Intellectual Ventures founder Nathan Myhrvold was formerly CTO at Microsoft. Intellectual Ventures

Most "patent trolls" are small operations with just a few real employees. Intellectual Ventures (IV) isn't like that; it has 700 employees and tens of thousands of patents. For years, IV just amassed patents and issued threats, but in 2010 it started filing infringement lawsuits. Since then, it has filed 52 patent lawsuits, according to Reuters.

Apparently it isn't that easy to keep hundreds of employees on the payroll with large-scale litigation. Reuters and various other news outlets have reported that the king of all patent-holders is letting go of almost 20 percent of its employees, or about 140 workers. It's the second round of layoffs at IV this year, following a five percent cutback in February.

Critics who complain about patent trolls have pointed to IV as being the most alarming threat of all. For its part, IV says it's creating a "market for invention," allowing inventors to reap cash from their ideas.

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A typical intersection configuration. Halderman et al., University of Michigan

Taking over a city’s intersections and making all the lights green to cause chaos is a pretty bog-standard Evil Techno Bad Guy tactic on TV and in movies, but according to a research team at the University of Michigan, doing it in real life is within the realm of anyone with a laptop and the right kind of radio. In a paper published this month, the researchers describe how they very simply and very quickly seized control of an entire system of almost 100 intersections in an unnamed Michigan city from a single ingress point.

Nodes in the traffic light network are connected in a tree-topology IP network, all on the same subnet. Halderman et al., University of Michigan

The exercise was conducted on actual stoplights deployed at live intersections, "with cooperation from a road agency located in Michigan." As is typical in large urban areas, the traffic lights in the subject city are networked in a tree-type topology, allowing them to pass information to and receive instruction from a central management point. The network is IP-based, with all the nodes (intersections and management computers) on a single subnet. In order to save on installation costs and increase flexibility, the traffic light system uses wireless radios rather than dedicated physical networking links for its communication infrastructure—and that’s the hole the research team exploited.

Wireless security? What's that?

The systems in question use a combination of 5.8GHz and 900MHz radios, depending on the conditions at each intersection (two intersections with a good line-of-sight to each other use 5.8GHz because of the higher data rate, for example, while two intersections separated by obstructions would use 900MHz). The 900MHz links use "a proprietary protocol with frequency hopping spread-spectrum (FHSS)," but the 5.8GHz version of the proprietary protocol isn’t terribly different from 802.11n.

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Sterile drilling equipment at the Whillans site. Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling

Life is hardier than was thought only a few decades ago. With the help of new exploration technologies and new methods for finding and identifying organisms, our perceptions of what constitute the environmental limits for life on Earth have changed.

You can find life in extreme environments, whether acid or alkaline, hot or cold. Life can be found under high pressure, without free water (in hot and cold deserts), in extremely salty environments (like the Dead Sea), and in areas that lack oxygen or experience high radiation levels.

We now recognize that microbial life can exist in most extreme environments on Earth. So it should not be a surprise that in a study just published in Nature, researchers report the first direct evidence of life in a lake located almost a kilometer below an ice sheet in Antarctica.

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velo_city

The National Football League’s campaign to preserve Federal Communications Commission rules that allow local TV blackouts when games aren’t sold out has descended into astroturfing, with thousands of form letters signed by “football fans” arguing on behalf of keeping rules that can prevent fans from watching home games on TV.

Former NFL player Lynn Swann last week submitted 3,300 letters to the FCC urging the commission to maintain its sports blackout rule. In all, “more than 10,500 fans” have petitioned the commission to keep the rule, he wrote.

Currently, NFL teams prevent games from being shown on local television when tickets aren’t sold out or if ticket sales don’t meet a threshold set by each team. The FCC has tentatively proposed to eliminate 40-year-old rules that enable the blackouts by preventing cable and satellite companies from importing game broadcasts from distant stations to show in local areas. The NFL argues that the rules benefit fans because they limit teams’ incentives to raise ticket prices by increasing in-person attendance and prevent games from being restricted to pricey cable packages. In practice, the FCC's blackout rules primarily affect the NFL.

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Secret: The Anonymous App. Esteban Contreras

On Monday, a Brazilian civil court in Vitória granted a preliminary injunction to a public prosecutor, prohibiting Apple and Google from distributing the anonymous sharing app Secret and Microsoft from distributing Secret's Windows Phone client, Cryptic. The injunction also said that the three app store proprietors had to remotely delete the app off Brazilian users' devices.

Secret is an app that lets users share anonymous messages with friends, friends of friends, or publicly. The anonymous nature of the app has led to some complaints of bullying, to which the app responded by adding a "no-bullying" filter.

