Antonio TwizShiz Edward

Just two days after a controversial trademark application by the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association (ALSA) was made public, it has been dropped.

The group has made nearly $100 million from donations related to viral videos of people doing the "ice bucket challenge," in which ice water is dumped on a person's head. In the last month, ALSA has made far more money from the campaign than the association made in all of 2013.

Last week, ALSA filed an application with the US Patent and Trademark Office seeking to trademark the term for use in charity fundraising. That move quickly sparked an outcry, since ALSA didn't invent the phrase "ice bucket challenge" and the concept has been used to raise money for other charities before.

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We heard it in 2011 and again the following year, but this time it's (maybe) true—the new iPhone will reportedly come equipped with a near field communication system that powers a brand-new payment platform. On Friday, Wired reported that "sources familiar with the matter" have confirmed that a mobile wallet will debut on the new iPhone and that its inclusion will be treated as a "hallmark feature" during the phone's reveal event on September 9.

This news follows a report from The Information in July that linked Apple to credit card and payment processing companies, suggesting that such conversations were building the retailer backbone necessary for a wide "iWallet" launch this fall. The company's growing iBeacon push may also factor into how new iPhones' mobile payment information would be gathered.

The iPhone has long lagged in the smartphone-NFC department, an issue that could be thanks to Apple's insistence on wireless-unfriendly aluminum casings. According to our last rumor roundup, that technical issue may have been fixed with a number of plastic cutouts in the new phone's design, but it also stands to reason that a mobile-wallet rollout was probably slowed more by Apple working to secure any such communication protocol. As Wired's report notes, an Apple patent filed in January could be the final key in resolving such security worries; in it, the company described coupling NFC with either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi as a second check in the protocol.

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JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said attacks were "going to be non-stop." It looks like he was right. Steve Jurvetson

The electronic attack on JPMorgan Chase’s network, now under investigation by federal law enforcement, apparently spanned months, according to a report by Bloomberg News. Starting in June, hackers used multiple custom-crafted bits of malware to infiltrate the bank’s infrastructure and slowly shipped bits of bank transaction data back out through computers in several countries before it was sent onward to Russia.

The attack, which went on for more than two months before being detected by JPMorgan in a security scan, bears the fingerprints of similar long-game attacks against corporate targets by cybercriminals from Eastern Europe, some of whom have developed capabilities more advanced than state-sponsored hackers. While the details obtained by Bloomberg’s Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley are sparse, the information provided by their sources is consistent with attacks on a number of European banks earlier this year.

While the FBI and National Security Agency are reportedly investigating whether the attack came from Russian state-sponsored hackers—or at least state-sanctioned ones—in retaliation for sanctions against Russia, making that connection will be difficult at best. It seems more likely, based on recent security reports, that the attacks were criminal in nature—but relied on tools and techniques that may have a mixed provenance, using methods honed in attacks on other banks and on government targets for financial gain.

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The last trace of Microsoft's once-dominant Messenger network will disappear at the end of October, reports TechNode. After October 31st, Chinese users chatting on the instant messaging network will have to use Skype, not the Live Messenger client, for their communication.

In late 2012, Microsoft announced that it would discard the Messenger brand for its instant messaging client in favor of the Skype client and brand. The company started blocking the official client early in 2013.

But one part of the Messenger user base was left behind: Chinese users. The Messenger service in China was operated by a separate company and wasn't part of the initial Skype transition.

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Mother Parkers is getting in on Keurig's new brewing machines, whether Keurig likes it or not. sarkasmo

Back in March, Keurig announced plans to lock down its popular coffee pod system in an effort to make third-party pod makers pay for a license. But the company's plans may be foiled. A press release last week from Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee suggests that the Keurig "DRM" used to lock out third parties has been cracked and that Mother Parkers is now making coffee pods that can work in Keurig's brewing machines.

New Keurig machines reportedly require pods to have a special "ink marker" on their foil top, according to The Verge. If that marking isn't detected, the machine will display an "Oops!" message and refuse to do anything further.

The Mother Parkers press release states that the company "will launch a new version of the RealCup capsule that is compatible with Keurig Green Mountain's K2.0 brewer scheduled for launch later this year." The release quotes Bill VandenBygaart, Mother Parkers' vice president of business development, as saying that the company's "new technology" means that "consumers will be the ultimate winners by having the best tasting coffees and teas available."

