Apple CEO Tim Cook speaking during a September 2012 media event. Nathan Mattise / Ars Technica

After years of speculation and debate about the seemingly open secret of Apple CEO Tim Cook's sexuality, Cook himself finally addressed the matter in an editorial in Bloomberg Businessweek Thursday. "I’ve come to realize that my desire for personal privacy has been holding me back from doing something more important. That’s what has led me to today," Cook wrote.

"While I have never denied my sexuality, I haven’t publicly acknowledged it either, until now. So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me."

Cook has long been a focal point in discussions about powerful gay CEOs. He's also been in the middle of a meta-discussion about titans of industry and their right to privacy versus the powerful position Cook is in as a member of the LGBT community. For a long time, Cook wrote, many Apple colleagues knew he was gay, but he refrained from publicly defining himself as such.

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Stockmonkeys.com

Since 1998, breaking most types of digital locks, often called Digital Rights Management (DRM), is against the law. Even well-lawyered companies that tried to plead fair use, as RealPlayer did in 2008, have been crushed. What chance does a regular Joe have?

But if you have a legal use for copyrighted content, there is an "out." Every three years, the Copyright Office accepts petitions on what activities should get an "exemption" under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The sixth tri-annual rulemaking is now upon us, and the deadline is this Monday, November 3.

"It's not a heavy lift to file a petition," said Sherwin Siy, VP of legal affairs at Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that's long been active on copyright issues. "Five pages, max, short and sweet."

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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 virtual reality excitement is happening beyond the world of gaming. Join us this afternoon for a live discussion on the topic with article author Kyle Orland and his expert guests; your comments and questions are welcome.

When Oculus almost single-handedly revived the idea of virtual reality from its ‘90s vaporware grave, it chose the 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo as the place to unveil the first public prototype of the Rift headset. The choice of a gaming convention isn’t that surprising, as the game industry has been the quickest and most eager to jump on potential applications for VR. Gaming has already demanded the majority of the attention and investments in the second VR boom that Oculus has unleashed.

But just as the Rift itself is the result of what Oculus calls a “peace dividend from the smartphone wars,” other fields are benefiting from virtual reality’s gaming-driven growth. Creators all over the world are looking beyond entertainment to adapting head-mounted displays for everything from psychotherapy, special-needs education, and space exploration to virtual luxury car test drives, virtual travel, and even VR movies. The well-worn idea of “gaming on the holodeck” may be driving much of the interest in virtual reality, but the technology’s non-gaming applications could be just as exciting in the long term.

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Microsoft

After being leaked just a few hours ago, it's now official: Microsoft's first entry into the wearable space is Microsoft Band, a fitness band.

The gadget isn't a smartwatch and isn't intended to replace your watch. It's a Bluetooth fitness band packed full of sensors: optical heart rate sensing, 3-axis accelerometers with a gyroscope to track movement, GPS to track your runs even if you leave your phone at home, skin temperature, galvanic skin response presumably to measure sweating, ambient light and UV light, and a microphone so it can be used with Cortana on Windows Phone.

Microsoft

The 1.4-inch touch screen with its 320×106 resolution can deliver alerts, and there's a vibration motor too. Twin 100mAh batteries give it 48 hours of what Microsoft calls "normal use" though GPS can shorten this. The charge time is 1.5 hours, using a magnetically attached USB charger. There are three different sizes, so it should fit on most wrists.

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Rumors that Microsoft was coming up with its own cross-platform fitness band appear to have been validated with the perhaps accidental disclosure of apps for OS X, Windows Phone, Android, and iOS designed to support the gadget. Windows Central was first to spot the early publication.

The OS X app

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The device will be called "Microsoft Band." Thanks to the app in the Mac App Store, we have a good idea of what it will look like: a black wristband with a screen. Functionally, it looks like it's going to be a pretty standard fitness band: it'll count footsteps (and use this information to attempt to count calories burned) and appears to monitor heart rates day and night to tell you how well you're sleeping.

The Windows Phone app. The apps for iOS and Android look all but identical.

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As we should expect, there will also be a cloud service for accumulating and analyzing the data the band collects.

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Not content with launching five Yoga-branded tablets earlier this month, Lenovo has added a sixth device to its range.

The new device almost rounds out the range announced before. The new lineup has 8-inch and 10-inch tablets in both Android and Windows variants, and a 13-inch Android tablet, the Yoga Tablet 2 Pro, that also includes an integrated projector that can cast a 50-inch picture.

Lenovo

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Today, the company has announced a 13-inch Windows tablet, the Yoga Tablet 2 Windows. This is almost a counterpart to the Yoga Tablet 2 Pro, matching its 13.3 inch 2560×1440 screen, quad core Intel Atom Z3745 processor at up to 1.86GHz, 802.11a/b/g/n dual-band Wi-Fi, 15-hour battery life, and a 2.27lb weight. But it's not quite identical. The Windows tablet doesn't have the integrated projector. It does, however, double the RAM to 4GB and double the storage to 64GB.

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The latest version of the Android operating system, Lollipop, adds encryption by default, along with a variety of easy-to-use ways to lock and unlock the phone and a more secure foundation to help protect devices against current threats.

In a blog post published on Tuesday, Google described the features, which will begin shipping with the Lollipop operating system in new Android devices in the coming weeks. While some of the capabilities, such as encryption, are already included in the current Android OS, the new version will turn them on by default.

Many of the security features were born of Android’s open-source foundations and the fact that other researchers and companies can create and test new security features for the operating system, Adrian Ludwig, lead security engineer for Android at Google, said during a briefing on the security features.

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University of Virginia

Early in my training, I learned one rule: loss is not your friend. In laser physics, loss means that every photon that goes missing is a photon that no longer stimulates emission. And, with every lost photon, it becomes just that little bit harder to keep a laser going. So, when Science published a paper showing that this rule doesn't always hold, I was intrigued.

Also it gives me the chance to talk about lasers, which I never tire of.

Gain, loss, and lasers

Before we get to the experiment, let's talk about lasers in general. Lasers emit light through a process called stimulated emission. Stimulated emission only dominates under two conditions: there have to be more emitters ready to emit light instead of to absorb light. This is referred to as population inversion and provides the gain (or the source of light amplification). The other requirement is that there is light present to stimulate emission. To put it slightly incorrectly, the amplifier needs something to amplify.

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Some 2011 MacBook Pros with AMD GPUs are experiencing graphical corruption issues. Apple Support Communities poster abelliveau

Last week three men filed a class action lawsuit in Northern California District Court alleging that Apple's 2011 MacBook Pro laptops were defective and that Apple did not take proper steps to compensate customers whose hardware broke.

The lawsuit specifically addresses 15” and 17” MacBook Pros from 2011, which the plaintiffs claim suffered from “random bouts of graphical distortion, system instability, and system failures.” The plaintiffs also assert that the problem is widespread, with an online survey conducted by the plaintiffs receiving over 3,000 responses from 2011 MacBook Pro owners in a single week.

In the complaint, the plaintiffs blame the solder used to connect the dedicated GPU in the laptops to the main circuit board, saying that the solder was lead-free to comply with EU regulations, and made its way into US products so Apple could save on manufacturing costs.

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After listening to our resident alien life form and cable industry sleuth Jon Brodkin lament yesterday evening that he hadn’t been invited to join Verizon’s funded cadre of tech writers over at SugarString, I popped over to the site and flipped through the articles, wondering what Brodkin was missing out on. SugarString's layout isn’t afflicted with what StackExchange developer Jeff Atwood once referred to as "Pinterest Cancer," so I scrolled through and clicked on a few things to get a feel for what kind of reporting—or possibly "reporting"—the Verizon-controlled site was producing.

This story caught my eye:

Not sure if entitlement or just hyperbole. SugarString

In the piece, author Meredith Haggerty reached out to three different professionals and gauged their reaction to the idea of being made to work in an office where the employer disallows the use of Google Chat (informally, "GChat"). Haggerty’s first interview subject drew a line in the sand, responding strongly in the negative when asked whether or not he would work in such an office:

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Today was the third day of Ars UNITE, our virtual conference, and the topic of the day was the advent of the self-driving car.

Our self-driving car feature this morning looked at the technological solutions that will soon allow our cars to drive themselves under certain circumstances, assuming the regulations and other policy issues are in place. That piece has seen a lively discussion covering a number of different areas. Ars reader mexaly suggested that “[t]o succeed, robots need only drive better than average humans. That's not a high bar.”

Some were skeptical that self-driving cars would be safer. caldron writes, “I think it is a big leap to assume a self-drive is better than a human at driving. Sure in certain conditions and in terms of reaction time, but no computers have been able to reach our level of decision making and ability to react in abstract and unpredictable situations, and there is none in the foreseeable future. We make constant micro-decisions all the time. When there is a grey-area situation that requires deduction I am not so sure a computer will be able to react properly.”

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It's never a good day when the Halon discharges in the server room. Keith4048

It all began when the monitors started bursting into flames. Well, at least that’s when I knew I had walked into a tech support horror story.

Back in the day when the cathode-ray tube was still the display of choice and SVGA really was super, I was working as a network engineer and tech support manager for a government contractor at a large military research lab. I spent two years on the job, and I learned in the process that Murphy was an optimist. The experience would provide me with enough tech horror stories and tales of narrow escape through the most kludged of hardware and software hacks ever conceived to last a lifetime—and to know that I would much rather be a writer than work in tech support ever again.

Of course, all of us have tech horror stories to tell, especially those of us who were “early adopters” before the term was de rigueur. So we’re looking for you, our readers, to share yours. The most bone-chilling and entertaining of which we’ll publish tomorrow in honor of Halloween—that day each year when some people change their Twitter handles to pseudo-spooky puns, and others just buy bags of candy to have ready for the traditional wave of costumed home invaders.

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redditmade

reddit has launched its own crowdfunding platform dubbed "redditmade" as of Wednesday, according to a post on the site. redditmade focuses on campaigns for T-shirts and knick-knacks associated with subreddit communities, but the boundaries expand as far as "the best designs and products by the community."

redditmade joins platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but with a more specific focus on redditors and items they want to see made. Sample projects on the redditmade front page currently include a "Not A Cocktail" book associated with r/cocktails, a t-shirt for r/redditblack, and bumper stickers for the r/camping subreddit.

While anyone can open any project for funding, the redditmade FAQ clarifies that "Official subreddit campaigns are distinguished on redditmade as featured campaigns, and they can also receive complimentary ads on reddit for the subreddit they are associated with." The ads are auto-generated but are not shown if the ad space has already been sold, reddit says.

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Biblioteca de Art

A movie theater industry group and the Motion Picture Association of America updated their anti-piracy policies and said that "wearable devices" must be powered off at show time.

"Individuals who fail or refuse to put the recording devices away may be asked to leave. If theater managers have indications that illegal recording activity is taking place, they will alert law enforcement authorities when appropriate, who will determine what further action should be taken," said a joint statement from the MPAA and the National Association of Theatre Owners, which maintains 32,000 screens across the United States.

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A very SCARY Wednesday to you, fellow Arsians! On this fine fall day, our partners at TechBargains have lined up a truly BOO-TIFUL selection of FRIGHTENING deals, sure to make your HAIR STAND ON END! (Cue maniacal laughter here!)

Yeah, OK, jumping the gun on Halloween a bit, but we watched the Tales from the Crypt intro on YouTube a few minutes ago and are feeling the vibe. OR SHOULD WE SAY... THE... knife... vibe? No, that doesn't work. TERRIFYING GHOST SOUNDS! OOOooooOOOO!

Below are our most HAUNTING bargains, featuring a Dell Inspiron with a Haswell i5 for just $549—a price guaranteed to make anyone SCREAM! But in delight, not terror, because it's a pretty good deal.

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The Sprout PC. HP

You know in Iron Man 2 when Tony Stark has JARVIS scan the diorama of Stark Expo and then manipulates a computerized version of the model with his hands?

HP today unveiled the peculiarly named Sprout, a PC that will let creative professionals do the same... more or less.

The Sprout projector houses a DLP projector, 3D camera, and a light. HP

The all-in-one desktop PC has an integrated 3D scanner that can digitize physical objects and a projector with a 20-inch touch-sensitive mat. The 3D scanner uses Intel's RealSense 3D capture, which combines the images from multiple cameras to construct its 3D models; it can also capture 14 megapixel 2D images. Both the 3D scanner and the projector point at the touch mat, creating a workspace enabling the "physical" manipulation of digital objects.

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With another 3,000 positions cut today, Microsoft's protracted series of layoffs is now at an end, according to GeekWire. A few more jobs may still be cut in early 2015, but the largescale redundancies are over.

Starting in July, the company eliminated close to 18,000 positions in total. After an initial wave of almost 13,000 layoffs, a further 2,100 people were cut in September and 3,000 more were cut today.

About 12,500 of the job losses are in the recently acquired Nokia Devices and Services business. Of the remaining cuts, some 2,700 were in and around the company's main campus in Redmond.

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Self-driving cars used to be a pipe dream, but then Moore's Law came along and did its thing. Within a few years, cars packed with sensors and processors and connected to the cloud will have the capability of driving themselves and reacting to traffic or accidents, at least under certain road conditions (think HOV lanes). Of course, that's only if the regulations are in place to let that happen.

What technological pieces of the puzzle remain to be worked out? Who takes responsibility when an autonomous car hits something? Are we about to fundamentally change society's relationship with the car? Join us today at 3pm ET for a live discussion on these questions and others.

Joining us today will be:

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DAHC

The Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) just returned an aerial surveillance balloon that it borrowed for two days in an effort to capture a man wanted for the murder of a trooper last month. Thomas Kelly, a PSP spokesman, told Ars on Wednesday that the “Blimp in a Box” was returned because it was ineffective.

"Due to the tree canopy and rugged terrain of our search area, the balloon was not as helpful as everyone hoped it would be,” he said by e-mail. “The tree canopy is too thick, we couldn’t see through it. It’s that simple. The balloon was offered to us as an alternative technique. We tried it and just didn’t work. It's best suited for open spaces, not heavily wooded forests.”

The manhunt is focused on finding Eric Frein, a suspected murderer now on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. Six weeks ago, Frein allegedly shot and killed a Pennsylvania trooper while wounding another outside the Blooming Grove Barracks in Pike County. After the incident, local and federal authorities named Frein, a local survivalist and amateur military historian, as the prime suspect.

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John Jackson

Pilots of drones or model aircraft could be fined or jailed for up to a year if they navigate near automobile racetracks or big sporting stadiums, the Federal Aviation Administration announced.

The Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) No. FDC 4/3621 is the first time US flight regulators have moved to criminally punish wayward drone pilots.

The rules—the first FAA update to pilots concerning sports venues in five years—reiterate an existing standard that prohibits pilots of all aircraft from flying under 3,000 feet and within three miles of stadiums from NCAA Division 1 football, Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and even big car races. The no-fly area is designated "national defense airspace" for one hour before and after events at these venues with 30,000 or more seating capacity. The new regulation does allow for the "broadcast rights holder" of stadium events to enter the no-fly zone with permission.

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