| Web font services join fray as .webfont format gains support
August 3, 2009 at 11:11 pm
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|   Improvements to CSS3, in particular a revival of the @font-face directive for linking to server-based fonts, promise to allow designers to deliver richer and more nuanced typography on the Web. And while Firefox and Safari (via WebKit) are leading the way buy supporting standard TrueType and OpenType font files, posting commercial fonts on a publicly available Web server violates the licensing agreements from most type foundries. So, at least three services are close to launching, giving Web designers and developers access to licensed typefaces that will work with @font-face. And even while several foundries are looking to license their fonts for these services, several prominent foundries have expressed support for the .webfont format that is being proposed to the W3C. 
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| ARM-based netbooks set to arrive on US shores by year end
August 3, 2009 at 10:44 pm
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|   DigiTimes has been making the rounds of the Taiwanese OEMs, and the company claims to have the scoop on a coming wave of ARM-based netbooks, often called "smartbooks," that will wash ashore in the US in the last quarter of this year. Smartbooks based on Qualcomm's SnapDragon processor and NVIDIA's Tegra line are allegedly on deck from netbook names like ASUS, Acer, and Foxconn. Lesser-known Chinese netbook maker Compal, which was showing off products at this past CES but which doesn't yet ship to the US, is also named as an ARM netbook maker, as are Inventec and Mobinnova. Then there's the Touch Book, from Always Innovating, which sent out a note today to everyone who contacted them via web form (including Ars) to say that the device is is now shipping. We haven't really covered the Touch Book, but boy have we been getting reader mail about it. A lot of folks want us to review it, and I've contacted the company in an effort to get a review unit. (No response so far, but I'll keep trying.) The Touch Books' main gimmick is that its screen can be detached and used as a standalone tablet, and the second gimmick is that it runs the TI OMAP 3 chip, which is looking like a killer PMP/tablet processor.
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| Accused domain thief faces jail time for "stealing" P2P.com
August 3, 2009 at 8:12 pm
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|   Domain name investing has been around almost as long as domain names were open for purchase by the general public, and the practice has picked up since the mid-90s, as companies stake out their spot on the digital frontier. Domain names can be so valuable, in fact, that people actually steal them to sell to unsuspecting companies or other domain name investors. The legal process to combat a domain name thief is complicated at best, but there is hope, as police have arrested a man accused of stealing the domain P2P.com. An initial investigation by Florida police, where the victims reside, was dropped for lack of evidence. The rightful owners of P2P.com then filed a civil suit as they believed it was their only recourse. However, Detective Sergeant John Gorman of the New Jersey State Police Cyber-Crimes Unit later reviewed the case, and asked the victims if they wanted to pursue the case in New Jersey, where the alleged thief lived. Based on evidence gathered for the civil suit, the NJ District Attorney approved an indictment. On July 30, Daniel Goncalves, a 25-year-old computer technician for a NJ law firm, was arrested at his home and his computers were seized. The first-ever criminal arrest for domain name theft has been made in the great state of New Jersey.
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| DPI vendor says 90% of ISP customers engage in traffic discrimination
August 3, 2009 at 5:42 pm
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|   In our globalized, post-industrial world, a single Canadian company can shape the Internet experience for 20 percent of the world's wireline broadband users. Sandvine makes deep packet inspection hardware that can identify and then block, shape, degrade, fold, spindle, or mutilate user traffic coming from particular applications such as Skype or BitTorrent clients. The 160 worldwide ISPs who use the company's products love this particular capability so much that a full 90 percent of them employ it to "manage" their networks in a discriminatory way. According to the company, these 160 ISPs serve 20 percent of the world's wireline broadband connections. If 90 percent of the ISPs shape traffic by application, Sandvine equipment alone may be responsible for the application-specific discrimination that 18 percent of world wireline broadband users face—and that figure says nothing about all the other ISPs who use similar products from other vendors. If you thought that network neutrality was some kind of default position for the worldwide Internet, think again.
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| FTC still probing Google and Apple after Schmidt resignation
August 3, 2009 at 5:39 pm
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|   Google CEO Eric Schmidt may have left Apple's Board of Directors, but the Federal Trade Commission ain't letting up on its investigation into the two companies. The FTC told Reuters today that the investigation into possible anticompetitive behavior was still on, though the Commission praised the companies for recognizing that there could have been a conflict of interest. The FTC first launched its probe into Google and Apple in May because the two companies shared two board members: Schmidt and Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson. The Clayton Antitrust Act bars individuals from sitting on the boards of two competing companies if it might reduce competition between them, and the FTC recognized that Apple and Google are increasingly offering products in the same space: iPhone OS versus Android, Safari versus Chrome, etc. There have also been questions about how involved (or not) Google has been in Apple's acceptance or rejection of its offerings in the App Store. In July, Schmidt admitted that he would "talk to Apple" about the issue, which resulted in his resignation from Apple's board announced earlier today.
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| Google search share drops as Bing gains momentum
August 3, 2009 at 3:20 pm
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|   Bing's initial popularity among Internet searchers seems to be sticking past launch—at least it has so far. Microsoft's recently relaunched search engine has actually gained another percentage point in the market share wars this July, according to Web metrics firm StatCounter. The firm noted that Bing was making "slow but steady" progress, and that Microsoft's deal with Yahoo would likely only result in good things for Bing's share of the search market. StatCounter says that Bing climbed to 9.41 percent of the search market last month, compared to 8.23 percent in June. Combined with Yahoo's current share of the market (10.95 percent), the two come out with 20.36 percent—still a distant second to Google's 77.54 percent, but a relatively large slice of the pie nonetheless.
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| Be first on the block with Snow Leopard via Amazon pre-order
August 3, 2009 at 1:38 pm
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|   The next major update to Mac OS X, codenamed Snow Leopard, will be materializing on Apple Store shelves next month. That doesn't mean you can't pre-order your copy from Amazon.com right this very minute, though, and have it shipped to you as soon as it is officially released. Snow Leopard is priced far lower than Mac OS X upgrades of years past, which have historically cost $129. To encourage quick adoption of Snow Leopard, Apple is pricing Snow Leopard at $29—$100 less than previous upgrades. And, while it isn't slated to have lots of new user-facing features, the OS has essentially been re-plumbed from the ground up for optimized performance on today's and tomorrow's hardware. It's also designed to set the stage for future improvements to the OS.
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| Hidden gay slur, search terms, get campaign site blacklisted
August 3, 2009 at 1:21 pm
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|   Add a new item to the long list of political shenanigans that backfire once discovered. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) has decided to run for Texas governor against incumbent Rick Perry, and her new campaign website contained hidden text that read "rick perry gay." The resulting flap led to the firing of the Web development firm involved, drew heated responses from Perry's office, and (perhaps worst of all) saw Hutchison's campaign website yanked from Google's search index. Texas newspapers uncovered the hidden text last week. The "rick perry gay" reference was one of only thousands of phrases tucked into the source code for Hutchison's site, apparently to help draw search engine traffic.
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| Locked out with your SSD out: Intel X25-M G2 firmware bug
August 3, 2009 at 1:00 pm
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|   Intel's X25-M SSD series continues to run into major trouble on minor flaws. The new 34nm X25-M G2 SSDs, which have all kinds of amazing juicyness baked in, are now known to be plagued by a firmware bug which has retailers halting shipments, Intel halting manufacturing and vowing a firmware upgrade within two weeks, and an unknown number of users permanently deprived of precious data.
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| GameStop hints at rentals, further loyalty programs
August 3, 2009 at 1:00 pm
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|   GameStop has long had the Edge Card, the program that allows you to save 10 percent on used games and accessories, as well as receive 10 percent more when you trade in games. A survey sent out to select customers today gives some hints about where GameStop would like to take this program, with some interesting ideas. Let's take a look at what the company thinks we want in a loyalty program.
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| Titan Studios announces fixes for Fat Princess
August 3, 2009 at 12:50 pm
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|   Despite the fact that we love Fat Princess here at Ars, some readers have reported experiencing problems like lag during online play and general connection problems. Apparently they aren't the only ones, because Titan Studios has announced that it is aware of the problems and has some fixes on the way. According to the developer's blog, they already have solutions to both problems in development. As of right now, the problem with lag in games is due to the following reason: "The matchmaking system will randomly pick potential servers bases on a number of criteria. As implemented, the results that are returned are fit in some regards, but sometimes have a high ping for your location." Titan is working on a system that will now favor servers with low ping numbers. As for connectivity issues, the studio has already got a patch in place that they're working to get through the Sony testing process as soon as they can. Some comments across the 'Net have been accusing Titan of inadequately testing their game—hence the problems—though the studio has made a point of denying this. "Fat Princess went through comprehensive testing with Sony in the US and Europe and a beta, but these issues did not manifest until the game went live at scale," the developer's blog states. "Rest assured, we’re working on it, and think we have it largely addressed." 
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| Exploit allows Apple keyboard ownage through firmware
August 3, 2009 at 12:29 pm
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|   One of the Apple-related talks given at this year's Black Hat security conference dealt with keyboard firmware. Given by "KChen," the talk discussed "Reversing and Exploiting an Apple Firmware Update." While it may not seem like much on the surface, the truth quickly becomes apparent: if someone gains access to your keyboard's firmware, there are a multitude of ways in which they can further compromise your machine. There are two ways in which this exploit can be perpetrated. The first is if someone has physical access to your computer and your administrative password, and the second is if someone has already gained access to a machine remotely through a rootkit hack. Why would an attacker want anything to do with a keyboard when he already has free reign on a system? The answer, as KChen pointed out, is that an affected user can patch the rootkit exploit and even reformat the drive, but the attacker could still have access to the keyboard.
