Patch notes! We considered rewriting them in Comic Sans for funsies, but cooler heads prevailed.

On Thursday evening, Apple gave its first major iOS 8 update another shot—only this time without the major bugs in yesterday's attempt. Upon installation, iOS 8.0.1 left many iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users with non-functioning cellular service and TouchID buttons. Apple told CNBC that 40,000 people were affected by the problems, and the update was quickly pulled.

iOS 8.0.2 is now available for all compatible iDevices, and its patch notes look remarkably like those from 8.0.1, with one major update: "Fixes an issue in iOS 8.0.1 that impacted cellular network connectivity and Touch ID on iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus." Otherwise, the good stuff we'd hoped for yesterday, including HealthKit fixes, a third-party keyboard update, and photo-library access for third-party apps, is now ready to rock on your favorite, compatible iDevice.

Our own Andrew Cunningham reported a smooth update on his latest iPhones; that, plus positive chatter on Twitter feeds, has us convinced that this should be a safer update to accept.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Ministerio del Interior 2014 James Comey, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, said Thursday he was "concerned" over Apple and Google marketing smart phones that can't be searched by law enforcement.

"What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law," Comey told reporters. He said the bureau has reached out to Apple and Google "to understand what they're thinking and why they think it makes sense."

The move to encryption is among the latest aftershocks in the wake of NSA leaker Edward Snowden's revelations about massive US government surveillance.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Yuneec Technology had this sleek-looking drone, called Flying Eyes, at the National Broadcasters Association conference in Spring 2014. It comes fully assembled for those who just need aerial images, not a weekend project. Megan Geuss

On Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration granted six aerial photo and video companies exemptions from rules that make it difficult to use drones for commercial purposes in the United States. US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx determined that drones used by these companies would not threaten other aircraft or pose a national security threat.

Law enforcement agencies, fire departments, and the military have thus far been the primary drone operators in the US. Commercial drones, especially those that are intended to make deliveries like the one that will be launched by DHL in Germany this week or the ones proposed by Amazon and others, have generally not been allowed since 2007. (Of course, people can use non-commercial drones, and potentially crash them, with certain caveats.)

The six firms, which include Astraeus Aerial, Aerial MOB, HeliVideo Productions, Pictorvision Inc., RC Pro Productions Consulting, and Snaproll Media, will certainly pave the way for other commercial drone companies seeking to deploy their own drones in agriculture, oil and gas, logistics, and other sectors as well.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

BoingBoing

As reports and videos about the bendability of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus continue to accumulate, Apple issued a response on Thursday that detailed the stress-test rigors its phones endure before shipping to market. Additionally, the company announced that in the new iPhones' first six days on the market, "only nine customers" had reported bent phone issues directly to Apple.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple called the bending cases "extremely rare," then described the five-step testing process that its newest models, made of "a custom grade of anodized aluminum" along with "stainless steel and titanium inserts," had to endure. The WSJ described two of those tests in detail: the "pressure point cycling test," which applies force all over an iPhone's screen and body, and the "sit test," which simulates a situation in which someone sits on a hard surface while wearing tight pants. (We'd love to see a crash-test dummy mock-up of the latter.)

Apple's response didn't include any concession of design fault, and its specific count of nine complaining customers certainly didn't include videos and other social-media complaints that have gone live since last weekend—particularly this hard-to-watch bending of an iPhone 6 Plus posted by BoingBoing (posted next to a video of other smartphones bending back into place for comparison's sake, which their iPhone 6 Plus was unable to do).

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Samsung loves "big." Its phones are big, its advertising budget is big, and as you'll see below, its employee headcount is really big, too. Samsung has more employees than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined. We dug through everyone's 10-K (or equivalent) SEC filings and came up with this:

Samsung Electronics vs the headcounts of other companies. Ron Amadeo

At 275,000 employees, Samsung (just Samsung Electronics) is the size of five Googles! This explains Samsung's machine-gun-style device output; the company has released around 46 smartphones and 27 tablets just in 2014.

If we wanted to, we could cut these numbers down some more. Google is going to shed 3,894 employees once it finally gets rid of Motorola. Over half of Apple's headcount—42,800 employees—is from the retail division, putting the non-retail part of the company at only 37,500 employees. The "Sony" on this chart only means "Sony Electronics," the part of the company that is most comparable to Samsung Electronics. Sony Group has a massive media arm consisting of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, and Sony Financial Services.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Amazon has started warning customers of its EC2 cloud computing platform that it's going to start rebooting their instances en masse over the next few days.

Not all EC2 instance types will need rebooting; the fast storage (HS1) and large memory (R3) virtual machines are unaffected. But the reboots will nonetheless be widespread, with all regions and all availability zones affected. Rebooting is due to start this evening and finish next Tuesday.

