Yahoo's homepage as it appeared in 1996 with the directory front and center.

As part of an ongoing effort to streamline and focus its business, Yahoo today announced that it was retiring its namesake product.

In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo, graduate students at Stanford University, created a hierarchical directory of websites, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." In March of that year, they gave it the name "Yahoo!," for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."

In the early days of the Web, these categorized, human-curated Web listings were all the rage. Search engines existed, but rapidly became notorious for their poor result quality. On a Web that was substantially smaller than the one we enjoy today, directories were a useful alternative way of finding sites of interest.

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© General Motors

Over the past few months, General Motors and its Chevrolet dealerships have been selling the 2015 Corvette with an interesting feature called Valet Mode. Valet Mode records audio, video, and driving statistics of the person in the driver's seat when the driver isn't around, thus keeping low-life valets from being too loose with their filthy mitts while inside a Corvette owner's fancy car.

Trouble is that in a handful of states, using Valet Mode might be considered a felony.

Federal wiretapping laws generally require only one party to consent to a recording of an interaction. But in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington, all parties involved in the recording must either consent to a recording or at least be aware that the recording is happening, depending on the state. So if a Corvette owner turns on Valet Mode in California and turns the car over to the unknowing attendant, that Corvette owner could be committing a felony.

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Comcast executive Charlie Herrin is aiming to improve Comcast's legendarily poor customer service. Comcast

After months of getting bashed for treating customers poorly, Comcast today said it's going to make improving customer service its "number one priority." But the company admitted that "it may take a few years before we can honestly say that a great customer experience is something we’re known for."

Neil Smit, CEO of Comcast's cable division, wrote today that Comcast's customer service hasn't kept up with Comcast's focus on "product innovation," technology, and content. "But this is only one half of the customer experience equation. The other half is operational excellence in how we deliver service," he wrote. "The way we interact with our customers—on the phone, online, in their homes—is as important to our success as the technology we provide. Put simply, customer service should be our best product."

A longtime Comcast executive is being called upon to fulfill that goal. Smit announced the promotion of 15-year Comcast veteran Charlie Herrin to a new role as senior VP of customer experience. Herrin previously was senior VP of product development and led design of X1, Comcast's new TV user interface.

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Update, 9/26 11:00 PM ET: The most recent patches issued for the "Shellshock" bug have apparently still left avenues of attack, based on the analysis of several open source developers. See the latest report for further information.

After the discovery that a patch designed to repair the “Shellshock” vulnerability in the GNU Bourne Again Shell (bash) still allowed for an attacker to execute commands on a remote system, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and other Linux distribution providers have pushed out a second fix to the vulnerability. At the same time, security researchers and service providers have detected a surge in scans for systems with the vulnerability, as would-be attackers seek to take advantage of the bug.

“Shellshock” has been compared to the Heartbleed bug discovered in the OpenSSL cryptography library in April because of its potential severity and its widespread nature. Like Heartbleed, the Shellshock vulnerabilities were introduced by errors in coding years ago—errors made by an unpaid volunteer writing code that would end up in millions of computer systems.

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Microsoft has announced the return of its WinHEC conferences. The first of the new conferences will be March 18 and 19 next year and is being held in Shenzhen, China.

The old WinHEC events, standing for Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, were held annually in the US. At them, Microsoft would outline its hardware plans and the direction that it saw the PC evolving, with the audience being hardware OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers), IHVs (Independent Hardware Vendors), and IDHs (Independent Design Houses).

The last old WinHEC was in 2008, held a few days after, and in the same location as, the PDC software developer conference. The focus then was Windows 7, which was given its first public preview at PDC. The last PDC was held in 2010. From 2011, Microsoft ran a conference that it named BUILD. Officially, this was supposed to appeal to both the traditional PDC audience of software developers and the WinHEC audience of hardware companies. In practice, however, BUILD has been heavily skewed toward software, so while it was a reasonable successor to PDC, it left the WinHEC community out in the cold.

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BT has conducted field trials that show it can deliver broadband download speeds of nearly 800Mbps using fiber and copper, a company announcement said yesterday.

The technology delivers data over fiber from the British telecom's facilities to neighborhoods while using copper for the final meters. Deployments of this sort are less expensive than fiber-to-the-home because they reuse existing copper lines used for telephone service and DSL.

"Previously it was thought such speeds would require a dedicated business line or a fibre optic cable to be laid all the way from a telephone exchange to a premises, a relatively expensive, disruptive and time-consuming process," BT said.

