NOAA

How did Earth develop its current atmosphere? A study published in the journal Nature Geoscience links the composition of Earth’s nitrogen-rich atmosphere to the same tectonic forces that drive mountain-building and volcanism on our planet. It goes some way to explaining why, when compared to our nearest neighbors Venus and Mars, Earth’s air is richer in nitrogen.

The chemistry of the air we breathe is partially the result of billions of years of photosynthesis. Plant life has transformed our world from one cloaked in a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, as seen on Mars or Venus, to one with significant oxygen. About a fifth of the air is made up of oxygen, but almost all the rest is nitrogen—completely unlike Mars and Venus. The origins of the relatively high nitrogen content of Earth’s air have been something of a mystery.

Geoscientists Sami Mikhail and Dimitri Sverjensky of the Carnegie Institution of Washington have calculated what nitrogen is expected to do when the churning cycle of plate tectonics cycles it through the rocks of the deep Earth. Active volcanoes not only shower volcanic rock and superheated ash as they erupt molten rock into the air; they also vent huge amounts of gas from Earth’s depths. The latest eruptions in Iceland, for example, have been noted for the amount of sulfurous fumes they have emitted.

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New York politicians say Comcast shouldn't be allowed to buy Time Warner Cable unless it provides free Internet service to all residents of public housing.

In a letter to the state Public Service Commission Wednesday, New York City Public Advocate Letitia James and 21 other officials asked for the free Internet promise and numerous other provisions, including a commitment to offer at least gigabit speeds to paying customers. The commission recently delayed its vote on the merger until November 13 after state officials found "deficiencies" in Comcast's customer service and the merger application.

James' letter asked Comcast to "guarantee that they will expand broadband to and provide free access, training, and equipment to their broadband services for all public housing residents of the New York City Housing Authority, and establish training and access centers for every housing complex within the merged entity’s service area." The same should be done for "[a]ll senior, youth, and community centers, and public parks. As well as all homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters (with anonymous browsing capability), congregate care facilities, supportive housing facilities, mental health group homes," the letter continued. Besides that, Comcast was urged to "[e]stablish free Wi-Fi service in all New York City Public Parks."

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A header on Lysol's home page.

While no more than four confirmed cases of Ebola have been diagnosed within the United States since September, that hasn't stopped the marketing team at Lysol from getting ahead of the disease. The company's October Ebola-related ad campaign peaked on Tuesday with the revelation that the company bought ad space on Google for any search of the term "Ebola."

Tuesday's Vice Motherboard report confirmed the targeted advertising via a screencap, propped above Google's default result from the CDC. The link, labeled "ad," asked Googlers to "learn the facts about Ebola from Lysol." Clicking on the link took users to the company's October 14 post about the disease. That post opens with a direct link back to the CDC and then recommends that Lysol be used "for surface disinfection in hospital settings to help prevent the spread of the Ebola virus." (The post also clarifies that Lysol's products have "not [been] specifically tested to kill the Ebola virus.")

However, if Lysol visitors don't click through to the CDC's official page on the virus, they won't see some of the most obvious safety recommendations and clarifications, including the rare, specific ways an average, non-hospital worker might contract Ebola—namely, through contact with contaminated fecal and mucus matter. It also doesn't recommend common safeguards like washing hands (even though Lysol happens to sell plenty of hand soap).

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Megan Geuss

Back in 2011 when I worked for PC World, Google gave me a Sprint Nexus S 4G review unit with the brand-new Google Wallet app on it. I set up a pre-paid card and took the phone around to a handful of retailers around downtown San Francisco, testing to see how paying with a phone worked in the real world.

The results were mixed: some interactions were fast and simple, but I went to a Peet's Coffee and an Office Depot where the terminals just didn't work. A few days after the article went up, I went to a Whole Foods where the terminal wasn't even plugged in, and the cashier directed me to another terminal nearby. All in all, it was clear that the system was a bit too rough around the edges to truly revolutionize the idea of the wallet. And I came away from the experience knowing that I certainly wasn't going to be leaving home without a wallet any time soon.

Three years later, Apple Pay has entered the scene with its own mobile payments platform. For the average consumer, the Apple Pay experience is not very different from the Google Wallet experience, except that retailers have had three extra years to get their act together and upgrade their terminals to adequately support NFC-based payments. Behind the scenes, Apple Pay does act quite differently from Google Wallet; see our “How mobile payments work” primer here for a more in-depth discussion of where Apple and Google fit into the card network and how tokenization works on Apple Pay. In this article, we'll just focus on the user experience.

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Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), a retailer-backed consortium, received a lot of attention this weekend when CVS and Rite Aid suddenly stopped accepting payments from systems like Google Wallet and Apple Pay. The two pharmacists reportedly made the move in solidarity with MCX, which is developing its own mobile payments system called CurrentC. CurrentC is set to launch in early 2015, although the app is already available.

On Wednesday, however, people who signed up to be on the forefront of the CurrentC launch were sent an e-mail saying that their e-mail addresses had been stolen.

“Thank you for your interest in CurrentC,” the e-mail read. “You are receiving this message because you are either a participant in our pilot program or requested information about CurrentC. Within the last 36 hours, we learned that unauthorized third parties obtained the e-mail addresses of some of you. Based on investigations conducted by MCX security personnel, only these e-mail addresses were involved and no other information.”

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streamishmc

It's hard to have a meaningful discussion about Apple Pay (iOS' most recent foray into mobile payments) and Google Wallet (Android's three-year-old platform that's had tepid success) without talking about how the systems actually work. And to talk about how those systems work, we have to know how credit card charges work.

It seems like a simple thing, especially in the US—swipe your card, wait a second or two for authorization, walk out of the store with your goods. But the reality is that a complicated system of different companies handles all that transaction information before your receipt ever gets printed.

The four-party system

If you're using a so-called “universal” card like Visa or MasterCard, there are typically four parties involved: the merchant, the payment processor, the merchant acquirer, and the issuer. Their roles are as follows:

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Flickr user: Vanessa Berry

Lumen View Technology, an organization that used a patent on computerized matchmaking to sue several small companies, has been ordered to pay almost $300,000 to Santa Barbara startup FindTheBest.

The patent holder was able to pull settlements out of several small companies, but when Lumen View asked FindTheBest for a $50,000 payout, it instead got hit with a RICO lawsuit and a pledge to spend up to $1 million to beat them. US District Judge Denise Cote found the Lumen View patent invalid in November, saying it described nothing more than a computerized version of "matchmaking," an ancient process. In June, she ordered Lumen View to pay FindTheBest's legal fees, ruling the case was exceptional.

After hearing from both sides, Cote has settled on an amount: $302,083.63. That includes $148,592 in attorneys' fees enhanced by a multiplier of two, as well as $4,899.63 in costs. They also have been awarded nine percent interest—a little bit better than your savings account, right?—beginning on May 30.

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Alyson Hurt

Comcast has agreed to pay $16.7 million and provide services worth another $33.3 million to end an 11-year-old class action lawsuit in which Philadelphia residents alleged that the company violated federal antitrust law.

Filed on December 8, 2003, the suit claimed that large cable companies such as Comcast “divided and allocated markets through a series of agreements ‘swapping’ customers and ‘clustering’ cable systems in geographic areas. Such conduct has allowed a cable company, including Defendant, in a particular ‘cluster’ to acquire or maintain monopoly power, raise prices, engage in anticompetitive conduct, and limit choice for cable consumers to effectively the only game in town—the cable services of the 'cluster' monopoly cable company.”

The case went through many twists and turns over the years, including a Supreme Court ruling in favor of Comcast in March 2013. The plaintiffs, who had been seeking $875 million, kept the suit going by moving to re-certify a narrower class of alleged victims. Comcast still denies the allegations but agreed to a proposed settlement.

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Throw traps, shoot guns, grind rails: that's the Sunset Overdrive way.

Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. If I stay still, the monsters attack. If I stop sliding down rails, bouncing off of car hoods, or rappelling over zip lines, everything falls apart—the music in my head stops playing; the electricity stops surging through my dodge-rolls; the fire stops spewing from my duct-taped battle-axe.

Welcome to Sunset City, a sunny, dilapidated corpse of a not-so-futuristic riverside metropolis. The place used to be overrun by selfie-snapping hipsters until they chugged a brand-new energy drink that turned them into crazed mutants (we mean literally, as opposed to the figurative craze of a caffeine high). Somehow, "you" (by way of a relatively robust character creator, which happens to sport the dumbest hairstyles known to man) avoided taking a sip, and now you must survive and escape the madness alongside the few remaining human survivors.

Unlike everyone else, of course, you come prepared. When you find high-powered weapons, like a freeze ray or a bowling-ball launcher, you're able to shoot everything in sight with remarkable aim. When you see a building edge, a zip line, or other grindable and bounceable objects, you become a lightning-fast, super-powered parkour master.

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The unclassified network of the Executive Office of the President—the administrative network of the White House—was breached by attackers thought to be working for the Russian government, according to multiple reports. The Washington Post reported that an investigation is ongoing, and White House officials are not saying what data, if any, was stolen from the computers on the network. “We are still assessing the activity of concern,” an unnamed White House official told the Post.

