Several computer algebra systems are available to Linux users. I even have looked at a few of them in this column, but for this issue, I discuss OpenAxiom. OpenAxiom actually is a fork of Axiom. Axiom originally was developed at IBM under the name ScratchPad. Development started in 1971, so Axiom is as old as I am, and almost as smart. more>>

The curators have spoken, but do they really help Steam shoppers sort intelligently through thousands of games?

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Valve's online video game shop, Steam, once took flak for being too difficult to penetrate as a game creator. Unless you were a big-time publisher or were invited to sell games on Steam because of particular critical buzz, you weren't likely to snag a sales spot alongside the Fallouts and Civilizations of the PC gaming world.

These days, it's customers who've struggled to penetrate a rapidly expanding, indie-friendly Steam, as initiatives like Greenlight and Early Access have helped the storefront explode with content—including a staggering 1,300 new games in the past 9 months. To deal with this problem, rather than introduce a slow drip of search and filtering tools, Valve unveiled a massive "discovery" update to Steam on Tuesday. It's possibly the service's biggest visual update in years, and it combines ideas like third-party curation and more intense filters to push new content onto gamers.

The overhaul, by default, is an improvement, but we took the features for a spin with a bigger question: has Steam positioned itself as an all-in-one walled garden of computer game discovery?

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The Apple A8 die shot as mapped out by Chipworks. Chipworks

Now that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have been released, the usual suspects have started to take them apart to get more information about the things Apple doesn't talk about. Last week, iFixit took the phones apart and identified many of the internal components and the battery capacities. Today, Chipworks picked up where it left off on Friday, taking up-close photos of the Apple A8 chip and trying to deduce what exactly is going on in there.

As was previously rumored, Chipworks has confirmed that the A8 is built on Taiwan Semiconductor's (TSMC) 20nm process rather than the 28nm Samsung process used for the A7. This is the first time one of Apple's chips has been produced by anyone other than Samsung—many of the previous reports also suggest that Apple has been looking for ways to reduce its reliance on one of its chief competitors, though a report from Re/code indicates that Apple may still be using Samsung to produce around 40 percent of the chips. Moving to a 20nm process has allowed Apple to cram roughly two billion transistors into a chip that is 13 percent smaller than the A7.

Chipworks confirms that Apple is still using a dual-core CPU, as we reported in our review yesterday. While Qualcomm, Samsung, and Nvidia have all built four, six, and even eight-core chips in an effort to boost performance, Apple has chosen to stick with fewer, more powerful cores instead. Chipworks (together with AnandTech) has also surmised that Apple is using a quad-core Imagination Technologies GX6450 to boost the A8's graphics scores by 50 percent relative to the A7. Previously, it was thought that Apple had moved to a six-core GX6550, but it looks like the quad-core version's GPU cores are bigger (and thus, more powerful) than expected.

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NBC

Martha Stewart, America’s home design and craft queen, took to late night television on Monday to gush about her latest obsession: drones.

On Late Night with Seth Meyers, Stewart proudly talked about how she now owns "three drones."

"These are not army drones! They're not dangerous!" she reassured Meyers.

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Adam Fagen

After successfully getting the Chicago Police Department to hand over records showing that it purchased cell site simulator devices, also known as IMSI catchers or stingrays, one local activist has now filed a second lawsuit in an attempt to better understand precisely how the stingrays are actually used.

The new lawsuit was filed on Tuesday by Freddy Martinez, a 27-year-old Chicagoan who works in the software industry.

Martinez’ earlier lawsuit resulted in three pages of invoices, dated 2009, showing that the department purchased an AmberJack upgrade (a model of stingray) and a StingRay II upgrade. While "StingRay" is a trademarked name and particular product of the Harris Corporation, it has entered the technical lexicon as a generic term, like Kleenex or Xerox.

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The enormous bright spot in the middle is the M60 galaxy; inset shows an expanded view of UCD1. The gorgeous spiral galaxy in the upper right? It's irrelevant to the story, but sure looks good. NASA/Space Telescope Science Institute/European Space Agency

The densest galaxy yet observed, as of its discovery last year, is a tiny object known as M60-UCD1. UCD1 is an extraordinary example of an ultra-compact dwarf (UCD), a class of galaxies that were only discovered recently. UCDs are tiny, dense, and somewhat difficult to define—are they really galaxies, or just large star clusters?

The distinction is not semantic but physical. If the UCDs are galaxies, it tells us a lot about their evolution and how they play into the wider evolution of the Universe. To answer this question, a team of scientists focused on UCD1, the brightest UCD. Like its fellow UCDs, UCD1 is more massive than predicted by its stars alone. But the source of this additional mass was not known.

