Sterile drilling equipment at the Whillans site. Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling

Life is hardier than was thought only a few decades ago. With the help of new exploration technologies and new methods for finding and identifying organisms, our perceptions of what constitute the environmental limits for life on Earth have changed.

You can find life in extreme environments, whether acid or alkaline, hot or cold. Life can be found under high pressure, without free water (in hot and cold deserts), in extremely salty environments (like the Dead Sea), and in areas that lack oxygen or experience high radiation levels.

We now recognize that microbial life can exist in most extreme environments on Earth. So it should not be a surprise that in a study just published in Nature, researchers report the first direct evidence of life in a lake located almost a kilometer below an ice sheet in Antarctica.

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velo_city

The National Football League’s campaign to preserve Federal Communications Commission rules that allow local TV blackouts when games aren’t sold out has descended into astroturfing, with thousands of form letters signed by “football fans” arguing on behalf of keeping rules that can prevent fans from watching home games on TV.

Former NFL player Lynn Swann last week submitted 3,300 letters to the FCC urging the commission to maintain its sports blackout rule. In all, “more than 10,500 fans” have petitioned the commission to keep the rule, he wrote.

Currently, NFL teams prevent games from being shown on local television when tickets aren’t sold out or if ticket sales don’t meet a threshold set by each team. The FCC has tentatively proposed to eliminate 40-year-old rules that enable the blackouts by preventing cable and satellite companies from importing game broadcasts from distant stations to show in local areas. The NFL argues that the rules benefit fans because they limit teams’ incentives to raise ticket prices by increasing in-person attendance and prevent games from being restricted to pricey cable packages. In practice, the FCC's blackout rules primarily affect the NFL.

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Secret: The Anonymous App. Esteban Contreras

On Monday, a Brazilian civil court in Vitória granted a preliminary injunction to a public prosecutor, prohibiting Apple and Google from distributing the anonymous sharing app Secret and Microsoft from distributing Secret's Windows Phone client, Cryptic. The injunction also said that the three app store proprietors had to remotely delete the app off Brazilian users' devices.

Secret is an app that lets users share anonymous messages with friends, friends of friends, or publicly. The anonymous nature of the app has led to some complaints of bullying, to which the app responded by adding a "no-bullying" filter.

The preliminary injunction is an interim decision ahead of a final ruling, and Apple, Google, and Microsoft will have a chance to appeal. As GigaOm writes, public prosecutor Marcelo Zenkner “said he had been contacted by people complaining about anonymous bullying. Because any removal request must be sent in English to an American judge via the Brazilian foreign ministry, he said, there was no way for victims to effectively defend themselves.” Secret has been available in Brazil since May.

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Chitika

Based on Amazon's selective PR history, the company isn't likely to reveal exact sales for its recent Fire Phone any time soon—unless the company's first-ever smartphone goes gangbusters. A recent study appears to put any hopes for a record-smashing debut in serious doubt. Rather than wait for the official word, online advertising company Chitika Insights pored over its data to figure out just how well the Fire Phone has performed out of the gate—and how AT&T exclusivity may have factored in to its initial performance.

On Tuesday, the advertising agency published a study that compared recent new phones' mobile browser advertising impressions, comparing them across their first 20 days. In its comparison of the Amazon Fire Phone, the LG G3, and the Motorola Droid Ultra, Chitika measured overall web usage, as opposed to unique users, and it published percentage estimates of total North American web traffic as opposed to hard numbers for each device, but the results were still plenty revealing.

Usage of the G3 over the 20-day span more than tripled that of the Fire Phone, and Chitika pointed out that LG enjoyed a hefty bump on the days that Verizon and Sprint began selling their versions of that phone. Meanwhile, the stats for the Droid Ultra, which launched as a Verizon exclusive in North America, more closely mirrored those of the Fire Phone, with slow-but-steady growth toward the 0.02 percent mark. (Motorola still outpaced Amazon by the end of its 20-day period.)

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The World of Warcraft isn't usually this empty, but it's getting there...

For about six years after its early 2005 launch, it looked like there was nothing that could stop the runaway success of Blizzard's World of Warcraft, which grew to a peak of 12 million paid subscribers by the end of 2010. Since then, though, the game has seen a long, mostly uninterrupted slide in its player numbers, with only 6.8 million subscribers as of July.

Blizzard obviously isn't happy about this trend for one of its biggest products but seems to have accepted that things aren't going to change any time soon. "We really don’t know if [World of Warcraft] will grow again,” lead game designer Tom Chilton told MCV in a recent interview. "It is possible, but I wouldn't say it's something that we expect. Our goal is to make the most compelling content we can."

A new expansion pack like the upcoming Warlords of Draenor could juice those subscriber numbers, as previous expansion packs have seemed to do. Chilton seems to see a bit of diminishing returns in this strategy, however. "By building expansions, you are effectively building up barriers to people coming back. But by including the level 90 character with this expansion, it gives people the opportunity to jump right into the new content."

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You know, there was some other huge platform that handled the update problem much more gracefully than Android. What was it called, again? Andrew Cunningham

Android updates have gotten a little faster over the last two years, at least if you invest in a flagship smartphone from a major company. We have reams of data that say so, and we can even tell you which carriers and companies you should stick to if getting updates factors heavily into your buying decisions.

But wouldn't it be great if you never had to think about this stuff at all? If you never had to read another multi-thousand word story about Android update speed, because it wasn't a problem anymore? We spend so much time discussing the state of Android’s fractured landscape and watching it improve baby step by baby step, but there has to be another way forward.

In fact, there's already a shining example that Google could decide to imitate. These devices come from many different manufacturers and use all kinds of different CPUs, GPUs, screens, and other components. There are hundreds of millions of them sold every year, and their operating system can be customized with additional apps and services to help differentiate them from one another. And yet, despite this fractured landscape, the operating system that runs on these devices gets security and feature updates on the day that they're released. Read any article about Android's update problems, and this sounds like a fairy tale you'd be insane to hope for.

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Ilulissat, Greenland, in the summer. Guido Appenzeller

Climate records, like tree rings or ice cores, are invaluable archives of past climate, but they each reflect their local conditions. If you really want a global average for some time period, you’re going to have to combine many reliable records from around the world and do your math very carefully.

That’s what a group of researchers aimed to do when (as Ars covered) they used 73 records to calculate a global overview of the last 11,000 years—the warm period after the last ice age that's called the Holocene. The Holocene temperature reconstruction showed a peak about 7,000 years ago, after which the planet slowly cooled off by a little over 0.5 degrees Celsius until that trend abruptly reversed over the last 150 years. That behavior mirrored the change in Northern Hemisphere summer sunlight driven by cycles in Earth’s orbit.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and led by the University of Wisconsin’s Zhengyu Liu delves into a problem with that pattern—and it’s not what climate models say should have happened.

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A rendering of the Martian Pyramid entry. Thingiverse

A Martian pyramid, a modular beehive, and a three-tiered Acropolis have made the final cut in the MakerBot Mars Base Challenge.

Run by Thingiverse and launched in conjunction with the 3D printer maker and Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the challenge has been open since May 30 and clocked up 227 applications. The three winning entries will each be awarded a MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer in order to help them fully explore their designs for Martian abodes.

The challenge brief asked entrants to take into account the extreme weather, radiation levels, lack of oxygen, and dust storms when designing their Martian shelters. And although the applicants did not always nail the science, their designs have a novelty we've not seen since Nasa's 1970s space station and scooter designs.

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nolifebeforecoffee

The way John Tye tells it, we’ve all been missing the forest for the trees.

Over the course of two phone calls, the former State Department official told Ars that anyone who has been following the government surveillance discussion since the Snowden disclosures has been too concerned with things like metadata collection. Since last summer, journalists, politicians, and the public have been inundated with largely-unknown terminology, like “Section 215” and “Section 702.”

(For a recap: The first disclosure to come from the documents provided by Snowden described the bulk metadata programs, whose legal authority derives from Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the legal authority which the NSA uses as the basis for PRISM and other surveillance and data collection programs.)

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Aurich Lawson

Android 4.4, KitKat was released on October 31, 2013, or at least, that's what you can say about one device: the Nexus 5. For the rest of the ecosystem, the date you got KitKat—if you got KitKat—varied wildly depending on your device, OEM, and carrier.

For every Android update, Google's release of code to OEMs starts an industry-wide race to get the new enhancements out to customers. So how did everyone do this year? Who was the first with KitKat, and who was the last? What effect does your carrier have on updates? How has the speed of Android updates changed compared to earlier years?

Given all those variables, we wanted to check in on the specifics of Android in 2014. There are lots of slightly different ways to go about measuring something like this, so first, a word about our methodology. All of these charts measure KitKat's update lag time in months. For our start date, we're picking October 31, 2013, the day KitKat was released on the Nexus 5. For our finish time for each device, we're going with the US release of an update via either OTA or downloadable system image. OTAs are done on a staggered release schedule, so it's hard to tell exactly when they start and finish—we just went with the earliest news of an update.

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Windows 8.1 running on Parallels Desktop for Mac. Parallels

Upgrades to software that let Mac users run Windows on OS X have become a yearly occurrence, as Parallels and VMware keep pace with new versions of the Apple and Microsoft desktop operating systems.

This year is no exception, with Parallels Desktop 10 becoming available today. Users of the previous two versions can upgrade to version 10 immediately for $49.99. Everyone else can purchase the new software for $79.99 beginning August 26. A student edition will run for $39.99.

VMware hasn’t yet announced when the new version of Fusion will come out, but you can probably expect it soon, or at least by the time Apple releases OS X Yosemite this fall.

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Adam Carolla at Hollywood's Roxy Theater in 2013. Eric Neitzel

Yesterday, news broke that the highest-profile opponent of podcasting, "patent troll" Personal Audio LLC, and podcaster Adam Carolla had reached a settlement. The settlement referred to a court-approved press release, which was finally published (PDF) today on Personal Audio's website.

The press release really includes nothing new. Through discovery, Personal Audio simply found out podcasters—even famous ones like Carolla—just don't make that much money, so it isn't interested in suing them.

It includes the odd tidbit of naming six big podcasters it won't sue, including Joe Rogan and Marc Maron. The six named podcasters have all been supportive of Carolla and presumably are in there because Carolla's people insisted they be "immunized" in writing.

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Netflix has agreed to a paid interconnection deal with Time Warner Cable (TWC), one of the first ISPs to cry foul over Netflix's attempt to gain direct access to broadband networks without payment.

TWC complained about Netflix's Open Connect content delivery network (CDN) back in January 2013, saying the online video company was "seeking unprecedented preferential treatment from ISPs."

Netflix at the time was making its highest-quality streams available only to ISPs who agreed to connect directly to the Netflix CDN. Netflix later stopped its policy of withholding "Super HD" and 3D video from ISPs who didn't cooperate, but was able to get free connections from the likes of Cablevision, Virgin Media, British Telecom, RCN, and Google Fiber. By building its own CDN, Netflix was able to avoid paying third-party CDN providers to distribute its traffic, but some ISPs demanded payment. Failed negotiations resulted in traffic being sent through congested links and poor quality for customers for months on end.

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Aurich Lawson

Ask anyone at Sony, and they're likely to tell you that sales of 10 million PS4s in less than nine months is unvarnished good news. But in an uncharacteristic bit of self-questioning, Sony's head of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida has expressed some bewilderment and nervousness over the system's quick success.

"It's just beyond our imagination. We are so happy. But I for one am a bit nervous because we do not completely understand what's happening," Yoshida told Eurogamer in a recent interview. "You need to understand why your products are selling well so you can plan for the future, right? It defied the conventional thinking. Lots of people thought the dedicated game hardware might not be needed going forward, but still lots of people are very excited."

While Yoshida said he thinks the lineup of upcoming exclusive games like The Order and Uncharted 4 explains why gamers are excited for the PS4, he said that it still doesn't completely explain the speed at which the system is selling. "I'm asking journalists who ask [about sales] their opinion," Yoshida said. "I'm asking marketing people to tell us why."

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Homer Simpson at Comic-Con.

FilmOn founder Alki David, fresh off getting sanctioned $90,000 for broadcasts using the Aereo-like parts of his TV-over-Internet company, is ramping up a new kind of litigation. He said he owns patents related to hologram technology and keeps accusing high-profile hologram performances of intellectual property infringement.

The newest lawsuit (PDF) is over a hologram of Homer Simpson that was one of the highlights of last month's San Diego Comic-Con. On July 26, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening chatted with Homer for about two minutes.

During the video (above), Simpson complains about the Comic-Con registration process. "I don't care. I get my free ticket from the hologram of Tupac Shakur," answered Groening.

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Not everyone likes their friendly neighborhood cable behemoth.