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Theodorus Van Vliet crashed his drone into Grand Prismatic Hot Spring (seen here) in Yellowstone National Park. Frank Kovalchek

After entering a guilty plea, a federal judge ordered a Dutch tourist to pay over $3,000 in fines after he crashed his drone into the Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming in August 2014.

According to Yellowstone officials, Theodorus Van Vliet was fined $1,000 and also must pay over $2,200 in restitution. His drone remains at the bottom of the iconic hot spring.

Van Vliet is the second person to be prosecuted since the National Park Service (NPS) banned drones in all parks as of June 2014.

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Sometimes, getting exactly the result you predict is more exciting than it sounds. Last week, Science published a paper about creating chemical compounds with element 106, Seaborgium. A quick glance at the abstract showed that this chemical behaved similarly to the one made of Sg's lighter cousin, tungsten. That sounds a bit dull—in fact I skipped covering it last week for precisely this reason—until you find out that you wouldn't necessarily expect this result.

Admittedly, just getting the experiment done at all is pretty impressive. The isotope of seaborgium used, 265Sg, has a half-life of only 16 seconds. It has to be produced in a particle accelerator, which means it's normally rather energetic and part of a cloud of energetic debris. So, the technique involved slowing it down and separating it, letting it undergo a chemical reaction, and only then could they characterize something about the resulting chemical's behavior.

In this case, the researchers reacted it with carbon monoxide to form Sg(CO)6. The resulting chemical stuck to a silicon dioxide surface briefly before the Sg decayed, allowing a very basic characterization of its chemical behavior. And, as noted above, it behaved similarly to the tungsten version of the same compound.

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Sidecar, and its rivals, Lyft and Tickengo, hope to make carsharing in San Francisco more social and more efficient. Sidecar

The district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles have sent a joint letter to Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar, threatening the popular quasi-taxi companies with a lawsuit if they do not make some modifications to their services.

Specifically, the letter, which was sent on Wednesday, says that the firms are in violation of state law that prohibits charging individual fares for drivers who pick up separate passengers traveling in the same direction at a lower price (essentially as a quasi-bus service), and for implying that their background checks of drivers extends beyond seven years in the past.

"Each of these measures can be implemented quickly, easily, and without impacting Sidecar's ability to operate," the district attorneys wrote, according to a copy of the letter Sidecar sent to Ars.

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On Friday, Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke delivered on a week of new-album teases and revealed to music fans what he'd been working on all along: his first solo album in six years (as opposed to releases from either Radiohead or his side project Atoms For Peace). The album, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, also marked a long-awaited return for Yorke: his first release to debut as an online product since 2007's In Rainbows.

Instead of unleashing the album's eight songs in pay-what-you-want fashion like last time, however, Yorke has joined forces with BitTorrent to sell the songs as a "BitTorrent bundle." Six dollars gives you access to the album via a BitTorrent file download, which users can then load with their favorite BitTorrent client to download the full album.

"It's an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around," Yorke wrote in a statement at BitTorrent's blog. Certainly, he has a vested interest in shaking up the music-distribution paradigm, having been a vocal opponent of sites like Spotify for some time. However, after reading the site's lengthy how-to guide for novices, complete with an apology for users wishing to download directly to their smartphones, we wonder how successful this experiment will turn out for the average Spotify lover.

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Brett Levin

On Friday, the European Aviation Safety Agency allowed airlines flying in European skies to let passengers speak on mobile phones or use other Internet-connected gadgets.

The Cologne, Germany-based regulators said "portable electronic devices," or PEDs, may "stay switched on, without the need to be in 'Airplane Mode.' This is the latest regulatory step towards enabling the ability to offer 'gate-to-gate' telecommunication or WiFi services."

The agency also provided guidance to airlines on how they can take advantage of the new permissions:

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Hope you got up early if you wanted one of these collectibles...

Nintendo collectors will go to ridiculous lengths to get their hands on the rarest of the company's games, as anyone who's followed the sky-high prices paid for Nintendo World Championship cartridges can attest. Today, those collectors have a new collectible to lust after: a limited-edition version of Hyrule Warriors given only to a few hundred patient customers at the Nintendo World Store in New York City this morning.

