The grand unbundling of Google’s G+ social network continues, with Gmail becoming the latest Google service to gain its independence from Google’s campaign of forced integration. As noted in a post on the WordStream Blog, Google has axed the requirement that new Gmail accounts be tied to a G+ social networking account as of "early September."

For some users, mandatory G+ integration has been an unwanted burden placed on Google’s popular services since 2012, when Google began to link G+ account creation to the sign-up process for most of its services (journalists even had to create G+ profiles in order for their names and pictures to appear next to their own stories in Google News search results). The forced integration became so prevalent—and so onerous—that when Google acquired smart thermostat manufacturer Nest, the running joke was that soon a G+ account would be required to change the temperature in your home.

It's not clear whether the move brought benefits to anyone but Google. Bolting G+ onto YouTube, for example, proved to be a colossal mess yet resulted in no measurable improvement to the cesspool of comments beneath most videos.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Megan Geuss

For the third September in a row, people around the United States have queued up (physically and virtually) to buy the latest Apple iPhone—and for the third September in a row, Apple has sold a hell of a lot of iDevices. A report this morning from The New York Times indicates that the Cupertino company has delivered more than 10 million shiny new iPhones 6 and 6 Plus, a number that The Times characterizes as being at the high end of analyst expectations.

Last year, with the introduction of the iPhone 5S and 5C, Apple sold somewhere in the area of nine million devices (though there weren’t as many gold devices as some shoppers would have liked). This year, Apple’s decision to offer larger screens has drawn a large amount of consumer interest—and opening weekend sales that reflect this.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the 5.5" iPhone 6 Plus has been the most difficult device to locate, with projected fulfillment of online orders quickly slipping into October. Apple’s official press release addresses the high demand with this quote from CEO Tim Cook: "While our team managed the manufacturing ramp better than ever before, we could have sold many more iPhones with greater supply and we are working hard to fill orders as quickly as possible."

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Shortly before 10pm ET on Sunday, NASA plans on having its Maven spacecraft begin a maneuver to enter the Martian orbit. If the satellite successfully reaches its destination, it marks a huge accomplishment for NASA's first spaceship dedicated to exploring the Red Planet's upper atmosphere.

Maven, short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, has gone 442 million miles during 10 months of interplanetary travel. But tonight marks the culmination of 11 years of planning and development, leaving Maven in position to begin the mission's science phase. By closely monitoring Mars' atmosphere, NASA hopes the satellite will allow them to investigate the planet like never before—launching thorough studies into Mars' history, present climate, and potential to support life.

NASA's most recent Maven update says all spacecraft systems are operating normally, and the orbiter is on track. According to the organization, tonight's procedure involves having it turn in order to point its main engines in the proper direction before firing them to slow down the spacecraft enough to be captured into Mars' orbit.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Neal Stephenson announced the cancellation of his Kickstarter game, Clang, one day before Kickstarter revealed new, more detailed guidelines for project creators and backers.

Kickstarter announced several updates late Friday to its terms of use and policies for crowdfunded projects, according to a blog post at the company's site. The terms of use are not changing much about the spirit of the platform, but the update provides more detailed guidelines for setting expectations, both between Kickstarter and users, and project creators and their backers.

Kickstarter has iterated on its policies several times since it launched in 2009, with the most recent wave of revisions surrounding the site's transition from only posting projects cleared by the staff to clearing all projects that meet a basic set of criteria. Even still, some projects lack clear goals, encounter setbacks, or fail to deliver, like the myIDkey project that has burned through $3.5 million without yet distributing a finished product. The most recent terms revision is timely: on Thursday, science fiction author Neal Stephenson announced that a game he Kickstarted in 2012 with $526,000 in funding was officially canceled.

