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Yes, the 5K Retina iMac’s screen runs at 60Hz at 5K resolution

The Retina iMac on my desk, driving my pair of 27-inch Thunderbolt monitors. Lee Hutchinson I’m at the end of my time with the Retina iMac now that our Senior Applemeister Andrew Cunningham is back from his nuptials. He’ll be finishing up our coverage of the device, but I wanted to touch on a couple of final points with the big Mac before I send it on its way to the East Coast. We’ve received several variations of the same question submitted to our feedback form: does the Retina iMac operate at 60Hz in its native 5120×2880 resolution? And if so, how is that even possible, given that DisplayPort 1.2 doesn’t have the bandwidth to support that resolution and refresh rate? To answer the first question: yes, the iMac’s display runs at 60Hz, even when driving all 14.7 million pixels of its native 5k resolution. Apple directly verified this when I asked; the company also told Daring Fireball’s John Gruber the same. Further, it can be confirmed with apps that measure your refresh rate, like SwitchResX : The output from SwitchResX on the Retina iMac, showing the 60Hz refresh rate. For additional verification, a quick visit to a Web-based app that demonstrates 60Hz movement shows that the screen is operating at that refresh rate: Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Yes, the 5K Retina iMac’s screen runs at 60Hz at 5K resolution

NTSB: SpaceShipTwo broke apart when “feathering” activated early

Ground imagery showing the destruction of SpaceShipTwo. Kenneth Brown/Reuters The Guardian has a good summary of how things are proceeding with the two-day-old National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation into the destruction of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo , which occurred at approximately 10:12am PDT on October 31. Some eyewitnesses reported seeing an explosion when the craft broke up, prompting speculation that the accident had something to do with SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid rocket engine—an engine that was making its first flight with its new fuel. However, at a press conference Sunday afternoon, acting NTSB chairman Christopher Hart said that crash investigators had already located the cause of the accident that injured 43-year old pilot Peter Siebold and took the life of 39-year old co-pilot Michael Alsbury: the spacecraft’s “feathering” mode had been engaged early. This put SpaceShipTwo in a high-drag configuration unsuitable for powered flight, and the craft then broke apart. The feathering functionality is designed to be used in the later stage of SpaceShipTwo’s flight. It changes the shape of the craft, swinging its wings upward and allowing them to move to the optimum angle to slow the craft down on descent, like a shuttlecock falling to the ground in a game of badminton. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NTSB: SpaceShipTwo broke apart when “feathering” activated early

Egypt jails 8 men for 3 years after same-sex wedding video goes viral

Eight men accused of participating in a same-sex wedding on a Nile riverboat in Egypt were handed a three-year prison term Saturday for committing “debauchery,” state run media said. Ahram Online reported  that the Prosecutor-General Hisham Barakat viewed the one-minute video, said to be filmed in April, and concluded it was of two men getting married. Eight men who were aboard the riverboat were detained in September after the minute-long video went viral on YouTube and other sites, Ahram Online said. They were jailed for broadcasting footage that “violates public decency,” CNN said . Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Egypt jails 8 men for 3 years after same-sex wedding video goes viral

FTC fines online dating service $616,000 for using “virtual cupids”

More and more people are becoming familiar with the joys—and frustrations—of online dating. A recent Pew study found that 10 percent of the US public is using online dating services, and a full 38 percent of those people say they are “single and looking.” There’s enough money to be made as an Internet matchmaker that it’s apparently sparking some companies to push the boundaries of what’s legal. Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission disclosed that  it reached a settlement with JDI Dating Ltd. , a UK company that runs 18 dating sites that it claims have over 12 million members. The sites include CupidsWand.com, FlirtCrowd.com, and FindMeLove.com. JDI will have to pay $616,165 in redress, and it must stop business practices that were said to violate both the FTC Act and a newer law that regulates recurring billing online. JDI’s dating sites would make fake profiles, which the company called “virtual cupids,” and have them send computer-generated messages to new users who had created profiles but hadn’t yet paid. On JDI’s websites, users received an e-mail notifying them that another user sent them a “wink” within minutes of joining. Then they got additional winks, messages, and photo requests, supposedly from other members in their geographic area. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FTC fines online dating service $616,000 for using “virtual cupids”

Beyond gaming, the VR boom is everywhere—from classrooms to therapy couches

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 virtual reality excitement is happening beyond the world of gaming. Join us this afternoon for a live discussion on the topic with article author Kyle Orland and his expert guests; your comments and questions are welcome. When Oculus almost single-handedly revived the idea of virtual reality from its ‘90s vaporware grave, it chose the 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo as the place to unveil the first public prototype of the Rift headset. The choice of a gaming convention isn’t that surprising, as the game industry has been the quickest and most eager to jump on potential applications for VR. Gaming has already demanded the majority of the attention and investments in the second VR boom that Oculus has unleashed. But just as the Rift itself is the result of what Oculus calls a “peace dividend from the smartphone wars,” other fields are benefiting from virtual reality’s gaming-driven growth. Creators all over the world are looking beyond entertainment to adapting head-mounted displays for everything from psychotherapy, special-needs education, and space exploration to virtual luxury car test drives, virtual travel, and even VR movies. The well-worn idea of “gaming on the holodeck” may be driving much of the interest in virtual reality, but the technology’s non-gaming applications could be just as exciting in the long term. Read 42 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Beyond gaming, the VR boom is everywhere—from classrooms to therapy couches

Newspaper outraged after FBI creates fake Seattle Times page to nab suspect

YoungToymaker In 2007, the FBI wrote a fake news story about bomb threats in Thurston County, Washington, and then sent out e-mail links “in the style of the Seattle Times .” The details have now been published by that very same newspaper , which today carries a story including outraged quotes from a Seattle Times editor. The FBI put an Associated Press byline on the fake news story, which was about the bomb threats in Thurston County that they were investigating. “We are outraged that the FBI, with the apparent assistance of the US Attorney’s Office, misappropriated the name of The Seattle Times to secretly install spyware on the computer of a crime suspect,” said Seattle Times  editor Kathy Best. “Not only does that cross a line, it erases it.” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Newspaper outraged after FBI creates fake Seattle Times page to nab suspect

One week later, Google algorithm change hits streaming, torrent sites hard

One of Project Free TV’s domains has dropped in traffic since Google’s algorithm change. se Video streaming and torrent sites have dropped precipitously in Google rankings after the company altered its algorithm last Monday, according to reports from Searchmetrics. One of Project Free TV’s main operating domains, free-tv-video-online.me, fell 96 percent in Searchmetric’s rankings, one of the biggest drops alongside torrentz.eu and thepiratebay.se. Google committed to fighting piracy by decrementing search results that allow users to access illegal streams or torrents back in 2012. The first round of changes didn’t help much, according to interested parties like the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America. Google complies with takedown requests, of which it received 224 million in the last year, according to its own report.  The company responded to these within six hours on average, but industry parties pushed for Google to make content sites less visible overall. Even with its new solution, Google notes that this won’t be the same as removing domains from search entirely: “the number of noticed pages is typically only a tiny fraction of the total number of pages on the site,” the company said. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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One week later, Google algorithm change hits streaming, torrent sites hard

Comcast lost 81,000 video customers in Q3, “the best result in 7 years”

Comcast reported its third quarter earnings today with positive results—and even the bad news was good. “Video customer net losses declined to 81,000, the best third quarter result in seven years,” the company’s announcement said . “I am pleased to report strong revenue, operating cash flow, and free cash flow growth for the third quarter of 2014,” CEO Brian Roberts said. In addition to slowing video losses over the past three months, “cable results highlight the consistent strength of high-speed Internet and business services,” he said. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast lost 81,000 video customers in Q3, “the best result in 7 years”

Bluetooth-tracking beacon programs uncovered in LA, Chicago

The Logan Square stop on the Chicago Transit Authority blue line. Kumar McMillan A report from BuzzFeed News Wednesday suggests that the tracking beacons that cropped up in New York phone booths last year have spread to new cities, including Los Angeles and Chicago. The beacons have been sprinkled around transit centers, including Chicago Transit Authority rail stops and LA bus stops. The beacons, created by Gimbal, connect with devices like smartphones via Bluetooth and can harvest information like the device’s Bluetooth address, as well as the date, time, and location of connection. The beacons in New York were installed as a “test” by advertising company Titan 360. Though officials called for their removal over a year ago, they were not taken out of phone booths until earlier this month, after they were used in promotions for the Tribeca Film Festival and shopping app ShopAdvisor. Marketing company Martin Outdoor Media confirmed the beacons’ existence in LA to BuzzFeed News, as did the CTA in Chicago. Martin called the beacons part of a “pilot program” in a press release last week, while the CTA stated its beacons were part of a “two-week test,” to be followed up by a bigger test for a longer period with beacons placed and tracked by Titan. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bluetooth-tracking beacon programs uncovered in LA, Chicago

A huge Halo: Master Chief Collection clocks in at 65GB

Microsoft reportedly scrapped its original plans to ship Master Chief Collection in a “car full of 5.25″ disks” format. Lenore Edman About a year ago, we had to quickly get used to 50 GB download sizes for console games like PS4 launch title Killzone: Shadow Fall . Game size inflation hasn’t exactly stopped since then, as evidenced by word that the upcoming Halo: Master Chief Collection will take up a whopping 65 GB on Xbox One hard drives next month. Buried in Friday’s official “gone gold” announcement was word that the Xbox One’s remastered edition of the first four Halo games, which is currently available for pre-loading, would actually be bigger than a standard 50GB Blu-ray disc. Rather than splitting the 65GB across two discs for the retail edition, Microsoft has decided to include 45GB of data in the box and require players to download a 20GB day one “content update” to access “some features and multiplayer content.” Players will be able to play the bulk of the single-player content while the 20GB content pack is downloading and installing, Microsoft says. Why make even retail buyers download so much data? “The game is designed to run as a single, unified product,” 343 Industries Franchise Development Director Frank O’Connor explained on gaming forum NeoGAF over the weekend . “Digital is seamless obviously, but we also wanted disc users to have the same experience, without swapping discs. Since the bulk of [the download] is [multiplayer] or MP related, the logic is sound.” While it may have been feasible to simply install a single, unified game to the Xbox One hard drive from two discs, O’Connor elaborated that such a solution “simply wasn’t practical for this product, this year in this timeline.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A huge Halo: Master Chief Collection clocks in at 65GB