Photo sharing site Twitpic will not be deleting its substantial archive of tweeted pictures after all, it announced today, after coming to an agreement with Twitter.

Twitpic announced in September that it would be closing down and deleting all the pictures it had hosted—rendering millions of historic tweets meaningless—after a trademark dispute with Twitter. Twitter issued Twitpic an ultimatum: drop its trademark claim to the word "Twitpic" or lose access to Twitter's API. Twitpic opted for the latter, promising to close down on September 25.

This crisis appeared to be averted on September 18 when Twitpic founder Noah Everett announced that the site had been acquired and would live on. However, the details that he promised would follow never materialized, and on October 16th Everett said that, once again, Twitpic was to close down, this time on October 25.

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I feel my vitality increasing just looking at these. Flickr user Jeffreyw

Normally, people do not enjoy being forced to do something. People also do not enjoy the guilt that comes with doing something that is bad for them. Surprisingly, these two wrongs seem to make a right: when people are compelled to engage in vices, they feel better than when they freely choose the vice for themselves. According to a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, persuading a friend to share a dessert removes the burden of choice from them, reducing their feelings of guilt and making them less conflicted about the decision.

Vices—junk food, movie marathons, celebrity gossip news, procrastination—have adverse consequences. Choosing them is ‘bad’ and results in guilt that we don’t get from virtuous activities such as exercise, working on a passion project, or reading high-quality media. “It has long been believed that yielding to vices…is bad,” write the researchers. “While not disagreeing with this picture, the current research presents the observation that a negative view of vices does not quite tell the full story.”

The researchers suggest that the guilt of choosing vices weighs us down, reducing our sense of ‘subjective vitality.' Vitality, a term used to describe the feeling of being energized, has been linked to mental and physical wellbeing, improved task performance, tenacity, and self-control. It is not quite the same thing as happiness, which is a related but conceptually different experience.

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A red light camera at the intersection of Sylvan and Coffee in Modesto, California. Cyrus Farivar

One of the three defendants indicted two months ago on federal corruption charges stemming from a major contract between Chicago and a major red light camera vendor will now plead guilty.

According to a new filing submitted to the federal court in Chicago on Wednesday, former Redflex contractor Martin O’Malley intends to appear before the court in early December to formalize his guilty plea. While the document does not explicitly say so, it’s likely that O’Malley also intends to testify against his co-defendants.

This marks the first guilty plea in a high-level case involving Redflex. Since losing the Chicago contract as a result of this corruption scandal, Redflex’s 2013 pre-tax profits in its North American division (its corporate parent is an Australian company) have plummeted over 33 percent—from $3.4 million in the first half of 2013, to $2.28 million in the second half.

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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.

Den asks:

As recently reported, "Xamarin has forked Cocos2D-XNA, a 2D/3D game development framework, creating a cross-platform library that can be included in PCL projects."

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According to interviews given to German publication Manager Magazine (Google translate) this week, sources from Porsche, Mercedes, and Audi said that they are all readying electric cars to respond “to the success of the Californian newcomer Tesla with its Model S.”

Porsche’s chairman Matthias Müller reportedly said that the company is working on an all-electric car that will be based on the company’s Modular Standard Platform (Modularer Standardantrieb-Baukasten in German, or MSB for short) and look similar to the company’s Panamera (which has already been introduced with a hybrid electric engine).

The car will be "an advanced battery-powered variant [that] is tasked with challenging the Model S on both performance and range,” Autocar UK says. The publication added that Porsche is aiming for a curb weight lower than the 4,647 lbs of Tesla’s Model S in its forthcoming car, and that it will come with a synchronous electric motor with horsepower comparable to the Model S.

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World Health Organization

New data released Saturday by the World Health Organization show that worldwide Ebola cases have topped 10,000.

Of those, just under 5,000 people have died—Liberia and Sierra Leone remain the most affected countries. A young girl in Mali has become the latest victim of the deadly virus, the first to die in that West African nation.

As the WHO announced:

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Aurich Lawson

In April 2007, only diehard Broken Social Scene fans salivated when band member Leslie Feist released a solo album titled The Reminder. Sales were moderate for the first five months, reaching an average of 6,000 per week.