Theoretical possibilities

One possibility was that UCDs form out of unusual distributions of material, one that could ultimately lead to its stars having slightly higher than average mass, thus explaining the excess. Another possibility was that the extra mass comes from supermassive black holes in the cores of these tightly packed dwarfs.

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Greetings, Arsians! Our partners from LogicBuy have a ton of deals this week for your consideration. At the top, we have a bunch of PC gaming equipment from Corsair. There's the Raptor M45 mouse for $33.99, Raptor K30 keyboard for $32.99, and the Corsair Vengeance 1500 headset for $54.99.

Buy all three and you'll save almost a hundred bucks! (Translation: that's more money to blow on the next Steam Sale.)

Featured deals

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Free to download, ready to customize, NetHunter puts the power of a pen-tester's Linux desktop on a Nexus phone or tablet. Kali.org

One of the tools we've leaned on heavily in some of our lab testing of software privacy and security is Kali Linux. The Debian-based operating system comes packaged with a collection of penetration testing and network monitoring tools curated and developed by the security training company Offensive Security. Today, the Kali developer team and Offensive Security released a new Kali project that runs on a Google Nexus device. Called NetHunter, the distribution provides much of the power of Kali with the addition of a browser-driven set of tools that can be used to launch attacks on wireless networks or on unattended computers via a USB connection.

NetHunter is still in its early stages, but it already includes the ability to have the Nexus device emulate a USB human interface device (HID) and launch keyboard attacks on PCs that can be used to automatically elevate privileges on a Windows PC and install a reverse-HTTP tunnel to a remote workstation. It also includes an implementation of the BadUSB man-in-the-middle attack, which can force a Windows PC to recognize the USB-connected phone as a network adapter and re-route all the PC’s traffic through it for monitoring purposes.

A demonstration of NetHunter's HID Keyboard attack on a Windows 8 computer.

In a phone interview with Ars, Offensive Security’s lead trainer and developer Mati Aharoni said that while NetHunter can be compiled to run on Android devices other than the Nexus family, “part of the reason we chose Nexus devices was because of the specific kernel sources we were able to get from Google. "The Nexus devices supported by NetHunter include the Nexus 5 ("hammerhead"), Nexus 7 (both 2012 and 2013 versions), and the Nexus 10 ("mantaray").

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The US Patent and Trademark Office has nullified a troll's app-rotation patent that is the subject of several infringement lawsuits brought against some of the biggest names in the tech sector.

Cloud-computing company Rackspace, a target of a lawsuit from Rotatable Technologies, refused to pay $75,000 to settle a suit and challenged the company's patent, US PAT. No. 6,326,978. Rackspace won, and the patent was declared unpatentable.

"This means that Rackspace will not pay one penny to this troll, nor will Apple, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Target, Whole Foods, or any of the other companies sued by Rotatable for how they use screen rotation technology in their apps," Van Lindberg, a Rackspace vice president, wrote on the company's blog in a post headlined: "Another Patent Troll Slain. You Are Now Free To Rotate Your Smartphone."

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An archival photo from long after the population bottleneck. Library of Congress

Ashkenazi Jews hail from Eastern Europe—"Ashkenaz" is the Hebrew word for Germany—and comprise the bulk of the Jewish population in the US. Their compatriots are Sephardi Jews, who lived in Spain until they were kicked out in 1492, and Mizrachi Jews, who lived in Arab countries for centuries until the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.

Ashkenazi Jews are a genetically distinct population, and the analysis of 128 complete Ashkenazi genomes shows just how distinct they are. Compared to genomes of modern Europeans—in this case, the genomes of 26 Flemish people—the Ashkenazi genomes have 47 percent more novel DNA differences per genome. These DNA variants, while novel, are population specific; sequence sharing, where two individuals have a set of the same variants, is eight percent more abundant among the Ashkenazi Jews than it is between the two populations or even among the Flemish genomes.

Using the length of the shared genetic segments, researchers determined that the current Ashkenazi Jewish population underwent a bottleneck 25-32 generations back, approximately 600-800 years ago. Caused by the Plague in the mid 1300s, perhaps? Or maybe by the decimation of Eastern European Jewish communities by roving bands of Crusaders? Whatever the cause, this bottleneck reduced the founder population to between 250 and 420 individuals.

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Engineers in the Colombian city of Medellin have blown up four tower blocks at the Space apartment complex, which was deemed unsafe following a deadly collapse.

For those that just can't get enough bling in their cases, NVIDIA today announced the availability of SLI LED bridges, available for the time being exclusively through the NVIDIA Store. Besides the obvious addition of LED lighting to the bridges, it's also worth noting that these are rigid bridges so the cards need to be in specific slots. There are three bridges available, two for 2-way SLI, one for systems where the cards are two slots apart and one for systems where the cards are three slots apart, with a third bridge for 3-way SLI with the cards spaced two slots apart.

The new LED SLI bridges were recently on display at NVIDIA's Game24 event, but this is the first time the bridges have been made available to the public. There are some caveats, unfortunately: for the time being the LED bridges are only available in the US/Canada at the NVIDIA Store. I suspect there will be some enterprising individuals that buy the bridges and then put them up on eBay or similar sites, but the other drawback is that the cost of the bridges is rather high already, so paying extra for non-North American markets will simply add to the price.

Speaking of which, the 2-way SLI LED bridges are priced at $29.99 while the 3-way SLI LED bridge will cost $39.99. That's not really very different from EVGA's existing illuminated 2-way SLI bridge and there's now a 3-way LED offering, but it's over four times the price of a normal 2-way or 3-way SLI bridge. Such is the price of bling.

As far as compatibility, the bridges are designed to work with all modern GTX cards with SLI support. NVIDIA specifically mentions the following products as being supported: GeForce GTX 770, GTX 780, GTX 780 Ti, GTX TITAN, GTX TITAN Black, GTX 970 and GTX 980. These are for NVIDIA reference designs, so the bridges may not work on cards with custom cooling solutions. GeForce Experience 1.7 or later is also required for the LED Visualizer, which allows control of the LEDs.

Elaine Adolfo

This weekend, Hollywood insider's news source Deadline reported that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is in talks to play security-contractor-turned-leaker Edward Snowden in an upcoming film directed by Oliver Stone. The film will be called The Snowden Files, sources say.

According to the Los Angeles Times, which confirmed that Gordon-Levitt was a shoe-in for the Snowden role, Sony is also working on a film based on Glen Greenwald's book No Place to Hide. Sony acquired the rights to that book earlier this year and named Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli as the producers. (The two also happen to be the producers of the James Bond franchise.)

Stone has purchased the rights to two books about the Snowden drama, which began in June 2013 when The Guardian published the first leaked documents revealing that federal authorities had been collecting vast amounts of metadata on phone calls through Verizon. One of those books is by Guardian journalist Luke Harding, called The Snowden Files: The Inside Story Of The World’s Most Wanted Man. The other is called Time of the Octopus by Snowden’s Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena.

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Free Press

AT&T and Verizon have been fighting to preserve 4Mbps as the nation’s definition of “broadband,” saying the Federal Communications Commission should abandon plans to raise the minimum to 10Mbps.

The companies also argue now that the FCC should not consider data caps when deciding whether an Internet service qualifies as broadband.

Verizon does not impose any caps on its home Internet service. AT&T advertises 150GB and 250GB monthly limits with financial penalties when consumers use more than that. While AT&T sends notices to customers about heavy usage, it generally hasn’t enforced the financial penalties.

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One of the more enjoyable rituals with Apple’s annual iPhone launch is the decapping, deconstruction, and photographing of the processor die at the heart of Apple’s newest SoC.  While we can learn a lot about the SoC from software, for some things there’s just no replacement for looking at the hardware itself and counting the functional blocks present. And this year, as in past years, the honor of being the first to tear apart the SoC goes to Chipworks.

For determining the layout of A8, Chipworks reached out to us to solicit our input on their die shot, and after some rounds of going back and forth we believe we’ve come to a solid determination of some of A8’s features and how it has been configured. So let's dive in.

First and foremost we’ll start with A8’s GPU, as this was one of the hardest elements to analyze in software. Based on Apple’s 50% performance improvement we had previously speculated that A8 contained an Imagination PowerVR GX6650. However as we noted back then, a die shot would reveal all, and right on schedule it has.

A close analysis of the die shot makes it clear that there are only 4 GPU cores available and not 6, which immediately rules out the 6 core GX6650 we were previously expecting. Instead with 4 cores present this is conclusive proof that Apple is using the smaller 4 core GX6450 on A8, the direct successor to the G6430 used on the A7. GX6450 induces some performance optimizations along with some feature updates – including ASTC support, which Apple’s documentation has already confirmed is present – so its inclusion here is a natural progression for Apple.

On A8 and its 20nm process this measures at 19.1mm2, versus A7’s 22.1mm2 G6430. As a result Apple is saving some die space compared to A7, but this is being partially offset by the greater complexity of GX6450 and possibly additional SRAM for larger caches on the GPU. Meanwhile looking at the symmetry of the block, it’s interesting that the blocks of texturing resources that every pair of GPU cores share is so visible and so large. With these resources being so big relative to the GPU cores themselves, you can see why Imagination would want to share them as opposed to building them 1:1 with the GPU cores.

