Plenty of Comcast and Verizon customers know just how bad Internet service was on major ISPs during the months-long battle over who should pay to deliver Netflix traffic.

But now we have more numbers on the performance declines, thanks to a new report from the Measurement Lab Consortium (M-Lab). M-Lab hosts measuring equipment at Internet exchange points to analyze connections between network operators and has more than five years' worth of measurements. A report released today examines connections between consumer Internet service providers ("Access ISPs" in M-Lab parlance) and backbone operators ("Transit ISPs"), including the ones that sent traffic from Netflix to ISPs while the money fights were still going on.

Netflix eventually agreed to pay Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T for direct connections to their networks, but until that happened there was severe degradation in links carrying traffic from Netflix and many other Web services to consumers. Connections were particularly bad between ISPs and Cogent, one of the backbone operators that Netflix paid to carry its traffic.

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"His eyes seem to follow me wherever I go." Vatican

Pope Francis took a stroll yesterday from the Vatican guest house apartment where he lives over to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to unveil a bust of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. The bust itself is rather Teutonically foreboding, but the most interesting bit of the unveiling came when Francis made a short speech to assembled members of the Academy. Though only a few paragraphs long (and currently available only in Italian; the translation below is unofficial), Francis's remarks focused largely on evolution—still a controversial doctrine in parts of the worldwide Christian church.

"When we read in Genesis the account of Creation, we are in danger of imagining that God was a magician, complete with a magic wand capable of doing anything," Francis said. "But he was not. He created beings and let them develop in accordance with the internal laws that He has given to each one."

He went on:

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One of the important consequences of Microsoft's new approach to updating Windows is that the company can deliver iterative, incremental improvements. This process has started already with the Windows 10 Technical Preview, and today at TechEd Europe in Barcelona, the company showed a few more small changes that will be coming soon.

Two improvements were demonstrated, and, in keeping with past work on Windows 10, they were designed to make the desktop experience better. The Aero Snap feature introduced in Windows 7 that enables side-by-side docking of desktop windows is being made better on multi-monitor systems.

In Windows 7 and 8, dragging windows with the mouse only supports snapping at the extreme screen edges; the internal edges between monitors don't "catch" the dragged windows (though the keyboard shortcuts can still be used to snap on all monitors). In Windows 10, snapping with the mouse will work on every monitor, making it much easier to snap on multimonitor systems.

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Adobe cares not for bullies, and on Tuesday, the company finally called out GamerGate participants for bullying.

On Tuesday, software maker Adobe took to its official blog to respond to a week-old brouhaha involving GamerGate, ultimately distancing itself from "bullying" associated with the anonymous hashtag.

One week ago, a post from the company's official Twitter feed launched Adobe into the GamerGate maelstrom, and today's post came "because it appears that our silence is causing more harm than good," Adobe wrote.

The post explained that Adobe had recently requested its logo be removed from an "advertisers" page at the Gawker media network. That fact had been perceived as a victory by apparent GamerGate supporters who'd asked companies to pull their ads from sites and magazines they had decried (known as "Operation Silent Nod"), including Gawker, whose editor Sam Biddle had posted tweets that had mentioned bullying. While Adobe's Tuesday post appeared to deny such a connection, it also mentioned last week's official (and unclear) tweet about the advertising issue.

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A compliant stream. imaqtpie

Streaming site Twitch is taking a hard line against users whose feeds include "sexually suggestive" outfits, according to the rules of conduct changes that posted Monday. "Nerds are sexy, and you're all magnificent, beautiful creatures, but let's try and keep this about the games, shall we?" reads the update.

Twitch states that gamers who stream themselves in no clothing, or sexually suggestive clothing including but not limited to underwear, lingerie, swimsuits, or pasties "will most likely get… suspended." Since the policy was implemented, Twitch has already banned one performer, according to Gamerheadlines: Rooster Teeth representative Meg Turney, who is "known for her high quality cosplay and saucy lingerie photos alongside excellent journalism for Rooster Teeth’s news show ‘The Know.’"

Twitch clarifies that even players who try to claim skimpy outfits or shirtlessness is due to the weather will still get banned. "If it's unbearably hot where you are, and you happen to have your shirt off (gents) or a bikini top (ladies), then just crop the webcam to your face," the company wrote. "If your lighting is hot, get fluorescent bulbs to reduce the heat. Xbox One Kinect doesn't zoom? Move it closer to you, or turn it off. There is always a workaround."

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This summer's news that deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was suing Call of Duty: Black Ops II maker Activision for inappropriate use of his likeness has the making of a nuisance lawsuit without much merit. A Los Angeles judge agreed with that assessment today, ruling that Noriega's lawsuit be dismissed with prejudice.

In his ruling [PDF], Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William H. Fahey noted that "Noriega's right of publicity is outweighed by defendants' First Amendment right to free expression." Fahey said Activision proved conclusively that Noriega was already known as a "notorious public figure," and that Noriega "failed to provide any evidence of harm to his reputation. Indeed, given the world-wide reporting of his actions in the 1980s and early 1990s, it is hard to imagine that any such evidence exists."

The ruling leaned heavily on reasoning laid out in a 2010 case brought against Activision by the band No Doubt, in which the group complained that its image was used in inappropriate ways in Guitar Hero. Unlike that case, here Fahey found that Activision's use of Noriega's likeness was "transformative," constituting "caricature, parody, and satire" that did not make up "the very sum and substance" of the work.

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YoungToymaker

In 2007, the FBI wrote a fake news story about bomb threats in Thurston County, Washington, and then sent out e-mail links "in the style of the Seattle Times."

The details have now been published by that very same newspaper, which today carries a story including outraged quotes from a Seattle Times editor. The FBI put an Associated Press byline on the fake news story, which was about the bomb threats in Thurston County that they were investigating.

“We are outraged that the FBI, with the apparent assistance of the US Attorney’s Office, misappropriated the name of The Seattle Times to secretly install spyware on the computer of a crime suspect,” said Seattle Times editor Kathy Best. "Not only does that cross a line, it erases it."

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We recently got to speak to some executives from the Android team about the upcoming Nexus 6, 9, and Android 5.0, Lollipop. We turned out a hands-on article and an interview post from the meeting, but some people wanted a transcript of the interview. So here you go!

This is the mostly raw transcript from our conversation with Google. We skipped the hands-on discussion because without the context of the device in front of you, it's not very useful. The conversation is with Dave Burke, VP of engineering for the Android platform and Nexus devices, Brian Rakowski, VP of product management, and Gabe Cohen, the Android team's group product manager.

Again, we've curated the important parts in this article, and this is just for people who want to dig through the whole interview. Enjoy!

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Two iPad Air 2 models posed perpendicularly, if you're asking. Sam Machkovech

Apple has trained us pretty well about what to expect from alternating years of iDevice launches. The year of the Big Upgrade is routinely followed by the year of an extra letter tacked to the end of the name.

Traditionally, Apple devotes its so-called "off" years to smoothing out prior iPhone or iPad issues while introducing respectable speed and spec boosts, even the occasional cool new feature. While we know better than to expect tablet revelations on an annual basis, now is a bad time for Apple to hit the snooze button. iPad sales are flattening, tablet/phablet competition is growing, and there's a looming sense—one we already had last year—of wonder on the device itself, of where, exactly, the default iPad form factor fits into our personal device portfolio.

It's good that in the face of all that, the iPad Air 2 really isn't a standard off-year release. It barely bends the external mold of its 2013 Air sibling, sharing most of the same dimensions and screen attributes, but it also takes the processing power and spec sheet we were happy to pay $500-plus for last year and jacks them up significantly. On top of everything, Apple reduces device thickness and weight even further for its latest iPad (and the company even improves the rear-facing camera, too).

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The Barents and Kara Seas, along with some of their ice. NASA

The cold winters in recent years have led some people to question the reality of climate change. But the winters have come at times where the global temperature was at or near record highs—so the issue was how the cold was distributed around the globe as much as anything else.

At the same time, there have been some suggestive hints that climate change may be influencing that distribution, at least indirectly, through the loss of Arctic sea ice. The idea was very preliminary, however, and it was difficult to get data that conclusively supported it. Now, a group of Japanese researchers found evidence that the loss of sea ice makes cold winters in Eurasia twice as likely as they would be otherwise.

