Super 45

In a months-long trademark lawsuit, hip hop star Kanye West has finally defeated all the alleged people involved with the parody cryptocurrency Coinye.

In January 2014, an unknown online group trumpeted the launch of “Coinye West” with a simple message: "We takin' shots at Bitcoin." Within days, West filed suit and Coinye appeared to collapse before really going anywhere.

Documents filed this week at a New York federal courthouse show that 10 of the named defendants lost by default, meaning that they never responded to the case. The only remaining step in the case is for the court to order a final judgment in favor of West.

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A reddit live thread in progress about the missing Air Algerie flight.

On Wednesday, reddit added a new post format for keeping up with breaking news events, according to a blog post at the site. reddit live threads are meant for "real-time updates" that appear from posters automatically without needing a page refresh.

The format is a reaction to numerous heavily trafficked threads that have appeared surrounding news events in the last few years, including the Boston Marathon bombing and the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Many reddit posters collect in relevant subreddits to discuss current events as they unfold, but because of the threaded and nested format of the site's comments, it's difficult for new information to surface without a user having to start a new thread, ultimately fragmenting the conversation.

reddit live threads are still backed by a traditional reddit discussion thread, but the new threads have an alternative layout to arrange posts as they appear in reverse chronological order, like an ongoing liveblog. There is no curation and no way to surface relevant or correct information; all priority is given to what is new.

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FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has been saying he’ll use the agency’s authority to overturn state laws that limit municipal broadband networks, and now he has a chance to make good on that promise.

EPB, a community-owned electric utility in Chattanooga, Tennessee, today filed a petition with the FCC asking it to invalidate a state law that prevents it from offering Internet and TV service outside its electric service area. EPB already operates a fiber network that provides broadband, TV, and phone service to people within its territory, and nearby communities have asked for service as well.

Wheeler is already facing opposition from House Republicans and the threat of a lawsuit, but he argues that the FCC can overturn state laws by using its authority to promote competition in local telecommunications markets by removing barriers that prevent investment.

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In May, the European Union's highest court ordered Google to grant EU citizens a "right to be forgotten" that would allow them to remove "inadequate" or "irrelevant" links. Google complied, providing a new form that was used thousands of times—mostly by those seeking to erase links related to accusations of fraud and other serious crimes.

But Google only removed links on its European sites, like google.co.uk. Users in Europe, or anywhere else, can still get "full" search results by visiting the US version of the site at google.com.

That decision is now under fire by EU regulators and experts, who have said the limitation "effectively defeats the purpose of the ruling," according to a Reuters report. EU authorities are scheduled to meet with Google today, as well as representatives from Yahoo and Microsoft, to discuss the issue.

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Watchlisting Guidance memo

Federal agencies have nominated more than 1.5 million names to terrorist watchlists over the past five years alone, yet being a terrorist isn't a condition of getting on a roster that is virtually impossible to be removed from, according to a leaked US "Watchlisting Guidance" manual.

The 166-page document, marked as "sensitive security information" and published by The Intercept, comes amid increasing skepticism over how people are placed on or get off of US terrorism databases like the no-fly list that bars flying to and within the United States.

Attorney General Eric Holder, for example, had claimed last year that national security would be imperiled if the public knew that a Stanford University graduate student was placed on the no-fly list because an FBI agent checked the wrong box on a nomination form. And just last month, a federal judge ruled that the government's method for allowing the public to challenge placement on the no-fly list was "wholly ineffective" and unconstitutional.

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Sean Nguyen

While Valve and its Steam distribution platform have been pushing Linux as the future of PC gaming for a long while now, the folks at online store GOG have contented themselves with PC and Mac software. That situation changed today, as GOG (formerly Good Old Games) announced support for Linux, offering over 50 titles for DRM-free download.

GOG's list of available Linux titles is unsurprisingly dominated by indie titles and overlaps somewhat with the more robust list of nearly 600 Linux titles on Steam. But GOG is promoting nearly two dozen titles that are being offered on Linux for the first time through GOG, after the site says it "personally ushered [them] one by one into the welcoming embrace of Linux gamers" with "special builds prepared by our team." That list of new-to-Linux titles on GOG includes some well-remembered, big-name classics like FlatOut (and FlatOut 2), Rise of the Triad, Sid Meier's Pirates, and Sid Meier's Colonization (not to mention Duke Nukem 3D, which was previously available on Linux).