Meanwhile opposite the GPU we have the CPU block. Unlike the GPU the CPU block has seen some significant shrinking, which Chipworks estimates is down from 17.1mm2 in A7 to 12.2mm2 in A8. In A7 Cyclone did not lend itself to easily picking apart the individual CPU cores, and neither does the CPU here in A8. We’ll be looking at the new CPU’s architecture in-depth in our iPhone 6 review, but for now it’s safe to say that while this is definitely derived from Cyclone, Apple has added a few tweaks over the last year that make it an even more potent CPU than the first Cyclone. Meanwhile based on this die shot Chipworks believes that the L2 cache has been reorganized to a per-core design, as there is no obvious single block of L2 on A8 like there was A7.

A8 With PoP DRAM Removed

The final major identifiable block on A8 is once again the SRAM cache memory. On A7 we discovered that this block was 4MB and was responsible for servicing the GPU and CPU. On A8 this block is similarly present and serving the same role. This 4MB of SRAM ends up being quite big despite the shrink from 28nm to 20nm, and while at first glance it seems like it should be larger than 4MB given the relative size, in practice what has happened is that the individual SRAM cells have not shrunk by a full 50%. Chipworks estimates the cell size to now be about 0.08µm2, versus 0.12µm2 on A7, which is closer to a 33% shrink that a 50% shrink. As a result the SRAM cache still takes up a fair bit of space, but the value of being able to serve larger memory requests without having to go off-die continues to be immense.

Apple A8 vs A7 SoCs   Apple A8 (2014) Apple A7 (2013) Manufacturing Process TSMC 20nm HKMG Samsung 28nm HKMG Die Size 89mm2 104mm2 Transistor Count ~2B "Over 1B" CPU 2 x Apple Enhanced Cyclone ARMv8 64-bit cores 2 x Apple Cyclone ARMv8 64-bit cores GPU IMG PowerVR GX6450 IMG PowerVR G6430

Overall, Chipworks’ analysis points to A8 being fabbed on TSMC’s 20nm process. This makes A8 among the first SoCs to receive the 20nm treatment. Thanks to this smaller node Apple has been able to build in additional features to the SoC while simultaneously shaving off around 15% of their die size. Chipworks estimates the final die size of A8 to stand at 89mm2, versus the 104mm2 for the Samsung 28nm based A7. Chipworks notes that if this were a straight shrink that one would expect the A8 to be closer to 50% the size of A7 (though not all logic can shrink quite that well), which indicates that Apple has spent quite a bit of die size on improving performance through more complex CPU and GPU architectures and miscellaneous feature additions.

Wrapping things up, we’ll be back later this month with our review of the iPhone 6 family and our full analysis of the A8 SoC. So until then stay tuned.

Luke Lai

As many as 77 members of Congress are warning federal regulators that allowing passengers to speak on their mobile phones at 30,000 feet could threaten the flight.

"The nature of an aircraft cabin would make it impossible for passengers to remove themselves from loud or unwanted conversations and disputes. Instead of focusing on required safety-related tasks, flight attendants may be forced to intervene in or mediate disputes between passengers on appropriate content and volume of voice calls, thus distracting their attention from other passengers and job responsibilities," the lawmakers wrote (PDF) Monday to the leaders of the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, the Justice Department, and Federal Communications Commission.

"Additionally, when noise and distraction levels rise because of talking passengers, the ability to hear important safety announcements, either from the cockpit or cabin, will be impaired and crucial information may be missed."

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Today Microsoft introduced their new Miracast-based wireless streaming device for HDMI monitors and televisions. Its lengthy name is the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter and it's Microsoft's take on an HDMI streaming dongle. One of the most popular devices in this category is Google's Chromecast, and there are many similarities between the two devices. Like the Chromecast, the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter is a small adapter that plugs into an HDMI port on your television and uses a USB port for power. From the photos Microsoft has provided, the USB connector seems to be wired directly into the adapter which could pose a problem depending on your television's arrangement of ports as the cord does not look very lengthy. 

The adapter allows streaming and display mirroring from any device with support for Miracast screencasting. Because of this, the adapter is able to work with a variety of devices running on different operating systems, rather than being a device limited to devices that run Windows or Windows Phone 8.

At $59.95 USD, the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter is around $25 more expensive than Google's Chromecast. It is available for pre-order now on Microsoft's online store, and it will ship in October 2014. 

Three Palestinian survivors of a refugee boat sinking have told the BBC they saw people smugglers deliberately ram the boat, and then chop the hands off those who clung to the sides of the vessel.

More than 1,000 students in Hong Kong have taken their fight for democracy to the centre of the city, on the second-day of a week-long strike.

The presenter and physicist Brian Cox says he supports the idea that many universes can exist at the same time.