The current incarnation of the SmartThings hub, which probably won't look much different once Samsung's acquisition of the company comes to fruition (unless they finally decide that white, clunky plastic is passe). Sam Machkovech

On Tuesday, Samsung announced that it would acquire Quietside, a manufacturer of air conditioners, heaters, and other HVAC appliances, for an undisclosed sum. This follows Samsung's purchase of smart home all-in-one solution SmartThings last week, an acquisition that had been hinted at in July, and the combination points to Samsung's desire to take over American homes by controlling their every device.

At first blush, the 100 percent acquisition of Quietside appears to merely streamline Samsung's operations, since the company already produces its own line of air conditioners—and has relied on Quietside to distribute those offerings in North America for over 15 years. Yet the Samsung announcement went so far as to hint at more to come: "[Samsung] also plans to unveil an enhanced HVAC product lineup that better reflects the needs of North American customers," it stated, though no timeline was attached to that sentence.

We can only assume that such a statement hints at the company's dreams of Samsung device interplay, with phones, watches, alarms, heaters, TVs, and more communicating with each other. As of now, Samsung's home appliance portfolio puts it in better position than its peers to consider taking over every corner of a home's electronics; where Google has Nest, Samsung has ovens and dryers. However, based on Samsung's "only Galaxy devices" compatibility track record, particularly with its Galaxy Gear offerings, we worry that Samsung will devour SmartThings' all-in-one home automation system and kill off compatibility with third-party products and protocols (a feature that, admittedly, was already thin enough when we reviewed the SmartThings hub earlier this year).

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Kevin Spencer

A healthcare system spanning 29 states announced on Monday that cybercriminals operating from China stole information on approximately 4.5 million patients, including names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers.

Community Health Systems, which comprises 206 facilities in the southern and western states, announced the incident in an 8-K filing submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The data breach likely stems from compromises in April and June of this year, involved sophisticated malware, and is apparently connected to China, the company stated.

"The attacker was able to bypass the Company’s security measures and successfully copy and transfer certain data outside the Company," CHS said in its 8-K filing. "Since first learning of this attack, the Company has worked closely with federal law enforcement authorities in connection with their investigation and possible prosecution of those determined to be responsible for this attack."

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A New York man who claimed police arrested and strip-searched him after he photographed a stop-and-frisk of three African-American youths has settled his civil rights suit with the New York Police Department for $125,000.

The settlement, first reported Monday by the Daily News, comes weeks after the NYPD reminded its officers that it was legal to peacefully record police activity. That department-wide memo followed the videotaped NYPD arrest of a man who died after being subdued by a chokehold last month.

The NYPD settled with a man named Dick George, who alleged that while he was sitting in his parked car in Flatbush in 2012, he saw two NYPD officers get out of an unmarked car and perform what is known as a stop-and-frisk of three youths. George said he captured the search on his mobile phone. He claimed he went up to the youths and told them next time that happens to make sure they get the officers' badge numbers.

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Watch Dogs is still planned for the Wii U, but it will be Ubisoft's last "mature" game for the system.

Nintendo consoles have long been decried by many gamers as "kiddie" systems that don't feature enough games targeted at adults. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot offered some support and explanation for that state of affairs recently, telling Game Informer that family focused titles are the only ones selling on the Wii U.

"It’s very simple. What we see is that Nintendo customers don’t buy Assassin’s Creed," Guillemot said in a recent interview with Game Informer. "Last year, we sold in very small numbers."

Apparently, that line of thinking extends past the Assassin's Creed series, as well. While Guillemot said that a long-delayed version of Watch Dogs will still be coming to Wii U, "it will be the only mature game we publish on it."

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Tesla has played a significant role in the rapidly growing credibility of the electric car. Yes, electric cars exist within an automotive niche, but so do plenty of other vehicles, and that niche is now a little larger following an announcement yesterday by Saleen Automotive, a noted tuning company. Much of the car world has been gathered south of San Francisco in the Monterey Peninsula for the annual Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance (a really fancy car show for people who insist on aligning all the screw heads under the hood in the same direction), and it was there that Saleen debuted the Foursixteen, its new performance car built atop a Tesla Model S.

