FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler speaking to the cable industry in April 2014. NCTA

The head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is reportedly close to proposing a "hybrid approach" to network neutrality in which Internet service providers would be partially reclassified as common carriers, letting the commission take a harder stance against Internet fast lane deals.

However, the proposal would not completely outlaw deals in which Web services pay for faster access to consumers.

As reported Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, the broadband service that ISPs offer to consumers would be maintained as a lightly regulated information service. But the FCC would reclassify the service that ISPs offer at the other end of the network to content providers who deliver data over Internet providers' pipes. This would be a common carrier service subject to utility-style regulation under Title II of the Communications Act.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (center) could be barred from entering Denmark at his sentencing hearing on Friday. Nicolas Vigier

One of the co-founders of the notorious Pirate Bay website was convicted (Google Translate) Thursday in a major hacking case in Denmark, and could face up to six years in prison.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, better known by his nom de hacker "anakata," was found guilty of "hacking and gross damage" after being accused of illegally accessing the country’s driver’s license database (Google Translate), social security database, the shared IT system across the Schengen zone, and the e-mail accounts and passwords of 10,000 police officers and tax officials. All of that data was managed by CSC, a large American IT contractor.

Under Danish law, even after conviction, the defendants are only officially known by anonymous monikers: Svartholm Warg was dubbed "T1," while his still-unnamed 21-year-old Danish co-defendant was named "T2."

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Earlier this month, a Quebecois court in Montreal decided that Google owed a woman $2,250 for picturing her with “part of her breast exposed” in a Street View image. The woman was sitting in front of her house, and although her face was blurred out, she was still identifiable by her coworkers, especially as her car was parked in the driveway without the license plate blurred out.

As GigaOm writes, “Maria Pia Grillo suffered shock and embarrassment when she looked up her house using Google Maps’ Street View feature in 2009 and discovered an image that shows her leaning forward and exposing cleavage.” Grillo complained to Canadian authorites and Google, but when she had no response from Google after several weeks, she wrote a letter to the company saying:

I have informed myself as to my rights concerning this situation through the office of the privacy commissionars of Canada. Under the law my lisence plate should not appear. Moreover, from a safety and security standpoint, the information shown constitutes a total violation. This puts me, my house, my vehicule and my family members that I live with at the mercy of potential predators. I feel very vulnerable knowing that the information is available to anyone with internet access. The damage has been done.

Google never responded—it later told the court that it never received the letter and could not find it in a search. Grillo filed a complaint in 2011 asking Google to blur out more of the image, including most of her body and her license plate. She also asked that Google pay her CAD $45,000 for the depression she suffered when her coworkers “at a well-known bank” found the image and mocked her for it. According to Canadian tabloid Journal de Montreal, Grillo eventually quit her job.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Motorola

Motorola has announced that it is now officially under control of Lenovo, closing the deal that was announced at the beginning of the year.

Lenovo isn't a well-known brand when it comes to smartphones, but the company is a major player in the laptop market, where it usually ranks #1 or #2 in worldwide sales for any given quarter. Lenovo hopes to combine Motorola's brand with its distribution network and the aggressive pricing that allows it to be number one in the low-margin, highly-competitive laptop business.

Under Google, Motorola has been one of the more exciting OEMs out there. It produced the first round Andorid Wear device, the Moto 360, and great flagships like the Moto X. It made best-in-class low-end phones with the Moto G and Moto E, and now with Google it produced the Nexus 6.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Retailers say the real culprit in poor cyber-security is those darned uncooperative credit unions. Kenneth Allen

Reeling from the bad press associated with an ongoing parade of data breaches caused by criminal infiltration of their payment systems, representatives of six retail industry associations signed a joint open letter that pushes back against a vocal critic of retailers' cyber-security practices—credit union associations.

In the letter addressed to the presidents of the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) and the National Association of Federal Credit Unions (NAFCU), retail industry representatives accused the associations of spreading “a number of misleading and factually inaccurate points… in the media and before Congress in regards to the cyber security in our country.” The industry group executives insisted that retailers already share the burden of dealing with the cost of lost data—at least to the degree that they are contractually obliged by credit card organizations. But given how much they actually do pay, the retailers may protest too much.

Unsafe at any register

The letter is a direct response to comments made in a letter to House Homeland Security Committee chairman Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) by Carrie Hunt, the NAFCU’s senior vice president of government affairs, posted on October 28. In her letter, Hunt called out the retail industry for not carrying enough of the burden associated with the loss of customers' financial data.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

An illustration showing how Share Play works.

