A phalanx in Ryse: Son of Rome

Occasionally, people ask me why Ars sometimes covers the relative sales performance of various consoles. "Who cares which console is 'winning'?" the argument goes. "I just want to play games." And my response is generally that relative sales performance has a direct impact on what games actually get made for the various consoles.

Case in point: troubled Ryse developer Crytek talked to Eurogamer recently about the potential for a sequel to its Xbox One launch exclusive, and the company expressed concern that there just weren't enough sales of the Microsoft console to make a sequel worthwhile.

"We have a good relationship with Microsoft. We are constantly looking at what we can do together," Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli said. "We are not 100 percent happy with Xbox One sales right now. So we want to wait 'till the current-gen and next-gen catches up. For Ryse 2, we aren't saying it's canceled. It's our IP. It just has to wait for the right timing. And the right timing means higher installed base across next-gen."

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Another kind of blackout: the field goes dark during a 2011 NFL game between the 49ers and Steelers. NFL

The National Football League (NFL) is trying to convince the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to preserve 39-year-old blackout rules that prevent games from being televised locally when tickets remain unsold. Last season, two games were blacked out locally in the regular season, while several blackouts were narrowly averted in the playoffs.

The FCC considered a proposal to eliminate its blackout rules last November, with then-acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn saying that the rules are outdated. Today, the rules aren’t actually responsible for the majority of blackouts, and they "have little relevance for sports other than professional football, because the distribution rights for most of the games in these sports are sold by individual teams, rather than the leagues,” the FCC said.

But they do matter to football. Naturally, the NFL wants to keep the rules in place—and argues that they are good for fans. Despite being the richest sports league in the country with more than $9 billion in annual revenue, the NFL said in an FCC filing that sports blackout rules are a “critical contributing factor” to its “ability to maintain its ‘free TV model.’”

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Aurich Lawson August isn’t the top time of year for thinking about tech policy. For many, it’s vacation time, a month when Americans are more focused on hacking a path to the nearest beach than hacking their computers.

Congress just left for vacation too, heading home last week for its traditional August recess. When it returns to Washington, election season will be in full swing, which means that betting on the passage of any bold legislation later this year is a long shot.

In light of that, now (and not December) is when we can look back at what activists, companies, and lawmakers were hoping to accomplish in the 113th Congress—compared to what actually happened. Which is to say "not much."

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This screen appears when the City of London police seize your site.

The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has arrested a 20-year-old man in Nottingham on suspicion of copyright infringement for running a proxy server providing access to other sites subject to legal blocking orders.

The man was questioned by police but has been released on bail. The arrest was made after police—with the support of the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT)—found evidence relating to the creation of a proxy server that provided access to 36 other websites that had been blocked for hosting illegal or infringing content.

The proxy server in question is Immunicity, run by the Torrenticity Group—as first highlighted by TorrentFreak—which was designed to unblock both torrent sites and proxies. It required users to make a simple change to their browser settings—adding a Proxy Auto Configuration file (PAC)—which could then instruct your browser to send your Web traffic through different proxies depending on the URL you are looking for. This means that you could access sites that had been blocked by UK ISPs following High Court orders, such as The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, HEET, ExtraTorrent, YiFY, and EZTV. Immunicity and similar services therefore fall foul of anti-circumvention provisions within UK copyright law.

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After game streaming site Twitch's surprise announcement yesterday that it would be muting the sound on all historic videos that contained unlicensed audio, its CEO, Emmett Shear, had an "Ask Me Anything" session on reddit. In the immediate wake of such an unpopular change, it was no surprise that there were quite a few questions for him.

The AMA wasn't universally well-received, with many of Shear's answers being bombarded by a barrage of downvotes. The juicy question of whether Twitch is being bought by Google was also deemed off-limits. However, he revealed some good news for Twitch users.

