EPIC 2014

Ten years ago this month, I saw an eight-minute video that I’ve never forgotten. It seared into my brain an imaginary corporate merger between two tech giants that never actually took place: Googlezon.

While the details of "EPIC 2014" were certainly off, its larger message about technology and media still rings true: the algorithms have won.

Back in the fall of 2004, I was a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Amazingly, hardly anyone was studying so-called "new media" at the time. We were all subdivided into "traditional" groups: newspaper, magazine, television, and radio. I was unusual in that I had an interest in tech reporting, but took classes from both the print and radio sides. While this approach is anathema to the way that journalism is taught today, each discipline was segregated—I never hung out with those weird TV kids.

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Full-size replica of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo shown at Farnborough Airshow.

Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson said that he plans to move forward with his company's plans to commercialize space travel just one day after SpaceShipTwo crashed in the Mojave desert on a test flight.

“We’ve always known that the road to space is extremely difficult - and that every new transportation system has to deal with bad days early in their history,” Branson wrote in a blog post on Saturday.

“Space is hard—but worth it,” he added.

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Artist's impression of the GG Tau A system, including the disks of gas and dust. ESO/L. Calçada

When Luke Skywalker stared off somberly toward the twin setting suns of his native planet Tatooine in Star Wars, he left some viewers with somber questions of their own. These questions had nothing to do with joining the rebellion. Instead, they were things like, "Could a planet like Tatooine actually exist? Can planets form in a system with more than one star?"

The formation of planets around their stars is a complicated business, and that’s when there’s only one star in the picture. Add two more stars and it can create problems for anything within their gravitational influence.

New observations of the triple star system GG Tau A addresses this issue, confirming theoretical models of planet formation in the process. The new data demonstrates that the system is capable of forming planets and suggests that planets may already be forming in GG Tau A.

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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.

davidk01 asks:

When Murray Gell-Mann was asked how Richard Feynman managed to solve so many hard problems Gell-Mann responded that Feynman had an algorithm:

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Max Tegmark/MIT

Earlier this week, a cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn, played host to the sort of debate that's usually reserved for smoke-filled dorm rooms: do we live in a multiverse, and, if so, is there another you out there?

But rather than mind-altered undergrads, the debate took place among three physicists, one of whom happens to have a Nobel Prize sitting back home.

The debate was held at Pioneer Works, a nonprofit center that places artists' studios next to a space for scientists-in-residence, mixing in a high-tech microscopy company and 3D printers for good measure. It's mostly known for the classes it offers, which range from crafts like lock picking and programming to learning how to play a theremin. But Pioneer Works is starting a series on controversial scientific topics, and the multiverse is the first one it chose to tackle.

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Prosecutors in Contra Costa County, directly across the bay from San Francisco, have filed criminal felony charges against a former California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer, Sean Harrington, who is accused of seizing and distributing racy photos copied from arrestees’ phones.

Harrington's attorney, Michael Rains, told a local NBC affiliate that his client has resigned from the CHP and was sorry for what he has done. Rains, who has a longstanding history of representing Bay Area law enforcement, did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment.

"This behavior is really not defensible,” Rains told NBC Bay Area. “It is impulsive, immature and inappropriate in every sense of the word.”

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Debris from SpaceShipTwo in the Mojave desert. ABC News

At a press conference this evening, officials confirmed the destruction of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and the death of one of its two-person crew. The air-launched spaceplane, intended to one day carry passengers for suborbital "space tourism" flights, left the ground at 9:20am PDT. At approximately 10:10am, SpaceShipTwo separated from its "mothership," WhiteKnightTwo. Approximately two minutes later, controllers noticed an "anomaly," and the flight was terminated as SpaceShipTwo broke apart.

Both of the two crewmembers aboard ejected from the spacecraft; one survived with serious injuries and was transported to a hospital, but the other perished. Although the names of the two crewmembers were not released, the president of the company that built the craft, Scaled Composites' Kevin Mickey, confirmed that both were Scaled Composites employees.

Representatives on hand during the press conference included officials from the Mojave Air and Space Port, Scaled Composites, Virgin Galactic, and local fire and police agencies. The officials delivered prepared statements and fielded a limited number of questions but deferred most substantial information until after the National Transportation Safety Bureau team could arrive. The NTSB is expected to begin its formal investigation at approximately 7:30am  PDT tomorrow morning, November 1.