When Sony announced the new "Share Play" feature for PlayStation 4 owners two months ago, it was one of the most unexpected and interesting potential uses for its cloud-based gaming infrastructure that we'd heard of. The promise: a "virtual couch" that lets remote players join your games as if they were sitting right there with you. That means the ability to take part in competitive or cooperative multiplayer, even in games not designed for online play, or just the freedom to "borrow" a friend's system and screen to briefly try out a single-player title.

With the launch of the PS4's firmware version 2.00 this week, the Share Play promise has become a reality for millions of PS4 owners with PlayStation Plus. After tinkering with the new feature for the better part of an afternoon, we found Share Play on the PS4 to be far from unusable, but also far from the seamless experience of actually playing with a friend in the same room.

Setting up a Share Play session is a bit of an onerous process. First, both players have to join a chat party. Then one player has to start the Share Play session though the Party menu. The "guest" then has to connect to that Share Play session. After all that, the host has to virtually "hand a controller" to the guest through another Party screen menu, and the guest has to accept the controller.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

My gamut measurement of the Retina iMac's screen. Unfortunately, the 1931 CIE diagram produced by our measuring software is "non-uniform and obsolete."

I originally wanted to devote at least one story to a qualitative analysis of the Retina iMac’s screen, including a list of physical measurements (gamut, gamma, intensity, and anything else I could measure). However, although I measured like a crazy fiend, my hopes of a constructive analysis were dashed when my expert—Dr. Ray Soneira of DisplayMate—told me that the data gathered was mostly unusable. Primarily, it's due to my choice of instruments. Sadly, our Spyder4 Elite just wasn’t quite up to the task.

"Your Spyder measurements indicate that the Color Gamut is close but not accurate enough for video production. The most likely reason is that the Spyder is inaccurate because Apple most likely did a better job of accurately calibrating the monitor. The 1931 CIE Diagram that you use is highly non-uniform and obsolete," Soneira said.

However, he gamely took a look through the results anyway, and the e-mail conversation turned to resolution. Soneira quickly put forward a handy explanation for why Apple chose the "5K" resolution of 5120×2880 rather than one of the myriad of "standard" 4K resolutions. There are of course a lot of technical reasons to pick 5120×2880—at double the older 27-inch iMac’s resolution of 2560×1440, it makes for precisely four times as many pixels and easy scaling—but Soneira’s explanation was particularly insightful.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Don McCullough

The French Interior Minister told French public radio (Google Translate) on Thursday that the government has begun an investigation into who has been flying drones above as many as 10 nuclear power plants nationwide this month.

"There's a judicial investigation under way," French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said in an interview on France Info radio. “Measures are being taken to know what these drones are and neutralize them."

Le Monde reported this week that the drones have been variable in size, with some “a few dozen centimeters" in size, while others had a diameter of up to two meters.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A false-color image of the virus, showing its unusual filamentous appearance. CDC

The outcome of Ebola infections often depends on a patient's access to sophisticated medical care. But there's the possibility that it could be influenced by genetics as well. That suggestion comes from the authors of a new paper that looked at what happens when genetically diverse groups of mice were exposed to the virus. As it turns out, the results ranged from losing a bit of weight to complete mortality.

The work doesn't seem to have been inspired by looking for insight into the progression of hemorrhagic fever in humans. Instead, the researchers involved appear to have been frustrated by the fact that the most convenient research mammal, the mouse, doesn't experience the symptoms typical of Ebola infections in humans: no problems with blood coagulation, no hemorrhages, and no shock. So they decided to see if they could find a mouse strain that did show these symptoms (and would thus enable convenient studies).

To do so, they started with something called the Collaborative Cross collection. Most of the mouse strains used in research have been inbred until all members of the strain are genetically identical. There are, however, differences between strains; C57 mice are genetically distinct from 129 mice. So it's possible to see very different things happen if you do the same experiment in different strains.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More and more people are becoming familiar with the joys—and frustrations—of online dating. A recent Pew study found that 11 percent of the US public has used online dating services, and a full 38 percent of people who say they are "single and looking" have used such sites.

There's enough money to be made as an Internet matchmaker that it's apparently sparking some companies to push the boundaries of what's legal. Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission disclosed that it reached a settlement with JDI Dating Ltd., a UK company that runs 18 dating sites that it claims have over 12 million members. The sites include CupidsWand.com, FlirtCrowd.com, and FindMeLove.com. JDI will have to pay $616,165 in redress, and it must stop business practices that were said to violate both the FTC Act and a newer law that regulates recurring billing online.

JDI's dating sites would make fake profiles, which the company called "virtual cupids," and have them send computer-generated messages to new users who had created profiles but hadn't yet paid. On JDI's websites, users received an e-mail notifying them that another user sent them a "wink" within minutes of joining. Then they got additional winks, messages, and photo requests, supposedly from other members in their geographic area.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

In the fourth day of the Ars UNITE virtual conference, we took a look at how the promise of cheap virtual reality head-mounted displays from Oculus and others are already revolutionizing fields well outside of the gaming industry that gets the most attention. This morning's feature on the topic attracted a number of comments, ranging from skepticism to excitement.

"I remember the last time it was all the rage. E3 1995 IIRC," commenter Feniks noted, echoing others who remember the last time VR was the "next big thing." But our expert live chat panel agreed that things are different this time around. "For starters, the technology is more affordable today than it was back then," Virtually Better Inc.'s Dr. Marat Zanov said. "I think what happened in the 90's wasn't nearly the scale of what we're seeing now. The number of companies, from tiny startups to megacorps, that are investing in the technology at this point is unprecedented," added NASA JPL engineer Jeffrey Norris.

Other commenters said they feel the technology isn't quite there yet, with commenter DisplayNameTaken complaining about feelings of nausea, even on the Oculus DK2 with additional head-tracking hardware. "This is a technology where fine tuning the apps is what's going to sell it at this point because I can see people having a bad experiences and swearing it off for good. The first time, I was in 5 minutes and had to lay down an hour [because] my head was swimming so bad. I really want this to take off."

Read 114 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Inflation—in the cosmic sense, at least—has been in the news lately. Early this year, researchers announced that they found conclusive evidence that our Universe experienced a period of rapid expansion fractions of a second after the Big Bang, an event that left its mark on the present-day Universe. Unfortunately, that result hasn't held up well under more intense scrutiny.

But it's worth understanding what all the fuss is about. Inflation is the only way we have of explaining how the Big Bang could possibly produce the Universe that we find ourselves in today. And the theory has consequences, including the implication that our Universe is not alone; other universes would pop into existence as inflation sped faster than the boundaries of our Universe expanded.

If this sounds like your cup of tea, then you'll have a great opportunity tomorrow afternoon. Alan Guth, the theoretical physicist who was instrumental in developing inflationary theory, is doing a live session in which he'll explain inflation and field questions about it.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Nintendo

Nintendo's latest internal financial report came with a Tuesday presentation from company president Satoru Iwata, who took the opportunity to announce a new type of product being developed by the game maker: a touchless sleep sensor. (Wait, really?)

Though neither a design nor product name was announced, Iwata repeatedly described a forthcoming "Quality of Life Sensor" meant to sit next to a user's bed during sleep. Overnight, the product will visually record "movements of your body, breathing, and heartbeat," then upload resulting data to Nintendo's cloud servers so that a corresponding app can analyze your sleep and offer suggestions for better rest in the future.

"Fatigue and sleep are themes that are rather hard to visualize in more objective ways," Iwata said. "At Nintendo, we believe that if we could visualize them, there would be great potential for many people regardless of age, gender, language, or culture."

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Intel Free Press

The Internal Revenue Service asked a federal appeals court Thursday to reconsider its September ruling that allowed Electronic Arts founder William "Trip" Hawkins to avoid paying $26 million in California and federal taxes.

The IRS said that Hawkins is not qualified to enjoy the tax relief benefits from his 2006 bankruptcy. The taxing agency claims that Hawkins maintained a wealthy lifestyle ahead of his bankruptcy filing instead of satisfying his tax debt. But the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals didn't agree, and a three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based court ruled 2-1.

"A mere showing of spending in excess of income is not sufficient to establish the required intent to evade tax; the government must establish that the debtor took the actions with the specific intent of evading taxes," the court said. "Indeed, if simply living beyond one’s means, or paying bills to other creditors prior to bankruptcy, were sufficient to establish a willful attempt to evade taxes, there would be few personal bankruptcies in which taxes would be dischargeable. Such a rule could create a large ripple effect throughout the bankruptcy system. As to discharge of debts, bankruptcy law must apply equally to the rich and poor alike, fulfilling the Constitution’s requirement that Congress establish 'uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States.'"

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A different RNA-based enzyme, showing how complex even short molecules can be. UCSB

Even the simplest forms of life, like bacteria, have a handedness, one that's built into the chemicals they're composed of. The complex, three-dimensional molecules that are essential to life can have the same exact set of atoms, yet be physically distinct—one the mirror image of the other. Almost all the amino acids that life uses have a single orientation; same with the sugars.

While life is very good at operating with this handedness, called chirality, nature isn't. Most chemical reactions produce a mixture of left and right forms of molecules. This seemingly creates a problem for the origin of life—if both chiral forms were available, how did life pick just one? The problem is even more severe than that. If both forms are present, then the reactions that duplicate DNA and RNA molecules don't work. And without those reactions, life won't work.

Now, researchers have found this doesn't pose much of a barrier at all. Through a little test-tube based evolution, they were able to make an RNA molecule that could copy other RNA molecules with the opposite chirality. In other words, they made a right hand that could only copy the left. But the duplicate, the left-handed form, could then readily copy the right-handed version. And as an added bonus, the new RNA molecule may be one of the most useful copying enzymes yet evolved.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The next wave of virtual reality may be largely driven by the gaming industry, but the technology's impact is being explored and felt by many other fields as well. Join us at 1pm Eastern for a discussion of how the cheap availability of quality VR headsets is already changing the worlds of psychology and space exploration.

With us today are:

• Dr. Marat V. Zanov, director of training at Virtually Better Inc., which has used VR in the treatment of phobias and trauma for decades
• Dr. Albert "Skip" Rizzo, USC Institute for Creative Technology, who has been researching therapeutic uses for VR since the early '90s
• Victor Luo and Jeff Norris, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who are using VR to improve Martian mapping techniques and robotic remote controls

Please join us using the link below and participate by leaving comments and questions for our panelists either before or during the event.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Verizon Wireless has agreed to a $64.2 million settlement in a class action lawsuit that alleged it billed phone customers for calls that were supposed to be free.

The proposed settlement (PDF) was filed last week in US District Court in New Jersey and first reported by Law360.

"The motion asks US District Judge Jose L. Linares to sign off on the agreement, which would include a $36.7 million cash payment from Verizon in addition to $27.5 million in 'calling units' that will be accessible via personal identification number," Law360 wrote. The lawyers who represented consumers will get $19.26 million from the total settlement amount.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

As a rule, you don't spend $2 billion on a company like Oculus without expecting the technology to eventually reach some kind of world-changing scale. In an earnings call earlier this week, though, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it could take a little bit of time before virtual reality becomes a market force that could represent the kind of "new major computing platform" that only comes around once every ten or 15 years.

"[Oculus] needs to reach a very large scale, 50 million to 100 million units, before it'll really be a very meaningful thing as a computing platform," Zuckerberg said during the call to investors and analysts. "So I do think it's going to take a bunch of years to get there. ... That'll take a few cycles of the device to get there, and that's kind of what I'm talking about. And then when you get to that scale, that's when it starts to be interesting as a business in terms of developing out the ecosystem."

Even with 100,000 development kits already distributed worldwide, Zuckerberg sees the first few consumer iterations of the Rift, expected in the next few years, to merely be the tip of the spear for VR as a platform, so to speak. "So when I'm talking about that as a 10-year thing, it's building the first set of devices and building the audience and the ecosystem around that until it eventually becomes a business."

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

If anyone was still unaware of GamerGate by this point, Stephen Colbert provided a one-night crash course through an editorial segment (below) and an interview with critic Anita Sarkeesian (above).

"You and the other feminazis in the gamer world are coming for our balls, to snip 'em off, put 'em in a little felt purse, and take them away so we have to play your non-violent games, right?"

"Not quite. There is something going on," Sarkeesian replied. "What it is, is women are being harassed, threatened, and terrorized..."

"After you first attacked male gamers for enjoying looking at big breasted women with tiny armor that barely covers their nipples?" Colbert interjected. "What's wrong with that? I'm a man, baby. Newsflash: I like that."

In typical Colbert fashion, the host boiled down a hot media controversy to its core and found spots of seeming lunacy. Sarkeesian retold the story of her lecture at Utah State University being canceled after an anonymous e-mail threatened the biggest school shooting to date. She dismissed the "threat" of women gamers, saying it may be a result of the gaming industry's resistance to becoming more inclusive. Colbert's response to all of that? "Why not just have a separate game? Have separate but equal games?"

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Spoooooooky!

Earlier today, Ars IT editor Sean Gallagher was doing some scary things with wireless when he discovered someone probing for a Wi-Fi network with a name that appeared to be something un-parseable. I theorized that it was actually something in Unicode that Wireshark wasn't parsing properly. "So someone has a Unicode SSID?" Gallagher asked, incredulous.

That's the strangest SSID I've ever seen. Sean Gallagher

I was inspired. I wanted a Unicode SSID—one that could match the season and give my network name a seasonal gothic flare. So I set out to see if I could do it with my own Wi-Fi network. While I was successful, the effect may be lost on Windows users and others on devices that can't handle Unicode characters in their wireless network name. And as Gallagher determined, it doesn't work on all Wi-Fi networking hardware.

OS X ♥ Unicode The tools

Unicode has some fun characters that can be used to generate a spooky SSID, but it can be difficult to type these characters using a traditional keyboard. After some digging around, I found the excellent Unicode Text Converter. This page allows you to enter a simple string and get back a variety of clever representations.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments