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Jury: MP3tunes founder must pay $41 million for copyright violations

Michael Robertson, an entrepreneur who has been waging legal feuds against the music industry for more than a decade now, has been ordered to pay $41 million to a record label that sued him. The record label EMI sued MP3tunes back in 2007, and the case finally went to a jury last week in New York federal court. The jury found MP3tunes, and Robertson personally, liable for copyright violations . A separate damages trial ended yesterday, with the jury issuing a verdict of around $41 million. That’s an estimate, because the decision was a “complex, lengthy” verdict that will take the lawyers until next week to calculate precisely, according to a Reuters report on the outcome of the trial. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Jury: MP3tunes founder must pay $41 million for copyright violations

New dwarf planet found sneaking through the inner Oort Cloud

An artist’s depiction of Sedna, the first of the objects from this class of bodies to have been discovered. NASA A new dwarf planet-like body has been found on the outer edges of the Solar System. This object, called 2012VP 113 , is about 450km wide and is the second body of its class found since the identification of the dwarf planet Sedna in 2003, and it joins an exclusive club composed of some of the strangest objects in the Solar System. The observable Solar System can be divided into three regions: the rocky terrestrial planets and asteroids of the inner Solar System, the gas giant planets, and the icy Kuiper Belt objects, which include Pluto. The Kuiper Belt stretches from beyond Neptune, which is at 30 astronomical units (where 1AU is the typical distance between the Earth and the Sun), to about 50AU. Sedna and 2012VP 113 are strange objects because they reside in a region where there should be nothing, according to our theories of the Solar System formation. Their orbit is well beyond that of Neptune, the last recognized planet of the Solar System, and even beyond that of Pluto, which differs from planets because of its size, unusual orbit, and composition. (Pluto, once considered a planet, is now considered the lead object of a group of bodies called plutinos.) Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New dwarf planet found sneaking through the inner Oort Cloud

Google: Cloud prices should track Moore’s Law, are falling too slowly

Tharan Parameshwaran Google today continued the trend of cloud services price cuts, while claiming that cloud network operators aren’t cutting average prices quickly enough. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google frequently advertise  price cuts , but Google today claimed that “pricing hasn’t followed  Moore’s Law : over the past five years, hardware costs improved by 20-30 percent annually, but public cloud prices fell at just 8 percent per year.” In today’s announcement, unveiled at Google’s Cloud Platform Live event , the company said, “We think cloud pricing should track Moore’s Law, so we’re simplifying and reducing prices for our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30-85 percent.” Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles about every two years, bringing steady increases in processing power. One Amazon price cut last year was on the order of 37 to 80 percent for its dedicated instances, so this actually isn’t that unusual. Google declined to say which companies it included in its “public cloud prices” statistic. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google: Cloud prices should track Moore’s Law, are falling too slowly

Microsoft releases source code for MS-DOS and Word

In recognition of their historical importance and commercial irrelevance, Microsoft has given the source code to MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 and Word for Windows 1.1a to the Computer History Museum  (CHM) in Mountain View, California. The source is now freely downloadable by anyone, though making practical use of it is an exercise for the reader. This source code joins other important early programs, including Adobe Photoshop 1.0 and Apple II DOS, among the CHM’s collection. Len Shustek, CHM chairman said, “We think preserving historic source code like [MS-DOS and Word] is key to understanding how software has evolved from primitive roots to become a crucial part of our civilization.” The scale of change between then and now is formidable. MS-DOS had just 300kB of source code and occupied as little as 12kB of memory. In 1981, MS-DOS was a key part of IBM’s PC, and the success of the PC—and its clones—made Microsoft the industry giant it is today. Word for Windows is the product that turned WordPerfect from market leader into all-but-irrelevant also-ran. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft releases source code for MS-DOS and Word

Facebook purchases VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion [updated]

Aurich Lawson Giant social networking company Facebook has just announced it has “reached a definitive agreement” to acquire virtual reality headset maker Oculus for $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares valued at $1.6 billion. Oculus can earn another $300 million if it reaches unspecified performance milestones, and the deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2014. In announcing the deal, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicated that the move is about much more than gaming, and goes well beyond the kneejerk FarmVille VR jokes that propagated at warp speed immediately in the announcement’s wake. “While the applications for virtual reality technology beyond gaming are in their nascent stages, several industries are already experimenting with the technology,” Facebook said in a blog post . “Facebook plans to extend Oculus’ existing advantage in gaming to new verticals, including communications, media and entertainment, education, and other areas,” he wrote. “Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow,” Zuckerberg said in a statement. “Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever and change the way we work, play, and communicate.” Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook purchases VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion [updated]

Spectacular fossil fern reveals Jurassic-era chromosomes

The internal tissues of the fossilized fern. Benjamin Bomfleur A violent death has led to a remarkably lucky preservation. Researchers in Sweden have discovered ferns that were buried suddenly in a volcanic eruption during the Jurassic period. The sudden burial has preserved stunning details of the fern, down to showing the plant’s chromosomes being separated during cell division. In fact, the details are sufficient to determine that its genome hasn’t undergone major changes in at least 180 million years. The fossil was found in a volcanic deposit in southern Sweden. It belongs to a group of plants called the royal ferns (technically, the Osmundaceae ). The group, which includes a number of different species, was already known as a bit of a living fossil, since some of its distinctive features have been seen on plants that are 220 million years old, and a variety of other fossil species look indistinguishable from modern forms. The samples themselves are simply stunning. Not only are the internal details of various plant tissues preserved, but internal details of individual cells have been preserved. These include cells at various stages of the cell division process; darker, dense material shows the chromosomes being split up between the two incipient daughter cells. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Spectacular fossil fern reveals Jurassic-era chromosomes

New cache design speeds up processing time by 15%

Texas A&M Supercomputing Transistors keep getting smaller and smaller, enabling computer chip designers to develop faster computer chips. But no matter how fast the chip gets, moving data from one part of the machine to another still takes time. To date, chip designers have addressed this problem by placing small caches of local memory on or near the processor itself. Caches store the most frequently used data for easy access. But the days of a cache serving a single processor (or core) are over, making management of cache a nontrivial challenge. Additionally, cores typically have to share data, so the physical layout of the communication network connecting the cores needs to be considered, too. Researchers at MIT and the University of Connecticut have now developed a set of new “rules” for cache management on multicore chips. Simulation results have shown that the rules significantly improve chip performance while simultaneously reducing the energy consumption. The researcher’s first paper, presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture, reported gains (on average) of 15 percent in execution time and 25 percent energy savings. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New cache design speeds up processing time by 15%

Sony reveals Project Morpheus, its virtual reality headset for PS4

Kyle Orland At a “Driving the Future of Innovation at Sony” panel today, Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida revealed the company’s long-rumored plans to enter a virtual reality headset space that has gained new relevance in the wake of the Oculus Rift’s development . The headset, codenamed Project Morpheus (after the god of dream, not the Matrix character, Sony clarified), is being developed by an international team of Sony engineers. “Virtual Reality is the next innovation from PlayStation that may well change the future of games,” Yoshida said. “Nothing elevates the level of immersion better than VR,” he continued, adding that VR “goes one step further than immersion to deliver presence.” The headset will have its position and orientation tracked 100 times per second in a full 360 degrees of rotation within a three cubic meter “working volume.” Tracking will make use of high-fidelity inertial sensors in the unit itself, tiny tracking markers on the surface of the headset, and the same stereo PlayStation Camera that tracks the DualShock 4 and PlayStation Move. Sony R&D engineer Dr. Richard Marks wryly noted at the panel that the PlayStation Camera “almost seems as if it was designed for VR, actually,” to laughs from the audience. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony reveals Project Morpheus, its virtual reality headset for PS4

Sextortionist who hacked Miss Teen USA’s computer sentenced to 18 months

Andrew Cunningham The California computer science student who hacked various women’s computers for the purposes of “sextortion”—including Miss Teen USA 2013, Cassidy Wolf —has been sentenced to 18 months in prison. The sentence comes after Jared James Abrahams pleaded guilty to one count of computer hacking and three counts of extortion last November. According to a press release published Monday afternoon by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, Abrahams “used the nude photos to extort victims by threatening to publicly post the compromising photos or videos to the victims’ social media accounts—unless the victim either sent more nude photos or videos, or engaged in a Skype session with him and did what he said for five minutes.” As Ars Deputy Editor Nate Anderson wrote last year , Abrahams became decently adept at using remote administration tools (RATs), a malware used to spy on victims. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sextortionist who hacked Miss Teen USA’s computer sentenced to 18 months

Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced

The BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) telescope at the South Pole, designed to measure polarized light from the early Universe. Steffen Richter When the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a press conference for a “Major Discovery” (capital letters in the original e-mail) involving an unspecified experiment, rumors began to fly immediately.  By Friday afternoon, the rumors had coalesced around one particular observatory: the  BICEP  microwave telescope located at the South Pole.  Over the weekend, the chatter focused on a specific issue: polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang. With the start of the press conference, it’s now clear that we’ve detected the first direct evidence of the inflationary phase of the Big Bang, in which the Universe expanded rapidly in size. BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization experiment, was built specifically to measure the polarization of light left over from the early Universe. This light, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), encodes a lot of information about the physical state of the cosmos from its earliest moments. Most observatories (such as Planck and WMAP) have mapped temperature fluctuations in the CMB, which are essential for determining the contents of the Universe. Polarization is the orientation of the electric field of light, which conveys additional information not available from the temperature fluctuations. While much of CMB polarization is due to later density fluctuations that gave rise to galaxies, theory predicts that some of it came from primordial gravitational waves. Those waves are ripples in space-time left over from quantum fluctuations in the Universe’s earliest moments. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced