Apple's newly split stock price has been on the rise lately. Let's see if this quarter's earnings make it move one way or the other. Andrew Cunningham View Liveblog2014-07-22T16:00:00-05:00

Apple will be announcing its Q3 2014 financial results on Tuesday, July 22 at 5pm Eastern time (2pm Pacific), and the standard earnings call with press and analysts will follow shortly afterward. As we usually do, we'll be following along with the call to liveblog and provide charts and other contextual information—Apple rarely makes major announcements on these calls, but it does give more information on how particular Apple products are doing both in the US and other markets.

Apple's third fiscal quarter runs from the beginning of April to the end of June, and while WWDC was full of new software announcements, those updates (and the new hardware that will accompany them) won't actually be available until the fall, late in Q4 2014 or early in Q1 2015. Beyond a new, slightly cheaper iMac and a security lock for the Mac Pro, we just haven't gotten many new gadgets lately, and the majority of Apple's money is made by selling hardware. That said, Apple's products tend to sell well even when they're in the middle of a refresh cycle. One stat in particular to keep an eye on: will iPad sales continue to be down as they were last quarter, or will they bounce back up? Analysts believe that tablet sales are beginning to level off, and the iPad's sales numbers will be a major data point in that discussion.

Apple's guidance for the quarter predicted revenue between $36 billion and $38 billion with profit margins between 37 and 38 percent. Other predictions for this quarter can be found in the Q2 2014 announcement.

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Sarah Braun

A YouTube video featuring a controversial San Francisco lawyer who has been representing landlords in eviction procedures appears to have been newly restored on Tuesday after being made unavailable for a week.

The lawyer, Daniel Bornstein, filed a seemingly spurious copyright infringement claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Many have noted (including Ars founder Ken Fisher a decade ago) that the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown provision practically encourages an overzealous response from those who claim copyright ownership.

The two-minute video depicts Bornstein at a January 2014 seminar in which he is speaking to local landlords but is interrupted by protesters angry at the rise in San Francisco evictions. Many such evictions have been blamed on rising rents, which have in turn been blamed on the huge influx of cash from high-paid tech jobs. (Just last week, the median home sales price in San Francisco topped $1 million for the first time.)

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Greetings, Arsians! Our partners at LogicBuy are back with even more deals. Have you upgraded to 4k yet? The top deal this week is a 28-inch 4K Dell monitor for just $399.99. That's $300 off the MSRP! There are a few options this week from Dell, and the company just started taking Bitcoin. So if you've got some lying around, make the most of them by hitting up these deals.

Featured Deal
Lowest price ever! Dell P2815Q 28" 4K UltraHD 3840x2160 Monitor w/3 year warranty for $399.99 with free shipping (list price $699.99)

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• Dell UP3214Q UltraSharp 32" 3840x2160 IPS Monitor for $2,249.99 with free shipping (list price $2,999.99)
• Dell UZ2315H UltraSharp 23" 1080p Anti-glare IPS Monitor w/ 2MP Webcam, USB 3.0 Hub for $224.99 with free shipping (list price $299.99)

HDTV and home theater

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Developers of the Tor privacy service say they're close to fixing a weakness that researchers for an abruptly canceled conference presentation said provides a low-cost way for adversaries to deanonymize hundreds of thousands of users.

The talk previously scheduled for next month's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas was titled "You Don't Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget." The abstract said that the hack cost less than $3,000 and could uncloak hundreds of thousands of users. On Monday, Black Hat organizers said the presentation was canceled at the request of attorneys from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where the researchers were employed, as well as the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The attorneys said only that the materials to be presented "have not yet been approved by CMU/SEI for public release." Researchers Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord have yet to explain why their talk was pulled.

Tor officials responded by saying that they're working on an update for individual Tor relay nodes that will close the unspecified security hole.

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As part of its last-ditch effort to be classified as a cable company, Aereo has filed documents with the US Copyright Office that has made public previously unknown details about the company.

At the end of 2013, Aereo had 77,596 subscribers in 10 cities, according to Peter Kafka of Re/code, who published the information earlier today. About 27,000 of them lived in New York City, Aereo's first market. Boston, its second market, had 12,000 subscribers, while Atlanta had 10,000.

By way of comparison, Kafka notes that Netflix has more than 50 million subscribers worldwide, while Hulu has 6 million subscribers for its premium service.

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This screenshot reminds us that Video Games: The Movie is better than the Bob Hoskins Super Mario Bros. film, but that's not saying much. Variance Films

The announcement of Video Games: The Movie was exciting and promising enough to help most fans stomach its amateur status (and its awkward title). Not that gaming documentaries are a rarity anymore; other recent, popular flicks have poked their noses into gaming culture, but they’ve typically chosen and focused on a niche, like competitive retro play or small-fry development.

VGTM, on the other hand, cast its documentary net wide by way of a giant interview cast. With luminaries like Nolan Bushnell, Warren Spector, Rob Pardo, David Crane (Pitfall), and other important games-history figures, the film’s comprehensive reputation preceded it.

Unfortunately, the film's scope, in fact, is its greatest stumble. This feature-length debut from director Jeremy Snead boasts an impressive cast and noticeable polish, but it has “overreach” written all over it, proven by a lack of focus, wildly varying levels of authority, and crippling indecision about whether gaming culture should still adopt the defensive pose of old.

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Johns Hopkins Health System is agreeing to pay more than 8,000 women as much as $190 million to settle a lawsuit charging a gynecologist with deploying a secret pencam to shoot photos and videos of patients' sex organs.

The Monday settlement is believed to be the largest involving sexual misconduct involving a physician.

The male doctor, Nikita Levy, committed suicide last year, days after a fellow doctor became suspicious and alerted administrators at the Baltimore-based hospital—one of the country's most prestigious medical centers. Levy died after wrapping his head in plastic and overdosing on helium.

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No company has lobbied more fiercely against network neutrality than Verizon, which filed the lawsuit that overturned the FCC's rules prohibiting ISPs from blocking and discriminating against Web content. But the absence of net neutrality rules isn't just good for Verizon—it's also good for the blind, deaf, and disabled, Verizon claims.

That's what Verizon lobbyists said in talks with congressional staffers, according to a Mother Jones report last month. "Three Hill sources tell Mother Jones that Verizon lobbyists have cited the needs of blind, deaf, and disabled people to try to convince congressional staffers and their bosses to get on board with the fast lane idea," the report said. With "fast lanes," Web services—including those designed for the blind, deaf, and disabled—could be prioritized in exchange for payment.

Now, advocacy groups for deaf people have filed comments with the FCC saying they don't agree with Verizon's position.

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Robert Scoble

Just how profitable is fully acquiring America’s largest mobile phone company? Very.

In February of this year, Verizon purchased the remaining minority stake in Verizon Wireless previously held by Vodafone. Verizon has since raked in $4.2 billion in profits during the second quarter of 2014, compared to $2.2 billion over the same time period in 2013. Still, investors remained unmoved: Verizon’s stock price was essentially flat on the news.

One data point that likely contributed to the new, bigger company’s bottom line is Verizon Wireless’ ever-rising average revenue per account (ARPA); this rose 4.7 percent quarter-over-quarter, hitting just shy of $160 per month. As recently as January 2014, Verizon customers on average paid the most of any major carrier in the United States, at $148 per month.

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Xiaomi is one of the biggest phone makers in China and is often called the "Apple of China" by the western press. The moniker is well-deserved, as the CEO has a penchant for doing product announcements wearing jeans and a black shirt and using Apple's trademark "One More Thing" surprise at the end of a show.

Today, the company announced the Xiaomi Mi 4, a new version of its flagship smartphone. The spec rundown is a 5-inch 1080p IPS LCD, 2.5Ghz Snapdragon 801 chipset, 3GB RAM, 13MP rear camera, 8MP front camera, and a 3080mAh battery. The real kicker is the price, 1,999 Yuan (about $320) for 16GB of storage, or 2,499 Yuan (about $400) for the 64GB version. The specs are similar to the OnePlus One—a 5.5-inch device for $300—and while the Mi 4 is slightly more expensive, the difference is that you can actually buy the Xiaomi device if you live in China.

And sure enough, Xiaomi is still taking inspiration from its western role model, as the Mi 4 looks like a big iPhone. A segmented metal band with chamfered edges surrounds the phone, and it even uses a similar earpiece design. The rest of the outside is plastic, but for the new version Xiaomi says it has incorporated a stainless steel frame into the device.

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Just give Riot an excuse to use the banhammer...

League of Legends developer Riot Games is ready to take a tougher stance with the toxic players that are ruining the gameplay experience for many of the game's more than 27 million players. Riot Lead Designer of Social Systems Jeffrey Lin announced via Twitter yesterday that, starting immediately, "players that show extreme toxicity (intentional feeding or racism, etc) will be instantly 14-day or permabanned."

In a a follow-up post on Reddit, Lin notes that things like "death threats [and] homophobia" will also draw the ire of the new stricter player moderation. Further, players that publicly complain about these bans will now be "named and shamed" through sharing the chat logs that led to the ban.

The new banning system will be largely automated, and players caught up in the dragnet will be told they are being banned "until Year 2500," though such permanent bans will have to be reviewed by a human before going into effect. After testing the new moderation system one server at a time, Riot plans to roll the program out across the entire game.

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As part of its normal life cycle, HIV inserts a copy of itself into the genome of every cell it infects. Most of these copies go on to cause an active infection, pumping out new copies of the virus. A few of them, however, go quiet and can persist even during aggressive antiviral treatments. These infected cells act as a reservoir for the virus, reestablishing an active infection if antiviral therapies are ever stopped. Eliminating this viral reservoir has proven extremely difficult.

Now, researchers are reporting on some of the first tests of a technique that targets the copies of the virus that are lurking in cells with a quiescent infection. Using a system that bacteria utilize to disable viruses, they've shown that it's possible to precisely edit out key HIV DNA sequences, essentially inactivating any copies of the virus. And if placed in cells prior to exposure to HIV, the same system effectively blocks infection.

Bacteria don't have an immune system, but that doesn't mean they have no defenses against viruses. When infected, the bacteria can make special RNAs that match the DNA sequences of the virus. These RNAs then guide a protein called Cas9 to the viral DNA, which the protein then cuts. The cut inactivates the virus, protecting the bacteria. The whole system (called CRISPR/Cas) is incredibly flexible; given the right RNA, it can be turned loose on pretty much any DNA sequence. Researchers have shown that it can be used to cut the DNA of living human cells, effectively editing their contents.

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Chris

When a call to cancel Comcast service descended into "a stunning display of hysteria and desperation," pretty much everyone who listened to a recording of the phone call agreed: it was painful to listen to.

Comcast Chief Operating Officer Dave Watson found it painful too. In an internal memo published by The Consumerist, Watson wrote:

[I]t was painful to listen to this call, and I am not surprised that we have been criticized for it. Respecting our customers is fundamental, and we fell short in this instance. I know these Retention calls are tough, and I have tremendous admiration for our Retention professionals, who make it easy for customers to choose to stay with Comcast. We have a Retention queue because we believe in our products, and because we offer a great value when customers have the right facts to choose the package that works best for them. If a customer is not fully aware of what the product offers, we ask the Retention agent to educate the customer and work with them to find the right solution.

A Comcast spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the Watson memo published by The Consumerist is authentic. The unfortunate customer Watson referred to was Gdgt founder and AOL Vice President of Product Ryan Block, who posted a recording of the latter parts of a nearly 20-minute call in which a Comcast employee repeatedly refused to cancel Block's service.

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A 27-year-old Illinois woman was arrested Monday after posting a selfie to Facebook showing off a dress that she allegedly stole from a local boutique.

Morties Boutique in West Frankfort took to Facebook to describe the hijacked goods. Somebody then sent the shop a link to a Facebook post in which a woman is seen wearing the colorful leopard-pattern dress, with the caption: "Love my dress." Surveillance photos allegedly captured Danielle Saxton stealing the dress earlier this month.

"I called the police department and said, 'It just hit Facebook,' and they were on it in two seconds," shop owner Gay Morton Williams told Reuters.

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Delicate Arch at Arches National Park in Utah. Howard Ignatius

There’s no need to ask what the appeal of Arches National Park is—it’s in the name. The gorgeous sandstone arches there seem almost impossible. How and why should the relentlessly erosive wind carve such a fantastic structure? The arches seem too vulnerable, too artificial.

And arches aren’t the only trick that sandstone has up its sleeve. Bizarre, mushroom-shaped pillars seem even more absurd, as if they were carefully placed by an incredibly patient and even more incredibly strong Zen garden enthusiast. In some places, networks of sandstone pillars even hold up ledges like a miniature Moria.

We know plenty about how this erosion takes place, and some details about why some sections of the rock erode faster than others, but the primary cause of these shapes has eluded geologists. A new study led by Jiri Bruthans of Charles University in Prague has revealed a surprisingly simple explanation.

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The "Shield Portable" (left) is now joined by the more conventional 8-inch Shield tablet. Nvidia

After it was spotted in FCC documents earlier this month and then leaked late last week, Nvidia has officially announced the latest member of its Shield family of Android gaming tablets. Where the first Shield was a 5-inch screen bolted onto the top of an Xbox 360-esque game controller, the new Shield is a standard 8-inch tablet that pairs with a standalone Shield controller via Wi-Fi Direct. Nvidia claims that using Wi-Fi rather than Bluetooth for the controller connection will reduce the latency that often affects Bluetooth controllers.

In our hands-on time with the tablet last week, Nvidia told us that its goal with the new Shield tablet (the previous Shield has been renamed the "Shield Portable" and is still available for sale) was to make it a good standard tablet as well as a good gaming tablet. To that end, the device is pretty unassuming when not connected to a controller or to your TV—the 8-inch 1920×1200 display is flanked by two front-facing speakers, and the tablet is narrow enough that holding it in one hand to read or browse isn't difficult. The tablet's body is a hard matte plastic that looks nice in person and feels fairly sturdy.

The Shield runs a near-stock version of Android 4.4 with a handful of Nvidia apps pre-installed, including a copy of Trine 2 and Nvidia's "Shield Hub" (also known as Tegra Zone), which lists Shield-compatible games available from the Google Play store. The tablet is among the first to use the 32-bit version of Nvidia's next-generation Tegra K1 SoC, which it announced at CES earlier this year. This chip's claim to fame is the "Kepler" GPU architecture, which supports the full range of desktop OpenGL, OpenCL, DirectX, and CUDA APIs where most mobile GPUs still support just a subset of those features. Nvidia claims that this API support makes it easier for developers to port their games from the desktop and was showing off enhanced versions of the Half-Life 2 and Portal Shield ports as well as a port of the upcoming War Thunder multiplayer game that will be compatible with the standard PC version.

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There hasn't been a strong El Niño in over a decade, which causes problems for some climate models. NOAA

Spend any amount of time reading climate arguments on the Internet, and you'll undoubtedly hear some version of the following argument: the Earth hasn't warmed in 17 years, and none of the climate models predicted that. Although there are a lot of problems with that statement (including the fact that it has warmed a bit), it's probably safe to say that the warming hasn't been as intense as many scientists expected.

Of course, to a scientist, unmet expectations are an opportunity, so a variety of papers have looked into why this has happened. They've found that, while volcanic eruptions seem to have contributed to the relatively slow rise in temperatures, a major player has been the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which has been stuck in a cool, La Niña state for most of the last decade. And, since climate models aren't expected to accurately forecast each El Niño, there would be no reason to expect that they would match the actual atmospheric record.

At least not intentionally. But some researchers have found that, simply by chance, a few of the models do produce an accurate ENSO pattern. And when those models are examined in detail, it turns out they match the existing temperature record pretty well.

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Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. Diliff

A startup has told Los Angeles city officials that it wants to build a citywide fiber-to-the-home broadband network and that it also hopes to build nationwide Wi-Fi and cellular networks.

The proposal sounds unlikely to succeed, but it's certainly ambitious. It comes in response to a Los Angeles city government request for information (RFI) regarding a plan to build a fiber and Wi-Fi network. The Los Angeles request itself struck telecom experts as unrealistic. The city wants a vendor to build a fiber network at an estimated cost of $3 billion to $5 billion, offer free Internet to all residents (while charging for faster speeds), and make the infrastructure available to any other service provider on a wholesale basis.

The RFI deadline passed Friday, and only one company has made its full response to the city public. It's a Dutch company called Angie Communications, which claims it will build fiber and mobile networks in the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, France, and the US.

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Smartphone gamers don't have a wealth of quality first-person shooter options, but in spite of its unoriginal name, Gameloft's Modern Combat games have been solid enough to lead the mobile sales charts. Ahead of the series' fifth release, Gameloft celebrated Modern Combat 5: Blackout's upcoming launch by awarding early free downloads to fans via social network contests.

As reported by Polygon, that move backfired when one of the contest winners cracked the iOS version and uploaded its IPA file over the weekend, allowing the game to be pirated in droves ahead of its launch. The news began to spread once Touch Arcade editor Eli Hodapp—the kind of gamer who would have early access to a mobile shooter—noticed thousands of players pop up in Modern Combat 5 multiplayer sessions during the pre-release period.

In a Facebook post on the game's official community page, Gameloft representative Florian Weber confirmed that this activity was due to the game's pirated leak, and he didn't mince words. "As you can imagine I am really pissed off," Weber said.

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The Air Force's failed ECSS logistics system cost more than putting a few GPS satellites in orbit. United States Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Mike Meares

A full two years after its cancellation, Congress is still taking the Air Force to task for the failure of an eight-year logistics system project that was intended to consolidate somewhere between 175 and over 900 legacy software systems—depending on who you asked and when. In a Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs investigative report (PDF) completed on July 7 and publicly released last week, Senate investigators called the Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS) “a cautionary tale” of poor management practices and horrific technology choices.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects in government and business over the past decade, especially since the software the Air Force attempted to use to solve its problems was an off-the-shelf package that was supposed to be only superficially modified to meet the needs of the Air Force. But ERP systems aren’t just software projects—they often require a total restructuring of organizational processes to make them fit the software rather than just making existing processes more efficient.

“The Air Force failed in its procurement of [ECSS]… because it lacked a clear objective and the organizational will to implement changes to its internal business processes vital to integrating ECSS into the organization,” the Senate investigators wrote in the report. “In doing so, the Air Force violated many crucial guidelines and best practices for information technology acquisition.”

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