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Most of Intel's announcements lately have focused on low-power chips, but every now and again it throws a bone to its high-end desktop users. Today we're getting our first look at Haswell-E and a new Core i7 Extreme Edition CPU, a moniker reserved for the biggest and fastest of Intel's consumer and workstation CPUs (if you want something faster than that, you'll need to start looking at Xeons).

We already got a little bit of information on these chips back in March, when Intel made announcements related to refreshed Haswell chips ("Devil's Canyon") and a handful of other desktop processors. Though much of today's information has already leaked, we'll run down the most important stuff for those of you who don't follow every leaked slide that makes its way to the public.

The CPUs

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Bill Bradford / flickr

The majority of patent lawsuits today are brought by "patent trolls" that do nothing but sue—but suits between actual competitors do still happen.

Case in point: AT&T has sued Cox Communications, saying that Cox has infringed seven AT&T patents covering everything from DVRs to methods for hiding "packet loss or frame erasure" over a network.

In its complaint (PDF), AT&T claims it "provided a detailed explanation" of how Cox's products infringe its patents during meetings that took place in 2009 and 2010.

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That grey blob on the right side is actually a second analog stick.

Continuing its tradition of splitting its portable hardware partway through its lifecycle, Nintendo today announced that a new version of its 3DS line, simply called the "new Nintendo 3DS," will be coming to Japan on October 11.

The new model features a number of internal and external hardware improvements. Much like the Game Boy Color before it, the new 3DS has a slightly improved CPU from the version that preceded it, though Nintendo didn't say specifically just how much more powerful. While the new revision will still support all existing 3DS and DS games, it will also be required to run some exclusive games, such as a newly announced port of the Wii's Xenoblade Chronicles.

The new 3DS sports some new features on the outside as well. A smaller, second analog nub, dubbed the "c-stick" in a nod to the old Nintendo GameCube, sits on the right side of the system, just above the face buttons. This addition removes the need to buy a bulky analog pad attachment for certain games, such as Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate.

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The songbook of the damned—or at least of the employed. CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});

"For thirty-seven years," reads the opening passage in the book, "the gatherings and conventions of our IBM workers have expressed in happy songs the fine spirit of loyal cooperation and good fellowship which has promoted the signal success of our great IBM Corporation in its truly International Service for the betterment of business and benefit to mankind."

That’s a hell of a mouthful, but it’s only the opening volley in the war on self-respect and decency that is the 1937 edition of Songs of the IBM, a booklet of corporate ditties first published in 1927 on the order of IBM company founder Thomas Watson, Sr.

The 1937 edition of the songbook is a 54-page monument to glassey-eyed corporate inhumanity, with every page overflowing with trite praise to The Company and Its Men. The booklet reads like a terribly parody of a hymnal—one that praises not the traditional Christian trinity but the new corporate triumvirate of IBM the father, Watson the son, and American entrepreneurship as the holy spirit:

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Google / The Atlantic

On Thursday, Google unveiled its latest project: a product delivery service powered entirely by drone aircraft. Coming from the same Google X teams that developed the likes of self-driving cars and Google Glass, the drone program, currently dubbed Project Wing, received a feature-length reveal in The Atlantic.

The article's video showed a prototype drone dropping a package at an apparent height of dozens of feet, which was guided to the ground by a combination of a wire and an attached "egg" that slowed the drop to a near-halt just before reaching the ground and releasing a box. MIT roboticist Nick Roy received the lion's share of credit for putting the machine together during his two-year stint with Google X; he came to the project with experience in helping Navy drones navigate through zones that lacked GPS signals.

In particular, Roy pushed for Google to employ a hybrid design, combining fixed-wing and helicopter elements, so that it could take off vertically in tail-sitter configuration. Google did not confirm that it will settle on this design for any final model. However, the wired "egg-drop" configuration will probably remain for the sake of both wind factors and safety concerns. Speaking of safety, Roy admitted the drones' detect-and-avoid system is far off, and this, among other concerns, has added years to Google's Project Wing time expectations.