But that September, Apple released its most impactful ad since it unveiled the Macintosh. The spot had a simple concept: a pudgy iPod Nano laid flat against a white table, with a hand repeatedly removing it to reveal another Nano in another color. Each Nano showed the same music video—the song "1234" from Feist.

A little video for everyone.

Within five weeks of the commercial’s launch, Feist’s total album sales reached nearly 300,000 units. Roughly 100,000 of those sales came after the ad campaign started, according to USA Today. Fast forward six more months and The Reminder had moved more than 730,000 copies, according to Spin.

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Look, a wall plug! That's new for Kinect v2 as of this week.

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced more ways for PC developers to make and promote apps that utilize the upgraded Kinect v2 sensor, which debuted with the Xbox One nearly one year ago.

The biggest news came in the form of the first public Software Development Kit (SDK) for the sensor, The free download came after nearly a year of access for "preview program participants," and Microsoft opted to wave fees for the creators of commercial products made with the SDK. That means those creators will have more money to spend on a potential upgrade to Windows 8 or 8.1, which they'll need to use the SDK. (Speaking of Windows 8, Microsoft also opened the floodgates to Kinect v2 app distribution within the Windows Store this week.)

However, up until now, budding developers had to use a PC-only version of the Kinect v2 hardware, as the Xbox One version launched with a proprietary connector to simultaneously juggle data and power demands. In fact, last year, Microsoft went so far as to tell Xbox One owners that they would be out of luck. That changed with this week's retail launch of the Kinect Adapter for Windows, which requires both a USB 3.0 connection to your PC and a wall plug connection for power. The adapter will set budding developers back $50, which is the exact cost difference at the Microsoft Store between the $150 standalone Xbox One version of Kinect v2 and the $200 PC version of the same sensor.

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Entering a Facebook "room" requires a QR-type code, which can come in the form of a screenshot or can be harvested from the phone's camera.

After a clash over Facebook's "real-names" policy, the company released an app Friday that encourages communication between anonymous parties. Dubbed Rooms, the app lets users share content based on themes within different chat threads.

The app is in the spirit of other anonymous-sharing apps like Secret or Yik Yak, which consist of threads of short posts based around one's social network or location, respectively. Because of the way they are organized, both apps have caused their share of controversy. Rooms, by contrast, is organized by subject—for instance "Photography Lovers Unite" or "GIFs" (yes,GIFs)—and consist of threads of photos.

The organization harkens back to sites like reddit or AOL chatrooms, with front-facing account names that are defined on a per-room basis. Other users can comment on posts or endorse them with a "like" button that is customizable by the creator of the room.

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Apple

The multi-carrier Apple SIM in the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 lets US customers purchase data from either AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile. But it turns out that if you want the option of switching carriers, you'll either have to avoid AT&T or acquire another SIM card.

When you set up cellular data on a new iPad with the multi-carrier SIM, you'll get this screen, which lets you choose a carrier:

Jon Brodkin

Click on AT&T and you'll see this warning, stating that once the SIM is activated on AT&T's network, it will be locked to AT&T and that you'll need a new Apple SIM to change carriers:

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The TP-Link router that was to be the basis of TorFi. TP-Link

Kickstarter is apparently not the place to go if you’re trying to crowdfund privacy hardware. Just days after the Anonabox project, a highly criticized effort to package the Tor privacy protection service into a portable miniature Wi-Fi router, was suspended by the crowdfunding site, another similar project has met its demise—and its founder’s account has been deleted.

TorFi, which Ars mentioned in a report on October 21, was a project by Jesse Enjaian and David Xu of Berkeley, California, aimed at creating home routers with turnkey Tor protection and support for OpenVPN connections—allowing users to route all their Internet traffic either through Tor's "onion router" network or a virtual private network provider of their choice. The project’s initial pitch was dependent on repurposing routers from TP-Link purchased through retail and re-flashing them with a customized version of the OpenWRT embedded operating system.

But just a day after Ars covered the TorFi project, Kickstarter suspended it. David Gallagher, a member of Kickstarter’s communications team, said that he couldn’t discuss the specific reasons for the suspension. “It’s our policy not to comment on individual projects,” he said in an e-mail.

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US EIA

Last year, the US Energy Information Agency suggested that emissions of carbon dioxide by the US had peaked in 2005 and were unlikely to return to such heights. So far, that prediction has held up, although there have been some bumps in the road. The year 2013 appears to have been one of those bumps, as emissions increased for the first time since 2010, reaching levels not seen since last decade. But there are many pieces of good news in the details.

To begin with, the EIA blames the boost in emissions, which came in at a 2.5 percent increase, primarily on the heavy use of heating during last year's unusually cold winter. A secondary factor was a rise in natural gas prices that shifted some electricity generation to coal (more on that later). The increase in emissions, however, wasn't tied to economic growth. While the GDP per capita went up by 1.5 percent, the energy use per GDP only went up by 0.5 percent; in turn, the carbon dioxide intensity of energy production actually declined slightly.

So, to an extent, carbon emissions have been decoupled from economic growth. They've also been somewhat decoupled from electricity use. Demand has decreased in recent years, in part due to a decrease in industrial activity, in part due to increased efficiency. A switch to natural gas has also decreased the carbon emissions per unit of generation, although, as noted above, this trend reversed slightly last year.

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Getting an accurate read on how well the new generation of consoles is selling is a difficult job, and it's complicated by sporadic and sometimes vague numbers provided by the console makers themselves. After taking a dive into the most recent numbers, Ars estimates that the PlayStation 4 has sold at least 42 percent more units worldwide than the Xbox One through September. This makes Sony's system responsible for at least 59 percent of hardware sales in the two-console market (PS4 and Xbox One).

Estimating Xboxes

Determining those ratios was not a simple process. As a starting point, we used Microsoft's announcement that it had shipped five million units of the Xbox One as of mid-April. Since then, the company has only released quarterly reports on how many total Xbox systems have shipped, lumping the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One together, which obscures the new console's true market performance.

For the April to June quarter, there were 1.1 million combined Xbox shipments. For the July through September quarter, there were 2.4 million combined Xbox shipments. Add all those numbers together, and you get an absolute ceiling of 8.5 million potential Xbox One shipments through September. For the new system to hit that ceiling, though, you'd have to assume that Microsoft has shipped exactly zero Xbox 360 units in the last six months, which is obviously false.

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A Silicon Valley startup said Friday that police agencies were field testing its new product: a wireless sensor that transforms officers' weapons into smart guns with real-time telemetry.

Yardarm Technologies' sensor is a small device that goes inside gun handles and provides dispatchers with real-time geo-location tracking information on the weapon. The Yardarm Sensor also sends alerts when a weapon is unholstered or fired, and it can "record the direction of aim, providing real-time tactical value for commanders and providing crime scene investigators valuable data for prosecution," the company said.

The 10-employee company based in Capitola, California, said it was deploying the technology on a trial basis. The first takers have been the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department in California and the Carrollton Police Department in Texas.

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Verizon

Cellular communications provider Verizon Wireless is adding cookie-like tokens to Web requests traveling over its network. These tokens are being used to build a detailed picture of users’ interests and to help clients tailor advertisements, according to researchers and Verizon’s own documentation.

The profiling, part of Verizon’s Precision Market Insights division, kicked off more than two years ago and expanded to cover all Verizon Wireless subscribers as part of the company’s Relevant Mobile Advertising service. It appends a per-device token known as the Unique Identifier Header (UIDH) to each Web request sent through its cellular network from a particular mobile device, allowing Verizon to link a website visitor to its own internal profiles. The service aims to allow client websites to target advertising at specific segments of the consumer market.

While the company started piloting the service two years ago, privacy experts only began warning of the issue this week, arguing that the service is essentially tracking users and that companies paid for a fundamental service that should not be using the data for secondary purposes.

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This looks like perfectly moral behavior. Washington Fish and Wildlife

The question of why good people do bad things has fascinated psychologists for decades. Stanley Milgram famously identified deference to authority as a factor pushing people toward unethical behavior, but it seems that something even simpler could be in the mix: fatigue.

A recent study published in Psychological Science found that people are more inclined to cheat on a task at different times of the day, depending on their individual body clocks, or “chronotypes.” Chronotypes affect people’s natural peaks and troughs of physical and cognitive functions throughout the day, making “larks” more alert first thing in the morning and “owls” more wakeful late at night. The new evidence suggests that morning people are more likely to cheat at night, while evening people are more likely to cheat in the morning.

