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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

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

It came from the server room: Halloween tales of tech terror

It’s never a good day when the Halon discharges in the server room. Keith4048 It all began when the monitors started bursting into flames. Well, at least that’s when I knew I had walked into a tech support horror story. Back in the day when the cathode-ray tube was still the display of choice and SVGA really was super, I was working as a network engineer and tech support manager for a government contractor at a large military research lab. I spent two years on the job, and I learned in the process that Murphy was an optimist. The experience would provide me with enough tech horror stories and tales of narrow escape through the most kludged of hardware and software hacks ever conceived to last a lifetime—and to know that I would much rather be a writer than work in tech support ever again. Of course, all of us have tech horror stories to tell, especially those of us who were “early adopters” before the term was de rigueur. So we’re looking for you, our readers, to share yours. The most bone-chilling and entertaining of which we’ll publish tomorrow in honor of Halloween—that day each year when some people change their Twitter handles to pseudo-spooky puns, and others just buy bags of candy to have ready for the traditional wave of costumed home invaders. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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It came from the server room: Halloween tales of tech terror

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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First major update to Windows 10 Preview, delivered through Windows Update

We’ve written before about Windows 10’s new updating policy, and today we’re seeing the real-world result for the first time. The Windows 10 Technical Preview, build 9849, is being updated to build 9860. That update will roll out automatically to members of the Windows Insider program, and it will be delivered through Windows Update. The operating system upgrade is a little more heavyweight than a regular hotfix; systems will need to reboot to finish installation, and Microsoft says that the reboot will take longer than normal. The major feature of the new build is that it contains the first iteration of Windows 10’s notification center. At the moment, it’s a simple collection of historic notifications. Microsoft says that future builds will add more capabilities to the notification center, such as the ability to take actions in response to notifications. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First major update to Windows 10 Preview, delivered through Windows Update

Microsoft “loves Linux” as it makes Azure bigger, better

Wait, what happened at this thing?!? Microsoft In San Francisco today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said something that was more than a little surprising: Microsoft loves Linux. The operating system once described as a “cancer” by Nadella’s predecessor, Steve Ballmer, is now being embraced (if not extended) with open arms, at least when it comes to Redmond’s Azure cloud platform. Nadella told us that some 20 percent of VMs on Azure use the open source operating system. The San Francisco event served dual purpose. First, it was an opportunity for Microsoft to tell the world just how much Azure had grown—Microsoft may not have been first to the cloud computing scene, but a ton of investment and development means that the company is now credible, and, if Gartner’s magic quadrants are to be believed, world-leading. Second, the event served to introduce new features and partnerships. Microsoft’s major sales pitch for Azure is essentially a three-pronged argument that Microsoft is the only company that can really do cloud right. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ferrari hit with lawsuit for taking over Facebook fan page

Ferrari You don’t need a degree in marketing to know that using social media right is an important part of building up any kind of brand these days. And the growing value of fan websites and Facebook fan pages seems to be leading to an increase in legal disputes over who controls them. The latest example involves Italian sports car manufacturer Ferrari. Last week, a Swiss father and son sued Facebook and Ferrari after control of their popular Ferrari fan page was taken away from them. In their lawsuit (PDF) , Olivier and Sammy Wasem claim they controlled “by far the most popular Facebook pages for Ferrari enthusiasts,” which they created in 2008. The complaint describes Sammy Wasem as an aspiring Formula One driver whose “passion for racing and Ferrari drew many fellow fans together.” By 2009, the Wasem’s Ferrari page had more than 500,000 fans. In February of that year, Olivier Wasem got an e-mail from a Ferrari employee stating that “legal issues force us [Ferrari] in taking over the formal administration of” the Ferrari fan page. The same employee promised “to preserve and even enhance your role in the Ferrari Web Presence and communities.” Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ferrari hit with lawsuit for taking over Facebook fan page

Obama signs “BuySecure” initiative to speed EMV adoption in the US

A chip card and the inside of a card’s chip. Explain That Stuff On Friday, President Obama signed an executive order to speed the adoption of EMV-standard cards in the US. The transition to EMV—an acronym eponymous of Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, the companies that developed the standard—has been slow to gain traction in the US. The EMV standard will require credit card companies to do away with the magnetic stripe cards that are common today in favor of cards with embedded-chips that will offer more secure credit card transactions. Lawmakers and credit card companies confirmed earlier this year that the US would make the transition to EMV cards in October 2015. But over the past several months, retail stores like Target , Home Depot , Michaels , Neiman Marcus , and more have sustained major hacks that caused the retailers to loose credit card information and personal information of millions upon millions of customers, giving new urgency to the call for more secure credit cards. Speaking at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Friday , President Obama said that the federal government would apply “chip-and-PIN technology to newly issued and existing government credit cards, as well as debit cards like Direct Express.” The White House also said that all payment terminals at federal agencies will soon be able to accept embedded chip cards. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Latest Xbox One update adds MKV support, quicker voiceless commands

Quick-snap! Now, Kinect-less Xbox One owners can do a few more cool system functions on the fly. Microsoft’s near-monthly streak of Xbox One updates continued on Wednesday with a substantial October update . The console maker had already teased the update’s most intriguing feature in August when it announced a media-player app set to handle a staggering number of codecs—particularly the MKV container—and DLNA streaming from other devices on a home network. XB1’s new media player, like the system’s Blu-ray player, must be loaded as a separate app. We were able to test it during a beta period, and it worked as advertised, meaning it allowed us to watch all of our favorite, legitimately acquired TV shows and films in crisp MKV format. The update’s other major addition, a quick-snap menu, can be accessed with a double-tap of the controller’s home button. It focuses largely on functions that were formerly locked to voice control, including quick loads of previous games and apps and the ability to record your last 30 seconds of gameplay—which should make it easier for players who snapped up a cheaper, Kinect-less XB1 to multitask with the system. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Since Netflix paid Verizon, video speed on FiOS has doubled

Netflix’s payments to Verizon for a direct connection to its network didn’t result in immediate improvements for the companies’ joint subscribers, but they’re finally paying off with better video performance. Verizon FiOS actually topped all other major ISPs in Netflix performance in September with an average stream rate of 3.17Mbps, Netflix said today . Netflix Although Verizon FiOS led all large ISPs in Netflix performance, Google Fiber is still No. 1 among all ISPs regardless of size with a 3.54Mbps average in September. In August, Netflix streamed at an average of 2.41Mbps on Verizon FiOS, ranking tenth out of 16 major ISPs. In July, Netflix speed on Verizon FiOS was 1.61Mbps and in June it was 1.58Mbps, ranking 12th in both months. The Netflix/Verizon deal was announced in late April . When performance continued to get worse after the interconnection agreement, Verizon said it might take until the end of 2014 to get all the proper network connections in place to speed up video. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ken May

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