The storage wars have been taken to their logical conclusion: Microsoft is giving Office 365 subscribers unlimited OneDrive storage just four months after announcing that every user would get one terabyte of space.

The unlimited space rollout will start today with Home, Personal, and University customers. These Office 365 users have their space on the "proper" OneDrive product. Subscribers to Office 365 business plans, which use the similarly named (but actually not at all the same) OneDrive for Business product, will start their upgrades in 2015.

The cheapest subscription with unlimited storage is Office 365 Personal at $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year. Free accounts remain at 15GB.

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KickassTorrents

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said Monday it's concerned that intellectual property pirates are being exposed to malware and other dangers.

"It is important to note that websites that traffic in infringing movies, television shows, and other copyrighted content do not harm only the rights holder. Malicious software or malware, which puts Internet users at risk of identity theft, fraud, and other ills, is increasingly becoming a source of revenue for pirate sites," the lobbying group told (PDF) US trade officials on Monday in its latest report about global "notorious markets" for illegal content.

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Amazon.com

On Monday, Amazon entered the stick-streaming gadget fray with the Fire TV Stick, a $39 device that plugs directly into a TV set's HDMI port to stream content and play video games. It will ship beginning November 19 with support for third-party streaming apps like Netflix, Hulu Plus, and YouTube. The device also comes with a remote control and can be yours for $19 if you're an Amazon Prime member and you place an order by the morning of Wednesday, October 29.

Amazon's product description wastes no time comparing its newest baby's specs and features to those of the Google Chromecast and Roku Streaming Stick. On paper, Amazon seems to win this battle: its 8GB of flash memory soundly surpasses Chromecast's 2GB, while its full gig of RAM doubles both Roku and Google's options. Meanwhile, the Fire Stick's listed dual-core processor may very well outpace its rivals' single-core offerings, but that's not saying much considering it's using the same Broadcom 28155 chip that debuted in a Samsung Galaxy S2 Plus refresh that launched early last year.

Still, thanks to those stats, the Fire TV Stick appears to replicate much of the functionality of April's $99 Amazon Fire TV due to its ability to stream content independently. You aren't required to "fling" content from a tablet or smartphone, though the Fire TV Stick offers that as well. Flinging will require living with Amazon's app or device ecosystem, and that's where the asterisks start coming in. The Fire TV Stick's iOS-compatible app is "coming soon," iOS and Android devices have only been advertised as supporting third-party flinging from YouTube and Spotify, and HBO Go hopefuls have again been left behind. (Should you be the proud owner of other Amazon Fire devices, you'll be all set, of course.)

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South Korean prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for the captain of the Sewol ferry, which sank in April killing more than 300 people.

Cities and towns are doing everything they can to make broadband better for their residents, and today industry experts and those on the front lines in city governments are going to tell us what's going on. Join us at noon eastern time for a discussion on how local governments are trying to change the broadband industry.

Joining us today will be:

• Blair Levin, a former FCC official who oversaw the development of the National Broadband Plan under President Obama and is now executive director of the Gig.U fiber initiative.
• Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
• Will Aycock, operations manager of Greenlight Community Broadband in Wilson, North Carolina. Wilson has petitioned the FCC to remove a state law that prevents it from expanding to surrounding communities.
• Ted Smith, chief of the Civic Innovation office in Louisville, KY. The city is working with two residential broadband providers to plan fiber networks.

Comments and questions during the live discussion are welcome. For more background, read this morning's feature story on the fight for better broadband. Then click here to join the fun:

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The Fire Phone is costing Amazon plenty of cash. Andrew Cunningham

Amazon’s financial results for the third financial quarter of 2014 didn’t do the company any favors when they were announced late last week; the retail giant posted a quarterly net loss of $437 million, up dramatically from last year’s 3Q loss of $41 million. The biggest single contributor to the bad news? Amazon’s Fire Phone.

We had mostly positive things to say about the Fire Phone when we reviewed it a few months back. We were especially impressed with the device’s "Firefly" feature, which quickly and (mostly) accurately recognizes things you point the phone at (and links you to the item's Amazon product page). However, in spite of this and other bits of whiz-bang wizardry, consumer adoption of the Fire Phone has lagged behind Amazon’s production of the device, and the company is now sitting on $83 million worth of unsold Fire Phone inventory.

Further, Amazon’s 3Q results included a $170 million write-down due to "Fire Phone inventory valuation and supplier commitment costs."

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Early this morning, Microsoft announced that the Xbox One will be available for as low as $349 in a special promotion starting November 2 and running at least through January 3, 2015.

The $50 price reduction applies to the Kinect-free base system and to two $349 bundles. One bundle features a white console and Sunset Overdrive, while the other includes Assassin's Creed Unity, last year's Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, and Dance Central Spotlight (the second bundle is also available in a package with the Kinect for $449). Microsoft also announced a new $449 bundle available November 3, including Call of Duty: Advance Warfare and the first 1TB edition of the console (but without the Kinect).

The Xbox One's price has now been reduced by 30 percent less than a year since its launch at $499, and though today's cheaper console eliminates the Kinect that was bundled for early adopters, it includes up to three games. An Ars analysis last year showed that prices drop an average of only 10 percent over the first full year that consoles are on store shelves.

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British pop star Sting makes his debut as a Broadway composer and lyricist in a musical called The Last Ship.

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

Welcome to Ars UNITE, our week-long virtual conference on the ways that innovation brings unusual pairings together. Today, a look at how once low-tech city governments are actively involved in high-tech broadband projects across the country. Join us at noon Eastern for a live discussion on the topic with article author Jon Brodkin and his expert guests; your comments and questions are welcome.

State and local governments aren't typically known for leading the way on technology. Remember that West Virginia library that uses a $20,000 router for a building the size of a trailer?

But all that’s changing fast, at least at the municipal level—and the demand for broadband is what's driving this shift. No longer content to let residents suffer from poor Internet access, cities and towns saw a need to boost their tech savvy. Now many are partnering with technologists in order to take matters into their own hands.

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It has been a busy year for Apple, although one could argue it has been more of a busy few months. The yearly updates for most of Apple's products now occur in September and October, and as a result we've seen the release of a number of new products and services in a very short period of time. On the hardware side we have the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, the iPad Air 2 and Mini 3, the iMac with Retina 5K display, and a preview of the upcoming Apple Watch. The software side has arguably been even more exciting with the release of iOS 8 and its first major update iOS 8.1, OS X Yosemite, and Apple Pay. 

The theme this year appears to be integration and the power of a software and hardware ecosystem. Apple has always had some level of integration between iOS and OS X. As time went on, both operating systems began to share a core set of applications like Reminders, Calendar, and Notes. The iPad extended this even further by bringing the iWork and iLife suites to mobile. iCloud also played a key role in integrating both systems, by synchronizing documents and photos between all of a user's devices. However, the launch of iOS 7 with its visual and functional enhancements left many of the shared features and applications on OS X feeling left behind. Read on for a look at how Apple has brought OS X up to speed, and integrated both of their operating systems together.

South Africa's football coach Ephraim Mashaba has paid tribute to captain Senzo Meyiwa, who died after being shot by intruders.

Engineering students from around the world compete in Singapore to create an unmanned boat.

As British and US troops end combat operations in Afghanistan, millions of Afghans are now left wondering if their country and its capital Kabul will remain out of Taliban hands.

President Dilma Rousseff has been re-elected for a second term, after securing more than 51% of votes in a closely-fought election.

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Following a reported rise in attacks on Muslims in Australia, mosques hold an open day to challenge misconceptions about Islam.

Don't expect to use your iPhone 6 or 6 Plus to pay for anything at CVS or Rite Aid in the near future. Apple

Last week's rollout of iOS 8.1 on new iPhone models ushered in the long-awaited debut of Apple Pay. And for now, Apple is relying on major retailers—and their upgraded, compatible sales registers—to convince more people to pay the Apple way. However, in the days since Apple Pay's public debut, two major pharmacy chains have switched course and declared, "Apple Nay."

This week, Rite Aid began pulling Apple Pay support from NFC-compatible sales kiosks, and over the weekend, CVS followed suit. According to a leaked document posted by Slashgear, Rite Aid made the decision due to its involvement with a competing still-in-testing mobile payment platform called CurrentC, which CVS is also affiliated with.

As it turns out, major merchant service Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) has been developing CurrentC since 2011, according to a report by 24/7 Wall Street. That may explain why other MCX retailers like Best Buy and Walmart have also elected not to employ Apple Pay at their registers.

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The UK Airprox Board did not discover the drone that was reported to have flown at a passenger aircraft in May, so we're stuck using a stock approxmiation. Doodybutch

On Sunday, a British regulatory agency revealed that the country faced its first near-collision between a passenger aircraft and a drone in May. The UK Airprox Board's report, uncovered by the Daily Mail, determined that a quadcopter flew "within 80 feet" of an 74-seat ATR 72 aircraft and did so "deliberately."

The incident happened over the county of Essex as the plane prepared to land at London Southend Airport. According to the report, the quadcopter came close to hitting the larger plane's right-side wing at an altitude of roughly 1,500 feet. The report included a conversation between the ATR 72's pilot and an air control tower, in which the tower confirmed the offending red-and-black craft was probably a quadcopter, as "we've had a couple of those around here" recently.

The Airprox Board noted that the drone's flight path and altitude seemed intent to collide with passenger airplanes taking off or landing. This event follows an American report of a drone nearly colliding with a passenger plane near Tallahassee's airport in March of this year; that near-collision happened at an altitude of over 2,000 feet. In both incidents, regulators did not discover the offending drone or its pilot.

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The Lumia 530 in a bright orange flip case. Andrew Cunningham

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:[], collapse: true});How cheap is too cheap? That’s the biggest question facing competitors in the burgeoning market for competent-but-inexpensive smartphones—their phones need to be cheap enough to appeal to dumbphone users and people in developing markets, but not so cheap that they’re unusably poor.

Intex obviously went too far when it built its $35 Firefox phone, which is so bad that using it is enough to make you swear off smartphones altogether. But there’s a wide gap between something like that and, say, the $129 Moto E or the comparable phones being pushed out as part of the Android One initiative.

Specs at a glance: Microsoft/Nokia Lumia 530 Screen 854×480 4" (244 ppi) LCD touchscreen OS Windows Phone 8.1 CPU 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 200 RAM 512MB GPU Adreno 302 Storage 4GB, expandable via MicroSD by up to 128GB Networking Single-band 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 Ports Micro USB, headphones Camera 5MP rear camera Size 4.7"× 2.45"× 0.46" (119.7 × 62.3 × 11.7mm) Weight 4.55 ounces (129g) Battery 1430mAh Starting price $50 locked to Cricket Wireless, $69 locked to T-Mobile

Microsoft’s (still-Nokia-branded) Lumia 530 smartphone aims squarely for that gap. In the US, the phone will usually be sold carrier-locked but contract-free for something less than $100—we picked up our T-Mobile version of the phone from Microsoft’s online store for just $69, and sales will send that price even lower. Despite being carrier-locked, it can still be used with budget-focused MVNOs like Straight Talk, making it a tempting option for anyone contemplating their first smartphone.

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