Saleen has been in the business of building souped-up versions of other companies’ cars since the 1980s—notably some rather quick Mustangs—as well as its own mid-engined supercars, although these probably had more success on the race track than in the showroom. The Foursixteen, which starts at $152,000 before the various EV tax subsidies are taken into account, looks sportier than the stock Tesla both inside and out, and upgrades to the driveline, suspension, and associated software mean that performance should be able to match the new look.

"We have used all the experience and ingenuity in our collective acumen to create a truly exceptional Tesla Model S in our new FOURSIXTEEN," said Saleen Automotive CEO Steve Saleen. "By dramatically improving the aerodynamics, suspension, braking, and drive train we are able to create a car that accelerates quicker with vastly improved handling. It is truly exceptional."

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An eruption pierces the glaciers at the Bárðarbunga volcano. Oddur Sigurdsson, Iceland Geological Survey.

The Iceland Meteorological Office has increased the risk level of an eruption at the Bárðarbunga (or Bardarbunga) volcano after hundreds of earthquakes were reported over the weekend. The risk level has been set to orange, which is the fourth-highest rating on a five-level scale.

We asked Dave McGarvie, a volcanologist at The Open University, to explain what this means.

Should we be worried?

We have known for some time that Bárðarbunga was going to do something—we just didn’t know what. Because it is covered in ice, we rely on instruments to reveal its behavior.

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A handful of the full set of screenshots obtained by Android Police. Android Police

More details have leaked about Google's upcoming subscription service for YouTube, these in the form of screenshots posted by Android Police on Monday. The service, called YouTube Music Key, will give subscribers ad-free and offline playback of YouTube videos, as well as audio-only material.

Per the screenshots, users will be able to play music on their mobile phones "with or without video, in the background, or with your screen off"—all things that the single-tasking YouTube apps could not previously do. Subscribers will also be able to play music via "YouTube Mix," a recently added feature that works similarly to radio stations on other streaming services.

A YouTube Music Key subscription provides access to a 20-million-song catalog, roughly the same size as that of Spotify and Rdio, as well as a collection of material the app refers to as "concerts, covers, and remixes." While YouTube is rife with content beyond artists' official discographies, a lot of it of legally questionable provenance, it's not clear from the screenshots how Google will decide what goes into YouTube Music Key. Subscribers to the service will also be subscribed to "Google Play Music Key" for free, which is likely a rebranded Google Play Music All Access.

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Flickr user: Geoff Cordner

Kim Goodsell was running along a mountain trail when her left ankle began turning inward, unbidden. A few weeks later she started having trouble lifting her feet properly near the end of her runs, and her toes would scuff the ground. Her back started to ache, and then her joints, too.

This was in 2002, and Kim, then 44 years old, was already an accomplished endurance athlete. She cycled, ran, climbed, and skied through the Rockies for hours every day; she was a veteran of Ironman triathlons. She’d always been the strong one in her family. When she was four, she would let her teenage uncles stand on her stomach as a party trick. In high school, she was an accomplished gymnast and an ardent cyclist. By college, she was running the equivalent of a half marathon on most days. It wasn’t that she was much of a competitor, exactly—passing someone in a race felt more deflating than energizing. Mostly Kim just wanted to be moving.

