31
Dec
Here are the top tech news items published by Ars that “went viral” this past year. GTA, spam, scams, and even some iTunes caught our readers’ attention.
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All posts from February, 2012
31
Dec
MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and more could soon by pulled from Time Warner Cable’s lineup after Viacom demands an extra quarter per month for its channels. The current contract expires at midnight tonight.
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31
Dec
Today is the last day of our Child’s Play drive, and we have wonderful news: so far, we have raised over $12,000. That makes Ars Technica a Child’s Play platinum sponsor, having given over $22,000 across two years.
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31
Dec
After several years of trying to develop its own national 3G standard, China has announced that it will license both WCDMA and CDMA 2000. Work continues on its own TD-SCMA initiative, however.
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31
Dec
Mad Catz is supporting Rock Band with an entire line of peripherals. Ars reviews the company’s microphone/controller and the ultra-convenient Portable Drum Kit. Do the products deserve a spot beside your home theater?
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31
Dec
Online sales may not have dropped as much as retail this holiday season, but they still fell significantly. Six years of solid overall growth has ended.
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31
Dec
A paper published in 2007 describing a way of attacking a widely-used cryptographic function was widely dismissed as “theoretical.” Now, a team of researchers has shown why that was a foolish thing to do, and why you can’t trust your browser’s padlock icon any more.
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31
Dec
Judgment day has arrived for owners of 30GB Zunes.
The music player inexplicably entered a worldwide coma last night, and players are completely nonresponsive. Whoops.
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31
Dec
Creative Commons, an organization responsible for creating free culture licenses, has met its goal of raising $500,000 with the help of Jonathan Coulton and Microsoft.
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31
Dec
Barack Obama’s online campaign was the envy of political strategists in 2008, but will the Internet machine keep humming through the president? Survey says: probably.
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31
Dec
Video games are big business, to the tune of roughly $50 billion a year, and lawyers are starting to realize that getting involved could mean a big increase in billable hours.
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30
Dec
FCC Chair Kevin Martin says he’s blocking the MPAA’s bid to let Hollywood block analog video outputs at its discretion.
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30
Dec
AMD will take a further impairment charge against its 2006 acquisition of ATI, and it’s laying off more workers than expected.
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30
Dec
If you’re reading this at work, one research company says you’re part of a $900 billion problem.
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30
Dec
Cisco is a giant in the world of corporate networking, but the company plans to create a new consumer line of products, apparently under its own name. First up: a networked stereo.
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30
Dec
The upcoming litigation between AMD and Intel, as well as the various ongoing investigations into the CPU giant’s activities combine in a tangled web of interconnected cases. We aren’t going to settle any of the legal issues today, but clarifying the structure of the cases has a value all its own.
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30
Dec
As more “rare” games see release on Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network, collectors are seeing their prized hard copies lose value. That is, if you measure your collection only in dollars.
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30
Dec
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is making a personal plea for donations to the organization, stirring new discussion on whether Wikipedia should just start showing ads.
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30
Dec
We take a look at how compressed air power storage operates in practice, providing up to a 90 percent return on the power used to compress the air in the first place.
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30
Dec
The Israel Consulate in New York today offers a “Citizen Press Conference,” soliciting questions about the situation in Israel and Gaza from users on Twitter. It is one of the most significant adoptions of this SMS-friendly medium yet.
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30
Dec
The Ubuntu Linux distribution builds on the rich history and deep roots of Debian. Ars explains why Debian still matters and looks at the shared history and mutual destiny of the two popular Linux distributions.
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30
Dec
Picking up a digital copy of the latest game may seem like a good idea, but there could be some extra costs involved if you want to download that title again in the future.
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30
Dec
The utility of social media services like Twitter and LinkedIn is being questioned yet again. But the criticisms aren’t really new to these services, and the same lessons we’ve learned from earlier media still apply.
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30
Dec
The Bush administration will leave behind an unprecedented store of digital records when it leaves Washington in Januray—but can the National Archives handle it all?
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29
Dec
FCC Chair Kevin Martin has dropped porn filtering from his free wireless broadband plan. “I’m saying if this is a problem for people, let’s take it away,” Martin told Ars today.
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29
Dec
Facebook has stirred up yet another controversy by removing certain breastfeeding photos from the site, even though they are not against site policy. One real world protest later and people are abreast of the matter.