Amazon hasn't explained why the bulk reboot is needed, but a source speaking to ITNews has said that it's due to an embargoed flaw in the Xen hypervisor. That bug, XSA-108, is due to be publicly disclosed on October 1, by which time Amazon's reboot should be complete.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Oculus

Over the last few years, I've tried a number of virtual reality "solutions" that involve popping a smartphone into some sort of mask that straps to your face. On the surface, it seems like a natural fit to use a phone as a combination virtual reality display, head-tilt sensor, and processor that avoids the need to tether to a bulky PC tower.

Unfortunately, every one of the prototype phone-based VR devices I'd tried delivered an on-the-cheap virtual reality experience that ranged from awful to mediocre. Issues with optics, frame rate, and accurate head tracking have plagued all of these efforts to the extent that I began to think modern cell phones just weren't up to the task of driving convincing virtual reality.

Thus, I was a bit skeptical of Gear VR, Samsung's recently announced hardware effort that turns the upcoming Galaxy Note 4 smartphone into a VR headset using a holster powered by Rift maker Oculus. The middling hands-on experience with Gear VR reported by our own Ron Amadeo earlier this month didn't really change my impressions, either.

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Misterbnb

If you were gay and a recent passenger on American Airlines, you might have used in-flight Wi-Fi provided by Gogo just like any other customer. In the course of finding somewhere to stay before you land, you might have navigated to misterbnb.com, a version of Airbnb where customers looking for a place to stay can be guaranteed the hosts are gay-friendly. Rather than getting the site's homepage, however, your browser would have kicked you to an interstitial page telling you the site had been censored by Gogo. The given reason would have been the site had been categorized as "adult-and-pornography."

Looking at Misterbnb, there is nothing to trigger a pornography-centric filter on the homepage. The word "gay" appears a handful of times, but there is no salacious language, no risque photos, no video, not even any wild-card advertising space that could turn up a rogue Flash ad, photo, or video that runs counter to the tone of the site. "Travel gay friendly," "build the gay travel community," or "attend the next gay events" is about as hot as the site's narrative gets. In total, the word "gay" appears 11 times in text on the site's homepage.

Gogo and American Airlines are not the first Wi-Fi providers to be touchy about LGBT content; over the last year, a handful of businesses, including Au Bon Pain, Tim Horton's, and McDonald's, made minor news for not allowing their customers to view innocuous LGBT-centric websites, like GLAAD's homepage.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

DHL

Tomorrow, German logistics company DHL is expected to launch a small drone which will fly approximately 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) from Norddeich, a village in northern Germany, to the island of Juist, a small island community off the north coast of Germany. DHL has dubbed the drone the “parcelcopter,” and it will be used to regularly deliver medications and other necessities, marking a noted advancement in the commercial use of drones worldwide.

DHL says that its parcelcopter is the first drone to fly in Europe outside of the field of vision of the pilot in a real-life mission. The company and two of its research partners worked with the German Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure to establish “a restricted flight area exclusively for this research project,” thus bypassing the kinds of regulations that have made it difficult for commercial drone use to take off elsewhere in the world (pardon the pun).

The parcelcopter's flight will also be fully automated. “This means that a pilot does not have to take any action at all during any phase of the flight,” a DHL press release explains. However, for safety reasons, and in order to comply with government requirements, “the DHL parcelcopter will be constantly monitored during the flight by a mobile ground station in Norddeich so that manual action can be immediately taken in real time if a malfunction or emergency occurs. The ground station will also maintain constant contact with air traffic controllers,” the press release says.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The South Carolina incident.
A South Carolina highway trooper was charged Wednesday over accusations of assault and battery in connection to the unprovoked shooting of a motorist pulled over for a seatbelt violation—an incident that was videotaped by the officer's dashcam.

And on the same day South Carolina patrolman Sean Groubert, 31, was charged with wrongful shooting, California officials agreed to pay a woman $1.5 million after a motorist captured video with a mobile phone of a California highway patrolman repeatedly punching a woman on the side of a Los Angeles freeway.

That officer, Daniel Andrew, agreed to resign and could still be charged in connection to the July pummeling of a homeless woman. The video of Andrew repeatedly punching Marlene Pinnock in the face invoked images of the Rodney King beating while garnering millions of hits on YouTube and elsewhere. An off-duty policeman helped subdue the officer.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A London-based security researcher made multiple reports to Apple that the company's iCloud service was vulnerable to brute-force password attacks months before the revelations that celebrities' iCloud backups were mined for intimate photos and videos. The Daily Dot reports that Ibrahim Balic sent descriptions of the vulnerability to Apple in March in addition to filing a report that the system leaked user data that could be used to mount such attacks. Balic attempted to reach out both via e-mail and through the company's Web-based bug reporting system.

In an e-mail dated March 26, Balic told an Apple employee:

I found a new issue regarding on Apple accounts (sic)...By the brute force attack method I can try over 20,000 + times passwords on any accounts. I think account lockout should probably be applied. I'm attaching a screen shot for you. I found the same issue with Google and I have got my response from them.

The Apple employee responded, "It's good to hear from you. Thank you for the information."

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Former FCC Chairman Michael Powell with FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. NCTA

FCC commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Mignon Clyburn yesterday called for stronger network neutrality rules than the ones fellow Democrat and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has thus far supported.

In a speech yesterday at a congressional forum on net neutrality, Rosenworcel said, "we cannot have a two-tiered Internet with fast lanes that speed the traffic of the privileged and leave the rest of us lagging behind."

The FCC's tentative proposal approved in May would not prevent Internet service providers from charging Web services for priority access to consumers over the network's last mile, but it asked the public for comments on whether the commission should impose stricter or weaker rules. A total of 3.7 million comments poured in, mostly in favor of stronger restrictions on how ISPs treat Internet traffic.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Dubbed "Shellshock," the vulnerability is already being exploited by what looks to be a web server botnet.

The vulnerability reported in the GNU Bourne Again Shell (Bash) yesterday, dubbed "Shellshock," may already have been exploited in the wild to take over Web servers as part of a botnet. More security experts are now weighing in on the severity of the bug, expressing fears that it could be used for an Internet "worm" to exploit large numbers of public Web servers. And the initial fix for the issue still left Bash vulnerable to attack, according to a new US CERT National Vulnerability Database entry. A second vulnerability in Bash allows for an attacker to overwrite files on the targeted system.

Update: The vulnerability was addressed by the maintainer of Bash, Chet Ramey,  in an email to the Open Source Software Security (oss-sec) mailing list. An unofficial patch that fixes the problem has  been developed, but there is as of yet no official patch that completely addresses both vulnerabilities.

In a blog post yesterday, Robert Graham of Errata Security noted that someone is already using a massive Internet scan to locate vulnerable servers for attack. In a brief scan, he found over 3,000 servers that were vulnerable "just on port 80"—the Internet Protocol port used for normal Web Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests. And his scan broke after a short period, meaning that there could be vast numbers of other servers vulnerable. A Google search by Ars using advanced search parameters yielded over two billion webpages that at least partially fit the profile for the Shellshock exploit.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

When we talk about greenhouse gas emissions, it’s usually in the form of one big number (bigger every year) representing the global total. There’s also the concentration of CO­2 in the atmosphere, which knows no borders. When it comes time to talk policy (during UN climate negotiations, for example), national totals for the top emitters will enter the conversation—too often to aid an argument that some other country should be the one to start doing all the work.

Many researchers need to zoom in much further, though, to really understand what’s going on. It’s a problem you can attack from the top—starting with national totals and spreading them across the country in some detail—or from the bottom, utilizing local measurements and emissions records.

A group of researchers led by Arizona State’s Salvi Asefi-Najafabady has produced the highest-resolution map of emissions yet, making the reality of our greenhouse footprint a little more real. It shows exactly where the most work remains to be done as we seek to unshackle ourselves from the fossil fuels that have brought great benefits, for which the bill is finally coming due.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Earlier this month, we reported on the Xbox One's historically weak Japanese launch, which saw under 24,000 units sold in its first four days on the market. Things have gone from bad to worse in the intervening weeks, with the system selling just under 1,500 units in the week ending September 21, according to tracking firm Media Create (as reported by 4Gamer).

Only 1,314 people bought a new Xbox One in Japan in the last week of reporting, a performance that follows just over 3,000 sales the week before. That puts the newly launched system well behind the Wii U and PS4, which continue to sell at least 7,000 systems a week in the country. Even the aging PS3 is outselling the Xbox One, with over 6,000 sales per week in the same time period.

Microsoft has traditionally struggled for a foothold in the Japanese console market, and there's no reason to think Xbox One sales would pick up after launch without any new exclusive software. Still, even the Xbox 360 managed to sell over 12,000 units in Japan a month after its launch, and it managed to average roughly 4,000 Japanese sales per week through 2010. For the Xbox One to drop this close to triple-digit weekly sales so soon after its Japanese launch isn't just a slow start, it's an anemic one.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Apple's latest iPhones are vulnerable to the same fingerprint forging attack as the older iPhone 5S, allowing access to the phone via a fingerprint fabricated with some specialized knowledge and materials costing less than a thousand dollars, according to a researcher who reproduced the attack against the latest iPhones.