Users who buy a Linux-compatible game from GOG will be able to download their games as distro-independent tar.gz archives and/or as DEB installers that will work on Ubuntu or Mint. For games compatible with multiple operating systems, one purchase gives access to all versions.

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Children are often fussy eaters, and most parents would say that trying to convince them that a given food is good for them won't help convince them to eat it. As it turns out, "won't help" might be overstating things. When told that a food serves some purpose other than tasting good, kids will rate it as less tasty and eat less of it.

Two Chicago-area researchers, Michal Maimaran and Ayelet Fishbach, phrase their research in terms of what they call "food instrumentality"—the idea that a given type of food is good for achieving a goal. Carrots are good for your vision, spinach makes you strong, and so on. The researchers suspect that this idea interacts with a quirk in the reasoning of young children: they tend to think of things as only serving a single purpose. If carrots are good for your vision, the reasoning goes, they're not likely to be good for your tastebuds at the same time.

Over a series of experiments with children three to five years old, the authors tested foods that were given various purposes: makes you strong, helps you read, or helps you count. In each case, the same foods were offered to a set of control children without any message. By a variety of measures, a positive message about the food undermined the cause: the children rated it as less tasty, planned on consuming less, and actually did consume less when they were given the chance to eat it.

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You, too can Yosemite-ize your desktop. Just proceed with caution. Andrew Cunningham

If you didn't sign up for the OS X Yosemite public beta after reading our preview yesterday, you should do it sooner rather than later. Apple has just released the software to its Beta Program site, and people who have signed up should be receiving their notification e-mails now if they haven't gotten them already. Beta testers will receive a Mac App Store redemption code for the software, at which point they can download it as they would a standard OS X installer.

Since this build of Yosemite is beta software, you should back up all of your data and treat the release as though it could wipe out your entire hard drive at any time. Time Machine is your friend. Use a Mac you don't rely on day-to-day if you have one, or at least make a separate test partition after backing all of your stuff up.

If you're one of the people who's going to run this on your primary computer as your primary operating system no matter what we say, Apple has said that the public beta build will be able to update to the final, "golden master" build of Yosemite when it's finished in the fall. There shouldn't be any need to completely reload the OS.

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The target chamber of the National Ignition Facility. Matt Swisher

The discovery of so many exoplanets in recent years has raised many new questions, forcing us to reexamine some of our ideas. Scientists had extrapolated models of stellar system evolution from our own Solar System, assuming that others look very similar to our own. But extrapolation can only get us so far. Scientists never expected to find so many “hot Jupiters”—gas giants larger than Jupiter and orbiting very close to their star.

We’re also having a hard time understanding the inner workings of exoplanets and stars with much greater mass than Earth. Scientists have managed to test some materials under extreme pressures and found that our conventional ideas about a material’s behavior may not apply. Certain exotic quantum mechanical models could apply in such extreme cases, but until recently, scientists have not been able to test those models’ predictions.

The difficulty, of course, is that actually visiting the cores of gas giants to test our understandings is wildly impractical. The next best thing, then, is to recreate these massive pressures on Earth and study their effects on materials. As impossible a task as it may seem, scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) used its enormous lasers to do exactly that.

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The PSN cracking saga is finally coming to a close, legally.

The final loose ends from the massive hack of Sony's PlayStation Network that first came to light in April 2011 are being tied up, with Sony agreeing to a settlement that could hold it liable for up to $15 million in damages, plus nearly $2.75 million in attorney fees.

The lengthy settlement agreement (PDF) offers a number of benefits to users affected by the breach: a free downloadable PS3 or PSP game (from a selection of 14 titles), three PS3 themes (from a selection of six), or a three-month subscription to PlayStation Plus. Users who took advantage of Sony's "Welcome Back" promotion back in 2011 can choose one of those benefits, while those who didn't get a free game back then can choose from two of the three benefits.

Sony has also agreed to pay up to $2,500 to each user who can show that their identity was compromised in a way that "more likely than not... directly and proximately resulted from the PSN Intrusion or the SOE Intrusion and not from any other source." Users can get additional benefits if they can show they stopped using their PSN account for the last three years because of the breach, if they lost out on time using an existing Qriocity music subscription, or if they were registered for Sony Online Entertainment games.

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While communication from Microsoft about its layoffs and reorganization lacks a certain amount of clarity, one statement made in its earnings call yesterday did appear to be straightforward: "We will streamline the next version of Windows from three operating systems into one single converged operating system for screens of all sizes" said CEO Satya Nadella.

The immediate reaction was twofold. From some parties, there were congratulatory noises, praising Nadella for this new strategy that moved away from the Ballmer-era multiple operating system. From others, there was glee that the "confusing" line-up of Windows, Windows RT, and Windows Phone would soon be gone and that in the future users would no longer need to worry about what their devices were using. Some are even cheering the "fact" that this means that Windows RT will be killed off forever.

That Nadella's remarks provoked headlines and column inches is ever so surprising, however, because what he said isn't new, isn't really being interpreted properly, and wasn't really his idea.

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Antana

Heritage Auctions, the Texas company orchestrating the Bitcoins.com sale, pulled the auction listing on Wednesday afternoon, stating: "This lot has been withdrawn from this auction. Bids are no longer accepted and previous bids are cancelled."

The move comes as the result of a federal judicial order issued on Tuesday that put an immediate halt to the sale of Bitcoins.com, the domain name owned by embattled Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles.

"The lot is being held for now so we can get this sorted out one way or the other," Noah Fleisher, a Heritage Auctions spokesman, told Ars. "I haven't heard from [Karpeles] at all."

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Today, NASA announced that it's issuing a Request for Information that seeks parties, either academic or commercial, who are willing to set up a communications relay orbiting Mars. Should the agency like the information it gets, it could extend its current fee-for-service approach well beyond Earth's orbit.

Because of weight and power restrictions, the hardware that we've landed on Mars can't carry high-bandwidth communication devices that can reach Earth (it does, however, carry lower-bandwidth hardware that can establish a direct connection). Instead, missions like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has its own science instruments, also carry communications hardware that lets them receive high volumes of data from the planet's surface and quickly send it back to Earth.

MRO is the most recent hardware that serves this purpose, but it's already nearly a decade old; Odyssey, its fellow relay, is even older. Fortunately, the MAVEN mission, which arrives this year, will also have relay capabilities, as will the ESA's ExoMars orbiter, which should arrive in 2016.

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NASA

With all the attention given to every nuance of climate data, areas of research that would have never attracted much public interest sometimes find themselves in the spotlight. So it is with the process of measuring sea ice cover. People pay careful attention because it appears to be a leading indicator of climate change. In the Arctic, where the warming has been most intense, sea ice is retreating rapidly, with record lows having been set every few years over the past decades.

But at the other pole, Antarctic sea ice has been steadily expanding, creating a bit of a conundrum for scientists. They've come up with a variety of explanations for why the two poles might be behaving differently but, in the mean time, people have latched on to the difference to question our understanding of climate change.

Now, a paper has come out questioning whether the difference between the poles is as dramatic as it seemed. The reason for the potential difference? Measuring sea ice is remarkably hard.

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The Asus RT-AC87.

If you've been waiting for a Wi-Fi router that supports multi-user beamforming, there's now one for sale. The Asus RT-AC87 advertises support for 1.73Gbps throughput, and it implements one of the most highly anticipated features of 802.11ac Wi-Fi: MU-MIMO (multi-user, multiple-input, and multiple-output).

As we explained in the feature, "Wi-Fi networks are wasting a gigabit—but multi-user beamforming will save the day," MU-MIMO relies on multi-user beamforming to send data streams of up to 433Mbps to three or more users simultaneously. This is an improvement over single-user beamforming, which could send multiple streams of data, but only to one device at a time.

The Asus RT-AC87 uses a Quantenna MU-MIMO chipset and sends data over four streams to get up to 1.73Gbps on the 5 GHz band. It can send another 600Mbps over 2.4 GHz.

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As many as 50,000 websites have been remotely commandeered by attackers exploiting a recently patched vulnerability in a popular plugin for the WordPress content management system, security researchers said Wednesday.

As Ars reported in early July, the vulnerability in MailPoet, a WordPress plugin with more than 1.7 million downloads, allows attackers to upload any file of their choice to vulnerable servers. In the three weeks since then, attackers have exploited the bug to install a backdoor on an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 websites, some that don't even run WordPress software or that don't have MailPoet enabled, according to Daniel Cid, CTO of security firm Sucuri.