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A screenshot of a domestic abuse scene from Watch Dogs used as an example in Anita Sarkeesian's "Women vs. Tropes in Video Games" series. Feminist Frequency

"Oh, Anita, you're so beautiful and sexy, you know that?" was the nicest terrible thing a random Twitter user said to Anita Sarkeesian, creator of the Tropes vs.Women in Video Games series, as he peppered her with threats of rape, death, and the address of her home and that of her parents following the posting of her latest video on Monday. The video, which would be right at home on PBS in tone if not content, suggested that many mainstream games represent women as accessories and shorthand rather than as humans, a viewpoint that generated swift and unrelenting rage.

The attack on Sarkeesian was among a number of incidents in the last few weeks that exposed some of the ugly (yet familiar) attitudes and prejudices that remain deeply ingrained in the gaming culture. This time, those sentiments have gotten tied up in ethical arguments in an attempt to highlight the toxic behavior.

A lie gets halfway around the world

The tide of abuse first surged over Zoe Quinn, creator of the game Depression Quest, who got a deluge of negative attention, abuse, threats, and harassment over a blog post written about her by an ex-boyfriend that was published August 16. The post, composed of narcissistic analysis mixed in with screenshots of several online conversations, exposed many personal details about Quinn irrelevant to her profession or professional conduct.

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Poor Robocallman just wants to make a friend. Kordite

On Thursday the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the winners of a robocall-defeating contest that the commission held at DefCon in early August. Three groups of contestants each won $3,133.70, and two runners-up each won $1,337 (for being just that elite). The FTC says it receives 150,000 robocall complaints each month, down from 200,000 per month one year ago.

The contest was called “Zapping Rachel,” for the well-known scam in which a pre-recorded woman's voice tells an unsuspecting phone answerer, “Hi this is Rachel at cardholder services." The FTC separated the contestants into Creator, Attacker, and Detective categories—Creator entrants were asked to build a honeypot to lure robocallers, Detective entrants were given the honeypot data and asked to analyze it, and Attacker entrants were tasked with finding honeypot vulnerabilities. Contestants were given between 24 and 48 hours to submit their entries, depending on the category they entered.

For the Creator category, Jon Olawski, who is a software engineering director for an Internet marketing company by day, won the prize. He built a honeypot that used “an audio captcha filter, call detail analysis, and recording and transcription analysis” to automatically rate an incoming call as to whether it came from a robocaller or not. In an e-mail to Ars, Olawski described his idea as “a 10-point 'strike' system,” and if a caller hits a certain number of strikes, that number is known to be a robocaller and can be placed on a blacklist.

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The raid and its aftermath start at the 6:30 mark.

Police in Littleton, Colorado are investigating a prank call on Thursday that led a SWAT team to raid an online video gamer's office. Heavily armed officers forced a well-known gamer to the ground in what is believed to be a case of "swatting" by an unknown rival gamer.

"This is not a game. It's not an online game. We have real guns and real bullets. There's some potential there for tragedy," Littleton Police Department Chief Doug Stephens told local media.

Nearby schools and businesses were immediately closed and sealed off after a 911 caller said he had shot at least two coworkers and was holding others hostage at the local gaming facility on Wednesday.

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The Windows Store has come under fire recently for its sheer amount of misleading apps. Scam apps that claim to offer downloads or training for other applications are abundant, and these bogus programs routinely abuse others' trademarks.

This situation doesn't sit well with an app store that's supposed to be curated and vetted to avoid scams.

Similar complaints have been made practically since the Windows Store's inception, and it appears that Microsoft has at least responded. Stricter rules on application naming and icons have been introduced and are being retroactively applied to existing apps.

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Photograph by langleyo

While controversy still swirls over whether the Internal Revenue Service has backup tapes with the “lost” e-mails of former IRS executive Lois Lerner, an IRS attorney confirmed that the agency had disposed of Lerner’s government-issued BlackBerry in June of 2012.

That would mean that the destruction of the data on the phone—including e-mails that may have been part of the missing messages both Congress and the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch have sought from the agency—happened after congressional staffers had begun asking her about the alleged targeting of conservative nonprofit groups. But it was over a year after the loss of e-mails on Lerner’s personal computer due to a reported hard drive crash.

In a declaration by the IRS in response to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, IRS Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel Thomas Kane wrote that the BlackBerry phone had been “removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.”

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Who thought this up anyway? University of Central Arkansas

Update: Following complaints, the ALS Association dropped its trademark applications on Friday Aug. 29.