Section 4 of the new terms of service goes to lengths to help project creators set themselves up for success and/or not frustrate their backers. If the creators can't deliver, Kickstarter explains how to try and make good when the creators do not fulfill their goals or backer rewards.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A radio image of a quasar, taken by the Very Large Array. The white dot in the middle is the core, while the protrusions pointed top-left and bottom-right are jets, traveling at relativistic speeds, culminating in lobes. Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI

In the hearts of some massive galaxies lie strange objects known as quasars. These mysterious objects were named for their apparent similarity to stars (quasar is short for ‘quasi-stellar radio source’), but they're now understood to be the light from rapidly accreting, supermassive black holes. In addition to their prodigious light output, they often emit jets of charged particles from their poles at close to the speed of light.

Mysteriously, quasars come in a variety of seemingly random forms, leading scientists to search for the cause of their diversity. While there are trends in their variation, up until now, no definitive evidence has been found to confirm any of the models we had for their appearance. But a new study has found a clear relationship between quasar properties and how they look, suggesting an underlying mechanism.

The study, which made use of archival data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, analyzed the spectra of more than 20,000 quasars, the first time a study of this type has been achieved with a statistically significant sample size. Within that huge sample, a pattern began to emerge.

Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Third-party keyboards have finally come to iOS 8. If you're tired of the stock Apple keyboard, just head on down to the App Store and check out the quickly growing roster of alternative options.

There's everything from typing, to swiping, to drawing, and you can do it all in style with a million themes and different looks. To give you an idea of what's out there, we're checking out some of the more interesting keyboards for iOS8.

Setup SwiftKey's setup instructions, the "Add New Keyboard" screen in the system settings, and the "allow full access" popup.  Ron Amadeo

Before you actually try a new keyboard, you'll need to go through the setup process. After installing the keyboard app, users are pretty much on their own to enable it, which requires a multi-screen slog through the system settings. SwiftKey presents the user with an eight-step installation guide (pictured above) after users install it: open the device settings, go to General -> Keyboard -> Keyboards -> Add New Keyboard -> [Keyboard name], [Keyboard name settings], and hit "allow full access".

Read 28 remaining paragraphs | Comments

At some point in the future, filling up could actually involve giving your car the gas. Oak Ridge National Lab

Continued concerns about global warming have boosted work on alternative fuel sources that reduce emissions. Hydrogen is an appealing, clean-burning fuel. Currently, most hydrogen comes from the processing of fossil fuels, which produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct. However, the electrolysis of water produces hydrogen without the release of greenhouse gases—provided the electricity used in the process comes from renewable energy.

Currently, the favored method for producing hydrogen involves what are called proton exchange membrane electrolyzers (PEMEs). These use a polymer membrane that allows the movement of protons between solutions of varied charge while separating the negatively charged cathode and positively charged anode. Since the two gases, hydrogen and oxygen, are produced at different electrodes, the membranes separate them as well, which allows for the easy harvesting of hydrogen.

Unfortunately, PEMEs are expensive because they require precious metal catalysts. Although higher power loads offset the price of these catalysts to some extent, these loads can lead to the simultaneous presence of hydrogen, oxygen, and catalytic particles, resulting in the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) that degrade the membranes. Low power loads are not as effective because the rates of oxygen and hydrogen production are similar to the rates at which these gases diffuse through the membrane. As a result, rather than pure hydrogen, you get a hazardous mix of the two gases.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Behold, the Teenage Engineering OP-1, a modern descendant of Bob Moog's pioneering work. Flickr user: Rasmus Andersson

This time last year, I walked into a Toronto store called Moog Audio and walked out with a Teenage Engineering OP-1—a curious little portable digital synthesizer that looks, at first glance, like a child’s toy. It has a row of just four candy-colored knobs as primary input controls, and there are only enough keys for an octave-and-a-half's worth of range. But damn does it ever sound cool. Its tiny OLED screen uses all sorts of clever visual conceits to convey otherwise complex audio transformations. Colors and animations explain the differences between synthesizer engines, changes to modulation and frequency, and attack and decay. And it's done in a way that’s easy for anyone with little synthesizer knowledge to understand while still being powerful in more experienced hands. This is a synthesizer, drum machine, and four-track recorder all-in-one—all in a device that fits inside a purse or messenger bag with ease.

