Sony

This week's gaming news has been dominated by Microsoft's controversial decision to buy timed Xbox exclusivity for the next Tomb Raider game. While this is not an unusual practice historically, a Sony executive is trying to make some hay by saying the PlayStation 4 doesn't need to buy exclusive games. Except when it does...

In an interview with CVG, PlayStation Europe's Jim Ryan said that Sony's stable of first- and second-party exclusives, as well as exclusive and early content in games like Destiny, is enough to make the PlayStation 4 compelling.

"So do we feel the need to go out and buy outright exclusivity? Probably not," Ryan said. "You saw last night [at Sony's press conference] that before the media briefing we showed updated videos of games that we had revealed at E3. That's because we wanted to keep the show itself full of new, fresh things. We think that gave us a good, strong, convincing portfolio of exclusive stuff, and we're happy with that."

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Greetings, Arsians! Our partners at LogicBuy are back with a ton of deals for this week. Have you backed up your files lately? The featured deal today is a 1TB portable hard drive from Toshiba for just $59.99. Nobody likes backing up files, but with USB 3.0, your backups should go just a little bit faster. The drive and a ton of other deals are below. Enjoy!

Featured deal

• Toshiba Canvio Basics 1TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive for $59.99 with free shipping (list price $119.99)

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Lenovo's smartphones are primarily sold overseas, but it's making moves that could significantly expand its presence. Lenovo

Lenovo posted its first-quarter financial results last night (PDF), and overall the news was good. Revenue was up 11 percent compared to the same quarter last year, and profit after operating expenses was up to $283 million from $202 million. These aren't huge numbers if you're used to looking at results from, say, Apple or Google or Microsoft. But overall Lenovo seems to be doing a good job of keeping its head above water and growing share in a time when that's hardly guaranteed for old-guard PC companies. In fact, Lenovo has been one of the few companies to grow faster than the wider PC industry over the last three-or-so years, as tablets and smartphones have taken a sizable chunk out of the traditional PC market.

Even more interesting was the information Lenovo presented about its smartphone sales—the company says it is now the largest seller of smartphones in its home market of China, though worldwide it's still a fairly distant fourth. Lenovo doesn't have a presence in the US market, but increasing share in China has become a major goal for other smartphone makers of late. Apple was very enthusiastic about its partnership with China Mobile earlier this year, and Apple's earnings drive home the extent to which China and other non-US markets are driving the company's continuing growth. Lenovo also says that 20 percent of its smartphone sales are coming from other countries, up from five percent a year ago—it's slowly beginning to expand outside of its home country, something that Xiaomi, Huawei, and other Asian phone companies are also looking to do.

Lenovo

From that perspective, Lenovo's pending purchase of Motorola from Google makes a lot of sense. Why fight to expand your market share when you can buy a ready-made smartphone manufacturer for relatively little money (at least, compared to what Google paid for it in 2011)? Motorola has lost money so consistently under Google's leadership that Lenovo's purchase might seem odd, but it gets the company a foothold in established Western markets and will help Lenovo expand its presence in other markets, too.

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Via Tsuji

The National League of Cities, a group of municipalities from across the United States, announced Thursday that it was forming a new network of startups, cities, and academics to “identify the regulatory challenges posed by the disruptive technologies that power the sharing economy.”

The aptly named “Sharing Economy Advisory Network” comes as many of its member cities have conducted sting operations and issued citations against companies like Lyft and Uber, which allow users to summon cars with the tap of a smartphone app. These cities say that such firms operate as illegal taxis and should be subject to relevant legislation. Both Lyft and Uber have previously fought and won similar battles in some jurisdictions: California formalized rideshare operations in September 2013.

For now, Gregory Minchak, a spokesman for the National League of Cities, underscored that while the umbrella group is a founding member, no individual cities have specifically joined the Sharing Economy Advisory Network to date.

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Radioman Sanya Sotkin wants you to send him WebMoney to help him out of his fix, so to speak. http://instagram.com/sanya_sotkin

Alexander “Sanya” Sotkin, the Russian soldier who posted a self-portrait of himself to Instagram from within Ukraine, is now using his social media following to beg for money. Apparently a sergeant in the Russian Army’s signal corps, Sotkin has posted pleas on Instagram and Twitter for “financial aid,” giving two WebMoney accounts for donations.

“Hello! Black PR created a big problem for me! Now I need financial aid,” Sotkin posted on Twitter on August 12. He posted a screenshot of the tweet on his Instagram account, as well as an image of him holding a piece of paper with two WebMoney account numbers. The Twitter account includes links to his VKontakte account, which lists his Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Skype accounts along with his mobile number.

Sotkin drew worldwide attention on Instagram when it was discovered that two posts he made showed up on Instagram’s Photo Map as being taken within Ukraine. However, there is some dispute over whether the photos were actually taken within Ukrainian territory. Depending on the location service used and distortion from the vehicle he was in when he posted the picture, his position could have been miles from where the location data shows, across the border to the north or south of the strip of eastern Ukraine he appeared to be in. The photos appear to have been taken inside a Russian BTR-90 wheeled armored vehicle equipped as a communications vehicle.

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Michael Rubenstein, Harvard

There is something magical about seeing 1,000 robots move when humans are not operating any of them. And in a new study published in Science, researchers have created just that. This swarm of 1,000 robots can assemble themselves into complex shapes without the need for a central brain or a human controller.

Self-assembly of this kind can be found in nature—from molecules forming regular crystals and cells forming tissues, to ants building rafts to float on water and birds flocking to avoid becoming prey. Complex forms emerge from local interactions among thousands, millions, or even trillions of limited and unreliable individual elements.

These self-organized systems have interesting features. First, they are decentralized—that is, they don't need a central brain or leader. Second, they are scalable, so you can add large numbers of individuals. Third, they are robust—individuals that are unreliable don't break the system.

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The BBC's defence correspondent Caroline Wyatt spends the day at an Iraqi hospital where the doctors have been treating Yazidi refugees.

The BBC's world affairs correspondent Paul Wood reports from Mount Sinjar in Iraq where many refugees are still located.

Teletext may have disappeared from British TV screens - but artists across Europe are keeping the format alive.

When I first started reading Ars Technica, performance of a processor was measured in megahertz, and the major manufacturers were rushing to squeeze as many of them as possible into their latest silicon. Shortly thereafter, however, the energy needs and heat output of these beasts brought that race crashing to a halt. More recently, the number of processing cores rapidly scaled up, but they quickly reached the point of diminishing returns. Now, getting the most processing power for each Watt seems to be the key measure of performance.

None of these things happened because the companies making processors ran up against hard physical limits. Rather, computing power ended up being constrained because progress in certain areas—primarily energy efficiency—was slow compared to progress in others, such as feature size. But could we be approaching physical limits in processing power? In this week's edition of Nature, The University of Michigan's Igor Markov takes a look at the sorts of limits we might face.

Clearing hurdles

Markov notes that, based on purely physical limitations, some academics have estimated that Moore's law had hundreds of years left in it. In contrast, the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), a group sponsored by the major semiconductor manufacturing nations, gives it a couple of decades. And the ITRS can be optimistic; it once expected that we would have 10GHz CPUs back in the Core2 days. The reason for this discrepancy is that a lot of hard physical limits never come into play.

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Facebook

Facebook has added the ability for marketers to track customers across devices when a displayed ad is followed by a purchase, according to a blog post from the company Wednesday. "Cross-device reporting" will allow advertisers to track users' activity across multiple devices, including smartphones, tablets, and computers, to better understand how their ads convert viewers into customers.

Facebook writes that it has long offered "conversion measurement," a metric to show how often a displayed ad results in a successful sale, on a per-device basis. If a user clicked an ad on his or her phone and bought the product it was showing, Facebook would be able to tell that advertiser about it. Now, if a user views an ad on his or her phone and then later gets on a computer to buy the product shown, Facebook will be able to know about those actions and report them back to advertisers, too, all thanks to the ubiquitous Facebook login.

In an infographic accompanying the post, Facebook pointed out that cross-device conversion rates can be as high as 32 percent for a clicked ad within a time span of 28 days. While the new metric does give a new concrete dimension to marketers, it has another benefit: showing how effective Facebook advertising can be on Facebook users.

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T-Mobile

An internal T-Mobile memo published by TmoNews says the company will begin enforcing rules against peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and unauthorized tethering from August 17 onward.

The terms and conditions of T-Mobile US have contained restrictions on P2P and tethering since 2008, but enforcement appears to be new. The memo says that "only customers with Unlimited High-Speed Data" will be affected, and they will be given warnings before their data speeds are reduced.

“T-mobile has identified customers who are heavy data users and are engaged in peer-to-peer file sharing, and tethering outside of T-Mobile’s Terms and Conditions (T&C)," the leaked memo states. "This results in a negative data network experience for T-Mobile customers. Beginning August 17, T-Mobile will begin to address customers who are conducting activities outside of T-Mobile’s T&Cs.”

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Today, HTC is finally launching their Zoe application. Normally, such an announcement is rolled into a smartphone launch, but the launch of this application is one of the first to stand alone. In fact, this is the first application launched by HTC Creative Labs. As a result, the vision and strategy behind this application is dramatically different from HTC's existing hardware and software divisions.

But before we dive into what this means for HTC, it's important to see what this application is. In short, Zoe is the culmination of multiple pieces of HTC Sense, packaged into a single application. It integrates the video highlights feature first introduced in Sense 5, and effectively brings back the HTC Share application which disappeared with the launch of the One (M8). For those that haven't kept up with what these features are, video highlights was an extension of the gallery application in HTC Sense, which allowed for automatic creation of ~30 second highlight reels. These highlight reels were automatically set to music with specific cuts and animations based upon the theme selected. HTC Share was simply a method to present highlight reels and all of the photos/Zoes used in a highlight reel over social media. Both of these were well-received when they first launched, and even now they're good features to have.

There's definitely more to Zoe though, as HTC has integrated a social network aspect with the ability to collaborate and remix other people's videos. While viewing highlight reels from friends using the Zoe network is expected, HTC has also integrated a discovery feature to see highlight reels from other people. In summary, the Zoe application brings HTC's video highlights feature and HTC Share to smartphones running Android 4.4 and adds a social network aspect on top.

In practice, it works just as expected in theory. HTC has done a surprisingly good job of bringing the Sense 6 UX to devices like the Galaxy S5, although some aspects like the status bar don't carry over perfectly. HTC has done a good job of providing a small taste of the well-designed HTC Sense 6 UI without removing major selling points from HTC devices. HTC emphasized that the major goal for this application was to become widely adopted, as while these features were good selling points for HTC hardware there was no real way to add a social network on top without making these features available to non-HTC devices.

In discussions with HTC, it seems clear that they are prioritizing user experience first over a monetization strategy. This is made clearer by the fact that there aren't any in-app purchases at this point in time. Of course, there are plenty of possibilities in this area once Zoe becomes widely adopted. Premium themes and music, along with in-app advertising were all mentioned as ways that HTC could bring in revenue. While HTC wasn't clear on how this would drive hardware sales, it wouldn't be surprising to see features exclusive to HTC devices in the future. It's surprising how far HTC has come in their software design, and I wouldn't be surprised to see this take off. Even if people aren't interested in the social networking aspect, the ability to create highlight videos and share them on pre-existing social networks is quite compelling. The social features also have great potential in situations where multiple people attend an event and take photos and videos on multiple devices. However, it's not quite clear whether this will gain the popularity of applications like Instagram and Twitter, and even if that happens it's currently hard to see the benefits to HTC's hardware division.

As of publication, the HTC Zoe Beta is available on the Play Store. HTC has stated that Android 4.4 devices should be compatible with this application although there may be additional restrictions.

The BBC's Dennis Okari investigates reports that al-Shabab is recruiting Kenyans and training them in Somalia.

Unusual weather in the Western US has caused an apparent "swap" in weather systems between Arizona and Washington State.

Unusual weather in the Western US has caused an apparent "swap" in weather systems between Arizona and Washington State.

Motorola is getting ready to unleash a wave of new hardware, if rumors are to be believed. Motorola

Fans of the Moto X and those drooling over early previews of the Moto 360 smartwatch have been waiting for months for official launch information, and it looks like we might finally have it. Motorola began sending out invitations to an event happening on September 4 in Chicago, and the company's teaser site for the event shows pictures of a watch, what appears to be a Bluetooth headset, and the Moto X and G. The Moto 360 was said to be launching in the summer of 2014, a promise that Motorola would just barely be keeping since the autumnal equinox happens on the 23rd, and rumors about a "Moto X+1" and a "Moto G2" have been swirling for several months now.

A telltale teaser from Motorola's site. Motorola

The Moto 360 watch was the first Android Wear device to be announced, but it's launching behind less-interesting entries from both Samsung and LG. It will be the first Android Wear device to use a round screen instead of a square one, even though the face is broken up by a small black bar across the bottom (likely used for the rumored ambient light sensor). The watch is also said to use a wireless charging dock, where Samsung's and LG's use micro-USB docks with pogo pins. The Moto 360 will be sent out to all Google I/O attendees for free—attendees were already given the opportunity to take home either Samsung's or LG's watch to help with developing Android Wear apps.

As for the phones, current rumors suggest that the Moto X+1 and the Moto G2 (assuming those are their names) are upgraded, refined versions of the phones that launched in 2013. This means both should have customizable backs, relatively clean Android installations that are updated quickly, and competitive pricing compared to other phones with similar specs. High-quality, low-cost phones like the Moto G and E have helped Motorola boost its sales significantly after years of losses, and even though Google is preparing to sell Motorola to Lenovo, we wouldn't expect either parent company to mess with a successful formula.

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Thousands of demonstrators have started marching from Lahore to the capital Islamabad, calling for the government to step down. The BBC's Shahzeb Jillani reports.

Police in the US state of Missouri have clashed with protesters for a fourth night amid growing anger at the fatal shooting of a black teenager by police.

Anti-government protesters led by Imran Khan begin marching from Lahore to Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, amid tight security.