The limited-edition box, announced earlier this month for the US, is a Nintendo World Store exclusive that includes a copy of the Dynasty Warriors-inspired hack-and-slash game packaged with a blue and gold Zelda-themed scarf. Nintendo didn't allow pre-orders due to "limited" quantities, causing eager fans to start lining up late last night for the midtown Manhattan store's 8am opening.

That line stretched to over 600 people by opening, according to one person on the scene (others simply said it "goes on forever"), but many of those in the line went home without the collectible edition they wanted. Nintendo reportedly made somewhere between 300 and 500 copies available, meaning buyers had to be in line by somewhere between 3:30 and 4am to get a wristband entitling them to a copy, accordingly to tweeted reports from the store. All limited-edition copies were distributed within an hour of the opening, according to a report from fan site Zelda Universe.

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Ron Amadeo

The Galaxy Note Edge.

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Earlier this month, Samsung held an event to show off the Galaxy Note 4, Note Edge, Gear VR, and Gear S. We've seen launch date announcements for the Note 4 and Gear S, and the Gear VR is still making the press rounds, but we haven't heard anything about the curved-screen Galaxy Note Edge.

ZDNet Korea (via PC World) has the scoop on what's going on with the product, and it looks like the Note Edge will be very hard to get. The device will be a "limited concept" that won't see Samsung's usual mass production, according to Samsung Electronics President DJ Lee. It sounds like the release will be similar to the Korea-only Galaxy Round, Samsung's curved-screen device from last year.

The Note Edge's claim to fame is the curved AMOLED display, which wraps around one side and runs little "ticker" apps that display information like sports scores, apps, or tweets. Though it sounds intriguing, we didn't immediately like several things about the Note Edge. The lopsided design leaves a lot to be desired, and the curved screen meets the back of the phone at a sharp edge which digs into your hand and makes the phablet-sized device uncomfortable to hold. The screen curve extends into the normal app area, too, which distorts the right side of apps. Also, crucially for Samsung, the device lacks little to differentiate it from the Note 4. The two devices are the same size, and both have a stylus, but only one looks like it was left out in the sun for too long.

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Comcast

Remember Comcast's Streampix service? Launched in February 2012, it was created to help Comcast compete against streaming video services such as Netflix.

But it never caught on—and thus regulators examining the Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger should reject claims that Comcast has an incentive to discriminate against online video distributors [OVDs] like Netflix, Comcast told the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week.

The tidbit was buried in Comcast's 324-page filing with the FCC and was pointed out yesterday by Karl Bode of DSLReports. Comcast still offers Streampix as a $5-per-month add-on to its Xfinity TV service but has given up on making it a standalone offering. The Streampix mobile app is still available on Apple and Android devices but will eventually be "decommissioned." The filing says:

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You know you want to flip these toggles. Just look at them. Lee Hutchinson

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I think I have a problem. I am not attracted to that many gadgets, but I lack anything even remotely resembling impulse control when it comes to those I do want. We don’t keep review hardware at Ars, so while I can often scratch an itch by requesting that companies send me the toys I lust after, I end up simply buying the things I want most—to hell with budget and consequences.

It was in mid-May when I stumbled across this fan-made video of the complex and sprawling spaceship simulator Elite: Dangerous showing off the new features added to the crowdfunded game’s alpha build. Ninety seconds into the ten minute video, I scraped my jaw off the floor and bought into Elite’s premium beta (you can read my thoughts on the game in this long-form review with video). Immediately I knew my current control set-up just wouldn’t cut the mustard in a game as complex as Elite: Dangerous. On top of that, Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen was also due to release a playable module in the near future. With two huge space sims on the horizon, I needed to step up my game. Substantially.

And that’s how a YouTube video convinced me to head over to Amazon and drop $463.53 on a joystick and throttle combination. As the price may indicate, this was not just any joystick and throttle—I aimed as high as I could reasonably aim. I bought a Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog.

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I don't think we're on Earth anymore, Toto.

While selecting my colonists' Earth-bound origins for the first time in Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, I could take a guess as to what the Polystralia or the African Union were meant to represent. I couldn't, however, give you a single clue regarding what they meant in a gameplay context. Ask me anything about the ARC or the Kavithan Protectorate, and I'll offer you the same, slow blinks I gave to my monitor when it first showed them to me. Right from the opening of my time with an extensive preview build of Beyond Earth, the game presented a series of jargon-heavy sci-fi moments that were a potent taste of what was to come.

