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OS X 10.8.4 beta suggests 802.11ac is coming soon to a Mac near you

Amid the sea of text, a revealing phrase: 802.11ac. 9to5Mac Before rolling them out to the public through Software Update, Apple regularly releases beta versions of its minor OS X updates to registered developers and other selected testers. These patches are normally routine—a security patch here, a new driver there—but they occasionally reveal tidbits about where Apple is taking OS X and, by extension, its Mac lineup. A new build of OS X 10.8.4 was released to beta testers today, and 9to5Mac cracked it open in short order. Hidden in the operating system’s “WiFi-frameworks” folder is a brand-new reference to 802.11ac Wi-Fi , a new standard that promises bandwidth of up to 1.3Gbps. The fastest Wi-Fi chips in today’s Macs support 802.11n at speeds of either 450Mbps (for devices with three antennae like the iMac or MacBook Pro) or 270Mbps (for devices like the MacBook Air with only two antennae), making the new standard quite the potential upgrade. As with previous Wi-Fi upgrades, the new 802.11ac adapters and routers will also be backward-compatible with 802.11n, g, b, and a-based devices. Routers and adapters that support 802.11ac first began to appear on the market last year, and have slowly proliferated as the months have gone on. We saw quite a few 802.11ac routers at this year’s CES , and 802.11ac chips from the likes of Broadcom should begin to show up in many consumer devices this year. Even some smartphones (the HTC One in particular) are beginning to ship with the new standard, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if Apple made the jump in this year’s Macs. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OS X 10.8.4 beta suggests 802.11ac is coming soon to a Mac near you

Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links

If Intel gets its way, old-school server racks will go the way of the dinosaurs. David Monniaux Intel is working to replace the traditional server rack with a more efficient architecture that separates CPU, storage, power, and networking resources into individual components that can be swapped out as needed. Power and cooling would be shared across CPUs, rather than having separate power supplies for each server. Server, memory, network, and storage resources would all be disaggregated and shared across the rack. Incredibly fast interconnects will be needed to prevent slowdowns because disaggregating components pushes them further apart, and Intel is thus building an interconnect that’s capable of 100Gbps. “We are developing a rack-scale architecture,” Lisa Graff, VP and general manager of Intel’s data center marketing group, said in a briefing with reporters last week. “We’re working with end users, OEMs, and ISVs to drive common standards in a reference architecture.” Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links

Meet the nice-guy lawyers who want $1,000 per worker for using scanners

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock Starting late last year, hundreds of US businesses began to receive demand letters from secretive patent-holding companies with six-letter gibberish names: AdzPro, GosNel, and JitNom. The letters state that using basic office equipment, like scanners that can send files to e-mail, infringes a series of patents owned by MPHJ Technologies. Unless the target companies make payments—which start at around $9,000 for the smallest targeted businesses but go up from there—they could face legal action. In a world of out-there patent claims, MPHJ is one of the most brazen yet. It’s even being talked about in Congress. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), who has sponsored the anti-troll SHIELD Act, cited the operation as a perfect example of why the system needs reform. After publishing a story on the scanner-trolling scheme , Ars heard from letter recipients and their lawyers from around the country—Idaho and Texas, California and South Dakota. Before the AdzPros and GosNels took over, the patents were owned by an entity called Project Paperless, which threatened dozens of businesses in Virginia and Georgia. Project Paperless ultimately filed two lawsuits, prosecuted by lawyers at Hill, Kertscher, and Wharton, an Atlanta firm with complex connections to the patents. In late 2012, Project Paperless sold the patents to MPHJ Technology Investments. Today, the anonymous owner of MPHJ operates GosNel, AdzPro, JitNom, and at least a dozen other shell companies now targeting small businesses around the country. Read 65 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meet the nice-guy lawyers who want $1,000 per worker for using scanners

Apple puts age ratings front and center on app product pages

The old App Store app page layout, left, and new layout, right. Apple has pushed the age ratings for its App Store apps to the top of the product pages in an effort to make buyers, especially parents, more aware of the type of content they’re getting. The age ratings are now directly below the app-maker’s name, and they sit above the user ratings. Apple has faced some disgraces lately with apps that have gained the spotlight only to blindside unexpecting users with adult content. The short-video sharing app Vine was featured as an App Store Editors’ Choice shortly before porn surfaced within the app’s Editors’ Picks ; the image-sharing app 500px was also yanked for its pornographic pictures. Both apps now have a 17+ rating slapped on them. While Apple’s new prominent app ratings won’t solve the unpredictable-user-generated-content problem, they will get parents and guardians to pay more attention to what kinds of apps they are downloading. This change also follows Apple’s addition of an “Offers In-App Purchases” label to app product pages to help account-owning parents anticipate which apps will allow their kids to wantonly bill items within an app—before they get the credit card bill. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Apple puts age ratings front and center on app product pages

Report: Troubled Doom 4 being retargeted for next-generation systems

Nearly five years after it was officially announced and nine years after the release of Doom 3 , we’ve heard precious little about the development of Id Software’s Doom 4 . It seems that silence has masked a troubled development cycle that has been restarted at least once and is currently not all that close to being finished. Kotaku talked to a number of unnamed sources “with connections to the Id Software-developed game” and lays out a tale of mismanaged resources and distractions. Chief among these distractions was Rage , the 2011 release that developer Id thought would put it back on top of the first-person shooter heap. When that game was  savaged by harsh reviews and low sales, Id reportedly halted plans for DLC and a sequel and refocused the entire company on Doom 4 , which had largely languished during the work on Rage . “I kinda think maybe the studio heads were so distracted on shipping Rage that they were blind to the happenings of Doom , and the black hole of mediocrity [the team] was swirling around,” one source told Kotaku. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: Troubled Doom 4 being retargeted for next-generation systems