So when her limbs started glitching, she did what high-level athletes do, what she had always done: she pushed through. But in the summer of 2010, years of gradually worsening symptoms gave way to weeks of spectacular collapse. Kim was about to head to Lake Superior with her husband, CB. They planned to camp, kayak, and disappear from the world for as long as they could catch enough fish to eat. But in the days before their scheduled departure, she could not grip a pen or a fork, much less a paddle. Kim, a woman for whom extreme sports were everyday pursuits, could no longer cope with everyday pursuits. Instead of a lakeside tent, she found herself at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

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AMD wants to be a "one-stop shop" for PC components, though RAM and SSDs are all totally standard commodity parts that rarely have compatibility trouble. AMD

PC builders mostly think of CPUs and GPUs when they think of AMD, but today the company announced that it's getting into the SSD business. AMD will be partnering with Toshiba-owned OCZ to launch three Radeon R7-branded solid-state drives in 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities. The drives use OCZ's Barefoot 3 controller and Toshiba's A19nm NAND chips, have four-year warranties, and include 3.5-inch drive adapters for desktops and disk cloning software from Acronis to aid with data migration. Additional information and specifications are laid out in the slides below.

AMD

The Radeon drives share many characteristics with other OCZ SSDs.

3 more images in gallery

The drives start at $99 for the 120GB model, well south of the $1-per-GB line, and the competitive SSD landscape usually pushes prices down a bit from the MSRP (the 240GB and 480GB models go for $164 and $299, respectively). However, AMD's drives will face strong competition from other entrenched competitors. Looking at Amazon shows well-regarded Samsung drives below that price point ($89 for a 120GB Samsung 840 EVO), and prices of older drives from value players like Kingston go even lower ($55 for a 120GB SSDNow V300 drive, $95 for a 240GB model). That's before you consider newer value-focused drives like the Crucial MX100, recently dubbed the best SSD for most people by the Wirecutter, or OCZ's own ARC 100, which uses the same controller and NAND as the Radeon drives, although it has a shorter warranty and lower transfer speeds.

Like the AMD-branded RAM the company introduced a few years back, there's nothing particularly special about these SSDs. They use controllers from an established company and share most of their specifications with other unbranded drives in OCZ's product lineup. OCZ said that the drive uses "a very different firmware that was engineered specifically for this drive," though it's not clear what differences buyers can actually expect to notice.

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The Roku TVs announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January will finally make their way into stores in the next few weeks, according to releases from TCL and Hisense Monday. The TVs range in size from 32 to 55 inches and are close in price to their dumb-TV counterparts with an operating system that's meant to be an antidote to the average TV interface.

The Roku setup of content "channels" like Netflix, YouTube, and Rdio, as well as the customizable home screen, remain largely unchanged in the new sets. Since the TVs have to handle other inputs, the interface also treats other connected devices (a cable set-top box or a console, for instance) as selectable "channels" on the home screen. If the connected devices are powered on, the TV can show a live preview of what is currently playing within the selected channel box.

The Roku TVs will be packaged with a Roku-style remote, which eliminates most of the interface-tweaking buttons found on a standard TV remote. Instead, there are directional buttons that handle menus, which are curated so that the most commonly tweaked settings get the best placement, according to Roku's research. If users dig deeper, they can find the more granular display settings and other features that TV remotes usually let viewers access with a button press.

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Gordon Smith, president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters and a former US senator from Oregon. Center for the Study of Ethics

On Monday the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) filed a petition asking a federal court to object to the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) rules for an upcoming auction of TV airwaves to cellular providers. Although lawsuits challenging FCC actions are relatively common, if the court sides with the NAB, the 2015 spectrum auction could be delayed, and promises of improvements to cellular networks could prove illusory.

The auction, which was mandated by Congress two years ago, is the first of its kind, and it has TV broadcasters bristling. The FCC has been asking TV stations to give up their airwaves in exchange for a cut of the auction proceeds, at which point participating stations can either go out of business or “channel share,” an arrangement where two stations occupy the same airwaves. Still, vigorous lobbying on behalf of the broadcast industry ensured that all participation in the auction would be voluntary.

In the NAB's lawsuit today, the industry group said that it was unhappy with the protections the FCC had put in place for those TV stations that chose not to participate in the auction. In 2012, Congress ordered that after participating TV stations had relinquished their rights to their airwaves, the commission would reorder the spectrum, being careful to preserve the remaining broadcasters' coverage areas as much as possible. At the time of the congressional order, the FCC had relied on a specific methodology to determine a broadcaster's coverage area, but in June of this year, the FCC switched to another methodology, which the NAB says is unacceptable.

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Carolla doing his podcast, earlier this month. Adam Carolla

After more than a year of litigation, podcaster and comedian Adam Carolla has reached a cease-fire with the well-known "patent troll" claiming to hold a patent that covers podcasting.

Carolla was sued for patent infringement in January 2013. He responded by fighting back, raising almost $500,000 in a crowd-funded campaign. The parties had a trial set for next month in East Texas.

Personal Audio LLC, the patent company, also sued TV networks CBS, NBC, and Fox over some of their Internet video-on-demand offerings, since it believes its patent covers some types of Internet "episodic content." The TV companies are continuing to litigate.

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Sprint announced new family plans today that provide 20GB of shared data for $100, calling it "double the high-speed data at a lower price than AT&T and Verizon Wireless."

New pricing options have been expected since last week when newly appointed Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure told employees that "When you have a great network, you don’t have to compete on price," according to Light Reading. But, "when your network is behind, unfortunately you have to compete on value and price."

AT&T and Verizon have the fastest and most reliable cellular networks in the US, according to a nationwide test conducted in late 2013. Sprint's network was the slowest among the four major carriers, but it ranked third in reliability, ahead of T-Mobile.

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Ewan McIntosh

As the protests in Ferguson, Missouri over police fatally shooting 19-year-old Mike Brown have raged through the past several nights, more than a few people have noticed how relatively quiet Facebook news feeds have been on the matter. While #Ferguson is a trending hashtag, Zeynep Tufekci pointed out at Medium that news about the violence was, as best, slow to percolate through her own feed, despite people posting liberally about it.

While I've been seeing the same political trending tags, my feed is mundane as usual: a couple is expecting a baby. A recreational softball team won a league championship. A few broader feel-good posts about actor Chris Pratt’s ice-bucket challenge to raise awareness and money for ALS, another friend’s ice-bucket challenge, another friend’s ice-bucket challenge… in fact, way more about ice bucket challenges than Ferguson or any other news-making event. In my news feed organized by top stories over the last day, I get one post about Ferguson. If I set it to organize by "most recent," there are five posts in the last five hours.

Zach Seward of Quartz noted, also anecdotally, that Facebook seems more likely to show videos of of people dumping cold water on their heads in high summer than police officers shooting tear gas at protesters and members of the media. And rightfully so in Facebook’s warped version of reality: people on Facebook may not be so interested in seeing the latter. At least, not if Facebook can’t show them the right angle. But Facebook’s algorithmic approach and the involvement of content sources is starting to come together such that it may soon be able to do exactly that.

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A red giant star really is quite gigantic compared to our Sun. NASA

Radioactive decay is a powerful tool. The predictable decay of radioactive isotopes can be used for far more than just dating old rocks. Scientists have used radioactive isotopes to determine the age of the Earth and the age of the Solar System itself. Now, a team of scientists has used radioactive dating to study the pre-history of the Solar System more accurately than before, in the process reconciling data that had seemed to be contradictory.

The contradiction came in the form of data from two different isotopes. The radioactive elements iodine-129 and hafnium-182 are found throughout meteoroids in the Solar System. The abundance of those elements, in relation to the abundance of their non-radioactive counterparts, should give estimates of the time when those elements were produced. The problem is that the date calculated from the iodine (~72 million years prior to the Sun’s formation) does not match the date from the hafnium (~15 million years). Since the two elements should have been produced in the same event (typically a supernova), this was quite a problem.

Both these isotopes are produced via a neutron-capture process. Under certain conditions, an atomic nucleus can pick up a loose neutron. While it remains the same element, it ends up being a different isotope with a different atomic weight. There are two known types of neutron-capture processes: the s-process and the r-process.