"To be clear, the MailPoet vulnerability is the entry point," he wrote in a blog post. "It doesn't mean your website has to have it enabled or that you have it on the website; if it resides on the server, in a neighboring website, it can still affect your website." In an e-mail to Ars, he elaborated:

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This image, confirmed by Ars Technica to be buried in the latest Steam client beta, could show a potential new design for a Steam Controller with a traditional analog stick. Valve

When Valve first unveiled its prototype for a handheld video game controller last September, the most striking thing about it, from a modern design perspective, was the complete lack of analog joysticks. It's an omission that remained even after Valve updated the controller prototype to include more traditional digital button placement.

So it's quite interesting that the latest version of the official Steam beta client includes the above image, showing a version of the Steam controller with an analog stick where the directional buttons used to be.

The file seems to have been first spotted by an enterprising member of the FacePunch.com forums, but we've confirmed that anyone with access to the PC version of Steam's latest beta client update should have this file on their hard drive (if you've updated the beta, it should be in [Steam directory]\tenfoot\resource\images\library\alpha_conroller_lines_d0g.png in case you want to confirm for yourself; we haven't checked the Mac and Linux clients yet). The file on our system, which appears to be an overlay for some sort of controller configuration or help menu, was created on May 19 and modified to the current analog-stick-sporting version on July 16.

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});In our preview of the OS X Yosemite beta today, we focused mostly on the OS-wide changes to the user interface and the new features of a few built-in apps. As happened in the transition from iOS 6 to iOS 7, though, there are plenty of other applications in Yosemite that still work like they did in Mavericks, just with a fresh coat of paint.

We've collected a few different representative examples in the photo gallery below—some of these designs completely rethink the way the original application looked (Game Center). Some of them look basically the same but compress the UI or move buttons to different places to make existing features more accessible (Maps, Preview). Still others are just the same apps with different colors (Notes).

The one class of app that remains essentially the same as before (at least of this writing) are the things in the Utilities folder, many of which even use the same "old-style" glassy icons as before. Only the Terminal and Activity Monitor get different icons at all, though the look of the apps don't change. The apps in Utilities are all, you know, utilities, so aesthetics aren't especially important there. Just know that Apple hasn't changed everything about the way Yosemite looks.

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Whether you're still running a years-long instance of 2004's The Sims 2, complete with a family's dozens of generations babbling in Simlish while running into all matter of torture-inducing home spaces or haven't even played the game once, Electronic Arts has a giant, if ancient, freebie for you. Years after the game's "exchange" content website shuttered, the game's producer announced last week it would no longer post updates or patches for the decade-old game.

To ease the pain for all 50 players who'll never see their Radeon-related visual glitches fixed, EA gave all Sims 2 owners on the Origin PC games service a free upgrade to the game's "Ultimate Collection" version, which includes the game's eight expansion packs and nine "stuff" packs.

But what about players who didn't register the game on Origin (or, er, never bought The Sims 2 in the first place)? EA has them covered, too, because as of Wednesday, the company is now offering free downloads of The Sims 2: Ultimate Collection to all Origin members until July 31. Simply log in to Origin and use the redemption code "I-LOVE-THE-SIMS" to immediately jump into the "Apartment Life" expansion, the Ikea household pack, and everything else your dollhouse heart desires.

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Duff Watson, of Minnesota, stirring up trouble with his hand computer, no doubt. CBS Minnesota

A Minnesota man was ejected from a Southwest Airlines flight for a tweet calling a gate agent rude, reported CBS Minnesota Wednesday. After tweeting, the man was removed from the plane and stated he was "forced" to delete the tweet before he could re-board.

Duff Watson is an "A-list" passenger with Southwest, which gives him priority boarding. Watson was miffed when the agent in question told him his two children couldn't board the plane as priority passengers with him, and Watson let her know that Twitter would, in fact, be hearing about this.

"Something to the effect of 'Wow, rudest agent in Denver. Kimberly S, gate C39, not happy @SWA,'" is how Watson summarized the tweet to CBS. The family eventually boarded the plane, but according to Watson's daughter, Lucy, the agent threatened to call the cops over the tweet. Watson relayed that the agent said her safety felt threatened.

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