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Time starts at the left and moves right, obviously. NASA

Time is something we're all very aware of. On my desk, I have no less than four devices that insist on telling me the current time. Despite this exactitude, we have very little idea about what time is and why it has only one direction, and it has turned out to be a remarkably difficult question to answer.

Like all good questions, this one lingers, like the contents in the back of a fridge. It haunts our dreams and desperately awaits someone strong enough to brave the mold and scrape out the pot.

Time and the laws of physics

What is this stuff called time, anyway? No one really knows. It's so embedded in our experience that we can measure its passage more accurately than just about anything else. But compared to spatial dimensions, we know nothing. Take, for example, the expansion of the Universe. This is space—the thing that provides room for us to move—getting larger. Somehow, space is stretching out and becoming bigger. This expansion occurs as a function of time, but... why is time not stretching out as well? Indeed, why is time even separate from space? Why can we turn left or right in space, but not turn "future" or "past" in time? It's simply an enigma.

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An edition of El Pais that pre-dates Google News. lacuadratura

Spain passed a new Intellectual Property Law yesterday, which includes a provision to levy fees on search engines that show snippets of other webpages. It's at least the third instance of a European government seeking to impose a fee on search techniques to support their traditional publishing industry. Such efforts are often labeled a "Google tax."

"We are disappointed with the new law because we believe that services like Google News help publishers bring traffic to their sites," Google told The Hollywood Reporter in a statement.  "As far as the future is concerned, we will continue working with the Spanish publishers to help increase their revenues while we evaluate our options within the framework of the new legislation."

The Spanish law allows for sanctions of up to $758,000 for those who violate the law. The penalty applies to anyone who "links to pirated content," according to THR, and in the Spanish view, that apparently includes Google News snippets.

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A Virginia Circuit Court judge ruled on Thursday that a person does not need to provide a passcode to unlock their phone for the police. The court also ruled that demanding a suspect to provide a fingerprint to unlock a phone would be constitutional.

The ruling calls into question the privacy of some iPhone 5S, 6, and 6 Plus users who have models equipped with TouchID, the fingerprint sensor that allows the user—and ideally only the user—to unlock the phone. It is possible for users to turn TouchID unlocking off and simply use a passcode, and Apple has provided certain extra protections to prevent TouchID privacy issues—requiring the entry of a passcode if the phone hasn't been used in 48 hours, for example. But if a suspect simply uses TouchID to open their phone, police could have a window to take advantage of that when apprehending them.

The case in question this week involved a man named David Baust, who was charged in February with trying to strangle his girlfriend. The Virginian Pilot reports that Baust's phone might contain video of the conflict but that his phone was locked with a passcode. Baust's attorney argued that passcodes are protected by the Fifth Amendment.

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Few things are scarier than 4Chan. But our readers told a few stories that spooked us. Paul van der Werf

Earlier this week, we asked readers to share their most frightening tales of technology terror and support horror. And via both comments and Twitter (using the hashtag #ITTalesofTerror), in poured stories that raised goosebumps from those of us who have worked in IT at one point or another.

After reading through them, we’ve picked out some reader favorites and a few of our own. Some of us at Ars were inspired to recount further tales of horror from our own IT careers—including one of mine that I’ve saved for last; it should cause a shudder of recognition from our more veteran readers and a bit of schadenfreude from those too young to remember five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks.

The chamber of horrors Danger: Intel inside. Cohesion

Many readers had short tales of terror about mishaps in the closed spaces where we hide our network infrastructure. Eli Jacobowitz (@creepdr on Twitter) shared a short, shocking scenario by tweet: “Raccoons in the network closet (not kidding).” David Mohundro shared another story of a somewhat more smelly infrastructure invasion that brings new meaning to “data scrubbing”: “I saw our IT guys lugging shop vacs through the lower parking deck one day. There was a sewage backup into the server room.”

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Mac users tired of their neglected four-year-old version of Outlook can heave a sigh of relief this morning, as Microsoft has released a new version of Outlook. Dubbed simply "Outlook for Mac," the upgraded release includes several standout features from the PC version of Outlook that Mac users have been forced to go without—and, unfortunately, it also brings with it a few features that Mac users probably wish would stay on the PC.

It's my inbox! As with many other companies, complaining about T&E and reimbursements is a popular topic at Ars.

There’s a caveat, though: the new version of Outlook for Mac can only be used if you have certain Office 365 subscriptions. This holds with Microsoft’s new policy of "prioritiz[ing] mobile first and cloud first scenarios," and it means that at least for now, users who don’t pay for monthly Office 365 subscriptions and prefer to buy "perpetual" licensed versions (in other words, users who prefer to buy Office the traditional way) will have to wait at least until the first half of 2015 to get their hands on the new version of Outlook. At least for now, it’s subscription-only. More confusing, not all subscriptions are eligible (more on that in a minute). Additionally, MSDN subscribers do not appear to be able to download the application through the MSDN software library (I have an MSDN subscription, and the new Mac Office is definitely not in my download library).

If you are a O365 subscriber and have the right licensing, you should be able to download the new version of Outlook immediately. Probably the most significant feature added in the new version is true push support for receiving Exchange e-mail. Office 2011 users have had to go without the instant e-mail delivery that Windows Office users have always enjoyed. Finally, the updated Outlook lets you receive e-mail immediately rather than making you wait anywhere between ten and sixty seconds for e-mail to show up in your inbox.

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Hidden services running on the Tor network got major support on Friday when Facebook began offering Tor users a way to connect to its services and not run afoul of the social network’s algorithms for detecting fraudulent usage of accounts.

On Friday, the company added a hidden service address with a .onion top-level domain, facebookcorewwwi.onion [updated to fix address], which allows Tor users to protect their data and identity all the way to Facebook’s datacenters. Hidden services accessed through the Tor network allow both the Web user and website to remain anonymous.

“Facebook’s onion address provides a way to access Facebook through Tor without losing the cryptographic protections provided by the Tor cloud,” Alec Muffett, a software engineer with Facebook’s security infrastructure group, said in a blog post. “It provides end-to-end communication, from your browser directly into a Facebook datacenter.”

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If you want to buy a PC with Windows 7 Home Basic, Home Premium, or Ultimate preinstalled, you'd better buy it today. As noted earlier this year, October 31 is Microsoft's cut-off date for OEM preinstalls of the consumer editions of Windows 7.

In truth, most major OEMs had all but ceased selling systems with these operating systems long ago. With Windows 8.1 available to OEMs at no cost in the form of its "with Bing" edition, Windows 7 becomes an expensive option.

Windows 7 Professional is still available as a preinstall for at least another year. There's no end date actually specified yet, but Microsoft says that it will give at least one year of notice before sales cease.

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The Wall Street Journal reports that Andy Rubin, the founder and former head of Android, is leaving Google. The report states that Rubin will be starting "an incubator for hardware startups."

The move shouldn't affect Android. Rubin left the mobile division in March of 2013, handing the reins over to Sundar Pichai. Pichai has turned into Larry Page's right-hand man and now controls just about every Google product.

For the last year and a half, Rubin has been running Google's mysterious robotics division. We've seen the company gobble up several high-profile robotics companies, including Boston Dynamics and SCHAFT, the winner of the DARPA Robotics Challenge. With Rubin out, James Kuffner will take over the division.

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Nearly a million websites running the popular Drupal content management system had only hours to update their software before attacks likely compromised the systems, thanks to a widespread vulnerability, the Drupal security team warned this week.

On October 15, the security team for the Drupal content management system announced the discovery of a critical security flaw that could allow attackers to steal data or compromise vulnerable sites. Within seven hours of the announcement, attackers had begun broadly scanning for and attacking Drupal sites, according to the project’s security team, which provided the details in an October 29 public service announcement.

“Systematic attacks were launched against a wide variety of Drupal websites in an attempt to exploit this vulnerability,” the group stated in its update. “If you did not update your site within < 7 hours of the bug being announced, we consider it likely your site was already compromised.”

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Oscar Swartz

After being convicted of “hacking and gross damage,” Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, better known by his nom de hacker "anakata," was sentenced (Google Translate) to 3.5 years in prison by a Danish court on Friday.

One day earlier, the Pirate Bay co-founder was found guilty of illegally accessing the country’s driver’s license database (Google Translate), social security database, and the shared IT system across the Schengen zone, Europe's common passport regions. Using this access, he obtained 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.

Svartholm Warg's accomplice, who was only named in court documents as “T2” in accordance with Danish anonymity law, was sentenced to six months. T2, the court said, was only involved in hacking attempts that took place on February 13 and 14, 2012; Svartholm Warg continued his activities until the end of August 2012.

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Update: When this story was first posted, there was an error with the axis scale/bar size on the above graph that made the PS4's sales look smaller than they are. Ars regrets the error.

Last week, we waded into the somewhat murky waters of console sales number reporting. Our estimate was that Sony had at least 59 percent of the market share in the battle between the PS4 and Xbox One. Since then, newly released numbers, plus a new look at some assumptions about the Xbox One market, have us revising Sony's share of that market upward. We now think it's in the 65 to 67 percent range.

The revised numbers come in part from Sony's quarterly report, which shows that an impressive 13.5 million PlayStation 4 systems have been shipped in the period from the system's launch late last year through September. That's up substantially from 10 million systems sold to consumers through mid-August, suggesting that PS4 sales have picked up considerably during September. Perhaps the the high-profile release of Destiny and its PlayStation-exclusive content has something to do with that.

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While there were a variety of rumors that Microsoft would soon ship a wearable device of some kind, the actual announcement and release—with mere hours between them—was a bit of a surprise. It was so uncharacteristically un-Microsoft. Not only did the company manage to keep most of the information under wraps until a few hours before the planned public reveal, but it also managed a real launch of real hardware. Not "you can buy it in a few months" or "pre-orders open next week." Instead, we got "you can toddle along to the Microsoft store and pick it up as soon as the doors open."

All this, and a product that's the company's first entrant into a new market, too.

In the box.

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I had a Band delivered a few hours ago (thanks Jeff!) and have had a bit of an opportunity to play with it. The Band is a neatly packaged but rather chunky wristband. There are three sizes of Band available to accommodate different wrist sizes. Fine-tuning of the design is done with the clasp mechanism. The clasp can stick anywhere along a long groove offering perhaps a little over an inch of size adjustment.

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Sure, you can read all the words that follow (and you should!), but first, come with us on a whirlwind video tour of Turn 10 Studios. (video link)

REDMOND, WA—In a relatively anonymous office park about 30 minutes from downtown Seattle, one headquarters clearly stands out from its neighbors. There are unavoidable glimpses of automobile ephemera—Maserati, Lotus, and Mercedes flags, particularly—hanging in the windows, and the parking lot contains a significantly higher concentration of interesting cars than one would expect. It's subtle, but to the cognoscenti it signals "interesting car stuff happens here." Welcome to Turn 10.

Ars editor Sam Machkovech and I recently spent a few hours in the game studio's car-culture drenched halls to learn more about how the fine folks at Turn 10 turn out the various entries in the Forza franchise. If the outside features hint to the workings within, the reception area shouts this office's purpose. That metallic burnt orange McLaren P1 hanging out next to the front desk? It was a version of the car that played cover star for Forza Motorsport 5, although the one serving as gate guard here was, sadly, an undrivable shell and not a full-on, 900 horsepower hybrid hypercar. Despite that fact, it still cost more than $300,000! That carbon fiber bodywork didn't come cheap, it turns out.

Sam Machkovech

Quite a few racing drivers have sat there, helping to tune Forza.

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Sam and I were issued visitor passes, and our host for the day, Turn 10 Content Director John Wendl, led us past the studio’s assorted trophies and into his world. There were fewer racing cockpits in the office than you might expect. A three-screen Xbox One setup took pride of place in the center of the office, complete with the rather good Thrustmaster TX racing wheel we reviewed recently. Sitting forlornly under the stairs was an older, three-screen cockpit that appeared to have the ability to tilt the seat around. This veteran of many a trade show was now gathering dust, obsolete with the move from the Xbox 360 (and Forza Motorsport 4) to the Xbox One.

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