Ron Amadeo

Update: For those of you that want a transcript of our conversation it's right here.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—In just a few weeks, Google will be pushing out one of its largest Android releases ever: Android 5.0, Lollipop. The update changes nearly every aspect of the OS—a new design for every app, a new runtime, lots of new features, and a focus on battery life. The company is also launching a pair of new Nexus flagships, the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9, aiming for a more premium market, and the first Android TV device, the Nexus Player. Together with the release of Google Inbox and a new Wear update, we're in the middle of a very busy few weeks.

We sat down with a few high-ranking members of the Android Team to get a better idea of what this new wave of Android devices will bring. At building 43 at Google's headquarters, Dave Burke, VP of engineering for the Android platform and Nexus devices; Brian Rakowski, VP of product management, and Gabe Cohen, the team's group product manager, were all gracious enough to talk to us about the future direction of Android.

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One of Project Free TV's domains has dropped in traffic since Google's algorithm change. se

Video streaming and torrent sites have dropped precipitously in Google rankings after the company altered its algorithm last Monday, according to reports from Searchmetrics. One of Project Free TV's main operating domains, free-tv-video-online.me, fell 96 percent in Searchmetric's rankings, one of the biggest drops alongside torrentz.eu and thepiratebay.se.

Google committed to fighting piracy by decrementing search results that allow users to access illegal streams or torrents back in 2012. The first round of changes didn't help much, according to interested parties like the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Google complies with takedown requests, of which it received 224 million in the last year, according to its own report. The company responded to these within six hours on average, but industry parties pushed for Google to make content sites less visible overall. Even with its new solution, Google notes that this won't be the same as removing domains from search entirely: "the number of noticed pages is typically only a tiny fraction of the total number of pages on the site," the company said.

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abc7.com

A Los Angeles International Airport flight bound for London was cancelled Sunday when a passenger's phone picked up the Wi-Fi signal "al-Quida Free Terror Nettwork" (sic) that was emanating from a fellow flier's hotspot minutes before the United Airlines flight was set to liftoff.

After a concerned passenger notified a flight attendant of the network at about 9:30pm, the plane taxied to a remote section of the Los Angeles airport and was held there for three hours. The plane was searched as passengers of Flight 136 were ordered to power off electronic devices, local media said.

"After an hour, (the captain) said there was a security threat and that we didn't have clearance to take off," passenger Elliot Del Pra told ABC7.com. The person responsible for the hotspot was not discovered, LaWeekly said.

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Brookhaven National Lab

If there is a “holy grail” to be found in modern astrophysics, it probably has something to do with finding out what’s going on inside of black holes. Since no light escapes from their event horizons, studying their insides directly is impossible. As if that wasn’t bad enough, our best theories tend to break down inside the event horizon, limiting our ability to study them even theoretically with present models.

Despite all that, there are ways to get at the behavior of black holes. A recent line of work is approaching the problem in a different way—by analogy. Rather than trying to observe real black holes or trying to simulate them mathematically, researchers are constructing analogs of black holes. These constructions can be observed in a lab, right here on Earth.

Of course, scientists have no way of creating an actual gravitational singularity on a table-top, so they had to rely on the next best thing. The essence of a black hole is that it has an event horizon—a point of no return from which no light can escape. By analogy, in a fluid, there can be a point of no return for sound waves. If, for example, the fluid is moving faster than the speed of sound, no sound can outrun the fluid to escape in the opposite direction. That’s the basic idea behind a new experiment published in the journal Nature Physics—an experiment that apparently makes a Hawking radiation laser out of a sonic black hole.

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An Estonian man who US authorities said was a leader in one of the world's "most sophisticated" illegal hacking organizations was handed an 11-year prison sentence in connection to a scheme that got away with $9.4 million from ATMs across the globe.

The sentence handed to Sergei Nicolaevich Tšurikov on Friday is among the largest ever given a hacker in the US. The biggest term, 20 years, was first given to Albert Gonzalez in 2010 for being the ringleader of the hack of retail outlet TJX.

"A leader of one of the most sophisticated cybercrime rings in the world has been brought to justice and sentenced," United States Attorney Sally Quillian Yates of Atlanta said about Tšurikov's sentencing. "In just one day in 2008, an American credit card processor was hacked in perhaps one of the most sophisticated and organized computer fraud attacks ever conducted."

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Our weeklong virtual conference, Ars UNITE, kicked off today with an examination of how city and town governments are going the extra mile to improve residential broadband.

After our feature on the topic—“Fed up, US cities take steps to build better broadband”—we hosted a live discussion with four experts: Blair Levin, a former FCC official who oversaw the development of the National Broadband Plan under President Obama and now the executive director of the Gig.U fiber initiative; Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance; Will Aycock, operations manager of Greenlight Community Broadband in Wilson, North Carolina; and Ted Smith, chief of the Civic Innovation office in Louisville, Kentucky.

To wrap up day one, let’s take a look at what readers and experts had to say. After a summary, we’ll post a lightly edited transcript of the live discussion.

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All in all, FTDI's counter-counterfeit maneuvers are just another brick in a wall that pirates will bypass and customers will run into. Autopilot

A driver update from the Scottish electronics firm FTDI that intentionally “bricked” USB devices with counterfeit FTDI chips has been removed from Windows Update by the firm. The move follows an uproar from users who found devices they thought used the company’s chips disabled without warning. However, the company plans on re-releasing the update with code that “will still uphold our stance against devices that are not genuine, but do so in a non-invasive way that means there is no risk of end user’s hardware being directly affected,” the company’s CEO said in a statement.

While the changes made in the firmware of chips affected by the driver’s counter-counterfeiting code can be reversed, there are questions about whether what FTDI did in the name of protecting the company’s intellectual property was ethical—or even legal. Commenting on FTDI’s driver tactics through Twitter, American Civil Liberties Union principal technologist Christopher Soghoian said, “It isn’t a stretch to view FTDI’s intentional bricking of chips as an unfair business practice.” Others were concerned that the move undermined the security of Windows’ automatic update system, possibly discouraging users from applying security updates in the future.

In a post to the company’s blog, FTDI CEO Fred Dart apologized for the move.

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The new floating castle where Microsoft is going to hold all the money it makes from Minecraft Lee Hutchinson

When Microsoft laid down a cool $2.5 billion to purchase Minecraft-maker Mojang last month, the company was quick to stress that it would continue to make the ultra-popular building game available on a wide variety of non-Microsoft platforms. That announcement, of course, led to instant speculation among some that there might be an unannounced, Microsoft-exclusive Minecraft 2 in the works that would serve as the big payday for the game's new owner.

Microsoft Head of Xbox threw some cold water on that idea in a recent interview with IGN's Podcast Unlocked, saying "I don't know if Minecraft 2 is the thing that makes the most sense."

Responding to a series of questions about Microsoft's plans for the Minecraft license, both in and out of games, Spencer remained focused on the idea of making good with the game's current fans before doing anything crazy. "The community around Minecraft is as strong as any community out there," he said. "We need to meet the needs and the desires of what the community has before we get permission to go off and do something else.

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The storage wars have been taken to their logical conclusion: Microsoft is giving Office 365 subscribers unlimited OneDrive storage just four months after announcing that every user would get one terabyte of space.

The unlimited space rollout will start today with Home, Personal, and University customers. These Office 365 users have their space on the "proper" OneDrive product. Subscribers to Office 365 business plans, which use the similarly named (but actually not at all the same) OneDrive for Business product, will start their upgrades in 2015.

The cheapest subscription with unlimited storage is Office 365 Personal at $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year. Free accounts remain at 15GB.

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KickassTorrents

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said Monday it's concerned that intellectual property pirates are being exposed to malware and other dangers.

"It is important to note that websites that traffic in infringing movies, television shows, and other copyrighted content do not harm only the rights holder. Malicious software or malware, which puts Internet users at risk of identity theft, fraud, and other ills, is increasingly becoming a source of revenue for pirate sites," the lobbying group told (PDF) US trade officials on Monday in its latest report about global "notorious markets" for illegal content.

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Amazon.com

On Monday, Amazon entered the stick-streaming gadget fray with the Fire TV Stick, a $39 device that plugs directly into a TV set's HDMI port to stream content and play video games. It will ship beginning November 19 with support for third-party streaming apps like Netflix, Hulu Plus, and YouTube. The device also comes with a remote control and can be yours for $19 if you're an Amazon Prime member and you place an order by the morning of Wednesday, October 29.

Amazon's product description wastes no time comparing its newest baby's specs and features to those of the Google Chromecast and Roku Streaming Stick. On paper, Amazon seems to win this battle: its 8GB of flash memory soundly surpasses Chromecast's 2GB, while its full gig of RAM doubles both Roku and Google's options. Meanwhile, the Fire Stick's listed dual-core processor may very well outpace its rivals' single-core offerings, but that's not saying much considering it's using the same Broadcom 28155 chip that debuted in a Samsung Galaxy S2 Plus refresh that launched early last year.

Still, thanks to those stats, the Fire TV Stick appears to replicate much of the functionality of April's $99 Amazon Fire TV due to its ability to stream content independently. You aren't required to "fling" content from a tablet or smartphone, though the Fire TV Stick offers that as well. Flinging will require living with Amazon's app or device ecosystem, and that's where the asterisks start coming in. The Fire TV Stick's iOS-compatible app is "coming soon," iOS and Android devices have only been advertised as supporting third-party flinging from YouTube and Spotify, and HBO Go hopefuls have again been left behind. (Should you be the proud owner of other Amazon Fire devices, you'll be all set, of course.)