Bullseye from 1,000 yards: Shooting the $17,000 Linux-powered rifle

1000 yards is a long, long way away. Steven Michael My photographer, Steve, squints through a computerized scope squatting atop a big hunting rifle. We’re outdoors at a range just north of Austin, Texas, and the wind is blowing like crazy—enough so that we’re having to dial in more and more wind adjustment on the rifle’s computer. The spotter and I monitor Steve’s sight through an iPad linked to the rifle via Wi-Fi, and we can see exactly what he’s seeing through the scope. Steve lines up on his target downrange—a gently swinging metal plate with a fluorescent orange circle painted at its center—and depresses a button to illuminate it with the rifle’s laser. “Good tag?” he asks, softly. “Good tag,” replies the spotter, watching on the iPad. He leaves the device in my hands and looks through a conventional high-powered spotting scope at the target Steve has selected. The wind stops momentarily. “Send it,” he calls out. Read 64 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bullseye from 1,000 yards: Shooting the $17,000 Linux-powered rifle

A flood of prank iMessage texts shows the app can be crashed easily

Human can’t be blamed for thinking this show of affection comes off as a little clingy. Adam Bell/The Next Web On Friday, The Next Web reported that a group of iOS developers were experiencing rapid-fire texts over iMessage, causing bothersome and repetitious messages and notifications. While the prank wasn’t serious on the level of, say, a full-scale DDoS of a bank website , and concern over spam via iMessage is not new either, the unwanted messages were fresh proof of some problems with the iMessage app, specifically in the lack of good spam-detection in iMessage, and in the lack of a way for users to block a message sender. One of the recipients of the spam, an iOS jailbreak tool and app developer who goes by the moniker iH8sn0w , informed The Next Web of the prank when it happened. iH8sn0w told Ars over Twitter that he simply disabled the handle that was getting flooded. “It’s just a bunch of kids bored playing with AppleScript,” he said. Another app and extension developer for iOS devices, Grant Paul, reported on Twitter that he was getting spammed on iMessage with very large messages, causing his iMessage app to crash. “The iMessage spammer has now completely locked me out of my iOS Messages app, by sending long strings of Unicode chars. Definitely a DoS,” Paul wrote on his Twitter account . Ars reached out to Paul but has not yet heard back from him. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A flood of prank iMessage texts shows the app can be crashed easily

Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up en masse

Aurich Lawson Apple’s iCloud is marketed to us end users as a convenient and centralized way to manage data on all of our Macs and iOS devices: sync contacts and bookmarks, re-download music and apps, back up iOS devices, and sync documents and data for third-party apps as MobileMe did. The last item, syncing of documents and data, is one of the least glossy features of iCloud, but it is one of the most important, and it should be among the most straightforward. Right? Perhaps not. Almost a year after Apple shut down MobileMe for good in favor of iCloud , third-party developers have begun to speak out about the difficulty involved in working with Apple’s cloud service. A piece published at The Verge this week highlights many of those complaints, with quotes coming from well-known developers and anonymous sources alike about the challenges faced by the developer community. From data loss and corruption to unexpected Apple ID use cases, developers have seen it all—but are stymied by the persistence of problems that prevent them from shipping products with working iCloud support. What’s the big problem, exactly? According to Bare Bones Software’s Rich Siegel, there are a number of moving parts to iCloud that all affect how things come out on the other end. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up en masse

How the maker of TurboTax fought free, simple tax filing

This story was co-produced with NPR . Imagine filing your income taxes in five minutes—and for free. You’d open up a prefilled return, see what the government thinks you owe, make any needed changes and be done. The miserable annual IRS shuffle, gone. It’s already a reality in Denmark, Sweden, and Spain . The government-prepared return would estimate your taxes using information your employer and bank already send it. Advocates say tens of millions of taxpayers could use such a system each year, saving them a collective $2 billion and 225 million hours in prep costs and time, according to one estimate. Read 49 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How the maker of TurboTax fought free, simple tax filing

Solar power, white spaces bring 16Mbps broadband to towns without electricity

Microsoft White space networks haven’t exactly revolutionized Internet access in the US, but that doesn’t mean the technology can’t have a major impact in countries that lack consistent access to the Internet. The latest project showing the power of white spaces is unfolding in Kenya, where a solar-powered network is bringing the Internet to people who aren’t even connected to an electric grid. Microsoft deployed the network last month in conjunction with Kenyan government officials. It is serving a health care clinic in Burguret, a primary and secondary school in Male (that’s pronounced “mah-lay”), a secondary school in Gakawa, and a library in Laikipia. The network will be expanded to 20 locations in the coming months. “Down in the valley, nobody has electricity,” Paul Garnett, director of technology policy at Microsoft, told Ars. Garnett has been shuttling back and forth between the US and Kenya to get the white spaces network up and running, and he gave me an update on the project in a recent phone interview. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Solar power, white spaces bring 16Mbps broadband to towns without electricity