ars technica

An estimated half million users of compromised computer systems risk losing their Internet connection next month unless a federal judge extends a court order authorizing a California not-for-profit to operate a network of surrogate domain-name-system servers.

Paul Vixie, founder of the Internet Systems Consortium, has been operating the servers since early November, when federal authorities obtained court permission for him to replace a fleet of rogue DNS resolvers used in a massive fraud scheme that directed millions of end users to websites they never intended to visit. Without the replacement servers, millions of people hit by the DNSChanger botnet would have experienced internet failures when the rogue systems were unplugged.

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Saying "American consumers can't wait any longer" for better privacy rules, President Obama took the wraps off his administration's framework for new privacy regulations. As part of its big reveal, the White House also announced the first product of that framework: the completion of an industry agreement on "Do Not Track" technology for behavior-based web advertising.

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As one of the top 100 websites in the world, the free porn video website, YouPorn, has a lot of subscribers. And as of late Tuesday night, at least 6,400 of those subscriber's passwords were exposed in a data dump on Pastebin that paired email addresses with plain text passwords. The list of YouPorn logins is thought to have been captured from a public-facing server, leaving YouPorn a bigger share of the blame for permitting lazy security.

Naturally, this creates a problem for thousands of people who may want to keep their enthusiasm for erotica secret, and having an e-mail address connected with the site is certainly a breach of privacy on a grand scale. Even if those affected don't care who knows they frequent X-rated sites, there's still the danger that someone will use the plain-text password to access other accounts with more important information in them, as people tend to use the same passwords to login to multiple different Websites.

It appears that the dump is the work of an unknown hacker. While YouPorn appears to have shut down the breached server, the damage is largely done. Portions of the list have been published around the Internet, and analysis of the list is taking all kinds of permutations. OZ Dump Centa divvied up the e-mail addresses by provider (the largest portion of YouPorn accounts were linked to Hotmail addresses, followed by Gmail). Technology researcher Ashkan Soltani made a word cloud of the most popular stolen passwords. While YouPorn has not made a public statement about the breach, the data-leak is a reminder that passwords should never be repeated across logins for different sites.

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Adobe has published its roadmap for its Flash browser plugin and its AIR desktop application counterpart. More releases, more features, and more performance, are all planned, but on fewer platforms: Adobe is giving up entirely on supporting smartphone browsers, sticking to the core desktop platforms for its plugin—and with a big question mark when it comes to Windows 8.

The company sees Flash as having two main markets that will resist the onslaught of HTML5: game development, and premium (read: encrypted) video. To that end, the features it has planned for future updates focus on making Flash faster, with greater hardware acceleration and improved script performance, and more application-like, with keyboard input in full-screen applications, and support for middle- and right-mouse buttons.

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In an age when Apple has become the top music retailer without selling a single physical disc, audio engineers are increasingly creating specially mastered versions of songs and albums designed to counteract the audio degradation caused by compression. Though audiophiles typically scoff at paying for compressed audio, preferring vinyl or high-end digital formats such as DVD-A, mastering engineers are doing their best to create digital masters that can pass through Apple's iTunes algorithms with minimal sonic corruption.

To highlight work done to improve the sound of compressed music files, Apple recently launched a "Mastered for iTunes" section on the iTunes Store. It now also provides a set of recommendations for engineers to follow when preparing master files for submission to the iTunes Store. To qualify for the "Mastered for iTunes" label, Apple says that files should be submitted in the highest resolution format possible, and remastered content should sound significantly better than the original.

How does this work? Ars spoke with Masterdisk Chief Engineer Andy VanDette, who recently completed a project remastering the bulk of Rush's back catalogue. As part of the process, VanDette created special versions of each song specifically for uploading to the iTunes Store. He described the often lengthy, trial-and-error process of trying to make iTunes tracks sound as close as possible to polished CD remasters.

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Superconductivity—the ability of certain materials to conduct electricity with no resistance—continues to be one of the most challenging fields in materials science. On the one hand, the effect appears reliably in a number of materials, although only at very low temperatures. Those temperatures went up with the discovery of copper-based (cuprate) superconductors in 1986. In the last four years, iron-based superconductors have been developed and seen the maximum temperature of their superconducting transition pushed higher, although it's still cold compared to both the cuprates and room temperature. But the exact way in which these superconductors perform their tricks is still unclear.

One form of iron-based superconductors, the chalcogenides, are very unusual, since they are strongly magnetic—in other superconductors strong magnetism destroys the effect. ("Chalcogenide" is pronounced with a hard "ch" as in "chemistry", and refers to the presence of the chalcogenide element selenium.) Now, a new report in Nature indicates that they have another unusual property: high pressures, which normally kill superconductivity, can cause them to undergo a phase transition that not only restores the behavior, but raises the critical temperature.

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This morning, Google announced some added features to its Google Docs app for Android that will surely make frequent users of the online office suite happy: most notably, the updated version will now allow collaboration on documents from Android phones or tablets. Previously, Google Docs opened in the app were restricted to a single user, but mobile users can now see real-time updates to shared text.

Other features now available to owners of Android devices include rich text editing, so you can bold and italicize text, highlight sections of your document, or indent paragraphs. The UI in the app has changed a bit, and the rich-text editing icons at the top are simple and scroll in a single bar across the top of the document.

Google also now permits “pinch to zoom” across all types of items in its app (like presentations, PDFs, and spreadsheets, as well as documents) so you can control how much larger or smaller the text appears, unlike the previous Google Docs interface which basically gave you two options: a double tap to zoom in, and a double tap to zoom out.

Google's app still doesn't allow you to collaborate on spreadsheets in real-time (although multiple people can open the spreadsheet, you still have to click "refresh" to see any changes made by others). The new mobile collaboration tool follows an update about a month ago that permitted users to view, but not edit, Google docs offline on mobile devices.

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Intel is opening up its manufacturing facilities to third parties, as it takes the further tentative steps toward building a chip-to-order foundry business. The microprocessor giant announced last year that it would build FPGAs for Achronix Semiconductor, and on Tuesday a second FPGA designer, Tabula, said that it would have its chips built by Intel.

In its announcement, Tabula emphasized that it would be using Intel's cutting-edge 22nm process with 3D trigate transistors. Intel's manufacturing capabilities are world-leading, with none of the established microprocessor foundries—including TSMC, UMC, and AMD spin-off GlobalFoundries—able to match the company's process.

Compared to the 28 and 32nm processes offered by the competition, Intel's 22nm process should offer higher speeds with lower power usage, at lower cost. The company will start shipping its first 22nm x86 processors, codenamed Ivy Bridge, in the coming months.

Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy says that the company has had other foundry customers in addition to the two that have gone public.

The foundry business is a double-edge sword for Intel. On the one hand, having additional customers gives the chip-maker the ability to keep the factories churning out processors even if demand for new PC chips is low. This makes it easier to recoup its substantial manufacturing investments.

On the other hand, Intel's process advantage is a key part of its competitive advantage: it can build complex chips on a process that's more refined and more advanced than anyone else in the industry. With the company unlikely to want to squander that advantage, it may find its customer base limited.

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Over the past week, Google has been called out for bypassing default privacy settings in both Safari and Internet Explorer in order to serve up advertising cookies. The two cases were quite different. With Safari, Google acknowledged the problem and said it was an accident. With Internet Explorer, Google said it was using the best available workaround for an outdated browser privacy technology that limits the capabilities of modern websites—and noted that thousands of other websites do much the same thing to get past IE's privacy policy.

Despite the differences, each case demonstrates one thing that may be troubling to Web users: privacy settings in browsers can be easily circumvented. There are few technological barriers preventing companies like Google and Facebook from tracking users to serve up personalized ads, and there are few legal barriers as well.

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A few days after I received my PlayStation Vita review unit in the mail, I got a set of six plastic cards with boxy black and white patterns on them. The free "augmented reality" games that rely on those cards were made available for download on the PlayStation Network today, and while the games definitely take place on a backdrop of reality, I'm not really sure how much the real world is being "augmented" through the Vita.

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The makers of the most widely used mobile app stores have agreed to comply with a California law requiring mobile apps that collect personal information to have a privacy policy. California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced the agreement today with Apple and Google, which run the two most popular mobile app stores, as well as Amazon, HP, Microsoft, and Research In Motion.

"These platforms have agreed to privacy principles designed to bring the industry in line with a California law requiring mobile apps that collect personal information to have a privacy policy," Harris's office said in a press release. "The majority of mobile apps sold today do not contain a privacy policy."

The agreement doesn't place restrictions on what types of data app makers may collect. But app makers must describe "how personal data is collected, used and shared," and make their privacy policies easily found by users. App store listings will contain either the text of the privacy policy or a link to the policy.