The audio muting system isn't going to go away, but Shear said that it is going to get better. It currently blocks audio in half-hour chunks. Twitch videos are internally divided into half-hour segments, and the audio matching system appears only to identify entire segments, so if any part of a segment has licensed music in it, the entire thing is silenced. Shear wrote that this is something that Twitch hopes to fix, working with Audible Magic (the company that provides the music matching service) to allow finer-grained muting.

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Reed Hastings' Facebook update boasting about Netflix's (possibly temporary) victory over its unwilling adversary.

Netflix has surpassed HBO in subscriber revenue, according to a status update from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Wednesday. The company is now pulling in $1.146 billion compared to HBO's $1.141 billion, and it boasts 50.05 million subscribers, according to its second-quarter earnings reported in July.

Netflix has long seen HBO as a competitor in terms of audience and, more recently, in produced content. While HBO has slowly started to come down from the ivory cable tower and be more flexible about how it offers its subscriptions, Netflix has been making gains.

Hastings acknowledged that HBO still surpasses Netflix "in profits and Emmy's [sic], but we are making progress." Hastings has said many times before that he considers HBO to be a media company that is well-positioned in the changing distribution landscape, where power is shifting away from cable providers and toward Internet streaming.

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Hundreds of thousands of websites running a popular WordPress plugin are at risk of hacks that give attackers full administrative control, a security firm warned Thursday.

The vulnerability affects Custom Contacts Form, a plugin with more than 621,000 downloads, according to a blog post by researchers from Sucuri. It allows attackers to take unauthorized control of vulnerable websites. It stems from a bug affecting a function known as adminInit(). Hackers can exploit it to create new administrative users or modify database contents.

"The vulnerability was disclosed to the plugin developer a few weeks ago, they were unresponsive," Sucuri researcher Marc-Alexandre Montpas wrote. "The developers were unresponsive so we engaged the WordPress Security team. They were able to close the loops with the developer and get a patch released, you might have missed it."

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Yahoo Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos announced today at Black Hat 2014 that starting in the fall of this year, the purple-hued company will begin giving users the option of seamlessly wrapping their e-mails in PGP encryption. According to Kashmir Hill at Forbes, the encryption capability will be offered through a modified version of the same End-to-End browser plug-in that Google uses for PGP in Gmail.

The announcement was tweeted by Yan Zhu, who has reportedly been hired by Yahoo to adapt End-to-End for use with Yahoo Mail. Zhu formerly worked as an engineer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that has consistently been outspoken in its call for the widespread use of encryption throughout the Web and the Internet in general.

@bcrypt

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Stamos acknowledged that the introduction of encryption will require some amount of education for users to make sure their privacy expectations are set appropriately. For example, he explained that PGP encryption won’t cloak the destination of your e-mail. "We have to make it clear to people it is not [a] secret you’re emailing your priest, but the content of what you’re e-mailing him is secret," Stamos said.

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Microsoft has supported Internet Explorer for an awfully long time. Each new version of Windows comes with a minimum of five years of mainstream support and five years of extended support. That support window covers all bundled and integrated software—including Internet Explorer—and any software updates.

Windows Server 2003, for example, is supported until July 2015. As such, Internet Explorer 6 (bundled with that operating system), Internet Explorer 7 (available as an update for that operating system), and Internet Explorer 8 (likewise, an update) are all supported until July 2015.

But all that is set to change under a new support policy announced today that is scheduled to take effect in about 18 months. Starting January 12, 2016, only the newest version of Internet Explorer for any given version of Windows will be supported. Older versions will cease to receive security fixes and other updates.

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Casey Hudson, one of the people most responsible for the direction and tone of the popular Mass Effect series, announced today that he will be leaving BioWare after a 16-year career with the EA-owned studio.

"After what already feels like a lifetime of extraordinary experiences, I have decided to hit the reset button and move on from BioWare," Hudson said in a statement. "I’ll take a much needed break, get perspective on what I really want to do with the next phase of my life, and eventually take on a new set of challenges."

