It's getting nasty between Sega of America and Gearbox. 20th Century Fox

The class-action lawsuit pitting angry gamers against the producers of critical stinker Aliens: Colonial Marines nearly reached a conclusion last month, when game producer Sega of America tentatively agreed to a $1.25 million settlement. However, on Wednesday, over a month after game developer Gearbox filed a motion distancing itself from any financial obligation—namely, to avoid paying $750,000 to bring the settlement's grand total to $2 million—Sega responded with its own motion insisting that Gearbox was just as responsible for any payout responsibility.

Ars obtained a copy of the motion, filed by Sega's lawyers in the Northern District of California Court. It included copies of e-mails, contracts, and correspondence that reinforced a particular sticking point in the case: that Gearbox was just as responsible for the game's promotional efforts—which were tagged as "misleading" in the class-action suit—as Sega was. Many of the dozen-plus letters hinged on Gearbox pushing forward with screens, videos, and other details that hadn't been cleared or approved for reveal by Sega, either on Gearbox's official website or at community events. Sega's attitude about this had deteriorated by October 2012, with a Sega PR rep blaming "persistent panel leaking" of game details on "Randy [Pitchford, Gearbox director] doing whatever the fuck he likes."

One e-mail, titled "Gearbox is announcing things," detailed a number of game facts and video preview footage revealed in June 2011 that hadn't been approved by Sega. In another, a Sega PR representative called out Pitchford for "talk[ing] a LOT beyond what was in there" at an event. And in yet another e-mail, Pitchford was quoted as saying "A:CM will curbstomp Dead Space," a prediction that we're comfortable saying never came true.

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});We're just a couple of days away from the official start of the IFA trade show in Berlin, but a lot of companies are trying to get out ahead of the noise and announce their biggest products early (this rush to announce early creates plenty of noise all by itself, but whatever).

IFA is usually where the Windows PC makers unleash their wave of holiday-season computers, and this year is no exception. Today we've got announcements from Toshiba, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus—we'll tell you about the most interesting PCs here, pointing out trends along the way, and we'll continue to cover new announcements as other companies take the wraps off of their new systems.

Toshiba

Toshiba's got a couple of new Windows systems, along with the new Chromebook 2 that we already covered earlier. The most significant of them is probably the Toshiba Encore Mini, a full Windows 8.1 tablet that will run you $119.99.

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Robyn Lee

On Tuesday, a Ninth circuit appeals court ruled that Yelp's ad sales strategies do not extort small businesses and merely amount to “hard bargaining” by the company.

Yelp lets anyone review a business, and businesses can't opt out of being reviewed. So when Yelp's ad sales team began calling around asking companies to buy advertising in exchange for displaying a chosen review more prominently, some storefronts cried foul. In 2010, four small business owners banded together to sue Yelp for extortion after they refused to buy advertising from Yelp and allegedly found that bad reviews were displayed more prominently.

Two of the business owners also alleged that Yelp authored negative reviews to induce them to advertise or in retaliation after the business declined to buy advertising.

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Autodealers in Georgia are trying to kick Tesla out of the state and prevent it from selling its Model S sport sedan and upcoming Model X SUV.

The move by the Georgia Automobile Dealers Association comes amid a flurry of fighting over Tesla selling directly to the public without the middleman, or franchise dealership.

The association is seeking to revoke "Tesla's existing dealer license" and to block "any attempt by Tesla to renew or reapply for a dealer or manufacturer license."

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"GreatLand Connections" is the United States' next cable company, potentially coming to 2.5 million subscribers currently served by Comcast in 11 states.

Comcast decided to spin off part of its territory to help persuade US regulators to approve its acquisition of Time Warner Cable and a related transaction with Charter. Until today, the new company had been referred to generically as "SpinCo" or "Midwest Cable LLC," but now it has an official name.

"GreatLand Connections Inc., a new, independent, publicly-traded company, will own and operate former Comcast systems serving approximately 2.5 million customers across the Midwest and Southeast," Comcast wrote. "At its inception, it is expected to be the fifth largest cable company in the United States."

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Here's what the front looks like without the phone and front plate.

Today's announcement of the Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VR was light on details about any content being designed for the device aside from a few built-in utilities for watching videos, viewing pictures, and navigating a store. We're already starting to get our first hints about third-party development for the device, though, with popular rhythm game developer Harmonix stealthily announcing a mysterious project for the device.

"The cat is out of the bag: Harmonix is developing software for Samsung's Gear VR," Harmonix publicist Nick Chester tweeted shortly after this morning's announcement. The statement was echoed by Harmonix's official Twitter account and by developer Dawn Rivers who tweeted to say that she "can't wait for folks to see the crazy project I've been on at Harmonix for Samsung's Gear VR!"

