10 APUs, along with FX-series CPUs (i.e. no graphics, though AMD is releasing mobile FX-series APUs now in the laptop market). If you want to know more about the features and specifications of any particular processor, you can use Intel's ARK or AMD's desktop APUs and desktop CPUs.

Comparison of CPU and Graphics Performance

With that introduction out of the way, let's move on to the level of performance you can expect. All of the performance information presented here comes from CPU Bench, but instead of looking at individual charts we have averaged performance across a bunch of tests and normalized the scores relative to Intel's Core i3-4330. Note that not all benchmarks were tested on every processor, but we selected those tests that were run on most configurations; some of the processors (e.g. i5-4670K) that didn't have all the benchmarks run on them thus fall further down the charts than expected. The charts below thus represent a high level abstracted overview of CPU performance. We have also tested the integrated graphics performance where applicable, again normalized relative to i3-4330 performance.

There's a lot of abstraction going on here, naturally, so if you want specifics on benchmark results you'll need to refer to CPU Bench. The benchmarks used include single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads, along with system tests that will hit storage and memory quite a bit (e.g. PCMark 8 and 7-zip); the graphics benchmarks use five games along with two GPU compute tests. While the i7-4960X may not win every benchmark, and likewise the Pentium G2030 may not lose every benchmark, looking at overall relative performance gives us the above results and provides a good baseline recommendation as to which CPUs are the fastest.

Intel's Haswell GT2 Die

The above graphs are a great picture of the split happening in the world of CPUs/APUs. On the CPU side of the fence, Intel is virtually untouched by AMD. Our reference i3-4330 is faster than all but the fastest AMD processors, and in fact only the AMD CPUs (i.e. not APUs) are able to surpass the overall performance of Intel's i3-4330. Of course we also have to look at what the overall scores really mean, and while the fastest CPUs like the i7-4960X are more than twice as fast as the i3-4330, the slowest CPU included in the charts – the Pentium G2030 – still provides 70% of the performance of the i3-4330. For general use cases like surfing the Internet and watching movies, all of the processors in the above chart should suffice, and other elements like storage often have a bigger impact on the user experience.

AMD's Kaveri Die

Moving to the graphics chart, the tables are turned and even Intel's fastest graphics solutions (outside of the HD 5000, Iris, and Iris Pro, which we have not includes as they're limited to laptops and OEM systems) are still slower overall than the AMD A8-5500. You can see from the above two die shots that AMD has dedicated a proportionally larger amount of the chip to graphics than Intel has, though Intel's Haswell GT3 parts double the graphics portion and end up being closer to AMD in terms of alloted space, while AMD disables portions of the graphics on their A8 and A6 APUs.

We're missing results from many older/slower processors of course, and adding in even a budget dedicated GPU (i.e. the AMD R7 240 or NVIDIA GT 730) would in most cases deliver better overall performance than even the fastest on-die GPU. While graphics has become more important over time, in practice it's mostly useful for gaming and a few computationally intensive workloads like video and image processing. That could change and GPU performance could become a bigger element of the overall user experience, and that's where AMD is trying to go with their talk about Compute Cores, but currently GPU performance isn't as useful as CPU performance for most tasks.

Performance to Price Ratios

Naturally, there's one other element that needs to be considered: the price of the parts. Intel holds the crown for the fastest CPU performance, but if we just look at the cost of the CPUs/APUs and how much you pay for a certain level of performance the story is quite different. Not surprisingly, the least expensive processors tend to look the best here. However, processors don't exist in a vacuum – they're only a portion of the total system cost – so we really need to add in a baseline price for the rest of a system.

If you purchase a motherboard, RAM, SSD, case, and PSU it will tack on $350-$510. I used the base set of components from the recent Budget PC Guide (minus the HDD), and then chose reasonable motherboards for the various platforms ($75 for FM2/FM2+, $80 for AM3+, $100 for LGA1155, $90 for LGA1150, and $225 for LGA2011 with $10 extra on RAM to get 4x2GB instead of 2x4GB). You could certainly spend a lot more on system components, but while less expensive motherboards exist for some of the platforms, I'm a bit wary of any motherboard priced under $70. The result is that the minimum cost for an entire system ends up being around $425-$500 for the less expensive CPUs/APUs, and $600 for something like the i5-4690K, $670-$705 for Core i7 LGA1150 systems, and as much as $1559 for the i7-4960X. Using the complete system prices (including a $50 discrete GPU on the AM3+ and LGA2011 systems), the performance to price charts look as follows:

Now we're back to Intel holding on to the top spots, and interestingly it's the more expensive CPUs that take the lead. AMD's FX-8320 makes a decent showing, though the need for a discrete GPU drops it to seventh place overall. The difference in relative value between the best and worst processors becomes far less pronounced, on both the CPU and graphics charts, though AMD continues to lead on graphics performance. (Again, toss in a moderate dedicated GPU and it would be a different story.) We've also left out any consideration of power requirements, which don't necessarily match up with the TDPs we've listed. In general, the latest APUs from AMD (Trinity, Richland, or Kaveri) and the latest CPUs from Intel (Ivy Bridge and Haswell) all have similar idle power draw, so unless you're looking at the AM3+ or LGA2011 platforms power isn't a primary consideration.

If you want a recommendation based on the above information, the short summary is that Intel's latest Haswell CPUs – the i7-4790 and i5-4690 – continue to be my two favorites, with overclockers getting a recommendation to spend a bit more for the Devil's Canyon i7-4790K or i5-4690K. If you're opposed to buying Intel, the price of Kaveri APUs right now is higher than I'd like, and the FX-8320 is still a potent CPU for certain workloads (and it has four modules with eight cores compared to two modules and four cores for the fastest APUs). Even so, unless you specifically need the additional CPU cores, I'm more inclined to go with a Kaveri or Richland APU. The A8-7600 is probably the best balance of performance and price, but if you want the best on-die graphics solution the A10-7800 and A10-7850K are right in the same relative range for relative value.

Update: I modified the charts and improved the system price estimates, and the results are reflected in the above graphs. I also updated the text slightly to reflect these changes. If you want to see the original charts (which had slightly different system price estimates), here are the links: Average CPU Performance, Average Graphics Perfomance, CPU Performance to Price, Graphics Performance to Price, CPU Performance to System Price, and Graphics Performance to System Price.

Sprint owner SoftBank has been talking about buying T-Mobile US for months, but is reportedly abandoning the plan because US regulators would likely object.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that SoftBank is giving up after "decid[ing] it simply would be too difficult to win approval from regulators." The report quoted the usual "people familiar with the matter." Sprint CEO Dan Hesse is also expected to be replaced tomorrow. The new CEO will be Marcelo Claure of Brightstar, according to Re/code.

We asked Sprint if it is ending its pursuit of T-Mobile, but a spokesperson declined to comment.

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Delight your houseguests by replacing all the sponges in your home with a compact PC heat sink.

A fact check on a PC workstation concept from Hack A Day suggests that consumers might want to be wary about investing in the concept device. Silent Power's pitch is for a compact tower that, among other unusual features, stays cool through the use of "copper foam," which Hack A Day calls "quite literally, one of the worst possible heat sinks imaginable."

Silent Power first surfaced as a crowdfunded project on IndieGogo, seeking money to produce the PC. The project was taken down "without warning," according to the team, but the company is now looking for funding via PayPal. If they can crack 45,000 ($60,424), they will start making the product.

Unfortunately, Hack A Day warns that the design's key feature, its sponge-like copper heat sink, is actually worse than the usual bladed anodized aluminum design. For one, the layer where heat retained by the copper mesh would transfer into the air wouldn't operate effectively; for another, heat sinks are often colored black to help them emit thermal radiation, but copper cannot be anodized to get this benefit.

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Groupon

There was a reason that we wondered in early 2013 if Groupon would make it to 2014—the company is hemorrhaging cash, and the situation has just gotten a lot worse.

According to the company’s latest earnings report published on Tuesday, the online deals site sustained a net loss of $22.8 million in the second quarter of 2014—approximately triple the level of losses the company had during the same period a year ago. During the first half of 2014, Groupon lost over $60.6 million, or over five times what it lost during the first half of 2013. From 2009 through 2013, Groupon has incurred total net losses of over $820 million.

Unsurprisingly, the stock price took a hit today—as of this writing, Groupon has plummeted over 15 percent in after-hours trading, hovering just under $6 per share. By comparison, Groupon closed at just over $26 per share after its first day as a publicly traded company back in November 2011.

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Dan Goodin

A Wisconsin security firm claims that a Russian criminal group has accumulated the largest known collection of stolen online usernames and passwords via SQL injections, according to a new report in The New York Times on Tuesday.

Hold Security, which did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment, apparently has 1.2 billion usernames and passwords across 420,000 sites. It declined to tell The Times which companies were affected, nor name the group specifically.

In February 2014, Hold Security also discovered 360 million compromised login credentials for sale in underground crime forums. The haul, which included an additional 1.25 billion records containing only e-mail addresses, came from multiple breaches. In October 2013, the same firm discovered the circulation of 153 million user names and passwords stolen during a massive breach of Adobe's corporate network. A month later, the security firm uncovered 42 million plaintext passwords taken during a hack on niche dating service Cupid Media.

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Summer continues to be the season that separates the gaming projects that will actually see a holiday 2014 release and those that will inevitably be pushed into the next year for slightly more development time. Cooperative shooter Evolve joined the latter group today when publisher 2K announced in an earnings call that the anticipated shooter is being pushed back from a planned October 21, 2014 release to February 2015. No specific reason was given for the delay.

Developed by Left 4 Dead studio Turtle Rock, Evolve sees four players with unique capabilities teaming up to take on a single, human-controlled beast, who evolves new abilities by eating local flora and fauna. The unique take on the usual team-based shooter dynamics impressed our previewer earlier this year, and the game has continued to shine at trade show demos since then. Just this weekend, 2K conducted a closed alpha test of the game on PC, and the title will also be available on PS4 and Xbox One.

This news follows a recently announced delay for Battlefield: Hardline, which publisher EA pushed back from October 21 to "early 2015." If the persistent delays of holiday games in the past two years is any indication, they might not be alone by the time October finally comes around.

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NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center

Chaos theory is sometimes described with an exaggerated story about the flapping of a butterfly’s wings affecting the formation of a hurricane thousands of miles away. Some “butterflies” flap harder than others, of course—a volcanic eruption can be one hell of a butterfly. According to a new study, the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, which made a dent in the average global temperature for a couple of years, may also have a lot to do with the slower surface warming more than a decade after its eruption.

Research has made it clear that a string of La Niñas—where cold water rises to the surface in the eastern tropical Pacific—has pulled down average global temperatures in recent years. The oscillation between La Niña and El Niño conditions is a major factor in the year-to-year variability of average global surface temperatures.

So why has the coin flip come up “La Niña” so frequently lately? It appears that stronger trade winds over the Pacific—which blow westward, pushing warm surface water in the tropical Pacific as they go and bringing up the cold waters of the La Niña—are responsible. And so, you should be asking, why have the trades strengthened?

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Ron Amadeo

The 2015 Cadillac ATS coupe. It's basically a big red smartphone.

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NEW YORK CITY—The world's fastest mobile hotspots? General Motors is bringing mobile connectivity to most of its 2015 car lineup with a service called "OnStar 4G LTE." As the name would imply, GM is integrating an LTE modem into its vehicles as a standard feature, giving owners a mobile data connection wherever they are. GM invited us down to SoHo's Classic Car Club to demo the feature on a 2015 Cadillac ATS.

Why would you want to get LTE through your car instead of through a portable hotspot or your smartphone? The simple answer is that a hotspot in a car can get much better reception. On the roof of the ATS is a "shark fin" antenna, similar to what has been used in the past for satellite radio. The antenna picks up LTE, carries it to the car infotainment system, and beams it via Wi-Fi to up to seven devices in your car.

The roof-mounted antenna benefits from being not just higher up than a smartphone, but it's outside of the potential signal killer that is a car. The antenna can also be better at picking up a signal than a smartphone. Smartphone antennas need to fit into a pocket-sized device and can only sip power from the tiny battery. A car antenna only needs to fit into several thousand pounds of vehicle and is eventually powered by gasoline, so there is much more room for a performance improvement. If you're in an area with a weak signal, the car has a much better chance of getting a signal than your phone.

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A futurist says it is "possible" the Chinese could start mining for fuel on the Moon.