The challenge of attributing cold winters to the loss of sea ice is that both of these phenomena show strong year-to-year variability. Thus, in order to tease out a correlation, you need long-term data on both. But we've only had accurate satellite measurements of sea ice since about 1980. If there is a connection between the two, it should show up in climate models if they're fed sea ice conditions that match those of the present. But climate models show strong variability in the winter weather they generate, which again makes determining any correlations very difficult.

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Mike Mozart

The Federal Trade Commission has sued AT&T for promising unlimited data to wireless customers and then throttling their speeds by as much as 90 percent, the FTC announced Tuesday.

All major carriers throttle certain customers during times and places of congestion, as we've reported previously. AT&T seems to have earned the FTC's wrath by throttling customers regardless of whether they were trying to use their phones in congested areas, however. As we've also written, AT&T was throttling unlimited subscribers regardless of network conditions until July, when it changed its policy. Throttling was enforced once users hit 3GB or 5GB of data per month. AT&T still throttles customers but now says it only does so in congested areas.

The FTC's lawsuit in US District Court in San Francisco alleges that AT&T hit unlimited data customers with an "unfair mobile data throttling program" and that AT&T committed a "deceptive failure to disclose [the] mobile data throttling program."

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Public cloud services have become critical to much of our digital lives, but the privacy and security of these services has always been suspect. And today, the Snowden leaks and the revelations of NSA and GCHQ spying on cloud services have created a backlash internationally for US cloud providers.

How big of a concern is the privacy of the public cloud? And what can we do to make it more privacy-friendly and secure? Join us today at 2:30pm ET for a live discussion on those questions and others regarding the future of cloud computing.

Joining us for the live conversation will be:

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A new report was published today noting a drop-off in recent patent lawsuits. The data released by Unified Patents is the second recent indication that there may be a decline in suits following this summer's US Supreme Court decisions.

The Unified Patents data shows that the third quarter of 2014 saw 23 percent fewer patent cases overall. When looking only at litigation from patent trolls, which Unified calls "non-practicing entities" or NPEs, one sees a 35 percent drop.

Unified Patents

As with the earlier Lex Machina data, it's too early to determine the decline is necessarily tied to the Alice v. CLS Bank decision from this summer. In that decision, the US Supreme Court said that "do it on a computer"-style patents should be knocked out as too "abstract" for patenting.

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Duncan C

Federal authorities have identified and recently searched the home of a suspected “second leaker”—in other words, not Edward Snowden—who has been providing sensitive surveillance-related documents to journalists for months now, according to Yahoo News.

In particular, this second leaker is allegedly the source for documents discussing the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, first published by The Intercept in August 2014. This leaker may have also provided the National Security Agency’s Tailored Access Operations catalog to the German magazine Der Spiegel in December 2013.

Yahoo News, citing anonymous sources, reported that Justice Department officials “may now be more reluctant to bring criminal charges involving unauthorized disclosures to the news media,” a likely reference to the resulting public relations backlash against the prosecutors of WikiLeaks-leaker Chelsea Manning and the ongoing case of investigative New York Times reporter James Risen, who may face jail time for not revealing a source.

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When Disney bought Lucasfilm for over $4 billion nearly two years ago to the day, we lamented the uncertain publishing future of the company's stable of classic LucasArts games. The fear was that these classics would be lost in corporate shuffling indefinitely. Thankfully, digital distribution site GoG isn't letting that happen. This week, GoG published its first games from the Lucasfilm/Disney catalog as DRM-free downloads playable on modern machines.

While the digital distribution site says its partnership with Disney Interactive allows for the release of 20+ classic LucasArts games, today's offerings include the following six titles:

• Star Wars: X-Wing Special Edition - Windows - $9.99 - first downloadable release
• Star Wars: TIE Fighter Special Edition - Windows - $9.99 - first downloadable release
• Sam & Max Hit the Road - Windows, Mac, Linux - $5.99 - first downloadable release
• The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition - Windows - $9.99 (temporary 20 percent off sale price)
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - Windows, Mac, Linux - $5.99
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - Windows - $9.99 (temporary 20 percent off sale price)

More LucasArts games will be "popping up frequently" on GOG.com in the coming months according to the site. A number of LucasArts classics are also available on Steam, if that's more your speed. [Update: Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson reminds me that even the Windows-only retro games might work on a Mac through a tool like Boxer]

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Comcast last week applied for a trademark on the phrase "True Gig" to describe extremely fast Internet service.

The trademark application filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office (and reported yesterday by The Donohue Report) says that True Gig describes "Internet service provider services; providing high speed access to the Internet, mobile networks, and other electronic communications networks; wireless broadband communication services; provision of telecommunication access to video and audio content via cable, fiber optics, the Internet, mobile networks, and other electronic communications networks."

Comcast is also using True Gig to describe online video streaming, specifically "provision of non-downloadable films, movies, and television programs via an online video-on-demand service; providing entertainment information via television, cable, telephone, wireless broadband, fiber broadband, and via the Internet."

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OPEN SESAME iFixit

There’s new Apple hardware out, and the people at iFixit are once again doing what they do best: disassembling the living crap out of it and posting pictures. This time, they’ve carefully torn down a new Retina iMac into its component pieces, and the images are illuminating.

The Retina iMac’s construction is essentially identical to the previous non-Retina iMac. There are no screws here: the thin aluminum body is glued to the display with a long strip of custom-cut adhesive. Prying that away gives you access to the machine’s internals, but then you’re left with the conundrum of how to get the machine back together when you’re done—the factory adhesive strip isn’t very reusable once it’s been removed.

Once inside, there are plenty of user-replaceable parts—the iMac’s CPU isn’t soldered and can be swapped out if desired, as can the hard disk drive, PCIe SSD, and RAM (the RAM is actually designed to be replaced through a small external port, so you don’t have to tear the computer apart to add more memory). The Radeon R9-class GPU is attached directly to the logic board, so upgrading that after the fact is out of the question.

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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 everyone involved with the modern cloud is looking to improve its security. Join us this afternoon for a live discussion on the topic with article author Sean Gallagher and his expert guests; your comments and questions are welcome.

When the technology industry embraced “cloud computing” and made it part of our daily lives, we all made a Faustian bargain. They gave us a way to break free from the expense of owning all the hardware, making computing and storage capacity dirt cheap and available on demand. On the other side, we promised not to worry too much about the fine print.

“In the 2000s we had this wild cloud party,” said Peter Eckersley, technology projects director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That party ended—Edward Snowden crashed that party. And we’ve woken up with a massive privacy and security hangover that companies are now trying to shake.”

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"What's gaming like on the retina iMac, Mother?" "PRODUCING 4K SCREENSHOT TO DEMONSTRATE."

A few weeks ago, Apple updated its iMac desktop line with "Retina" displays—an Apple marketing term used to denote LCDs with a pixel density high enough that individual display elements are invisible to the unaided eye at typical viewing distances. On Apple’s iPhones, the "Retina" moniker means a PPI of at least 300; for MacBook Pro portables, it means about 220. The new iMac’s 27" 5120x2880 LCD panel has a PPI of 218, putting it just below the 15" MacBook Pro’s 220 PPI.

Those numbers translating into a stunning screen is unsurprising, and now that I’ve got one on my desk to play with, I’ll absolutely add my voice to the chorus of other reviewers saying that the new iMac looks amazing. I haven’t yet attached a colorimeter to the display and gone to town—that’s coming in the next few days—but here’s the color space information right out of the box:

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At its European TechEd conference today, Microsoft announced a range of new and improved features for its Linux-loving Azure cloud platform, Office 365, and management tools.

Chief among these was a set of new Office 365 APIs (and corresponding SDKs for iOS, Android, and Windows) exposing mail, calendars, contacts, and documents to developers.

One early adopter of these new APIs is IFTTT ("if this then that"), a popular service for cobbling together a wide range of online services. With IFTTT, it's easy to set up simple triggered actions, and now with Office 365 support, Office events will be able to trigger these actions. For example, users will be able to send themselves an SMS alert every time they receive an e-mail from a particular person.

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