Harmonix is so far offering no information about the type of game it's working on for Samsung's entry into the virtual reality space, merely promising "more info soon!" While the studio is known for console rhythm games like Rock Band and Dance Central, Harmonix released its first mobile title, the musical platform game Record Run, for Android and iOS earlier this year.

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Aurich Lawson

Verizon has agreed to pay a $7.4 million fine to the US Treasury for violating its wireline phone customers' privacy rights. The Federal Communications Commission said today that this “is the largest such payment in FCC history for settling an investigation related solely to the privacy of telephone customers’ personal information.”

The fine won't hurt Verizon's finances much, though: the company made $31.5 billion in revenue in Q2 2014.

An FCC investigation found that Verizon failed to notify 2 million new residential and business customers of their privacy rights, "including how to opt out from having their personal information used in marketing campaigns, before the company accessed their personal information to market services to them,” the FCC said. This deprived customers “of their right to deny Verizon permission to access or use their personal information for certain marketing purposes.”

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Audi R18 in Forza 5. Microsoft

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced the first-ever free trial of a full, unlocked retail game on an Xbox platform. The first game to receive the "Gold Weekend" treatment will be Forza Motorsport 5, which will become free to download and play for all Xbox Live Gold members on Xbox One beginning Thursday, September 4 and lasting until the following Sunday.

While nearly all games on Xbox 360, and many games on Xbox One, can be downloaded as free trials, this offer has the distinction of unlocking the full, start-to-finish experience of a game that hasn't been purchased. It also seems to split the difference between limited trials and the free games doled out to Gold members by way of the Games With Gold promotion.

Adding to the confusion, this differs from Xbox Live's occasional "free weekends," which had mostly opened up online play to users who had yet to pony up for a Gold subscription. We've asked Microsoft to confirm technical details of this promotion—whether it requires an uninterrupted online connection to play the game in question, what happens mid-game when the trial period ends at midnight PST on Sunday, and whether we may ever see the promotion reach Xbox 360—and we'll update this post with any clarifications.

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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is supporting Comcast's purchase of Time Warner Cable, has received more than $100,000 in donations from Comcast's political committee and its employees.

As detailed by the International Business Times yesterday, public records show that Comcast's political arm and employees have been supporting Emanuel for a decade. Emanuel was a member of Congress from 2003 to 2009 and then served as President Obama's chief of staff for nearly two years. He has been Chicago mayor since May 2011.

"[D]uring his time running for and serving as mayor of Chicago, Emanuel has received large campaign contributions from Comcast and its employees, including from [Comcast Executive Vice President David] Cohen himself, who contributed $5,000 to Emanuel’s mayoral campaign in February 2011," the International Business Times wrote. "Cohen also contributed $10,000 to the Chicago Committee, which the Chicago Tribune has described as Emanuel’s 'other political fund (which) he uses for political activities that support his policy initiatives at City Hall.' In all, records from the Illinois State Board of Elections show that Emanuel’s mayoral campaign and his other municipal political organizations have received $50,000 from Comcast employees since he began running for mayor in 2010."

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The IFA consumer electronics show kicks off this Friday in Berlin. Today seems to be product announcement day, though, so get ready for a flood of new devices. One of the first companies to show off its new mobile lineup is Sony, which is launching three smartphones, two wearables, one tablet, and a range of accessories at the show.

For now, we'll focus on the pair of flagship smartphones and the tablet. Sony didn't provide full spec sheets for everything at press time, but we'll pass along what we have.

Xperia Z3—the 5.2-inch flagship The 5.2-inch Sony Xperia Z3. Sony

First up is the Xperia Z3, the company's new 5.2-inch flagship Android phone. It has a premium build with an aluminum frame and tempered glass on the front and back of the device. The spec sheet includes a 1080p LCD, 2.5-GHz Snapdragon 801 SoC, 3GB of RAM, 20.7MP camera, a 3100mAh battery, Android 4.4 KitKat, and an IP65/68 dust/waterproof rating.

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Samsung announced plans to release its own virtual reality headset that will use its latest Note smartphone at a press conference Wednesday in New York. The Samsung Gear VR includes a set of headbands and a holster for the new Galaxy Note 4 to secure the phone to a wearer's face and will represent the first consumer product from virtual reality tech company Oculus.

The headset needs no wires and relies entirely on the Note 4's battery and the hardware in the mount, unlike Oculus's own Rift headset. The device tracks movement with an accelerometer and gyroscope, according to Engadget.

Samsung referred to the headset as a "virtual cinema" that would get content from studios including Marvel and Dreamworks. The headset will also be able to handle games and a slightly delayed video passthrough using the feed from the Note 4's 16-megapixel rear camera.