Morality in the morning

Building on research suggesting that people are more dishonest when they are tired, Brian Gunia, Christopher Barnes, and Sunita Sah assessed the chronotypes of participants, classifying them as either morning, intermediate, or evening people. Participants attended morning test sessions that required completing a puzzle task and were paid $0.50 for each puzzle they claimed to have solved correctly. If a participant failed to solve a puzzle but reported having done so, this was counted as a cheat.

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Getty Images

Getty Images, a massive image licensing company, has earned quite a reputation for aggressive copyright enforcement over the past several years. But the company says it wants to turn that around.

Until now, Getty’s strategy has been to comb the Web for illegal reproductions of its images using special software and to send threatening letters to anyone who appears to be infringing. Getty has told the targets of its letters that it will pursue an expensive lawsuit unless those who re-post the images agree to pay settlements that include penalties and licensing fees, sometimes amounting to hundreds or several thousand dollars. Generally, Getty Images tends not to pursue its claims in court, instead favoring the so-called “settlement demand letters” which bill the alleged user of an unlicensed Getty image for the use of the image, as well as a portion of the "enforcement fees."

But that won’t be the case any longer. Earlier this week, general counsel for Getty Images John Lapham told GigaOm that Getty’s "enforcement polices are being ramped down.”

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A physician at Columbia University Medical Center who recently travelled to Guinea to work with Doctors Without Borders has become the first case of Ebola in New York City. The New York Times says that there have been positive results in preliminary tests performed by city health authorities, although these await confirmation by the CDC. This would be the first US case outside of an initial cluster in Dallas, Texas.

The physician, who has been identified as Craig Spencer, posted photos of himself in full protective garb on Facebook in September. He returned from West Africa less than two weeks ago and had been self-monitoring since. He apparently began feeling unwell several days ago and developed a high fever on Thursday. As soon as health authorities were alerted, they brought him to Bellevue Hospital, which has been prepared for the isolation of Ebola patients and has trained staff for this contingency.

Unfortunately, the night prior to reporting his fever, Dr. Spencer took public transportation and a cab in order to go bowling in Brooklyn, according to the Times report. Authorities are now trying to identify people who might have had extensive contact with the patient and have sealed off his home and quarantined his girlfriend, according to CNN.

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bfishadow/ Flickr

In the first quarter of its 2015 financial year, Microsoft sold more phones than expected and continues to do well in the cloud space, leading it to a record for Q1 revenue.

Revenue for the quarter was $23.20 billion, up 25.2 percent on the same quarter in the 2014 financial year. Operating income was down 7.9 percent, to $5.84 billion, and earnings per share were down 12.7 percent to $0.55.

The large drop in operating income was driven primarily by a $1.14 billion charge for "integration and restructuring." The majority of this, $1.05 billion, was made up of severance expenses and restructuring-related write-downs.

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A single blue orb floating among billions, part of a galaxy that’s among hundreds of billions, houses the sum total of human achievement. The Sid Meier's Civilization series is one of those achievements, taking the total history of that great, big ball we all live on and condensing it into perhaps the best, and certainly the most popular, 4X strategy game ever made.

Civilization has always held the sanitized, slightly goofy ideal common to all projects bearing Meier's moniker. Maybe Civilization: Beyond Earth's developers felt infinitesimal when considering the vastness of space, or maybe they were simply struck with a distrust of the future common to science fiction. Either way, the latest game in the franchise that all but defines turn-based strategy is a bit less sanitized and a bit more sinister than its predecessors.

For one thing, despite the veneer of technological and social advancement inherent in exploring life on a new planet, the future represented by Beyond Earth is frighteningly similar to that of past Civilization titles. The humans still squabble over resources, land, and ideology, and they do so in ways that are similar to Civilization V from turn one on.

The similarities make Beyond Earth feel more like a sci-fi themed Civ V expansion than a bold new direction for the series. Units are moved the same way; cities are grown the same way; resource tiles are worked in the same way. While the new victory conditions each have some pseudoscience flavor dialogue, winning is still a matter of out-researching or out-fighting opposed factions in more or less the same ways as before.

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