In previous Civilization games, I could use my knowledge of real-world history to guide my initial choice of the dozen or so societies on offer and know that their attributes at least loosely reflect their real-life counterparts (sometimes very loosely; see: Brigadier General Gandhi).

Civilization has always benefited from history: the history of lessons learned by the developers over time, sure, but also the benefit of foreknowledge. I know that muskets are better than spears. I know what benefits researching the assembly line is likely to provide. I know what Mr. Anderson's sixth grade history class taught me about conquistadors and the Industrial Revolution. What I don't remember Mr. Anderson telling me about is the effect of Genetic Mapping on my Purity Affinity.

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Apple has responded to concerns about “Shellshock,” a pair of vulnerabilities in versions of the GNU Bourne-Again Shell (bash), issuing a statement that the company is “working to quickly provide a fix” to the vulnerability. However, a company spokesperson said that most Mac OS X users have nothing to fear.

In an email to Ars Technica, an Apple spokesperson provided the following statement from the company:

"The vast majority of OS X users are not at risk to recently reported bash vulnerabilities. Bash, a UNIX command shell and language included in OS X, has a weakness that could allow unauthorized users to remotely gain control of vulnerable systems. With OS X, systems are safe by default and not exposed to remote exploits of bash unless users configure advanced UNIX services. We are working to quickly provide a software update for our advanced UNIX users.”

Update: Chet Ramey, the maintainer of bash, said in a post to Twitter that he had notified Apple of the vulnerability several times before it was made public, "and sent a patch they can apply. Several messages." So it's not certain why Apple hasn't already packaged that fix for release, other than

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DirecTV stockholders have voted in favor of AT&T's $48.5 billion acquisition of the company.

"The final voting results indicate more than 99 percent of votes cast were in favor of the adoption of the merger agreement, representing 77 percent of all outstanding shares," DirecTV said in an announcement yesterday.

Announced in May, the AT&T/DirecTV merger is still subject to regulatory review by the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice. AT&T has said it needs to buy DirecTV because its limited pay-TV customer base has left the company lagging behind rivals Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which are attempting to merge as well. AT&T said it expects to complete its merger in the first half of 2015.

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This isn't the cave in Destiny that once spawned endless, loot-heavy mobs. Activision / Bungie

In the two and a half weeks since the launch of Destiny, Bungie's first major post-Halo game, the developer has been gathering user data and using it to inform a news post that lays out a series of major gameplay changes to come.

Thursday's post indicates that players of the always-online shooter can expect the updates within "the next month or two," with some going live as early as today. Most notably, the game's biggest exploit, a "loot cave" in the Old Russia area that spawned endless, easily killable cretins, has been patched; it will no longer allow players to spit gunfire for hours in the hopes of nabbing "legendary" and "exotic" weapons and gear. "Shooting at a black hole for hours on end isn't our dream for how Destiny is played," Bungie wrote.

In reviewing Destiny, one of our biggest issues with the game was that it descended into grinding for loot in redundant environments far too quickly. Bungie acknowledged that criticism (if only slightly) by saying it would fine tune the game's "strike" missions, which it said are currently too "grindy."

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A Philips Hue bulb, strutting its purple stuff.

I owe Ars alum and Wirecutter Editor-in-Chief Jacqui Cheng a debt of gratitude for forwarding me an e-mail from Philips PR representatives back in October 2012. Philips had approached Jacqui about reviewing the just-launched devices, but Jacqui’s schedule at the time was filled to bursting with Apple topics, and so I volunteered to step up and play with the fancy wirelessly controlled color-changing lights—and I fell in love with them.

In spite of their high price—$199.95 for a starter kit with three bulbs and $59 for each additional bulb after that—it wasn’t long before I found my house festooned with dozens of the things, scattered through every room. My wife and I wake up to them in the bedroom at 6:30am, and the set in my office shifts tones throughout the day, brightening to task lighting levels at mid-morning and shifting to a golden sunset color at five o’clock when it’s time to start wrapping up work. I am an unabashed fan, and after two years it’s impossible to imagine working at home without them.

Hue isn’t the only fancy wirelessly controlled light—there’s Lifx, Lümen, Insteon bulbs, and others as well. They all form a subcategory in the Internet of Things pantheon called "connected lighting." But though competitors are multiplying, Hue was the first color-changing app-controlled system to make it to market, and thanks to an open and easily accessible API it remains one of the most feature-complete. Out of all of them, it’s the one I’ve chosen to live with, and so far it’s been a rewarding product to own.

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