Media attention and fallout from Comcast’s viral customer service missteps continue to plague the country’s largest Internet service provider. First there was Ryan Block’s ludicrous cancellation call, then Comcast refused to refund invalid fees for Tim Davis until he caught the company in a lie, and then Comcast kept Aaron Spain on hold for three hours, long enough for the customer service lines to close and leave Spain in limbo.

Each instance has been met with a swift response from Comcast’s PR group after going viral, but quick, reactionary responses don’t do anything to fix the underlying problems. Leaked documents obtained by The Verge (full PDF) paint a portrait of exactly how broken things are in Comcast call centers throughout the country, and the documents confirm what current and former Comcast employees have been saying for the past few weeks: selling services is a required part of the job, even for employees doing tech support. Comcast did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

It’s all part of "S4," a "universal call flow" for Comcast call center employees. Those four letters stand for "start, solve, sell, and summarize."

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Howdily doodily, Ars-iarinos! We come bearing a giant slew of discounts this Tuesday, including a variety of discounted BenQ monitors, particularly the 1440p BL3200PT for 37 percent off. Scroll through a few choice Dell laptop deals to find a selection of deeply discounted Lenovo accessories as well, including a wireless headset and wireless mouse that will set you back less than $30 combined.

Featured deals:

• BenQ Sale! BenQ VA LED GW2255 21.5" Screen LED-lit Monitor for $119.99 with free shipping (list price $199.99)
• BenQ Gaming Monitor RL2455HM 24" Screen LED-lit Monitor for $179.99 with free shipping (list price $299.99)
• BenQ GW Series GW2760HS 27" Screen LED-lit Monitor for $199.99 plus shipping (list price $399.99)
• BenQ BL3200PT CAD/CAM WQHD 32" Screen LED-Lit Monitor for $629 with free shipping (list price $999.99)

Monitors:

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has announced that he's stepping down from the company's board, effective immediately.

With his ownership of the LA Clippers, teaching, and "civic contribution" taking his time, Ballmer wrote that he's now "very busy," and with both a new NBA season and new class of students, it would be "impractical" for him to remain on the board.

In announcing his departure, Ballmer expressed confidence in new CEO Satya Nadella's leadership, noting that although there are challenges ahead, there are also great opportunities, and he said that Microsoft's mix of software, hardware, and cloud skills is unmatched in the industry.

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Ron Amadeo

The HTC One M8 for Windows and the original HTC One M8.

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NEW YORK CITY—HTC has announced the HTC One M8... again. This time, though, it runs Windows Phone and is a Verizon-exclusive called the "HTC One M8 for Windows." HTC is the first OEM to take advantage of changes in Windows Phone 8.1 that allow for OS-agnostic smartphones, allowing (Verizon) customers to pick their hardware first and software—Windows Phone or Android—second.

We aren't glossing over any details here, either; the hardware is exactly the same as the Android version. That means you get all the good stuff from the HTC One M8: a 5-inch, 1080p LCD, a 2.36GHz Snapdragon 801, 2GB of RAM, a 2600mAh battery, and massive BoomSound speakers, all wrapped in an aluminum shell.

You get the not-so-good stuff from the original One M8, too. The device is huge for something with a 5-inch screen. The speakers add an extra set of bezels to the top and bottom of the device, and along with a strip below the screen dedicated just to the HTC logo, the device is easily the biggest 5-inch phone out there.

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OneNote for Android has been optimized for tablets. Andrew Cunningham

Microsoft's OneNote app for Android has just received a significant update that adds a brand-new UI design for tablets and improved handwriting recognition, the company announced on the Office blog today. The previous version of the OneNote app would run on tablets, but its interface made poor use of the extra space.

The old OneNote app running on a Nexus 7. You can see very little information at once, and the editing interface isn't much better. Andrew Cunningham

The new UI includes Office's trademark ribbon, a revamped UI for navigation, and requires much less zooming and tapping than before. It feels just a little cramped on the 7-inch screen of our Nexus 7, but it still works reasonably well and should be more comfortable on larger 8- and 10-inch Android tablets. The new handwriting feature allows you to draw on the screen with your finger, or with a stylus on Android phones and tablets that include them (Samsung's Note series comes to mind).

Andrew Cunningham

The new OneNote interface on a Nexus 7. Like many of Google's own apps, the new OneNote makes extensive use of sliding panels for navigation. Swipe from right to left to dismiss these panels and see your content.

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The phone version of OneNote for Android gets the same panel-based navigation system and handwriting support, though everything has been scaled down to fit better on smaller screens.

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