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HTTP Shaming's ethos is even on a fridge. Tony Webster, HTTP Shaming

The amount of personal data traveling to and from the Internet has exploded, yet many applications and services continue to put user information at risk by not encrypting data sent over wireless networks. Software engineer Tony Webster has a classic solution—shame. 

Webster decided to see if a little public humiliation could convince companies to better secure their customers' information. On Saturday, the consultant created a website, HTTP Shaming, and began posting cases of insecure communications, calling out businesses that send their customers' personal information to the Internet without encrypting it first.

One high-profile example includes well-liked travel-information firm TripIt. TripIt allows users to bring together information on their tickets, flight times, and itinerary and then sync it with other devices and share the information with friends and co-workers. Information shared with calendar applications, however, is not encrypted, Webster says, leaving it open to eavesdropping on public networks. Among the details that could be plucked from the air by anyone on the same wireless network: a user's full name, phone number, e-mail address, the last four digits of a credit card number, and emergency contact information. An attacker could even change or cancel the victim's flight, he says.

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The world is still waiting for the year of Linux on the desktop, but in 2003 it looked as if that goal was within reach. Back then, the city of Munich announced plans to switch from Microsoft technology to Linux on 14,000 PCs belonging to the city's municipal government. While the scheme suffered delays, it was completed in December 2013. There's only been one small problem: users aren't happy with the software, and the government isn't happy with the price.

The switch was motivated by a desire to reduce licensing costs and end the city's dependence on a single company. City of Munich PCs were running Windows NT 4, and the end of support for that operating system meant that it was going to incur significant licensing costs to upgrade. In response, the plan was to migrate to OpenOffice and Debian Linux. Later, the plan was updated to use LibreOffice and Ubuntu.

German media is reporting that the city is now considering a switch back to Microsoft in response to these complaints. The city is putting together an independent expert group to look at the problem, and if that group recommends using Microsoft software, Deputy Mayor Josef Schmid of the CSU party says that a switch back isn't impossible.

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Anyone paying vague attention to the PC games market has long known that it's a space dominated by downloadable titles. Still, it's a bit astounding to hear a report estimating that a full 92 percent of PC game sales in 2013 came from digital downloads, as DFC Intelligence recently told British tech site PCR.

That may sound high, even to people who haven't bought a PC game on a disc for years, but it lines up with other numbers reported throughout the industry. Last year, Payday 2 publisher Starbreeze announced that 80 percent of its 1.58 million first-month sales came from downloads, for instance. And let's not forget the scores of PC games that are totally ignoring retail sales for 100 percent downloadable releases these days, from Dota 2 to Day Z.

Download-dominated PC gaming is a newer phenomenon than some gamers might realize. As recently as 2010, analyst firm NPD was estimating that downloads made up only 48 percent of all PC game sales.

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Tim Redpath

Delaware has become the first state in the US to enact a law that ensures families’ rights to access the digital assets of loved ones during incapacitation or after death.

Last week, Gov. Jack Markell signed House Bill (HB) 345, “Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets and Digital Accounts Act,” which gives heirs and executors the same authority to take legal control of a digital account or device, just as they would take control of a physical asset or document.

Earlier this year, the Uniform Law Commission, a non-profit group that lobbies to enact model legislations across all jurisdictions in the United States, adopted its Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (UFADAA). Delaware is the first state to take the UFADAA and turn it into a bona fide law.

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Rightscorp

Internet copyright enforcer Rightscorp has told investors some revelatory details about its strategy in its second-quarter earnings call, as reported by TorrentFreak.

Rightscorp was founded to be a kind of RIAA-lite, getting online pirates to pay record companies and other rights-holders without the need to resort to high-stakes litigation. Instead, it creates e-mail notices demanding $20 per song from users it deems "repeat infringers" and insists that ISPs forward those notices.

The company is growing fast, but is still way, way in the red. Last year it earned $324,000 in revenue, while spending more than $2.1 million to run its operations. This year it's earning more revenue: $440,414 in the first six months of the year. However, operating costs during the same period have already hit $1.8 million.

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