Version:next-20140922 (linux-next) Released:2014-09-22

A year on from the assault by Islamist militants on the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi, Kenyans still have questions about the four-day siege and its aftermath.

As global leaders gather in New York for the General Assembly the current wave of global crises has also raised questions about the UN's ability to deal with them all.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has told the BBC that IS militants will not be defeated until they are fought on the ground.

Shortly before 10pm ET on Sunday, NASA plans on having its Maven spacecraft begin a maneuver to enter the Martian orbit. If the satellite successfully reaches its destination, it marks a huge accomplishment for NASA's first spaceship dedicated to exploring the Red Planet's upper atmosphere.

Maven, short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, has gone 442 million miles during 10 months of interplanetary travel. But tonight marks the culmination of 11 years of planning and development, leaving Maven in position to begin the mission's science phase. By closely monitoring Mars' atmosphere, NASA hopes the satellite will allow them to investigate the planet like never before—launching thorough studies into Mars' history, present climate, and potential to support life.

NASA's most recent Maven update says all spacecraft systems are operating normally, and the orbiter is on track. According to the organization, tonight's procedure involves having it turn in order to point its main engines in the proper direction before firing them to slow down the spacecraft enough to be captured into Mars' orbit.

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Neal Stephenson announced the cancellation of his Kickstarter game, Clang, one day before Kickstarter revealed new, more detailed guidelines for project creators and backers.

Kickstarter announced several updates late Friday to its terms of use and policies for crowdfunded projects, according to a blog post at the company's site. The terms of use are not changing much about the spirit of the platform, but the update provides more detailed guidelines for setting expectations, both between Kickstarter and users, and project creators and their backers.

Kickstarter has iterated on its policies several times since it launched in 2009, with the most recent wave of revisions surrounding the site's transition from only posting projects cleared by the staff to clearing all projects that meet a basic set of criteria. Even still, some projects lack clear goals, encounter setbacks, or fail to deliver, like the myIDkey project that has burned through $3.5 million without yet distributing a finished product. The most recent terms revision is timely: on Thursday, science fiction author Neal Stephenson announced that a game he Kickstarted in 2012 with $526,000 in funding was officially canceled.

Section 4 of the new terms of service goes to lengths to help project creators set themselves up for success and/or not frustrate their backers. If the creators can't deliver, Kickstarter explains how to try and make good when the creators do not fulfill their goals or backer rewards.

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Worldwide demonstrations ahead of a UN meeting in New York on how to reduce global carbon emissions attract hundreds of thousands of people, organisers say.

Worldwide demonstrations ahead of a UN meeting in New York on how to reduce global carbon emissions attract hundreds of thousands of people, organisers say.

Version:3.17-rc6 (mainline) Released:2014-09-21 Source:linux-3.17-rc6.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.17-rc6.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.17-rc6.xz

Yemeni Prime Minister Mohammed Basindwa resigns amid reports that rebels have taken control of the government headquarters.

A radio image of a quasar, taken by the Very Large Array. The white dot in the middle is the core, while the protrusions pointed top-left and bottom-right are jets, traveling at relativistic speeds, culminating in lobes. Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI

In the hearts of some massive galaxies lie strange objects known as quasars. These mysterious objects were named for their apparent similarity to stars (quasar is short for ‘quasi-stellar radio source’), but they're now understood to be the light from rapidly accreting, supermassive black holes. In addition to their prodigious light output, they often emit jets of charged particles from their poles at close to the speed of light.

Mysteriously, quasars come in a variety of seemingly random forms, leading scientists to search for the cause of their diversity. While there are trends in their variation, up until now, no definitive evidence has been found to confirm any of the models we had for their appearance. But a new study has found a clear relationship between quasar properties and how they look, suggesting an underlying mechanism.

The study, which made use of archival data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, analyzed the spectra of more than 20,000 quasars, the first time a study of this type has been achieved with a statistically significant sample size. Within that huge sample, a pattern began to emerge.

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Turkish security forces have fired water cannon and tear gas at crowds which had gathered in support of Syrian Kurdish refugees on the border.

Third-party keyboards have finally come to iOS 8. If you're tired of the stock Apple keyboard, just head on down to the App Store and check out the quickly growing roster of alternative options.

There's everything from typing, to swiping, to drawing, and you can do it all in style with a million themes and different looks. To give you an idea of what's out there, we're checking out some of the more interesting keyboards for iOS8.

Setup SwiftKey's setup instructions, the "Add New Keyboard" screen in the system settings, and the "allow full access" popup.  Ron Amadeo

Before you actually try a new keyboard, you'll need to go through the setup process. After installing the keyboard app, users are pretty much on their own to enable it, which requires a multi-screen slog through the system settings. SwiftKey presents the user with an eight-step installation guide (pictured above) after users install it: open the device settings, go to General -> Keyboard -> Keyboards -> Add New Keyboard -> [Keyboard name], [Keyboard name settings], and hit "allow full access".

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At some point in the future, filling up could actually involve giving your car the gas. Oak Ridge National Lab

Continued concerns about global warming have boosted work on alternative fuel sources that reduce emissions. Hydrogen is an appealing, clean-burning fuel. Currently, most hydrogen comes from the processing of fossil fuels, which produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct. However, the electrolysis of water produces hydrogen without the release of greenhouse gases—provided the electricity used in the process comes from renewable energy.

Currently, the favored method for producing hydrogen involves what are called proton exchange membrane electrolyzers (PEMEs). These use a polymer membrane that allows the movement of protons between solutions of varied charge while separating the negatively charged cathode and positively charged anode. Since the two gases, hydrogen and oxygen, are produced at different electrodes, the membranes separate them as well, which allows for the easy harvesting of hydrogen.

Unfortunately, PEMEs are expensive because they require precious metal catalysts. Although higher power loads offset the price of these catalysts to some extent, these loads can lead to the simultaneous presence of hydrogen, oxygen, and catalytic particles, resulting in the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) that degrade the membranes. Low power loads are not as effective because the rates of oxygen and hydrogen production are similar to the rates at which these gases diffuse through the membrane. As a result, rather than pure hydrogen, you get a hazardous mix of the two gases.

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Behold, the Teenage Engineering OP-1, a modern descendant of Bob Moog's pioneering work. Flickr user: Rasmus Andersson

This time last year, I walked into a Toronto store called Moog Audio and walked out with a Teenage Engineering OP-1—a curious little portable digital synthesizer that looks, at first glance, like a child’s toy. It has a row of just four candy-colored knobs as primary input controls, and there are only enough keys for an octave-and-a-half's worth of range. But damn does it ever sound cool. Its tiny OLED screen uses all sorts of clever visual conceits to convey otherwise complex audio transformations. Colors and animations explain the differences between synthesizer engines, changes to modulation and frequency, and attack and decay. And it's done in a way that’s easy for anyone with little synthesizer knowledge to understand while still being powerful in more experienced hands. This is a synthesizer, drum machine, and four-track recorder all-in-one—all in a device that fits inside a purse or messenger bag with ease.

It wasn’t always like this. In fact, it was 50 years ago this year that, in 1964, a man by the name of Bob Moog unveiled a synthesizer of a very different sort. Called the Moog Modular, it is regarded as one of the first. Though Moog wouldn’t officially advertise his creation as a synthesizer until 1966, that’s precisely what it was—an array of electronic modules that Moog designed, often controlled via keyboard, and connected to one another with a bird's nest of cables that, somehow, produced weird musical sounds unlike anything anyone had heard before.

The Moog Modular was not the only synthesizer in development at the time, however. On the opposite end of the continent in Berkeley, California, a man named Don Buchla independently devised a similar device, but it differed in a crucial way. Buchla’s synthesizer eschewed the use of a keyboard to trigger notes for touch-controlled panels that produced unfamiliar, atonal music unbound from the traditional musical scale. Both had their proponents, but for most musicians, the familiarity of the keyboard paradigm eventually won out. For a time, Moog was synthesizers. Even today, it’s a testament to the enduring cachet of Moog’s work that one can now buy any number of competing synthesizers from a store bearing his name.

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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.

CodeWarrior asks:

I am looking for a job and have applied to a number of positions. One employer responded. I had a pretty lengthy phone interview (perhaps more than an hour) and they then set me up with a developer test. I was told that the test was estimated to take between six and eight hours and that, provided the results met with their approval, I would be paid for my work.

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Botto Bistro, in Richmond, California. Cyrus Farivar

RICHMOND, CA—Of all the places that have come up with a clever way to protest Yelp’s alleged aggressive advertising tactics, a small plucky Italian restaurant in a strip mall just northeast of San Francisco is as unlikely as they come.

For a few weeks now, Botto Bistro has been actively trying to become the worst-reviewed restaurant on Yelp as a way to stick it to the venerated review site—so much so that they’re offering 25 percent off for anyone who does so.

In recent years, Yelp has been publicly accused of extortion—asking for money from businesses that are automatically listed on the site in exchange for preferred placement on the site. There are also accusations of abruptly vanishing positive reviews and suddenly appearing negative reviews. Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco dismissed two cases alleging that such behavior by Yelp is illegal.

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Memorials are held in Kenya to commemorate the anniversary of the attack on a shopping centre by Al-Shabab.

Megan Geuss

SAN FRANCISCO—Last week, Ars met up with several representatives of the non-profit USB Implementer's Forum (USB-IF) to check out some of the first USB Type-C connectors off the assembly lines. The Type-C specification was announced in December and finalized in August, and it's set to bring a number of improvements to its predecessors, in addition to being smaller than the Type-A USB plugs we're familiar with today.

Considering how many USB Type-A devices are still being actively built out there (over 4 billion USB-compatible products are made each year), this smaller, reversible connector represents a significant jump. Jeff Ravencraft, president and COO of USB-IF, told Ars that USB-IF wanted a connector that worked equally well for large and small devices. “We also understand that yeah the consumer maybe has some trouble with putting in that cable connector,” he added of the Type-C's new-found ability to be plugged in right-side up or upside down, like Apple's Lightning connector.

The new Type-C connector is also slightly bigger than its proprietary cousin, with Type-C sized at approximately 8.4mm by 2.6mm and Lightning coming in at 7.7 mm by 1.7 mm. Unlike the reversible Lightning, but similar to USB connectors before it, the USB Type-C connector has a mid-plate inside the receptacle that the plug surrounds when it's inserted.

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Kenya is marking a year since the attack on Nairobi's Westgate shopping centre, in which at least 67 people were killed.