BioWare Studios General Manager Aaryn Flynn added in a statement that "Casey’s focus on production quality, digital acting technology, and emotionally engaging narrative has made a substantial impact on BioWare and the video game industry as a whole."

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Which one do you want to see before starting a Hearthstone match?

Of all the strategic debates constantly swirling around Blizzard's Hearthstone, there's one question that seems simple on the surface but generates a surprising amount of debate among players. That question: is it better to go first or go second in a match?

The fact that there's such a debate shows just how effective Blizzard's in-game solution for inter-turn balance has been. The player that goes first has an important tempo advantage in Hearthstone, getting access to mana crystals before the opponent has a chance to respond with the same resources (i.e. the first player gets to use three mana crystals on Turn 3 before the opponent has the same chance). To make up for that difference, the designers at Blizzard give the second player a free extra card draw at the start of the game, as well as "The Coin," a card that gives a free one-time-use mana crystal.

There are enough pros and cons to each turn order position that even serious players can't seem to agree on which side has an advantage. There is an answer to this question, though, and Blizzard has addressed it a few times in the Hearthstone's short history. Last September, early in the game's closed beta, Hearthstone Lead Designer Ben Brode shared statistics showing a slight advantage for the first player, which becomes even more negligible when you reach expert-level play:

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FishPlaysPokemon via Kotaku

Earlier this year, a user on the Twitch game streaming site made a figurative splash when he created a system that allowed all of the users in the stream’s chatroom to play Pokémon Red. Now, another stream has made a literal splash by rigging a system to allow a fish to play Pokémon Red.

The “Fish Plays Pokemon” stream is manned by Grayson Hopper, a fish who can make button presses by swimming around in a webcam stream split into a three-by-three grid. Each square is mapped to a specific Game Boy button, and when Grayson swims into a square that button is pressed. According to the stream’s creators, the project was created in about 24 hours for hackNY, a “hackathon” for students organized by NYU and Columbia faculty members.

So far Grayson has been playing for more than 130 hours, in which time he has chosen and named a Charmander (an interesting choice, since Grayson is most likely a Water-type) and defeated his rival’s Squirtle. Given the fish’s totally random button inputs, the length of the game, and the average lifespan of every fish I’ve ever owned, it seems unlikely that Grayson will ever make it to the end of the game.

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Google

Google is releasing a preview version of the Google Fit SDK, the company's cloud-powered fitness tracking service. Google Fit, like Google Play Games, is a back-end set of APIs that Google wants developers to plug into.

The service aims to be a one-stop shop for fitness data. Google Fit gives developers high-level access to sensors from Android devices and wearables, allowing them to save fitness data to the cloud and read back that data. The cloud component isn't ready yet, so for now only local fitness history is available.

Google describes the existing APIs this way:

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The Federal Communications Commission is taking public comments and petitions regarding AT&T's proposed $48.5 billion purchase of DirecTV until September 16, the commission announced today.This is one of the first steps of a review process in which the FCC will determine whether the acquisition is in the public's interest.

You can submit filings to the FCC at this link. Comments began coming in shortly after AT&T announced the deal, but today's announcement sets a deadline.

By September 16, all initial comments and petitions to deny the merger must be submitted. Responses to initial comments and oppositions to petitions can be filed until October 16. A third round consisting of replies to the responses and oppositions will then begin and continue until November 5.

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Greetings, Arsians! Our partners at LogicBuy are back with a ton of offers this week. The top deal is a Haswell-powered Dell XPS 8700 desktop computer with a 23-inch 1080p monitor for just 849.99. That's about $270 off the MSRP.

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Laptops, desktops and tablets

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IBM

For raw calculating prowess, a run-of-the-mill computer can handily outperform the human brain. But there are a variety of tasks that the human brain—or computer systems designed to act along the same principles—can do far more accurately than a traditional computer. And there are some behaviors of neurons, like consciousness, that computerized systems have never approached.

Part of the reason is that both the architecture and behavior of neurons and transistors are radically different. It's possible to program software that incorporates neuron-like behavior, but the underlying mismatch makes the software relatively inefficient.

A team of scientists at Cornell University and IBM Research have gotten together to design a chip that's fundamentally different: an asynchronous collection of thousands of small processing cores, each capable of the erratic spikes of activity and complicated connections that are typical of neural behavior. When hosting a neural network, the chip is remarkably power efficient. And the researchers say their architecture can scale arbitrarily large, raising the prospect of a neural network supercomputer.

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New Foursquare is almost entirely focused on telling you where to go, and it figures out how to do that by seeing where you are at all times.

Foursquare has finally revamped its smartphone app into the version it promised long ago: a service that can passively track and log its users' locations and eventually use that information to offer recommendations. The data that the app will traffic in will prove extremely valuable to local businesses looking to advertise or get insight on how they can drive more people to their doorsteps. And the way that Foursquare captures this information obviates the need for the "social network" aspect that apps have long relied on to motivate (or trick, depending on your perspective) users into sharing.

The new Foursquare is meant to drive discovery of destinations based on "opinions of actual experts… not just strangers." According to the New York Times, recommendations will be based on Foursquare's database of 10,000 tastes, which cover qualities like food served, ambience, and activity type that Foursquare has gleaned from all the user tips that it has stockpiled over the years.

Before it split its app into two pieces, Foursquare relied on manual, case-by-case "check-ins" to locations to see where users were and what they were doing. The first to be released, Swarm, still uses the manual check-in process, but it's meant more to help friends find each other at locations. By contrast, the new Foursquare requires no interaction to log users' locations, instead passively logging where they are and where they go even when the app isn't open.

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In a shift aimed at fostering wider use of encryption on the Web, Google is tweaking its search engine to favor sites that use HTTPS to protect end users' privacy and security.

Sites that properly implement the transport layer security (TLS) protocol may be ranked higher in search results than those that transmit in plaintext, company officials said in a blog post published Wednesday. The move is designed to motivate sites to use HTTPS protections across a wider swath of pages rather than only on login pages or not at all. Sites that continue to deliver pages over unprotected HTTP could see their search ranking usurped by competitors that offer HTTPS. Facebook is also getting more serious about encryption, with plans to acquire PrivateCore, a company that develops encryption software to protect and validate data stored on servers.

In Wednesday's post, Google Webmaster Trends Analysts Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes noted that Google was among the first sites to offer end-to-end HTTPS protection by default across virtually all of its properties. It has also offered a variety of tools to help sites detect and recover from security breaches. They went on to write:

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Kanye West. NRK P3

It’s not every day that Kanye West graces these pages. (Yes, we’ve reported on him before.) But it’s also not everyday that the venerable hip hop star expresses a bona fide concern about drones buzzing above his home.

Specifically, West is worried about paparazzi using drones that could perhaps crash and then injure his young daughter, according to TMZ. This revelation came out late Wednesday afternoon as part of a leaked deposition that West gave. (The deposition is part of an ongoing civil lawsuit relating to a scuffle West got into with a paparazzo at Los Angeles International Airport.)

"Is your daughter stalked by, like, drones?” West reportedly asked during the deposition. “Are there drones flying where she's trying to learn how to swim at age one? Wouldn't you like to just teach your daughter how to swim without a drone flying? What happens if a drone falls right next to her? Would it electrocute her?"

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DonkeyHotey

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has been granted permission to stay in Russia for three more years, his lawyer said Thursday.

Snowden's temporary asylum expired on August 1, but it has been extended via a three-year residency permit. Snowden, who faces espionage charges in the US, fled to Russia in June 2013, two weeks after his first leak appeared in the Guardian.

The leaker's lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, told a news conference Thursday that Snowden had a tech-related job, was learning Russian, and had private body guards. Kucherena said Snowden was living from donations and his meager wages, and he had not accepted housing or protection from the Russian government.

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