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29
Dec
Sony’s Home has a huge challenge: protect the many different gamers who want to play by cracking down on hate speech and bad behavior. But with a low barrier to entry, that’s been tough to do. Ars explores Sony’s impossible dilemma.
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29
Dec
Microsoft has received a patent detailing a new cost structure and purchasing procedure for PCs; just pay for whatever you use, as long as you use it. The idea does have some merit, but the company’s proposed pricing system might have worked better 20 years ago.
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29
Dec
Digital photo frames were the target of malware authors this holiday season. Viruses and worms showed up on frames from Wal-Mart and Amazon, ensuring that the need to keep our antivirus suites current isn’t going anywhere soon.
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29
Dec
Some national effort to make our electric grid a bit smarter, so it can better match power supply and demand during peak usage hours, seems likely to be part of President-elect Obama’s infrastructure programs. But having a “smart” grid doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.
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29
Dec
Text messaging is quite expensive in the US, but the major carriers don’t really want to talk about the costs. No matter: the American public is in love with SMS, despite the high prices.
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29
Dec
The judge overseeing the RIAA case against Jammie Thomas has refused to allow the music industry to appeal his order; the RIAA will instead need to go through a complete new trial before an appeal is possible.
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29
Dec
We’re nearing the end of our yearly Child’s Play drive, so it’s time to pull out the big guns: here is the ultimate Gears of War 2 prize package.
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29
Dec
Here in America, politicians are prone to calling for the government to enforce ratings on porn sites. But the UK’s Culture Minister wants to take things a step further, with a full slate of content-based website ratings.
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29
Dec
In this latest game of cybersquatting Whac-A-Mole, Verizon has won a massive settlement against a company for sitting on over 600 domains related to Verizon’s brand. Now it just has to track someone down to deliver the bill.
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29
Dec
Researchers find evidence that our unconscious expectations influence how our brain processes visual input.
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29
Dec
The art of remaking games is much harder than it looks. You have to upgrade the graphics, update the game play, avoid annoying old fans, and gain new ones. Ars explores the treacherous path of the classic-gaming update.
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28
Dec
The FCC has a lot on its plate in 2009, and much of that agenda will directly affect enterprise computing. Ars looks at the coming year in network policy, and what it means for business.
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28
Dec
If you’re reading this, consider yourself lucky. The Internet has been having problems all day, today, with most of the trouble arising out of the Midwest.
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28
Dec
For the first time since the group started surveying the US about how the country gets its news, the Pew Research Center has found that the Internet has passed newspapers as a primary news source.
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28
Dec
It’s no surprise that holiday sales are down this year. A new report reveals which sectors were hurt the most, and which ones saw the least carnage.
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28
Dec
Version 2.6.28 of the Linux kernel has officially been released. Ars takes a look at some of the new features, including the ext4 filesystem and the new GEM GPU memory manager.
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28
Dec
As the DTV transition looms, the FCC creates rules to that would let stray analog viewers know that they need to get their act together, fast.
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28
Dec
The news writers at Science magazine describe what they believe were the 10 biggest scientific breakthroughs this year. From changing cells to modeling protons, and seeing planets outside our solar system, the discoveries cover a wide swath of natural science and represent some astonishing finds.
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26
Dec
A small networking services company was recently granted a patent covering the use of representational icons in an operating system. What follows next should be no surprise: a lawsuit delivered to Microsoft, Apple, and even Google, just in time for the holidays.
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26
Dec
Nintendo is dipping its toe in downloadable video through a newly-announced deal with Dentsu Inc. This could be the first step into a new market, but Nintendo has historically been gun-shy when it comes to non-game uses for its systems.
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26
Dec
A Privacy Impact Assessment released by the Department of Homeland Security this week examines potential privacy risks posed by fusion centers.
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26
Dec
A California woman filed a class action complaint against Comcast, charging that the company is using its monopoly power to keep her paying monthly rental fees for decryption hardware.
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24
Dec
“So was the year in gaming, and we’d say it was pretty all right:
plenty of games with which gamers can fight the good fight.” Ars Technica wishes you happy holidays!
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24
Dec
Combine open redirect web pages with search engine optimizations and you get a new twist on Google Bombing, now with extra malware. Attackers have begun using this new method, which presents consumers with infected options from supposedly secure companies.
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