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“Pirate Bay Bundle” shares 101 little-known indie games via BitTorrent

Since The Humble Bundle launched in 2010 to almost immediate success , the Internet has been absolutely flooded with similar pay-what-you-want bundles of various indie games. Even amid this flood, a new indie game bundle stands out, both for its selection of titles and its distribution method. The Pirate Bay Bundle is a free collection of 101 small indie titles that I can almost guarantee you’ve never heard of, let alone played. Curator Moshboy describes the collection as an extension of his Underrated Indie Games series of YouTube videos . “Some were made for game jams, others were made just because, some are made by celebrated game makers, many are made by folks that you won’t know,” Moshboy explains. “Many are usually only available to play in your browser, but I managed to convince these wonderful folks to provide me with offline versions.” As the name implies, this massive collection of games is being distributed via a BitTorrent link on The Pirate Bay , with the cooperation of all the creators involved. While other indie bundles have also shared their DRM-free games via BitTorrent, I’m not aware of any that have willingly offered their selections entirely free via the popular and perpetually legally pressured torrent-sharing site (though that hasn’t stopped some people from turning to piracy to save a penny on other bundles). Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Pirate Bay Bundle” shares 101 little-known indie games via BitTorrent

Shields up: Tesla Model S gains (free) titanium and aluminum armor upgrade

Model S 1, concrete block 0. Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk has taken to Medium.com to post about a design change to the expensive-but-awesome Model S electric car: all Model S vehicles manufactured after March 6, 2014 will come with additional titanium and aluminum armor on their underbellies. The Model S carries its thousands of battery cells in a sealed enclosure below the floorpan, and the added armor is intended to protect the enclosure from puncture even under extreme conditions. This in turn should reduce the chances of Model S vehicles catching on fire. Not that the cars catching on fire is much of a thing; Musk is quick to point out that there have been only two Tesla fires resulting from road accidents (one of which involved a Model S being driven at 110 miles per hour directly into—and then through—a concrete wall), versus hundreds of thousands of gasoline vehicle fires last year. Nonetheless, Musk has directed his company to improve the car’s battery armor in an effort to assure customers (and investors) that the Model S really and truly isn’t going to burst into flames if you drive over a curb. The new armor takes the form of a three-part system: there’s a big hollow aluminum bar to deflect objects, a large titanium plate to absorb impacts, and an angled aluminum extrusion to cause the car to “ramp up and over” objects that can’t be crushed or flung aside. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Shields up: Tesla Model S gains (free) titanium and aluminum armor upgrade

BlackBerry still losing money, just 10 times less than it did last quarter

The BlackBerry Q10. Ars Technica On Friday, BlackBerry announced (PDF) its quarterly earnings. Compared to the previous quarter, the embattled Canadian handset maker seems to have slowed the bleeding. In just three months, it slashed its losses by a factor of 10. In its fourth fiscal quarter ending March 1, 2014, BlackBerry sustained a net loss of $423 million, down from a net loss of $4.4 billion the previous quarter . That harsh third fiscal quarter loss was a driver behind a terrible fiscal 2014 year overall for Blackberry: the company lost $5.8 billion from March 1, 2013 to March 1, 2014. “I am very pleased with our progress and execution in fiscal Q4 against the strategy we laid out three months ago. We have significantly streamlined operations, allowing us to reach our expense reduction target one quarter ahead of schedule,” said John Chen, the company’s CEO, in a statement. “BlackBerry is on sounder financial footing today with a path to returning to growth and profitability.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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BlackBerry still losing money, just 10 times less than it did last quarter

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

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]

Xbox One gamepads finally, unofficially supported on PC

Not seen here: the Xbox One controller’s USB port that hackers have finally bent to their will. We at Ars have argued about which next-gen video game controller is more comfortable , but what hasn’t been up for discussion is that we want to use both pads on our computers. Both have USB connections, after all, and we’ve been racking up controller-friendly PC games lately. But neither Microsoft nor Sony has released official drivers to get their newest controllers working via that connection. That’s a bit crazy, as Microsoft’s choice to officially support PC gaming using the 360 pad helped make it the de facto standard for non-mouse-and-keyboard play for computer gamers. With the Xbox One controller, on the other hand, we’ve had to go the seedy, indirect path, installing unofficial drivers while crossing our fingers. Shortly after its launch, DualShock 4 buyers lucked out with an unofficial PC patch, but Xbox One controller owners had their chance shot down after Microsoft asked hacker Chris Gallizi  to stop developing his own workaround . Thankfully, another hacker made his own attempt this month before conferring with Microsoft, meaning that Windows users can finally add next-gen pads to their PC arsenal. At this time, hacker  Lucas Assis’ patch is quite inelegant, even though it received an update last week that fixed issues with the controller’s triggers. You’ll need to install an unofficial driver and two applications (linked in the video tutorial above) before the controller will even work, and you’ll probably want to install the paid XPadder app afterward to enjoy full support for your Steam library. Many games we tested didn’t work without that latter addition tossed on top. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Xbox One gamepads finally, unofficially supported on PC

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

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

10,000 Linux servers hit by malware serving tsunami of spam and exploits

Researchers have documented an ongoing criminal operation infecting more than 10,000 Unix and Linux servers with malware that sends spam and redirects end users to malicious Web pages. Windigo, as the attack campaign has been dubbed, has been active since 2011 and has compromised systems belonging to the Linux Foundation’s kernel.org and the developers of the cPanel Web hosting control panel, according to a detailed report published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Eset. During its 36-month run, Windigo has compromised more than 25,000 servers with robust malware that sends more than 35 million spam messages a day and exposes Windows-based Web visitors to drive-by malware attacks. It also feeds people running any type of computer banner ads for porn services. The Eset researchers, who have been instrumental in uncovering similar campaigns compromising large numbers of servers running the nginx, Lighttpd , and Apache Web servers, said the latest campaign has the potential to inflict significant harm on the Internet at large. They explained: Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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10,000 Linux servers hit by malware serving tsunami of spam and exploits