There have been several controversies over mobile app privacy, and one of the most recent centered on the social network Path accessing and uploading iPhone users' contact databases without permission. Harris noted that a Wall Street Journal report last year found "that 45 of the top 101 apps did not provide privacy policies either inside the application or on the application developer’s website," despite the fact that most of the mobile apps were transmitting a phone's unique device ID or location "to other companies without users' awareness or consent." Some apps were also transmitting the user's age, gender, and other personal details.

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Apple has given developers yet another few months to implement application sandboxing for OS X apps, a security feature brought over from iOS: the deadline is now June 1, 2012. While the intent of sandboxing is to prevent hacked apps from taking over a user's system, however, the sandbox design inherently limits functionality that users and developers have come to expect on the desktop. Apple's changes and delays to sandboxing requirements have also created a situation where the sandboxing goalpost keeps moving while developers continue to push Apple to improve its design.

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The nation's fourth-largest cellular firm has asked the Federal Communications Commission to block a spectrum acquisition by its largest competitor. T-Mobile argues that allowing Verizon to purchase more spectrum would make it too difficult for smaller wireless firms to build next-generation networks of their own.

The spectrum under dispute was acquired in an auction by a coalition of cable companies led by Comcast and Time Warner in 2006. But the cable firms have apparently decided they don't want to be in the wireless business after all. In December, Verizon Wireless announced plans to buy the spectrum, which is in the AWS band, for $3.6 billion.

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Since September, scientists have been scratching their head over results that appear to show neutrinos traveling between Switzerland and Italy faster than light would. As far as anyone could tell, the team behind the results had done everything they could to eliminate errors, and had even released some preliminary data that had strengthened their results. But the results remained difficult to square with everything else we know about how the Universe operates.

But now, ScienceInsider is reporting that there was a good reason the measurements and reality weren't lining up: a loose fiber optic cable was causing one of the atomic clocks used to time the neutrinos' flight to produce spurious results. If the report is confirmed (right now, there's only one source), then it provides a simple explanation for the fascinating-yet-difficult-to-accept results. According to the new report, researchers are preparing to gather new data with the clocks properly hooked into computers, which should definitively indicate whether the loose connection was at fault.

It's somewhat ironic that ScienceInsider, which is part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, broke the news now. Over the weekend, the AAAS held its annual meeting, which included a discussion of the biggest news in physics, where the neutrino results were highlighted. The session indicated that five different neutrino experiments were upgrading their hardware in order to check timing, and some would have data before the year is out. So even if this report doesn't pan out, we should know more soon.

At the AAAS meeting's discussion, CERN's director of research, Sergio Bertolucci, placed his bet on what the results would be: "I have difficulty to believe it, because nothing in Italy arrives ahead of time."

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The prospects for quick European approval of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement dimmed Wednesday as the European Commission, the EU's executive branch, announced plans to seek an opinion from the European Court of Justice about ACTA's constitutionality.

In a statement, Viviane Reding, the EU Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, reiterated her commitment to "a freely accessible Internet" and "freedom of expression and freedom of information via the Internet." She said the EC has decided to ask the ECJ for an opinion to "clarify that the ACTA agreement and its implementation must be fully compatible with freedom of expression and freedom of the Internet."

"I believe that putting ACTA before the European Court of Justice is a needed step," Commissioner Karel De Gucht wrote in a Wednesday press release explaining the move. "This debate must be based upon facts and not upon the misinformation or rumor that has dominated social media sites and blogs in recent weeks."

"Intellectual property is Europe's main raw material, but the problem is that we currently struggle to protect it outside the European Union," De Gucht wrote. "This hurts our companies, destroys jobs and harms our economies. This is where ACTA will change something for all of us—as it will help protect jobs that are currently lost because counterfeited and pirated goods worth 200 billion Euros are floating around on the world markets."

The European Commission has traditionally been a strong supporter of the ACTA agreement. The executive body adopted the treaty in December, and it is due to be considered by the European Parliament later this year. Presumably, the commission hopes that a favorable ruling from the high court will ease the agreement's passage by rebutting critics' charges that ACTA threatens Internet freedom.

But the decision to seek a judicial opinion could also further delay consideration of the treaty, giving opponents more time to organize against it.

ACTA opponents have been particularly effective in Poland, where the government suspended ratification of the treaty earlier this month. As our sister site Wired has reported, online activists persuaded Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to participate in a 7-hour online conversation about ACTA on Twitter, Facebook, and even IRC. Last week, Tusk repudiated his earlier support for ACTA and called on other European nations to reject the treaty as well.

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Nokia is gearing up for some big smartphone announcements at Mobile World Congress next week, and not all are related to Windows Phone. In addition to a few Windows Phone handsets, the company is also teasing a camera-centric Symbian phone with one of the largest camera sensors on a mobile phone yet.

First, the Symbian outlier: the Nokia 803 will have a large imaging sensor that will be Nokia's big step up to 1080p video, according to PocketNow. With a 4-inch AMOLED screen, the phone will be an all-touchscreen successor to the Nokia N8, a phone revered for its photo prowess. Nokia's teaser commercial offers little information, but has some 1080p shots of winter scenes.

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Trying to pass unconstitutional restrictions on a burgeoning artistic medium is not cheap. Just ask the state of California, which will end up paying $1.8 million in attorney's fees in its failed effort to restrict violent game sales to children with a law that was overturned by the Supreme Court last year.

It was widely reported last month that the state would be paying $950,000 to cover legal costs for the Entertainment Merchants Association and Entertainment Software Association, which argued against the law. But that number didn't take into account nearly $300,000 the state had paid to industry defenders during earlier court battles, and $500,000 it spent on its own side of the legal battle, as The Sacramento Bee recently reported.

But there are no regrets from the sponsor of the bill. "When you fight the good fight for a cause you know is right and just, and it's about protecting kids, you don't ever regret that," bill sponsor Leland Yee told The Bee. "I think we felt the issue was so important that it warranted the costs associated with it," former California deputy attorney general Jim Humes added.

And while the legal costs are a drop in the bucket compared to the state's massive annual budget of over $92 billion, some say legislators should have known that the law would end up being a waste of time and money. "I think it's fair to say the industry warned the state that they were just getting themselves into a big legal mess and they would end up having to pay attorney fees—and that's exactly what happened," game industry attorney Paul M. Smith told The Bee.

The good news is that states seem unlikely to waste taxpayer money on this specific issue in the future. The 7-2 Supreme Court ruling that overturned the California law was very clear in granting games full First Amendment protections, setting a precedent that other states seem unlikely to challenge directly. But that doesn't mean they won't try to find other ways to limit the impact of games they deem objectionable, as proven by an Oklahoma representative's recent efforts to add a surtax on games rated T and up.

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Last week, several documents that purportedly came from the Heartland Institute appeared on the Web, laying out the organization's financial efforts to undercut the mainstream understanding of climate science. Although the Heartland admitted that most of the materials were genuine, it claims they had been obtained via deception, and that one of the documents (the most inflammatory) was a fake. Now, a prominent environmental researcher has admitted that he impersonated a Heartland board member in order to obtain the documents, but claims they are all genuine.

Peter Gleick is the founder and current president of the Pacific Institute, where he specializes in research on the water cycle. His research can be provocative—some of it suggested that the US has already passed peak water—but has been considered important enough to get him elected to the National Academies of Science.

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Apple's massive North Carolina data center is apparently only the beginning when it comes to handling the deluge of content traffic flowing through Apple's servers. The company has now confirmed that it has plans to build another large data center in Prineville, Oregon, continuing the green efforts that it initiated with its east coast facility.

The news came via Oregon news station KTVZ, which was following up on rumors from December about the project as Apple spokesperson Kristin Huguet confirmed that Apple had indeed purchased the land for the data center. Huguet declined to offer any further details about Apple's plans, but KTVZ says the property's price tag was $5.6 million and the deed was signed by county commissioners on February 15. The location for the new 160-acre data center is said to be a "stone's throw" away from another large facility owned by Facebook.

Before Apple publicly acknowledged its North Carolina facility, rumors spread for years about what the company was planning to do with it. As it turned out, the NC data center ended up powering iCloud—which launched in October with iOS 5—and Apple began talking about its plans build a 171-panel solar farm to help run it. Apple's Oregon data center is expected to boast similar green efforts, but no details have been offered. Apple just laid out this week some of the other green initiatives it's taking in North Carolina, so it's likely we'll see some of those same elements carried over to the facility in the Beaver State.

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These days, it seems, its not enough for a digital device to just play games. To keep up with the smartphones and tablet computers of the world, any game system needs to at least nod in the direction of cloud-based and social networking "apps" that are all the rage with the kiddies. Sony's PlayStation Vita has now done exactly that, launching free downloadable Netflix, Twitter and Flickr apps in conjunction with the system's official debut today (though pre-orderers have had the system for a week now).

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