Unless you've been living in a sensory-deprivation chamber for the past few weeks, you've heard of the "ice bucket challenge" being shown off on all types of social media. People get buckets of ice water dumped on them in order to encourage donations to the ALS Association, the foundation that supports research and care for those living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a muscle disease that's also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

It's impossible to know exactly what makes something like the ice bucket challenge go viral. Whatever the case may be, the sensation been an incredible benefit for the ALS Association. Yesterday, the group said it has raised $94.3 million since July 29, compared to just $2.7 million during the same time period last year. That's nearly 35 times as much money.

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Packets on packets... Flickr user: timcaynes

In a paper presented at the prestigious ACM SIGCOMM conference last week, researchers from the University of Michigan, the International Computer Science Institute, Arbor Networks, and Verisign Labs presented the paper "Measuring IPv6 Adoption." In it, the team does just that—in 12 different ways, no less. The results from these different measurements don't exactly agree, with the lowest and the highest being two orders of magnitude (close to a factor 100) apart. But the overall picture that emerges is one of a protocol that's quickly capturing its own place under the sun next to its big brother IPv4.

As a long-time Ars reader, you of course already know everything you need to know about IPv6. There's no Plan B, but you have survived World IPv6 Day and World IPv6 Launch. All of this drama occurs because existing IP(v4) addresses are too short and are thus running out, so we need to start using the new version of IP (IPv6) that has a much larger supply of much longer addresses.

The good news is that the engineers in charge knew we'd be running out of IPv4 addresses at some point two decades ago, so we've had a long time to standardize IPv6 and put the new protocol in routers, firewalls, operating systems, and applications. The not-so-good news is that IP is everywhere. The new protocol can only be used when the two computers (or other devices) communicating over the 'Net—as well as every router, firewall, and load balancer in between—have IPv6 enabled and configured. As such, getting IPv6 deployed has been an uphill struggle. But last week's paper shows us how far we've managed to struggle so far.

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6 more images in gallery

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Do you want your smartwatch to look like a regular watch? While some companies are designing wearables that look more like smartphones that you wear on your wrist, the most compelling designs are the smartwatches that look more normal. With its round display and stainless steel body, the Moto 360 has been the standard-bearer for this school of thought. Today, LG has announced the LG G Watch R, which looks even more like a normal watch than Motorola's offering.

After teasing the device over the weekend, LG has come clean about its newest gizmo. The awkwardly named LG G Watch R is modeled after a normal diving watch, and if the press pictures are accurate, you'll have a hard time telling it's a smartwatch at all.

The device has mostly the same specs as the two-month old LG G Watch: a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage. It's also water resistant and runs Android Wear. What's new is the stainless steel body, leather strap, a slightly bigger 410mAh battery (up from 400mAh), heart rate monitor, and, most importantly, a round 1.3-inch P-OLED display.

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Within four days of the first public reports of a major flaw in OpenSSL's software for securing communications on the Internet, mass attacks searched for and targeted vulnerable servers.

In a report released this week, IBM found that while the attacks have died down, approximately half of the original 500,000 potentially vulnerable servers remain unpatched, leaving businesses at continuing risk of the Heartbleed flaw. On average, the company currently sees 7,000 daily attacks against its customers, down from a high of 300,000 attacks in a single 24-hour period in April, according to the report based on data from the company's Managed Security Services division.

"Despite the initial rush to patch systems, approximately 50 percent of potentially vulnerable servers have been left unpatched—making Heartbleed an ongoing, critical threat," the report stated.

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Apple

The rumors were true: Apple has just sent out invitations for an event on September 9 at the Flint Center for the Performing Arts in the company's hometown of Cupertino, California. Apple's invitations often include subtle hints or wink-and-a-nod references to whatever it is the company plans to announce—analyzing (and over-analyzing) these "clues" has become something of a joke among Apple writers—but this invitation is almost entirely unadorned. "Wish we could say more," it reads, as if to tease those who would hope to unlock its secrets.

Of course we already have plenty of indications about what Apple is going to announce—we'll likely be treated to one or more brand-new iPhones, a release date for iOS 8, and possibly even a first look at Apple's long-rumored wearable device.

The event will begin at 10:00am Pacific. We'll be on the ground to liveblog the proceedings, cover the announcements, and go hands-on with any new products.

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