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One of the biggest stars we know about, here surrounded by material it has ejected, is half the size of the predicted first stars of the Universe. APOD

There were giants in the very early Universe, or so it has been predicted. Stars so massive they not only put the Sun to shame, but potentially also every other star that’s been observed to currently exist anywhere in the Universe.

These first stars, predicted by models of a Universe with little beyond hydrogen, could have been greater than 300 times the mass of the Sun. Compare that to Eta Carinae. It's one of the largest stars ever observed, but Eta Carinae is only ~100 to 150 times the mass of the Sun. There’s evidence that stars don’t get much bigger than this, at least not in the present Universe (the exceptions being where multiple stars have merged).

The existence of these primordial behemoths, however, is not yet certain. While we’ve lacked even indirect evidence of these stars, a new study seems to have uncovered evidence that those supergiants did exist after all. Using new high-definition spectrographic data they obtained with the Subaru Telescope High Dispersion Spectrograph, researchers studied the star SDSS J001820.5-093939.2, which has a chemical composition significantly different than any previously discovered.

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The Galaxy Note 4. Samsung

NEW YORK CITY—We're live in New York, where Samsung has taken the wraps off of its newest "phablet," the Galaxy Note 4. It has also introduced a brand-new type of phone, the "Galaxy Note Edge," which has a curved screen.

The Note 4

The highlight the Note 4 is, of course, the giant screen. This year Samsung has packed in a 5.7-inch, 2560×1440 AMOLED. That works out to a ridiculously high 515 PPI. The back of the phone keeps the faux-leather, soft-touch back introduced with the Note 3, though the fake stitching appears to have disappeared. People who don't care for Samsung's usual plastic can rejoice—the sides of the device are now chamfered metal, not entirely unlike the recently announced Galaxy Alpha. Like other recent Samsung devices, the capacitive buttons on the front of the screen ditch the Menu button in favor of the standard Recent button. The device will launch with Android 4.4.

The Note 4 looks like it doesn't change the standard Note formula as defined by the Galaxy Note 3. The company has gone with a 2.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 processor, up from a 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 in the Note 3. The Note 4 has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, which, while hopefully faster, matches the Note 3's spec sheet. The rear camera has been upgraded from 13MP to 16MP, while the front camera has been boosted from 2.1MP to 3.7MP. A microSD card slot can boost storage by up to 64GB. The battery capacity increases a little (from 3200 mAh to 3220 mAh), but we'll be relying on efficiency improvements in the SoC and other components for any significant battery life improvements.

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Ryan Fanshaw / flickr

eBay has settled charges that it agreed to a "no poach" deal with Intuit, in which neither company would hire each others' employees.

Under the deal, first reported by Reuters, eBay will pay $3.75 million to compensate workers who were affected by the deal. The settlement was outlined in May and authorized Tuesday by a San Francisco federal judge.

The settlement (PDF) terms also obligate eBay to not pressure any person to refrain from "hiring, soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees." For the next five years, the company will have to report to the government annually about any potential hiring violations and will be subject to inspections by the Department of Justice.

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Samsung's Unpacked 2014 event invite. Samsung View Liveblog2014-09-03T08:00:00-05:00

It's September, which means that it's time for a never-ending flood of devices from manufacturers hoping that their new gizmo will be the must-have item of the holiday season. The first wave of this smartphone tsunami comes from everyone's favorite first-mover, Samsung.

With even Apple (possibly, maybe) getting into the phablet game, the originator of the giant phone craze will be laying another device on us in just a few hours. On Wednesday, September 3 at 9:00am ET, Samsung will take the wraps off the Galaxy Note 4.

We don't have a lot of details, but the current rumors suggest that the usual strategy of "make all the spec sheet numbers bigger" is on tap. Right now we're expecting a 5.7-inch, 1440p screen; Snapdragon 805 processor; 3GB of RAM; and a 16MP camera.

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Running Windows applications on Mac with VMware Fusion 7's Unity mode. VMware

VMware today released the seventh version of Fusion, its virtualization software for Macs, with a new feature that lets users access virtual machines running in remote data centers.

The feature is available on VMware Fusion 7 Pro, which is intended for developers and other professionals who need to do more than simply run non-Mac operating systems on OS X.

Fusion Pro 7 is scheduled to become available for download from vmware.com today for $150. A basic version of Fusion 7 that lacks advanced features but allows users to run Windows and other operating systems on OS X costs $70. When Fusion 6 was released a year ago, the prices were $60 and $130, respectively.

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Creative? Big science grants don't want you today. Flickr user: opensource.com

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a 33-year-old software engineer at Europe’s largest Physics Laboratory (CERN), was frustrated with how the Internet would only enable sharing of information between clients and a single server. Doing anything more required establishing a new connection. To get around this, Berners-Lee had a creative idea—use a hypertext system that would elegantly connect machines and servers across a ‘world wide Web.’

Like any researcher, Berners-Lee had to find support to work on his idea. He wrote up a 14-page proposal and sent it to his boss at CERN, Mike Sendall, who famously scribbled the following on the front-page: “Vague, but exciting….”

We are all very lucky that Berners-Lee was in a time and place that gave the young engineer some latitude to pursue his vague but creative idea, one that would ultimately change the world. If Berners-Lee submitted that idea to government funding agencies for support, who knows where the Internet would be today?

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Toshiba's Chromebook 2 will get you a very nice screen, provided you spring for the more expensive model. Toshiba

Most Chromebook hardware can be described as "only OK." The need to compete with others requires OEMs to cut costs, and this leads to laptops with only OK processors, or only OK keyboards, or only OK screens. The aging Chromebook Pixel hit most of the right notes, but had a price tag that was hard to swallow (and at this point, it doesn't look like Google has a Haswell update planned to improve its mediocre battery life). The quest continues for a Chromebook that does better than OK in multiple areas without being compromised in other areas.

Toshiba's Chromebook 2 may come close. The entry-level $249.99 model falls more into the "only OK" camp, with a 13.3-inch 1366×768 display and 2GB of RAM—it's mostly a streamlined version of the Haswell Chromebook Toshiba released earlier this year, processor aside. The $329.99 model is the interesting one: it bumps your RAM to 4GB and uses a good-looking 1080p IPS display, increasing your pixel density and your panel quality drastically. Chromebooks have offered 13.3-inch, 1080p screens before, but those display panels have been non-IPS versions with inferior colors, contrast, and viewing angles.

The only downside is that Toshiba's Chromebook 2 doesn't use one of Intel's Haswell chips, as its predecessor did. It steps sideways to a dual-core Bay Trail-based Atom chip, the Celeron N2840, which should be adequate for most basic tasks but includes a weaker GPU and can execute fewer instructions-per-clock than Haswell. Hopefully the higher 2.16GHz (2.58GHz Turbo) clock speed can close the performance gap, and in any case the laptop should feel a fair bit faster than older ARM-based systems like the original Samsung Chromebook and the HP Chromebook 11. Battery life is rated by Toshiba at about 11 hours.

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Net Market Share

After a couple of months that saw Windows 8.x stop growing and even lose some usage share, August was quite a turnaround. Both Microsoft's operating system and its browser saw usage increase. Firefox, which has been on a downward spiral for almost a year now, also had a good month, picking up a few points.

Net Market Share Net Market Share

Internet Explorer was up 0.45 points, Firefox gained 0.15 points, and Safari's presence also grew, up 0.16 points. Chrome, however, lost out, dropping a hefty 0.76 points in the month. For both Firefox and Chrome, this marked the end of a ten month run of losses and gains, respectively.

Net Market Share Net Market Share

Chrome's mobile performance is more assured, with Google's browser gaining 1.63 points in August. Chrome's sort-of predecessor, Android Browser, fell sharply, dropping 1.35 points, though overall this still represents a gain by Google's mobile browsers. Safari was up a little, growing by 0.24 points. Internet Explorer grew for the second month in a row, up 0.20 points.

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Nigeria's new national eID card. amediaagency

Last week, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan was one of the first citizens to receive a National eID card, a biometric identification card that will be rolled out to 13 million Nigerians in the near future. Although a handful of countries already use biometric identification systems, Nigeria's will be unique as its pilot program will be branded with MasterCard logos. The program will eventually be expanded to encompass the rest of the country's adult population, and the BBC says that all Nigerians will be required to have such a card by 2019 if they wish to vote in the country's upcoming elections.

As MasterCard stated in a press release, the eID cards come equipped with an EMV chip that allows card carriers to access prepaid financial services backed by Nigeria's local Access Bank and MasterCard. The justification for intertwining identity documentation with financial services from a private company like MasterCard is that many of Nigeria's citizens have never set up a bank account and therefore tend to be excluded from loan qualification.

The Nigerian government says that putting a payment platform on the ID cards will eventually let citizens receive and spend money from government institutions. As MasterCard writes, “Using the card as a payment tool, Nigerians can deposit funds, receive social benefits, save, or engage in many other financial transactions that are facilitated by electronic payments with the extra security assurance that biometric verification provides. They can also pay for goods and services and withdraw cash at millions of merchants and ATMS that accept MasterCard payment cards in Nigeria and in more than 210 countries and territories globally.” MasterCard has a number of similar partnerships with government institutions in countries like Pakistan and Turkey, as well as the city of Toronto. They all use prepaid cards from Mastercard to dole out government funds.

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