Ars Technica
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Week in Apple: Magic Mouse, ra1n & sn0w, iPhone chicanery
We gave you the lowdown on how well Apple's new Magic Mouse works, told you about a Dutch teen that used port scanning to find vulnerable jailbroken iPhones, showed how less-than-honest iPhone developers claim to have developed others' apps, and how Apple may or may not be dropping support for Atom …
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Week in tech: sexy bootlegged Star Trek slumber party edition
Tales of Star Trek piracy and sexy slumber party pics topped the week's tech and science stories. Here's what was hot over the past seven days.Two high school student athletes got in hot water after pictures from a slumber party posted on MySpacewith privacy controls, no lessended up on the principa …
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Week in Microsoft: Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Live 4.0 rumors
Let's look back at the week that was in Microsoft news. Here were the top stories: Windows 7 SP1 beta rumored by end of 2009, RTM summer 2010: Windows 7 may be out, but Microsoft is of course still hard at work improving the operating system. Rumor has it that SP1 for Windows 7 will come sooner tha …
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Week in gaming: Modern Warfare 2 PC, Torchlight, Dragon Age
This week we take a look at just how much content and choice is missing from the PC version of Modern Warfare 2, and the news is not good for fans of the PC as a gaming platform. We also take a look at how to score some cheap consoles this weekend, why you should be playing Torchlight, and what one …
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Aftershocks from slow faults may arrive centuries later
I have a deep and rather personal interest in earthquake and volcano prediction. This comes from spending most of my youth within a few kilometers of an active fault line and less than 100km from a volcano that has, in the past, left a layer of ash over most of the surface of the Earth. In fact, eve …
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HTTPS, SSL attack vector discovered; fix is on the way
A security flaw that has been identified in the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol could open the door for man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks against HTTPS communication. All implementations are said to be vulnerable because the flaw is in the protocol itself. Security researchers are taking step …
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More successor than sequel: hands on with Assassin's Creed 2
"It doesn't really feel like a sequel," Ubisoft's Charles Randall told me as I sat down to play Assassin's Creed 2 for the first time at a recent press event in Toronto. "It feels like a whole new game." And that should be welcome news. Because while it wasn't a terrible game by any stretch of th …
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Big cable: move millions from phone subsidies to broadband
The cable industry is proposing a sweeping measure to simplify the nation's subsidy system for rural phone service providers. Make it tougher for providers to get Universal Service Fund High Cost program subsidy money, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association recommends, in areas where …
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Complete Genomics produces a cheap—well, $5,000—human genome
With the newest DNA sequencing technology starting to reach the market, we're seeing a bit of a bifurcation. Some of the methods can do long reads, covering hundreds of bases, and provide data that's appropriate for assembling a genome that's never been sequenced before. Others produce lots of sho …
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Google opens up its JavaScript development toolbox to all
Google is providing the web development community with an intriguing glimpse under the hood at some of the fundamental building blocks of the company's most popular web applications. The search giant has opened the source code of its comprehensive JavaScript library collection and is making it avail …
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Hands-on: OpenMoko WikiReader is simple, appealing
OpenMoko's WikiReader is a unique gadget with a single function. The simple handheld device stores the text of over 3 million Wikipedia entries, enabling convenient offline access to the popular Internet encyclopedia. We have conducted some hands-on testing with the new product and found it to be su …
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EU adopts "Internet freedom" provision on Internet cut-offs
For weeks, the major governing institutions of the European Union have been locked in a battle over three-strikes laws, Internet disconnections, and the appropriate role of judges in the process. Just after midnight last night, the deadlock was broken and all parties agreed to a new "Internet freedo …
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Judge hits Beatles MP3 seller with restraining order
The wheels of justice don't always turn slowly. Only two days after music label EMI asked a federal judge to stop BlueBeat.com from selling The Beatles' newly remastered albums online at a quarter a track, the judge has agreedand suggests that he's just as confused about what BlueBeat is doing as ev …
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Resurrecting Newton to do away with dark matter
It was 1687 when Issac Newton first published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in which he first described his universal law of gravitationthe inverse square law that we are all taught in middle school science class. Nearly 230 years passed before Newton's law was dethroned by …
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Warner Video shows Hollywood doesn't need HDTV blocking
The trade press is praising Warner Home Video for its innovative approach to cable releases. Even before launching Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Observe and Report on DVD, Warner deployed them on video-on-demand throughout the Atlanta, Georgia couch potato market. "It's the first test by a major st …
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Bill could kill ISP safe harbor in cases of financial fraud
In the wake of the collapse of many a 401k and a Ponzi scheme or three, it's no surprise that a bill called the Investor Protection Act of 2009 has attracted significant support in Congress. In 60 sections over 113 pages, the Act clarifies existing legislation and provides new oversight powers to t …
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Want to freelance for Ars Technica?
One of the things I'm most proud of is the fact that the entire Ars Technica staff were readers and community members before coming aboard, and this is also true for our freelancers with maybe one exception. One of the ways this was accomplished was by reaching out to you guys when we had opportunit …
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Bizarre legal defense after EMI sues over Beatles MP3 sales
When the news broke earlier this week that the so-famous-you've-never-heard-of-it BlueBeat.com was both streaming and selling The Beatles remastersand for 25¢ a trackwe speculated that an entertainingly weird legal theory was at the root of this behavior. We just had no idea how weird it was.
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PC Modern Warfare 2: it's much worse than you thought
Infinity Ward needs to realize that talking to people in the PC community does not end well for the buzz around its game. The lack of dedicated servers was "announced" during an interview with a gaming podcast, and the interviewers were stunned into silence when they were basically told their commun …
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Why I use Tripit to organize my travel plans
Let's face it: sometimes planning travel can be a pain in the butt. Not only that, but actually going through with themgetting to the airport at the right time, catching your connecting flight at the right time, getting to the right hotel, etc.can be equally frustrating if all your information is sc …
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