It wasn’t always like this. In fact, it was 50 years ago this year that, in 1964, a man by the name of Bob Moog unveiled a synthesizer of a very different sort. Called the Moog Modular, it is regarded as one of the first. Though Moog wouldn’t officially advertise his creation as a synthesizer until 1966, that’s precisely what it was—an array of electronic modules that Moog designed, often controlled via keyboard, and connected to one another with a bird's nest of cables that, somehow, produced weird musical sounds unlike anything anyone had heard before.

The Moog Modular was not the only synthesizer in development at the time, however. On the opposite end of the continent in Berkeley, California, a man named Don Buchla independently devised a similar device, but it differed in a crucial way. Buchla’s synthesizer eschewed the use of a keyboard to trigger notes for touch-controlled panels that produced unfamiliar, atonal music unbound from the traditional musical scale. Both had their proponents, but for most musicians, the familiarity of the keyboard paradigm eventually won out. For a time, Moog was synthesizers. Even today, it’s a testament to the enduring cachet of Moog’s work that one can now buy any number of competing synthesizers from a store bearing his name.

Read 33 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Stack Exchange

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

CodeWarrior asks:

I am looking for a job and have applied to a number of positions. One employer responded. I had a pretty lengthy phone interview (perhaps more than an hour) and they then set me up with a developer test. I was told that the test was estimated to take between six and eight hours and that, provided the results met with their approval, I would be paid for my work.

Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Botto Bistro, in Richmond, California. Cyrus Farivar

RICHMOND, CA—Of all the places that have come up with a clever way to protest Yelp’s alleged aggressive advertising tactics, a small plucky Italian restaurant in a strip mall just northeast of San Francisco is as unlikely as they come.

For a few weeks now, Botto Bistro has been actively trying to become the worst-reviewed restaurant on Yelp as a way to stick it to the venerated review site—so much so that they’re offering 25 percent off for anyone who does so.

In recent years, Yelp has been publicly accused of extortion—asking for money from businesses that are automatically listed on the site in exchange for preferred placement on the site. There are also accusations of abruptly vanishing positive reviews and suddenly appearing negative reviews. Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco dismissed two cases alleging that such behavior by Yelp is illegal.

Read 32 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Megan Geuss

SAN FRANCISCO—Last week, Ars met up with several representatives of the non-profit USB Implementer's Forum (USB-IF) to check out some of the first USB Type-C connectors off the assembly lines. The Type-C specification was announced in December and finalized in August, and it's set to bring a number of improvements to its predecessors, in addition to being smaller than the Type-A USB plugs we're familiar with today.

Considering how many USB Type-A devices are still being actively built out there (over 4 billion USB-compatible products are made each year), this smaller, reversible connector represents a significant jump. Jeff Ravencraft, president and COO of USB-IF, told Ars that USB-IF wanted a connector that worked equally well for large and small devices. “We also understand that yeah the consumer maybe has some trouble with putting in that cable connector,” he added of the Type-C's new-found ability to be plugged in right-side up or upside down, like Apple's Lightning connector.

The new Type-C connector is also slightly bigger than its proprietary cousin, with Type-C sized at approximately 8.4mm by 2.6mm and Lightning coming in at 7.7 mm by 1.7 mm. Unlike the reversible Lightning, but similar to USB connectors before it, the USB Type-C connector has a mid-plate inside the receptacle that the plug surrounds when it's inserted.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});It's no secret that Cars Technica is a big fan of the World Endurance Championship. Thousand horsepower hybrids, racing versions of road cars like Porsche's 911 and Ferrari's 458, the sights, the sounds; we love it all. Once a year, the series visits the US, coming to the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, where it shares an event with our national endurance racing series, the Tudor United Sportscar Championship. Ars is in town for the races as part of a future feature, but in the meantime here's a gallery to give you a flavor of the event. Not pictured? The crushing humidity.

Jonathan Gitlin

Audi's R18 e-tron quattro. Diesel power, flywheel hybrid, and a string of Le Mans victories

48 more images in gallery

.related-stories { display: none !important; }

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Former information technology employees at Home Depot claim that the retailer’s management had been warned for years that its retail systems were vulnerable to attack, according to a report by The New York Times. Resistance to advice on fixing systems reportedly led several members of Home Depot’s computer security team to quit, and one who remained warned friends to use cash when shopping at the retailer’s stores.

In 2012, Home Depot hired Ricky Joe Mitchell as its senior IT security architect. Mitchell got the job after being fired from EnerVest Operating in Charleston, West Virginia—and he sabotaged that company’s network in an act of revenge, taking the company offline for 30 days. Mitchell retained his position at Home Depot even after his indictment a year later and remained in charge of Home Depot’s security until he pled guilty to federal charges in January of 2014.

The Home Depot breach, which reportedly began in April of 2014 and went undetected until earlier this month, exposed an estimated 56 million credit card numbers. Home Depot spokesperson Stephen Holmes told The New York Times that the company maintains “robust security systems.” Home Depot officials have said that the malware used in the attack, BlackPOS, had not been seen before and would have been difficult to detect with its security scans.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Oculus' Crescent Bay Prototype. Oculus VR

Oculus VR announced a new prototype for its virtual reality headset at the Oculus Connect conference in Los Angeles on Saturday.

Some new features on the updated headset, called Crescent Bay, include improved optics, 360 degree head tracking (thanks to LED on the back of the headstrap), higher resolution, and a higher refresh rate. The headset is also lighter than the previous Oculus prototype. New built-in headphones, along with software from partner RealSpace3D, promise a virtual surround sound audio component to the Rift (though users will still be able to use their own headphones, if they wish).

While Oculus has yet to go into details on the tech specs of the new prototype, CEO Brendan Iribe said Crescent Bay's jump in performance over the latest Rift development kit is similar to the jump from last year's original DK1 dev kit to the new DK2. While this isn't the long-desired consumer version of the Rift headset, Iribe said it is closer than ever to being a consumer-ready product.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Not so long ago, on a website not so far away, an opinion was expressed: creativity was being suppressed in science. On the surface, the statistics support this: younger researchers are getting progressively less of the funding. Older researchers, it is asserted, tend to propose less risky and less innovative research. As with any good opinion in science, Nobel prize winners are wheeled as supporting cast. But, is it really true? Are we truly suppressing the creative side of science?

The answer is, overwhelmingly, no. Scientific papers are a crude measure for scientific progress, but never have more papers being produced per year than now. Clearly, something creative is going on here. If you don't like scientific papers, simply look at technological progress: your smartphone would not have nearly as much punch without the creativity of scientists; antiviral drugs were not found lying about on the ground; experimental stem-cell therapies were not accidentally attempted. Behind all of these new things lies a decade or more of scientific research. But, you know, thats not creative at all.

Maybe a lack of creativity manifests if we restrict ourselves to more fundamental breakthroughs, like... finding exoplanets, brown dwarfs, the anisotropy in cosmic microwave background, the Higgs Boson, Bose Einstein Condensates, or the acceleration of the rate of expansion of the universe. Not to mention very clever experiments that test the very nature of reality itself, like Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, and Bell inequality tests. Oh wait, all of those have happened in the last 20 years. Some have even garnered Nobel prizes for their work.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Valmyndigheten

Swedish democracy had its latest workout last Sunday, September 14, with the election of members to the national parliament (Riksdag), county council assemblies, and municipal assemblies. While established political parties drew most of the votes, Sweden allows (and then minutely chronicles) write-in votes. This process has created such venerable institutions as the Kalle Anka Partiet (the "Donald Duck Party," a common write-in), but it also lends itself to more mischievous uses—such as jotting down a bit of JavaScript on the vote form.

Valmyndigheten, the Swedish electoral authority, helpfully logs every single write-in vote across the country, then publishes the complete list on its website. In last Sunday's election, for instance, Swedes voted for:

• Satanistiskt initiativ
• Schizofrena autistpartiet
• Wisemans wisdoms
• Young volcanoes
• Vote for pedro
• Jesus kristus! vår frälsare som älskare oss, dog för oss vill oss det absolut bästa! Halleluja ("Jesus Christ ! Our savior loves us, died for us, wants the best for us! Hallelujah")
• Ett bättre Sverige för Allah ("A better Sweden for Allah")
• Bangkok bargirls
• Led Zeppelin

And, naturally, the "Cannabispartiet."

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The doors to the 2014 GameStop Expo held in Anaheim, California, last week. Sam Machkovech

Last week, during the third annual GameStop Expo, executives at the nation's leading game-focused retailer met with Ars behind the expo's floor of playable game kiosks to detail their plans for life—and revenue—beyond the sale of physical video games. As gamers have begun cozying up to a brave new world of downloadable, triple-A games, GameStop has responded with the recent acquisition of non-gaming, hardware-focused companies Simply Mac, Spring Mobile, and Cricket Wireless.

That's not to say the company is preparing for an imminent departure from the gaming space; between DLC card sales, next-gen hardware, and a 2013 victory over the threat of one-time-use codes, GameStop still has enough physical product to push in its 4,400 American stores. But our conversations with multiple GameStop executives revealed a somewhat surprising desire: to begin buying and selling used downloadable content.

"One of the questions, frankly, the industry is going to have to address going forward is [this]: 'Is the value of a digital game less than the value of a physical game?'" Executive Vice President Mike Hogan told Ars. "If you can’t trade in a digital game—which you can’t, at this point in time, but maybe you can in the future—there’s less residual value."

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Desmond Talkington

MonkeyParking, the Italian startup that allows iPhone users to sell public parking spaces via its smartphone app, has now set up shop in Southern California after being run out of San Francisco in June.

According to a blog post from nearly a month ago, which was only discovered by local media this week, MonkeyParking is now operating in the cities of Santa Monica and Beverly Hills.

The respective city attorneys did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment, but Santa Monica (the hometown of yours truly) told a local newspaper that it does not look favorably upon the company.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The lasers involved look nothing like these. NREL

One of the side benefits of the smartphone generation is that there is lots of interest in making new and better sensors. The current generation of smartphones comes equipped with accelerometers, gyroscopes, proximity sensors, and light sensors. Thanks to these, your smartphone knows its orientation, its motion, when it's in the dark, and when you put it to your face. It's a compass, a level, a location beacon, a pedometer, and much, much, more. We're told that wearable devices are the next big thing. These devices will be packed with even more sensors.

The sensitivity of sensors often depend on their physical dimensions: big gyroscopes can detect smaller changes in location and orientation than small gyroscopes. Likewise, long cantilevers measure smaller changes in torque than short cantilevers. This is simply because a change in torque rotates the cantilever by a fixed angle—the longer the cantilever is, the larger the displacement at the end, and larger displacements are easier to detect.

But a team of Canadian researchers have found that it's possible to make a relatively compact sensor that's also exquisitely sensitive—so sensitive, in fact, that it can detect the force exerted by a virus falling on it.

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A federal judge in Texas has convicted a local man of conducting a massive Bitcoin-based Ponzi scheme, and ordered him to pay $40.4 million. The court found on Friday that Tendon Shavers had created a virtual bitcoin-based hedge fund that many suspected of being a scam—and it turned out they were right.

The Bitcoin Savings and Trust (BTCST) shut down in August 2012, and by June 2013 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed charges against its founder. In a statement at the time, the SEC said Shavers "raised at least 700,000 Bitcoin in BTCST investments, which amounted to more than $4.5 million based on the average price of Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012 when the investments were offered and sold."

Judge Amos Mazzant wrote:

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments