Microsoft has unveiled a revamp of its developer program today, ending the annual fees to have apps published in the Windows and Windows Phone stores, in favor of a single up-front payment. Individuals can pay about $19 and companies about $99 to gain perpetual access to both storefronts.

The company is also promoting a new reward scheme for developers. Registered devs are divided into three categories, Explorer, Expert, and Master. The Explorer category, open to all, offers design and architecture guidance for developers. Developers can upgrade to the other categories by having successful apps; the more downloads and revenue apps receive, the better the status that's earned. Expert level gives improved ad terms, and Master level adds marketing support and early access to future SDKs.

The new scheme is clearly a nice gesture toward one developer demographic: the hobbyist. While $19 a year was never going to break the bank, scrapping the annual fee partially addresses one of the more paradoxical aspects of the platform: if Microsoft is so desperate for apps, why does it charge people to publish them? From a pure cost of entry perspective, this change clearly makes Windows and Windows Phone somewhat more attractive than they were before, and substantially more attractive than iOS.

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A Fire Keyboard + Fire HDX 8.9 + origami case. Casey Johnston

Amazon announced a slate of new Kindle products late Wednesday, including two new e-readers, a handful of new tablets, and a new version of its Android-based Fire operating system. Among the products are the new, ultra-thin Kindle Voyage e-reader and a new version of the 8.9-inch Fire HDX tablet, which now has an optional keyboard reminiscent of the Microsoft Surface.

A couple of new e-readers...

The Kindle Voyage is designed to be Amazon's new high-end Kindle model at 7.6 millimeters thick with a magnesium metal back. The Voyage has a 300ppi Paperwhite display that is 39 percent brighter than the previous model. The screen is front-lit and adaptive, so not only can it adjust to the ambient light in the room, Amazon says it will also perform a gradual adjustment over the course of 30 minutes to compensate for the adjustment of readers' eyes to the display in that environment.

The Voyage also slightly revamps the controls: instead of the page-turning buttons used in older Kindles, the Voyage has pressure-sensitive pads with haptic feedback on either side of the screen that are meant to be quieter. The screen in the Voyage is a single piece of glass flush with the bezel that is micro-etched to minimize reflections and mimic the feeling of paper, according to Amazon.

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Goodwill Industries was one of three companies affected by an attack on a retail managed service provider that went undetected for over 18 months. Dwight Burdette

In July, it was revealed that Goodwill Industries had suffered from a credit card data breach that affected the charitable retailer’s stores in at least 21 states. The Goodwill breach seemed by many to be just the latest case of criminals taking advantage of the weak underbelly of retailers—their point-of-sale systems. But now, as it turns out, the Goodwill breach was just part of a much larger attack on an outside managed service provider that affected at least two other companies. And many more may have been affected without their knowledge.

Security reporter Brian Krebs first broke the news on the Goodwill breach in July and traced the breach back to C&K Systems, a reseller of retail software systems from NCR, Retail Pro, and other retail software and systems providers. Goodwill had outsourced much of the operation of its retail systems, including its point-of-sale (POS) systems, to C&K through a managed service contract.

In a statement published on Monday, C&K Systems admitted that they had suffered a breach of point-of-sale systems tied to their “Hosted Managed Services Environment.” The company determined with the assistance of outside forensic investigators that the breach began sometime in early 2013. “The unauthorized access affected our Hosted Management Services Platform intermittently between February 10, 2013 and August 14, 2014.”

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Suspects in the brutal beating of two gay men were caught on CCTV, and social media stepped in to connect the dots.

Last Thursday night, a gay couple was brutally beaten by a group of two men and six women who were “visibly intoxicated.” NBC Philadelphia reports, “Witnesses say someone in the group asked, 'Is this your f****** boyfriend?' When one of the victims told them yes, the group allegedly attacked them, punching and kicking them in the face, head and chest.” One of the attackers grabbed a victim's bag and fled. At least one of the victims was taken to the hospital for fractures to his face and had to have his jaw wired shut.

Generally after an attack of this kind, the investigation can draw out indefinitely. The Philadelphia Police Department said it was looking for as many as 12 people in relation to the attack.

But today Philadelphia's ABC News syndicate reported that some of the suspects are expected to surrender to police in the near future.

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Extreme weather is punishing the south-western United States with a heatwave and a hurricane causing chaos from California into Mexico and flash flooding forecast for Arizona.

Free Press

Contrary to what AT&T and Verizon would have you believe, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler today said 4Mbps is too slow to be considered broadband and that Internet service providers who accept government subsidies should offer at least 10Mbps.

Last week, we reported on AT&T and Verizon urging the FCC to abandon a proposal that would redefine broadband download speeds from 4Mbps to 10Mbps. If the standard is raised, ISPs that accept government subsidies to build networks in hard-to-reach rural areas would have to provide the higher speed. AT&T and Verizon argued that 4Mbps is good enough, but Wheeler said otherwise today at a hearing in front of the US House Committee on Small Business.

US Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) pointed to communities with little or no access to high-speed broadband, saying if the minimum speed isn’t high enough, “rural constituents in my district will be left on the wrong side of the digital divide.”

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HealthKit may record a lot of data, but until third party apps can access it, it will sit lazily on a figurative couch. Andrew Cunningham On Wednesday morning, apps designed to connect to the new iOS HealthKit framework were set to launch alongside the brand new iOS 8, but those apps, hungry for your data about calories and fitness progress, apparently hadn't laced their jogging shoes. Shortly after the new version of iOS launched, developers learned that their HealthKit-ready apps and updates had been pulled from the App Store.

A few developers, including the creator of Carrot Fit, soon reported receiving calls and e-mails from Apple confirming that "HealthKit... isn't ready to launch," and later in the day, Apple publicly confirmed that HealthKit support would have to wait until a bug was fixed.

"We discovered a bug that prevents us from making HealthKit apps available on iOS 8 today," an Apple spokesperson told Ars in a statement. "We're working quickly to have the bug fixed in a software update and have HealthKit apps available by the end of the month."

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While opinions have been mixed on Destiny, Bungie's first post-Halo video game, most impressions and reviews of the game thus far—including our own—have at least praised its online stability. That's no small feat for an always-online game, especially in its first week, but error reports are beginning to accumulate from Destiny players across all four of the game's consoles.

There's a reason for that: Bungie launched its "shared world shooter" without much of a customer support structure in place. Eight days after launch, users who haven't been able to connect—including one of Ars Technica's own contributors, who still can't get online with an Xbox 360 copy of the game—have exhausted all of the suggestions listed at help.bungie.net. At that point, those users are directed to visit Bungie's forums, "staffed by community mentors who are here to help you."

The end result is a funneling of complaints to a forum whose topics are broken down not by official categories but by hashtags. With nothing in the way of a trackable "ticket" system or a customer service hotline, users are stuck with a "#help" page that is currently dominated by topic titles like "I've Given Up on Destiny and Got My Refund; Here's Why Maybe You Should Too" and "Bungie Please Give Us Info."

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Flickr user Bukowsky18

People who are watching their weight will often opt for a diet soda, reasoning that the fewer calories, the better. But the availability of drinks and foods made with artificial sweeteners like saccharin, sucralose, and aspartame hasn't seemed to help much with our booming obesity levels. Now, some researchers might have identified a reason for this: the sweeteners leave their users with elevated blood glucose levels. But they don't seem to act directly on human metabolism. Instead, the effects come through alterations in the bacterial populations that live inside us.

The paper that describes this work, which was performed by a large collaboration of researchers from Israel, is being released by Nature today. The researchers note that epidemiological studies about the effects of artificial sweeteners have produced mixed results; some show a benefit, while others indicate that they're associated with weight gain and diabetes risk. Given that human populations haven't given us a clear answer, the researchers turned to mice, where they could do a carefully controlled study.

They started taking a group of genetically matched mice and spiking their drinking water with either sucrose or a commercial prep of an artificial sweetener (either saccharin, sucralose, or aspartame). After five weeks, they checked the blood glucose levels of these animals. Eleven weeks later, the groups that were given the artificial sweeteners all had elevated blood glucose levels compared to those that received sucrose. This is typically a sign of metabolic problems, most often caused by insulin losing its effectiveness. It can be a precursor to type 2 diabetes.

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A senior IT employee with the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati has been arrested for grabbing the firm's confidential client information and using it to trade stocks.

FBI agents arrested 41-year-old Dimitry Braverman at his San Mateo, California, home on Tuesday morning, according to a report in the New York Law Journal. He was released on a $500,000 bond secured by $100,000 cash.

That same day, the SEC filed a civil suit against Braverman. He's accused of loading up on stock and stock options over a three-year period for companies involved in eight pending transactions. After the transactions, he sold the stock or used his options, reaping about $297,000 in profits.

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Police investigating the murders of Hannah Witheridge and David Miller in Thailand say two British men are "possible suspects" and will face questioning.

The Tower Records store in Shibuya, Japan. Wikipedia

After the United States, Japan is the second largest music market in the world. And while the country is usually seen as an early adopter of new technology, digital music sales haven't taken off. In total, 85 percent of music in Japan is purchased on a flat, plastic circle called a "compact disc" or "CD."

The New York Times takes a look at Japan's music situation, which surprisingly trails the rest of the world in the move to online distribution. Japan's online music sales are actually going down—online sales have gone from almost $1 billion in 2009 to just $400 million last year.

Japan has proven a tough nut to crack for the music industry's move to online, with the chairman of the Universal Music Group saying “Japan is utterly totally unique." Part of the reason CD sales are still going strong is Japanese culture's love of collecting things. There's also a general "protectionist business climate" within the Japanese music industry, which is suspicious of digital sales. (Where have we heard that before?)

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Sony's Xperia Z. Andrew Cunningham

This fiscal year, Sony announced that it lost over $1.2 billion. According to revised forecasting, the company is on pace to lose nearly double that figure by the end of the following fiscal year, largely due to lackluster sales of its mobile phones.

According to a new document released by the Japanese corporate giant on Wednesday, the company will lose $2.1 billion during the fiscal year ending March 31, 2015.

During the 2013 fiscal year, Sony managed to profit $435 million, its first profit in years. Overall, the company has missed profits in six of the last seven years. If the upcoming $2.1 billion in net losses prediction proves to be correct, Sony will have sustained over $12 billion in losses in eight years.

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iOS 8 has been released to the public. Andrew Cunningham

As promised at the iPhone 6 unveiling last week, Apple has just released iOS 8 to current iDevice users with compatible hardware. The software arrives two days ahead of the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and it's available either as an over-the-air update or through iTunes. The update should be available for the iPhone 4S, 5, 5C, and 5S; all iPads except the first-generation model; the fifth-generation iPod Touch; and both revisions of the third-generation Apple TV.

You can read pretty much everything there is to know about iOS 8 in our main review, but suffice it to say this is a big update. The headlining features include the new extensions, Continuity features that make your iDevices work more seamlessly with one another, improvements to many core applications, Family Sharing accounts that allow you to share purchases between different Apple IDs at no extra cost, and more.

Our tests indicate that the update didn't have adverse effects on battery life, and, for almost all current iOS users, it's a no-brainer. However, if you're using older devices with an Apple A5 chip—the iPhone 4S, iPad 2, non-Retina iPad Mini, and the iPod Touch—you may want to read our posts about those specific devices to decide whether the added features outweigh performance problems we ran into. You'll still probably want to update, but we wouldn't blame you if you wanted to wait for some performance-enhancing updates from Apple.

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Version:3.16.3 (stable) Released:2014-09-17 Source:linux-3.16.3.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.16.3.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.16.3.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.16.3

Graphene, a sheet of carbon one atom thick, has properties that are distinct from other forms of carbon—even graphite, which is just a bulk collection of graphene sheets. That's prompted researchers to look into other forms of what are called two-dimensional materials (at an atom thick, the third dimension isn't counted). And now, they've started experimenting with one-dimensional materials, which are essentially a line of single atoms.

Unfortunately, single atoms aren't especially cooperative about getting in line. Even stable crystals, like those formed by a salt, stay together in part because there are multiple interaction partners for each atom that stabilize the structure. Putting atoms in a line gets rid of most of these interactions, leaving the remaining ones unstable.

But researchers have figured out a way around this problem: they've managed to pack a line of atoms inside a carbon nanotube. Having chosen cesium iodide for their work, they simply had to pick a diameter that was larger than the atoms (over 3.4 Angstroms) but smaller than you'd need to put two atoms side-by-side (less than 8 Angstroms). They chose double-walled carbon nanotubes and loaded them with CsI simply by vaporizing the chemical under pressure.

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FamZoo Staff

Senators who have vocalized their opposition to net neutrality are taking in, on average, 40 percent more campaign cash from the broadband-delivery industry than those who support it, according to an analysis of campaign data.

The data (XLSX)—a Maplight analysis of campaign contributions prepared for Ars Technica—highlights the disparity between what the monied Washington interests want compared to the public's desires. Most of the 800,000 initial public comments to the Federal Communications Commission backed the FCC adopting net neutrality rules. The commission is weighing whether to enact regulations that, among other things, could prevent broadband providers from charging for Internet fast lanes. The public commenting period ended Monday.

What the commission will do is anybody's guess, but the political money so far is lining up against net neutrality. No vote date has been set.

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Google's reportedly real Android Silver program is now reportedly dead. According to The Information, Google is shelving the project.

Android Silver was supposed to get high-end stock Android phones into the hands of users, sort of like the Nexus program, but in a way that was more mainstream and inclusive of the rest of the industry. Silver would have given big ad dollars to OEMs and carriers in exchange for sticking to Google's guidelines. Just like Nexus phones, Google would handle the software and updates, and it would be up to OEMs to create "premium" hardware. The program was expected to launch in the US, Germany, and Japan as early as next year, but now it seems like that isn't happening.

The Information pegs the July departure of Google Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora as the reason for the program's cancellation. Arora was the program's primary champion inside of Google, and with the 10 year Google veteran leaving for Softbank, the program's momentum fizzled.

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The 15 states in which the ACLU knows that police use cell phone tracking devices. ACLU

A newly published e-mail from 2010 shows that Harris Corporation, one of the best-known makers of cellular surveillance systems, told the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that its purpose "is only to provide state/local law enforcement officials with authority to utilize this equipment in emergency situations."

That e-mail was among 27 pages of e-mails that were part of the company’s application to get FCC authorization to sell the device in the United States. Neither the FCC nor Harris Corporation immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment, and Harris traditionally stays mum on its operations.

"We do not comment on solutions we may or may not provide to classified Department of Defense or law enforcement agencies," Jim Burke, a spokesman for Harris, told Ars last month.

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Another year has passed and like clockwork Apple has released a new iPhone and a new version of iOS to accompany it. Our reviews of both new iPhones will be coming soon, with a look at new iOS features specific to those devices like ApplePay, but with iOS 8 rolling out today to millions of existing iOS users across the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, it's worth taking a look at what Apple is bringing to the users that are already in the iOS ecosystem. The eighth iteration of Apple's mobile operating system brings some new features, and while on the surface it may appear quite similar to iOS 7, under the hood the changes are quite significant. If iOS 7 was the biggest update for users in the seven years since the iPhone and iOS first appeared, then iOS 8 is the biggest update for developers since the launch of iOS 2.0 and the App Store. Read on for our full review.