Mark Rogers, principal security researcher for mobile security firm Lookout, used techniques common to law enforcement investigators and prototypers to first lift latent prints from the device and then create a mold from a custom circuit-board kit. Then, using glue, he made a thin rubber print that he placed over his thumb, fooling the Touch ID sensor on the latest iPhones.

While his experiments suggested that Apple improved the sensor on the latest iPhones—it rejected slightly fewer legitimate prints and slightly more fake prints—Rogers found that the technique still works on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Forza Horizon 2 is the latest installment of Microsoft’s console racing franchise, and it brings the driving-meets-MMO concept to the Xbox One. As with its predecessor, Forza Horizon 2 is built from Forza Motorsport DNA, which UK-based Playground Games have combined with experience gleaned from titles like Project Gotham Racing, TOCA, and DiRT. Once again, the result is a driving game with that familiar Forza look and feel, but it's tuned to appeal to a slightly different audience.

Forza Horizon 2 swaps its predecessor's open roads of Colorado for digital versions of Southern France and Northern Italy. The Horizon music festival has crossed the Atlantic, and, as the game begins, you’re given the job of ferrying the new Lamborghini Huracan to the opening event. From here, you begin the career mode, which has you driving between France and Italy along the coast and through the mountains. You’re guided from event to event by Ben, the festival organizer, imbued by British actor Sean Maguire with just enough charisma to keep him the right side of being horribly annoying.

Sights and Sounds

A real high point of the first Forza Horizon game was its soundtrack, carefully curated by British DJ Rob Da Bank. He’s back with Forza Horizon 2 and a much larger soundtrack, now with seven different radio stations (although some of these have to be unlocked as you progress through the game). Da Bank is particularly good at curating a good driving soundtrack. These are the kinds of songs you might expect to hear in commercials for the next few years after being first exposed to them here.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Photographer Alex Wild really knows his bugs. That's because his love of the craft grew out of an appreciation for the insects, "an aesthetic complement to scientific work," as he notes in his bio. Wild is a biologist with a Ph.D. in Entomology from the University of California-Davis, where he focused on ant evolution; he got serious about photography in 2002. Nowadays he's taught both science (entomology and beekeeping at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and skill (his BugShot insect photography workshops).

Wild was kind enough to share with Ars his personal experiences of being a copyright-reliant photographer in the Internet age. His imagery has recently appeared on billboards, YouTube commercials, pesticide spray labels, website banners, exterminator trucks, T-shirts, iPhone cases, stickers, company logos, e-book covers, trading cards, board games, video game graphics, children’s books, novel covers, app graphics, alt-med dietary supplement labels, press releases, pest control advertisements, crowdfunding promo videos, coupons, fliers, newspaper articles, postage stamps, advertisements for pet ants (yes, that’s a thing), canned food packaging, ant bait product labels, stock photography libraries, and greeting cards.

And that list includes only the outlets that displayed his work without permission.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A worker honey bee covered in pollen. Honey bees add about 20 billion dollars a year to the US economy, mostly through their pollination services. Urbana, Illinois, USA. Alex Wild

Here is a true story about how copyright infringement costs my small photography business thousands of dollars every year.

Or, maybe it isn’t. It could also be a true story of how copyright infringement earns me thousands of dollars every year. I can’t be sure. Either way, this is definitely the story of how copyright infringement takes up more of my time than I wish to devote to it. Copyright infringement drains my productivity to the point where I create hundreds fewer images each year. And it's why, in part, I am leaving professional photography for an academic position less prone to the frustrations of a floundering copyright system.

I have an unusual, and an unusually fun, job: I photograph insects for a living. I love what I do in no small part because the difference between my profession and getting paid to be an overgrown kid, is… not that much, really. I collect ants and beetles, I play with camera gadgets, I run around in the woods. Meanwhile, publishers, museums, and the pest control industry send me enough in licensing fees that I haven’t starved to death. By nature photographer standards, business is booming. I cover a modest mortgage in a working class neighborhood. I even afford a new lens or two every year.

Read 41 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Disagreements between company executives and the army of PR people who serve them always raise a smile. Public relations teams work so hard to control corporate messaging, and then execs who should know better ignore it.

Next week, Microsoft is having an event in San Francisco. The official purpose of this event is to show off "what's next for Windows and the enterprise." That's a little vague; it could mean a new version of Windows, or a new update, or anything in between. But Alain Crozier, president of Microsoft France, told employees earlier this week that Windows 9 was going to be shown off at the event, as spotted by ZDNet France.

But it turns out that wasn't suitably on-message. Microsoft PR got in touch with ZDNet to tell them that the next version of Windows doesn't actually have a name. So it's not Windows 9 at all.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments