Tag: user agreement

Fossils of strange Cambrian predator preserved with brains preserved

The new species, showing the eyes (upper and lower center) and a single clawed appendage (top left). Peiyun Cong The animals of the Cambrian are noted for being a collection of oddballs that are sometimes difficult to match up with anything currently living on Earth. But even among these oddities, Anomalocarids stand out (as their name implies). The creatures propelled themselves with a series of oar-like paddles arranged on their flanks, spotted prey with enormous compound eyes , and shoveled them into a disk-like mouth with large arms that resided at the very front of their bodies—although some of them ended up as filter feeders . We’ve identified a large number of anomalocarid species, many of which appear to have been the apex predators of their ecosystems. Yet for all our knowledge of them, there’s a key issue we haven’t clarified: how do they relate to any species that might exist today? New fossils from a Cambrian era deposit in China have revealed three samples of a new species that are so exquisitely preserved that their discoverers can trace the animals’ nerves. And the structure of the brain reveals affinities for two completely different types of organisms. The new species, Lyrarapax unguispinus , is a relatively small anomalocarid  at only about eight centimeters long. Like others of this group, it’s got a set of distinctive features, such as a neck, large compound eyes, and large frontal appendages, in this case shaped a bit like claws. Just past the neck, it’s got two large segments that look a bit like the fins on the sides of animals like dolphins. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fossils of strange Cambrian predator preserved with brains preserved

It may be “barely an operating system,” but DOS still matters (to some people)

By your command. Sean Gallagher Earlier this month, I spent a day working in the throwback world of DOS. More specifically, it was FreeDOS version 1.1, the open source version of the long-defunct Microsoft MS-DOS operating system. It’s a platform that in the minds of many should’ve died a long time ago. But after 20 years, a few dozen core developers and a broader, much larger contributor community continue furthering the FreeDOS project by gradually adding utilities, accessories, compilers, and open-source applications. All this labor of love begs one question: why? What is it about a single-tasking command-line driven operating system—one that is barely up to the most basic of network-driven tasks—that has kept people’s talents engaged for two decades? Haven’t most developers abandoned it for Windows (or, tragically, for IBM OS/2 )? Who still uses DOS, and for what? To find out, Ars reached out to two members of the FreeDOS core development team to learn more about who was behind this seemingly quixotic quest. These devs choose to keep an open-source DOS alive rather than working on something similar but more modern—like Linux. So, needless to say, the answers we got weren’t necessarily expected. Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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It may be “barely an operating system,” but DOS still matters (to some people)

Human memory-saving devices get $37.5m research boost from DARPA

Flickr user: Dierk Schaefer Two teams creating devices that stimulate the brain to restore memory function have been  granted $37.5 million  by DARPA to develop the technology. Both will initially work with people with epilepsy who have been given implants to locate where their seizures originate. The researchers will reuse the data gathered during this process to monitor other brain activity, such as the patterns that occur when the brain stores and retrieves memories. One team will then attempt to map these patterns by recording the brain activity of epilepsy sufferers with mild memory problems while they play a computer game about remembering things. The pattern differences between the best and worst scores among these patents will be used to develop an algorithm for a personalized stimulation pattern to keep the brain performing at an optimal level. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Human memory-saving devices get $37.5m research boost from DARPA

Seattle utility wants $17,500 refund after failure to scrub negative search results

John Tregoning Seattle’s publicly-owned electrical utility, City Light, is now demanding  a refund for the $17,500 that it paid to Brand.com  in a botched effort to boost the online reputation of its highly-paid chief executive, Jorge Carrasco. The project was concocted by the CEO’s chief of staff, Sephir Hamilton . In an interview with Ars, Hamilton said that the agency may even file a lawsuit to enforce this refund. “We’re leaving our options open,” he said. “I hope that they’ll see that what we signed up for was not the service that they delivered. We were sold one bill of goods and we were given another.” Read 26 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Seattle utility wants $17,500 refund after failure to scrub negative search results

Judge orders unmasking of Amazon.com “negative” reviewers

A federal judge has granted a nutritional supplement firm’s request to help it learn the identities of those who allegedly left “phony negative” reviews of its products on Amazon.com. The decision means that Ubervita may issue subpoena’s to Amazon.com and Cragslist to cough up the identities of those behind a “campaign of dirty tricks against Ubervita in a wrongful effort to put Ubervita at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace .” (PDF). According to a lawsuit by the maker of testosterone boosters, multivitamins and weight loss supplements, unknown commenters  had placed fraudulent orders “to disrupt Ubervita’s inventory,” posted a Craigslist ad “to offer cash for favorable reviews of Ubervita products,” and posed “as dissatisfied Ubervita customers in posting phony negative reviews of Ubervita products, in part based on the false claim that Ubervita pays for positive reviews.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Judge orders unmasking of Amazon.com “negative” reviewers

Emergency Windows update revokes dozens of bogus Google, Yahoo SSL certificates

Microsoft has issued an emergency update for most supported versions of Windows to prevent attacks that abuse recently issued digital certificates impersonating Google and Yahoo. Company officials warned other undiscovered fraudulent credentials for other domains may still be in the wild. Thursday’s unscheduled update revokes 45 highly sensitive secure sockets layer (SSL) certificates that hackers managed to generate after compromising systems operated by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) of India, an intermediate certificate authority (CA) whose certificates are automatically trusted by all supported versions of Windows. Millions of sites operated by banks, e-commerce companies, and other types of online services use the cryptographic credentials to encrypt data passing over the open Internet and to prove the authenticity of their servers. As Ars explained Wednesday , the counterfeit certificates pose a risk to Windows users accessing SSL-protected sections of Google, Yahoo, and any other affected domains. “These SSL certificates could be used to spoof content, perform phishing attacks, or perform man-in-the-middle attacks against Web properties,” a Microsoft advisory warned. “The subordinate CAs may also have been used to issue certificates for other, currently unknown sites, which could be subject to similar attacks.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Emergency Windows update revokes dozens of bogus Google, Yahoo SSL certificates

Crypto weakness in smart LED lightbulbs exposes Wi-Fi passwords

Context In the latest cautionary tale involving the so-called Internet of things, white-hat hackers have devised an attack against network-connected lightbulbs that exposes Wi-Fi passwords to anyone in proximity to one of the LED devices. The attack works against LIFX smart lightbulbs , which can be turned on and off and adjusted using iOS- and Android-based devices. Ars Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson gave a good overview here of the Philips Hue lights, which are programmable, controllable LED-powered bulbs that compete with LIFX. The bulbs are part of a growing trend in which manufacturers add computing and networking capabilities to appliances so people can manipulate them remotely using smartphones, computers, and other network-connected devices. A 2012 Kickstarter campaign raised more than $1.3 million for LIFX, more than 13 times the original goal of $100,000. According to a blog post published over the weekend , LIFX has updated the firmware used to control the bulbs after researchers discovered a weakness that allowed hackers within about 30 meters to obtain the passwords used to secure the connected Wi-Fi network. The credentials are passed from one networked bulb to another over a mesh network powered by 6LoWPAN , a wireless specification built on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard . While the bulbs used the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to encrypt the passwords, the underlying pre-shared key never changed, making it easy for the attacker to decipher the payload. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Crypto weakness in smart LED lightbulbs exposes Wi-Fi passwords

Deep-sea streaming: 500-mile NEPTUNE cabling brings Internet to the ocean floor

Your home Ethernet cable doesn’t deal with any of this ish—pictured here, a sea star and a squat lobster—behind some desk. NEPTUNE Canada The Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is by far one of the Earth’s smallest. It spans just a few hundred kilometers of the Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia coast. But what the Juan de Fuca lacks in size it makes up for in connectivity. It’s home to a unique, high-speed optical cabling that has snaked its way across the depths of the Pacific seafloor plate since late 2009. This link is called NEPTUNE—the North-East Pacific Time-Series Underwater Networked Experiment—and, at more than 800 kilometers (about 500 miles), it’s about the same length as 40,000 subway cars connected in a single, long train. A team of scientists, researchers, and engineers from the not-for-profit group Oceans Network Canada maintains the network, which cost CAD $111 million to install and $17 million each year to maintain. But know that this isn’t your typical undersea cable. For one, NEPTUNE doesn’t traverse the ocean’s expanse, but instead loops back to its starting point at shore. And though NEPTUNE is designed to facilitate the flow of information through the ocean, it also collects information about the ocean, ocean life, and the ocean floor. Read 52 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Deep-sea streaming: 500-mile NEPTUNE cabling brings Internet to the ocean floor

Google asks Hangouts users to “migrate” their Google Voice accounts

Hangouts integration in Google Voice. Google has added a menu option inside its Android Hangouts app asking users to “migrate Google Voice to Hangouts,” according to a post in the Android subreddit from Tuesday. The dialogue, accessible through debug mode, tells users they can get their voicemail and SMSes through Hangouts instead of the Google Voice app, though it doesn’t specify how the feature works with dedicated Google Voice numbers. As time passes, Google Voice is becoming a Google product that is an increasingly odd combination of dead useful and difficult to use, beloved by its users for its (limited) functionality but long ignored by Google itself. The iOS app’s design is still from the dark days of skeuomorphism, and until recently, Google hadn’t made any attempts to absorb the service into the Google+ black hole it has been using to knit disparate parts of the company together. Hangouts seems like a natural place for Google Voice to be absorbed, but so far, there’s been little movement. Google integrated SMS into Hangouts in October 2013 and introduced an SMS for Hangouts feature for feature phones that would send Hangouts messages as SMSes. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google asks Hangouts users to “migrate” their Google Voice accounts

The Witcher coming to iOS, Android, WP8 as a free-to-play MOBA game

For a video game, the jump from “series” to “franchise” can have its seriously awkward moments. At what point does it make sense for a beloved game character to show up in different genres, like puzzle, sports, or kart-racing games? It’s a question worth posing to the folks at Polish design studio CD Projekt Red, who today publicly unveiled the first major spin-off for the company’s plot- and morals-loaded RPG series The Witcher . Thankfully, The Witcher: Battle Arena  seems more logical for the series than, say, Dr. Geralt of Rivia’s Mean Bean Machine , as the game will pit the series’ heroes and villains against each other in three-on-three “MOBA”-styled combat by the end of this year. The game’s unveiling didn’t come with a grand pronouncement of new twists on the genre; rather, CD Projekt Red appeared to justify the game’s existence on the fact that quality MOBA games simply don’t exist on smartphones and tablets. “I dare you to name three MOBA games on mobile devices,” Tadek Zielinski said in a Eurogamer report , adding, “We don’t want to fight with League of Legends or Dota . We are a humble company. It wouldn’t be wise to go against guys who are working on it for such a long time.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The Witcher coming to iOS, Android, WP8 as a free-to-play MOBA game