According to the Post’s anonymous sources, the breach was discovered in early October after a friendly foreign government alerted US officials. The network’s virtual private network access was shut down, and some staff members were told to change passwords. "We took immediate measures to evaluate and mitigate the activity,” the Post’s source at the White House said. “Unfortunately, some of that resulted in the disruption of regular services to users. But people were on it and are dealing with it.”

This isn’t the first time attackers, apparently sponsored by a foreign state, have targeted the White House’s network. In 2008 and 2012, Chinese hackers penetrated the White House’s network. On the first occasion, the attackers gained access to the White House’s e-mail server; in 2012, a phishing attack against White House staffers gave attackers access to the network, though officials said no sensitive data was exposed.

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Nintendo

There hasn't been much good news to report regarding Nintendo's financial situation since the company's historic annual loss way back in the 2011-2012 period. That may be changing, though, as strong sales of new Wii U and 3DS software helped raise the company to a surprising quarterly profit of 24.2 billion yen (about $224 million) in net income for the three months ending September 2014. That's quite a turnaround after a loss of over eight billion yen (about $74.2 million) in the same period last year.

Nintendo cited a few hit titles in driving the financial turnaround: newly released Super Smash Bros. for 3DS sold 3.22 million copies worldwide in September alone, while zany simulation Tomodachi Life sold an additional 1.27 million copies in the last six months. On the Wii U side, Nintendo noted that Mario Kart 8 has "continued to show steady sales," following its 2.82 million unit debut last quarter, and Hyrule Warriors has "gained popularity" following its Western release. Perhaps tellingly, the company didn't release specific sales data for those two Wii U titles.

On the console hardware front, Nintendo sold just over 600,000 Wii U units worldwide in the July through September period, pushing the system to 7.29 million units overall since its 2012 launch. That puts the total installed base for the Wii U roughly on par with that for the Xbox One, according to a recent Ars analysis. It's important to note, though, that Nintendo's system has had an extra year on the market to reach that sales figure, and the Wii U currently seems to be selling more slowly than the Xbox One on a monthly basis.

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Defendant Paul Phua YouTube

When the FBI applied for warrants this summer to raid three $25,000-per-night villas at Caesar's Palace Hotel and Casino, it omitted some key investigatory details that eventually resulted in the arrest of eight individuals, including an alleged leader of a well-known Chinese crime syndicate, defense lawyers maintained in Las Vegas federal court documents late Tuesday.

The authorities built, in part, a case for a search warrant (PDF) by turning off Internet access in three villas shared by the eight individuals arrested. At various points, an agent of the FBI and a Nevada gaming official posed as the cable guy, secretly filming while gathering evidence of what they allege was a bookmaking ring where "hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal bets" on World Cup soccer were taking place.

"If this Court authorizes this duplicity, the government will be free to employ similar schemes in virtually every context to enter the homes of perfectly innocent people. Agents will frequently have no incentive to follow the warrant procedure required by the Constitution," defense lawyers wrote the Las Vegas federal magistrate presiding over the prosecution.

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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 the slow roll to autonomous cars. Join us this afternoon (3pm ET) for a live discussion on the topic with article author Jonathan Gitlin and his expert guests; your comments and questions are welcome.

Self-driving AI cars have been a staple in popular culture for some time—any child of the 1980s will fondly remember both the Autobots and Knight Rider’s KITT—but consider them to be science fiction no longer. Within the next five years, you’ll be able to buy a car that can drive itself (and you) down the highway, although transforming into a Decepticon-battling robot or crime-fighter may take a while longer. As one might expect, the journey to fully automated self-driving cars will be one of degrees.

Here in the US, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has created five categories of autonomous cars. The most basic of these are level zero, which might include your vehicle if it doesn’t have a system like electronic stability control. Fully autonomous cars, which can complete their journeys with no human control beyond choosing the destination, are categorized as level four. While level fours are still some way off, level three autonomous cars, which will be able to self-drive under certain conditions (say, an HOV lane during rush hour), are much closer than one might think.

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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry group that oversees the development of the specs used on the Web, today announced that the fifth major version of the hypertext markup language specification, HTML5, was today given Recommendation status, W3C's terminology for a final, complete spec.

The last version of HTML was 4.01, released in December 1999, making it almost fifteen years between updates. That's a long time to wait. The story of HTML5's development was a messy affair. After HTML 4.01, W3C embarked on XHTML, an update to HTML that incorporated various XML features such as stricter validation of Web pages and which was intended to make HTML "modular," broken down into a range of sub-specifications.