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Cities and towns are doing everything they can to make broadband better for their residents, and today industry experts and those on the front lines in city governments are going to tell us what's going on. Join us at noon eastern time for a discussion on how local governments are trying to change the broadband industry.

Joining us today will be:

• Blair Levin, a former FCC official who oversaw the development of the National Broadband Plan under President Obama and is now executive director of the Gig.U fiber initiative.
• Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
• Will Aycock, operations manager of Greenlight Community Broadband in Wilson, North Carolina. Wilson has petitioned the FCC to remove a state law that prevents it from expanding to surrounding communities.
• Ted Smith, chief of the Civic Innovation office in Louisville, KY. The city is working with two residential broadband providers to plan fiber networks.

Comments and questions during the live discussion are welcome. For more background, read this morning's feature story on the fight for better broadband. Then click here to join the fun:

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The Fire Phone is costing Amazon plenty of cash. Andrew Cunningham

Amazon’s financial results for the third financial quarter of 2014 didn’t do the company any favors when they were announced late last week; the retail giant posted a quarterly net loss of $437 million, up dramatically from last year’s 3Q loss of $41 million. The biggest single contributor to the bad news? Amazon’s Fire Phone.

We had mostly positive things to say about the Fire Phone when we reviewed it a few months back. We were especially impressed with the device’s "Firefly" feature, which quickly and (mostly) accurately recognizes things you point the phone at (and links you to the item's Amazon product page). However, in spite of this and other bits of whiz-bang wizardry, consumer adoption of the Fire Phone has lagged behind Amazon’s production of the device, and the company is now sitting on $83 million worth of unsold Fire Phone inventory.

Further, Amazon’s 3Q results included a $170 million write-down due to "Fire Phone inventory valuation and supplier commitment costs."

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Early this morning, Microsoft announced that the Xbox One will be available for as low as $349 in a special promotion starting November 2 and running at least through January 3, 2015.

The $50 price reduction applies to the Kinect-free base system and to two $349 bundles. One bundle features a white console and Sunset Overdrive, while the other includes Assassin's Creed Unity, last year's Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, and Dance Central Spotlight (the second bundle is also available in a package with the Kinect for $449). Microsoft also announced a new $449 bundle available November 3, including Call of Duty: Advance Warfare and the first 1TB edition of the console (but without the Kinect).

The Xbox One's price has now been reduced by 30 percent less than a year since its launch at $499, and though today's cheaper console eliminates the Kinect that was bundled for early adopters, it includes up to three games. An Ars analysis last year showed that prices drop an average of only 10 percent over the first full year that consoles are on store shelves.

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Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

Welcome to Ars UNITE, our week-long virtual conference on the ways that innovation brings unusual pairings together. Today, a look at how once low-tech city governments are actively involved in high-tech broadband projects across the country. Join us at noon Eastern for a live discussion on the topic with article author Jon Brodkin and his expert guests; your comments and questions are welcome.

State and local governments aren't typically known for leading the way on technology. Remember that West Virginia library that uses a $20,000 router for a building the size of a trailer?

But all that’s changing fast, at least at the municipal level—and the demand for broadband is what's driving this shift. No longer content to let residents suffer from poor Internet access, cities and towns saw a need to boost their tech savvy. Now many are partnering with technologists in order to take matters into their own hands.

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Don't expect to use your iPhone 6 or 6 Plus to pay for anything at CVS or Rite Aid in the near future. Apple

Last week's rollout of iOS 8.1 on new iPhone models ushered in the long-awaited debut of Apple Pay. And for now, Apple is relying on major retailers—and their upgraded, compatible sales registers—to convince more people to pay the Apple way. However, in the days since Apple Pay's public debut, two major pharmacy chains have switched course and declared, "Apple Nay."

This week, Rite Aid began pulling Apple Pay support from NFC-compatible sales kiosks, and over the weekend, CVS followed suit. According to a leaked document posted by Slashgear, Rite Aid made the decision due to its involvement with a competing still-in-testing mobile payment platform called CurrentC, which CVS is also affiliated with.

As it turns out, major merchant service Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) has been developing CurrentC since 2011, according to a report by 24/7 Wall Street. That may explain why other MCX retailers like Best Buy and Walmart have also elected not to employ Apple Pay at their registers.

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The UK Airprox Board did not discover the drone that was reported to have flown at a passenger aircraft in May, so we're stuck using a stock approxmiation. Doodybutch

On Sunday, a British regulatory agency revealed that the country faced its first near-collision between a passenger aircraft and a drone in May. The UK Airprox Board's report, uncovered by the Daily Mail, determined that a quadcopter flew "within 80 feet" of an 74-seat ATR 72 aircraft and did so "deliberately."

The incident happened over the county of Essex as the plane prepared to land at London Southend Airport. According to the report, the quadcopter came close to hitting the larger plane's right-side wing at an altitude of roughly 1,500 feet. The report included a conversation between the ATR 72's pilot and an air control tower, in which the tower confirmed the offending red-and-black craft was probably a quadcopter, as "we've had a couple of those around here" recently.

The Airprox Board noted that the drone's flight path and altitude seemed intent to collide with passenger airplanes taking off or landing. This event follows an American report of a drone nearly colliding with a passenger plane near Tallahassee's airport in March of this year; that near-collision happened at an altitude of over 2,000 feet. In both incidents, regulators did not discover the offending drone or its pilot.

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The Lumia 530 in a bright orange flip case. Andrew Cunningham

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:[], collapse: true});How cheap is too cheap? That’s the biggest question facing competitors in the burgeoning market for competent-but-inexpensive smartphones—their phones need to be cheap enough to appeal to dumbphone users and people in developing markets, but not so cheap that they’re unusably poor.

Intex obviously went too far when it built its $35 Firefox phone, which is so bad that using it is enough to make you swear off smartphones altogether. But there’s a wide gap between something like that and, say, the $129 Moto E or the comparable phones being pushed out as part of the Android One initiative.

Specs at a glance: Microsoft/Nokia Lumia 530 Screen 854×480 4" (244 ppi) LCD touchscreen OS Windows Phone 8.1 CPU 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 200 RAM 512MB GPU Adreno 302 Storage 4GB, expandable via MicroSD by up to 128GB Networking Single-band 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 Ports Micro USB, headphones Camera 5MP rear camera Size 4.7"× 2.45"× 0.46" (119.7 × 62.3 × 11.7mm) Weight 4.55 ounces (129g) Battery 1430mAh Starting price $50 locked to Cricket Wireless, $69 locked to T-Mobile

Microsoft’s (still-Nokia-branded) Lumia 530 smartphone aims squarely for that gap. In the US, the phone will usually be sold carrier-locked but contract-free for something less than $100—we picked up our T-Mobile version of the phone from Microsoft’s online store for just $69, and sales will send that price even lower. Despite being carrier-locked, it can still be used with budget-focused MVNOs like Straight Talk, making it a tempting option for anyone contemplating their first smartphone.

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An all-terrain camera slider, successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2012 and effectively abandoned by the creator in 2013. Kickstarter

The public life-cycle of a Kickstarter rarely ends in tragedy. Often, if a Kickstarter manages to get covered by the media before its funding round end, or even starts, it can meet its goal within days, and superfluous funds continue to roll in over the next few weeks. By the time its crowdfunding stage closes, the creators, backers, and media alike are excited and proud to have ushered this new project so quickly to a place of prosperity, eager for it to continue to grow.

Plenty of projects manage to deliver the goods, even if the timeline slides a bit. That was the case with Tim Schafer's Kickstarter game Broken Age. If creators miss deadlines, backers typically continue to receive updates via e-mail and the Kickstarter page. But sometimes the end of funding is the beginning of a slide into radio silence, which ultimately turns into few or no backer orders fulfilled, and no satisfactory explanation for why the project didn't pan out according to the orderly delivery schedule the creators promised.

A project can go off the rails and fail even after its funding succeeds for a number of reasons. There can be unforeseen costs, or design problems, or a team member quits or fails to deliver their part of the project. Often, when a project skids to a halt, the final updates are obscured from the public and sent only to backers, which may be part of the reason failures are often not well-publicized. Occasionally, backers who receive them pass them on or post them publicly on forums, which is as good as it gets in terms of letting the outside world know a project did not ultimately pan out.

Why burn out when you can fade away

MyIDkey, a password manager dongle, raised $473,333 on Kickstarter in March 2013, and $3.5 million overall from other investors. The team decided to change the design of the product and many of its features midstream. In his second-to-last update to backers, which was sent privately rather than posted publicly on the project page, creator Benjamin Chen wrote about how his company's funding situation very suddenly changed:

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California Highway Patrol officers have allegedly been obtaining nude photos of female suspects from their cell phones and sharing them among other officers.

Sean Harrington, 35, allegedly sent photos from the cell phone of a DUI suspect to his own phone, reported the San Francisco Chronicle. He then reportedly shared the photos with other CHP officers.

The investigation began after a woman who was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence in August noticed that photos from her phone had been sent to a number that she did not recognize, according to the Contra Costa Times. The photos were sent when the woman was being processed in jail, the newspaper reported.

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