The preliminary injunction is an interim decision ahead of a final ruling, and Apple, Google, and Microsoft will have a chance to appeal. As GigaOm writes, public prosecutor Marcelo Zenkner “said he had been contacted by people complaining about anonymous bullying. Because any removal request must be sent in English to an American judge via the Brazilian foreign ministry, he said, there was no way for victims to effectively defend themselves.” Secret has been available in Brazil since May.

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A couple of weeks ago at Flash Memory Summit, Silicon Motion launched their next generation SATA 6Gbps SSD controller. Dubbed simply as SM2256, the new controller is the first merchant controller solution (hardware + firmware) to support TLC NAND out of the box and succeeds the SM2246 controller we tested a while ago with ADATA's Premier SP610. The SM2246 was not the fastest solution in the market but it provided decent performance at an alluring price and the SM2256 is set to lower the total cost even more thanks to support for lower cost TLC NAND.

The SM2256 continues to be a 4-channel design and I am guessing it is also based on the same single-core ARC design with most changes being in the ECC engine. NAND support includes all NAND that is currently available including Toshiba's 15nm TLC NAND and the controller is designed to support 3D NAND as well. DDR3 and DDR3L are supported for cache and the controller is also TCG Opal 1.0 compliant. 

To make TLC durable enough, the SM2256 features Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) error-correction, which is a new ECC scheme that is set to replace BCH ECC. Intel did a very detailed presentation on LDPC at FMS a few years ago, although I must warn you that it is also very technical with lots of math involved. Silicon Motion calls its implementation NANDXtend and it has three steps: LDPC hard decode, soft decode and RAID data recovery. Basically, hard decode is much faster than soft decode because there is less computation involved and in case the ECC engine fails to correct a bit, the RAID data recover kicks in and the data is recovered from parity. Silicon Motion claims that its NANDXtend technology can triple the endurance of TLC NAND, making it good for ~1,500-3000 P/E cycles depending on the quality of the NAND. Marvell's upcoming 88SS1074 controller supports LDPC as well and I will be taking a deeper look at the technology once we have a sample in our hands. 

TLC is expected to become the dominant NAND type in four years, so focusing on it makes perfect sense. Once the industry moves to 3D NAND, I truly expect TLC NAND to be the NAND for mainstream SSDs because the endurance should be close to 2D MLC NAND, which eliminates the biggest problem that TLC technology currently has.

The SM2256 is currently in customer evaluation and is expected to enter mass production in Q4'14 with shipping devices coming in late 2014 or early 2015. 

Chitika

Based on Amazon's selective PR history, the company isn't likely to reveal exact sales for its recent Fire Phone any time soon—unless the company's first-ever smartphone goes gangbusters. A recent study appears to put any hopes for a record-smashing debut in serious doubt. Rather than wait for the official word, online advertising company Chitika Insights pored over its data to figure out just how well the Fire Phone has performed out of the gate—and how AT&T exclusivity may have factored in to its initial performance.

On Tuesday, the advertising agency published a study that compared recent new phones' mobile browser advertising impressions, comparing them across their first 20 days. In its comparison of the Amazon Fire Phone, the LG G3, and the Motorola Droid Ultra, Chitika measured overall web usage, as opposed to unique users, and it published percentage estimates of total North American web traffic as opposed to hard numbers for each device, but the results were still plenty revealing.

Usage of the G3 over the 20-day span more than tripled that of the Fire Phone, and Chitika pointed out that LG enjoyed a hefty bump on the days that Verizon and Sprint began selling their versions of that phone. Meanwhile, the stats for the Droid Ultra, which launched as a Verizon exclusive in North America, more closely mirrored those of the Fire Phone, with slow-but-steady growth toward the 0.02 percent mark. (Motorola still outpaced Amazon by the end of its 20-day period.)

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The World of Warcraft isn't usually this empty, but it's getting there...

For about six years after its early 2005 launch, it looked like there was nothing that could stop the runaway success of Blizzard's World of Warcraft, which grew to a peak of 12 million paid subscribers by the end of 2010. Since then, though, the game has seen a long, mostly uninterrupted slide in its player numbers, with only 6.8 million subscribers as of July.

Blizzard obviously isn't happy about this trend for one of its biggest products but seems to have accepted that things aren't going to change any time soon. "We really don’t know if [World of Warcraft] will grow again,” lead game designer Tom Chilton told MCV in a recent interview. "It is possible, but I wouldn't say it's something that we expect. Our goal is to make the most compelling content we can."

A new expansion pack like the upcoming Warlords of Draenor could juice those subscriber numbers, as previous expansion packs have seemed to do. Chilton seems to see a bit of diminishing returns in this strategy, however. "By building expansions, you are effectively building up barriers to people coming back. But by including the level 90 character with this expansion, it gives people the opportunity to jump right into the new content."

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The BBC's Yalda Hakim met with people who have fled to a huge refugee camp near Dohuk.

You know, there was some other huge platform that handled the update problem much more gracefully than Android. What was it called, again? Andrew Cunningham

Android updates have gotten a little faster over the last two years, at least if you invest in a flagship smartphone from a major company. We have reams of data that say so, and we can even tell you which carriers and companies you should stick to if getting updates factors heavily into your buying decisions.

But wouldn't it be great if you never had to think about this stuff at all? If you never had to read another multi-thousand word story about Android update speed, because it wasn't a problem anymore? We spend so much time discussing the state of Android’s fractured landscape and watching it improve baby step by baby step, but there has to be another way forward.

In fact, there's already a shining example that Google could decide to imitate. These devices come from many different manufacturers and use all kinds of different CPUs, GPUs, screens, and other components. There are hundreds of millions of them sold every year, and their operating system can be customized with additional apps and services to help differentiate them from one another. And yet, despite this fractured landscape, the operating system that runs on these devices gets security and feature updates on the day that they're released. Read any article about Android's update problems, and this sounds like a fairy tale you'd be insane to hope for.

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The man regarded by many as the father of modern yoga, BKS Iyengar, has died, aged 95.

Ilulissat, Greenland, in the summer. Guido Appenzeller

Climate records, like tree rings or ice cores, are invaluable archives of past climate, but they each reflect their local conditions. If you really want a global average for some time period, you’re going to have to combine many reliable records from around the world and do your math very carefully.

That’s what a group of researchers aimed to do when (as Ars covered) they used 73 records to calculate a global overview of the last 11,000 years—the warm period after the last ice age that's called the Holocene. The Holocene temperature reconstruction showed a peak about 7,000 years ago, after which the planet slowly cooled off by a little over 0.5 degrees Celsius until that trend abruptly reversed over the last 150 years. That behavior mirrored the change in Northern Hemisphere summer sunlight driven by cycles in Earth’s orbit.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and led by the University of Wisconsin’s Zhengyu Liu delves into a problem with that pattern—and it’s not what climate models say should have happened.

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A rendering of the Martian Pyramid entry. Thingiverse

A Martian pyramid, a modular beehive, and a three-tiered Acropolis have made the final cut in the MakerBot Mars Base Challenge.

Run by Thingiverse and launched in conjunction with the 3D printer maker and Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the challenge has been open since May 30 and clocked up 227 applications. The three winning entries will each be awarded a MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer in order to help them fully explore their designs for Martian abodes.

The challenge brief asked entrants to take into account the extreme weather, radiation levels, lack of oxygen, and dust storms when designing their Martian shelters. And although the applicants did not always nail the science, their designs have a novelty we've not seen since Nasa's 1970s space station and scooter designs.

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nolifebeforecoffee

The way John Tye tells it, we’ve all been missing the forest for the trees.

Over the course of two phone calls, the former State Department official told Ars that anyone who has been following the government surveillance discussion since the Snowden disclosures has been too concerned with things like metadata collection. Since last summer, journalists, politicians, and the public have been inundated with largely-unknown terminology, like “Section 215” and “Section 702.”

(For a recap: The first disclosure to come from the documents provided by Snowden described the bulk metadata programs, whose legal authority derives from Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the legal authority which the NSA uses as the basis for PRISM and other surveillance and data collection programs.)

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Aurich Lawson

Android 4.4, KitKat was released on October 31, 2013, or at least, that's what you can say about one device: the Nexus 5. For the rest of the ecosystem, the date you got KitKat—if you got KitKat—varied wildly depending on your device, OEM, and carrier.

For every Android update, Google's release of code to OEMs starts an industry-wide race to get the new enhancements out to customers. So how did everyone do this year? Who was the first with KitKat, and who was the last? What effect does your carrier have on updates? How has the speed of Android updates changed compared to earlier years?

Given all those variables, we wanted to check in on the specifics of Android in 2014. There are lots of slightly different ways to go about measuring something like this, so first, a word about our methodology. All of these charts measure KitKat's update lag time in months. For our start date, we're picking October 31, 2013, the day KitKat was released on the Nexus 5. For our finish time for each device, we're going with the US release of an update via either OTA or downloadable system image. OTAs are done on a staggered release schedule, so it's hard to tell exactly when they start and finish—we just went with the earliest news of an update.

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Sunday Times photographer Paul Conroy pays tribute to US reporter James Foley, who has apparently been killed by the Islamic State.

Conductor Daniel Barenboim speaks to Newsnight's Kirsty Wark about how the situation in Gaza has affected his orchestra of musicians from both sides in the conflict.

Violence subsides but protests continue over the police shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, as 47 arrests are made.

Next in our recent run of lower cost motherboards is the MSI Z97 Guard-Pro, a motherboard that MSI billed to me as one suited for the overclockable Pentium G3258 on a budget. At $110, we see if it differs much from the more expensive options on the market.

Aerial pictures show flooding across the desert region of Phoenix, Arizona, following torrential storms.