XHTML wasn't particularly compatible with the real world, however—Web pages that are, per the specs, broken are abundant, and under XHTML rules, browsers should refuse to display such pages entirely—and many in the Web community felt that W3C had lost its way and was irrelevant to the needs of real Web developers.

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(Almost) all the news that's fit to print. SugarString

The tech press has competition from Verizon Wireless.

Verizon's wireless subsidiary is bankrolling a tech site called SugarString. It looks kind of like a regular news site at first glance, but scroll to the bottom and you'll see the words, "Presented by Verizon," followed by this disclaimer: "These articles were written by authors contracted by Verizon Wireless. The views expressed on SugarString may not necessarily reflect those of Verizon Wireless."

The site has headlines such as "Why The Future Of Anonymous Browsing Lies In Hardware," "Drag Queen Lady Bunny Speaks on Controversial Facebook Policy," and "Just How Terrible Is Hungary’s Proposed Internet Tax?"

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TV-over-Internet company Aereo, shut down this summer by a Supreme Court decision, may still pull victory from the jaws of defeat. As was rumored last month, the FCC may be its savior.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler published a blog post today saying that Aereo, and other "linear channels" of online programming, should be allowed to negotiate for programming just like cable companies. Just like satellite companies needed regulatory change in order to be allowed to compete in 1992, Internet video providers should be able to negotiate on the same terms, he wrote.

While Wheeler writes that "Aereo visited the commission to make exactly this point," he emphasizes that this isn't a rule that would be for just one company. Dish, Sony, Verizon, and DirecTV have all showed interest in offering preprogrammed content online, he noted; CBS and HBO, which recently announced it would offer online-only service, may well join in. Wheeler wrote, in part:

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A professional espionage group has targeted a variety of Eastern European governments and security organizations with attacks aimed at stealing political and state secrets, security firm FireEye stated in a report released on Tuesday.

The group, dubbed APT28 by the company, has targeted high-level officials in Eastern European countries such as Georgia, and security organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). While Russian and Ukrainian cybercriminal groups are known to conduct massive campaigns aimed at stealing money and financial information, APT28 focuses solely on political information and state secrets, according to FireEye.

The report argues that the group is closely tied to Russia and likely part of Moscow’s intelligence apparatus.

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An Antares rocket carrying supplies to the International Space Station on an Orbital Sciences mission exploded during launch at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Tuesday evening.

The livestream of the event showed the rocket launch failing seconds after liftoff, leading to a dramatic explosion.

"The Orbital Sciences team is executing its contingency procedures, securing the site and data, including all telemetry from the Antares launch vehicle and Cygnus spacecraft," NASA stated on its website. "Before launch the Orbital team was not tracking any issues."

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samazgor

Several months ago, Facebook acquired messaging startup WhatsApp for a whopping $16 billion, plus an additional $3 billion for its founders and small staff. On Tuesday, Facebook announced that in 2012 and 2013, WhatsApp lost a combined $192.8 million. (WhatsApp famously has no advertising, and its current revenue model is to make money off annual subscription fees.)

Facebook also disclosed for the first time how it arrived at that $16 billion purchasing figure: $15.3 billion of that was simply wrapped up in the nebulous accounting term: “goodwill.”

"We're the most atypical Silicon Valley company you'll come across," Brian Acton, a WhatsApp co-founder, told Wired UK in February. "We were founded by thirtysomethings; we focused on business sustainability and revenue rather than getting big fast; we've been incognito almost all the time; we're mobile first; and we're global first."

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Aurich Lawson

In our second day of the Ars UNITE virtual conference, we looked at just how broken cloud privacy is and asked what can be done to fix it. Response to our feature on the topic, “Taking back privacy in the post-Snowden cloud,” fell primarily into two camps: “Don’t use the cloud!” and “build your own!” (The latter which can be loosely translated as... “don’t use the cloud.")

It seems unlikely that Congress will act to fix the problems with cloud privacy, which include a gap between privacy laws in the US and other countries. That was a source of concern long before the Snowden revelations, and it predates the extra-territorial reach of US law enforcement and intelligence damaging trust in cloud privacy overseas. Long-time Arsian Kilroy240 expressed cynicism over any government involvement in a fix. “Other than minimizing cyber-theft (personal/corporate data, IP), what would the government gain by improving the security of the cloud?” the user wrote. “This would just make it harder for them to monitor data traffic—strictly because they are trying to ‘save us from the terrorists.”

Both in the feature comments and in the live discussion, we explored whether government could (and would) do anything to fix the cloud’s privacy and security problems—many of which government agencies created in the first place. Perhaps more importantly, what could be done absent their help?

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