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| Physicists trap light in a bottle
August 3, 2009 at 12:22 pm
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|   Over the past three decades, scientists have been working on making light and matter interact strongly. This may come as a surprise, since nearly every bit of color we see around us is generally due to the interaction of light and matter. But this interaction is quite weak, and what we see is the result of light interacting billions and billions of times. If you want to observe light interacting with a single atom or molecule, what must be done? The answer is to confine the light into a very small volume that just happens to contain the atom. But this is easier said than done. To make this job easier, researchers have shown us how to put light in a bottle.
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| FCC probes Google Voice rejection, AT&T denies involvement
August 3, 2009 at 12:10 pm
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|   Apple and AT&T opened up a can of worms when Apple not only rejected Google's native Google Voice iPhone app, but summarily purged the App Store of any application that worked with Google Voice. The FCC has been giving the exclusive deals between handset makers and mobile carriers a lot of scrutiny lately, and now the FCC is looking into Google Voice-gate. The FCC has informed Apple and AT&T that it is trying to determine if the exclusivity between Apple and AT&T is having adverse effects on developers and consumers. A group of Senators asked the FCC to examine handset exclusivity agreements that have become more prevalent—and have come into the spotlight with Apple's iPhone. FCC chairman Julius Genachowski promised to look into the issue, even before his appointment to the FCC became official. The investigation has been ongoing recently, prompting hearings before the Senate Commerce and Science Committee, prompting Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) to say that there are "too many places in this country where wireless call quality is low and service is unreliable—places where wireless broadband is only a pipe dream."
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| Rock Band: Country Track Pack wastes country's fun
August 3, 2009 at 12:00 pm
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|   The idea of a Rock Band release actually centered around country music has a lot of appeal; country has as strong of a history as rock, with much overlap between the two styles. I put in the Rock Band: Country Track Pack—a stand-alone product—hoping to be able to create a country star with a large hat and perhaps a stunning belt buckle. What I got was a by-the-numbers set of songs, with no customization for the type of music being offered. Even the cover is generic.
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| Microsoft confirms Windows 7 E is dead
August 3, 2009 at 11:30 am
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|   Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 7 E, a version that was meant to ship without Internet Explorer 8 installed, would never see the light of day. The announcement comes even though the replacement solution, a browser ballot screen, has not yet been approved by the EU. With talk of this alternative, many were expecting that Windows 7 E was going to be pronounced dead before release, but Redmond has made it official via the Microsoft on the Issues blog:
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| Dear Readers: sales of games do not indicate quality
August 3, 2009 at 11:20 am
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|   In the video gaming world, both writers and readers tend to get hung up on how well a game sells. We argue over NPD figures, we endlessly trot out graphs and charts, and we look forward to seeing if this game on that system ends up being a "hit." There's nothing wrong with taking a healthy interest in the commerce end of this particular art form, but it seems as if too many people are taking these numbers to heart.
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| Google using billboards to lure IT into Google Apps embrace
August 3, 2009 at 11:08 am
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|   Google has begun a new ad campaign for its enterprise services, but it isn't your typical Google venture—it's going oldschool. Starting today and running for the next four weeks in August, Google will be running a series of billboards—yes, real ones—in Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco in order to showcase the benefits of "going Google" for business. The hope is that more business owners will ditch managing their own e-mail, calendaring, and doc sharing solutions in favor of Google Apps—especially now that they're out of beta. For those who want to see the billboards for themselves, they will be placed along Highway 101 in San Francisco, the West Side Highway in New York, the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago (and that's why we haven't rushed out to go see it yet), and the Mass Pike in Boston. Google says that the billboards will be changed every single weekday for the next month, but you environmentalists in the crowd should worry not—all vinyl used on the billboards will be recycled and turned into either computer bags or shopping bags.
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| DSi sells 1.7 million in US, Facebook application tonight
August 3, 2009 at 10:50 am
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|   If you've been taking snapshots with the Nintendo DSi's built-in camera and you've been wondering what to do with them, wonder no more! After 5 pm Eastern time a system update will be made available for the DSi, allowing you to upload the pictures directly to Facebook! If your profile has been lacking in grainy pictures of you wearing a Mario hat, this is the perfect solution to your problem. Nintendo explains the process. "While reviewing pictures they've stored in the Nintendo DSi Camera album, which includes photos taken by users and manipulated using the built-in interactive lenses, users can simply tap the Facebook icon on the system's touch screen to instantly transmit photos to the user's Facebook profile," the company states. "The user's system must be configured to a wireless broadband Internet connection for the transmission of photos." The announcement does give us some other interesting information, such as the fact the DSi has sold 1.7 million units in the US alone. That's not bad for a system that launched at a higher price point than the original, featuring updates the gaming public wasn't sure they wanted... such as the ability to update Facebook remotely. 
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| The Matrix Online? "No... not like this."
August 3, 2009 at 10:30 am
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|   It's odd when online games come back into the news because they shut down. There is something strangely touching about a world—even an unpopular one—where all the stories, all the gaming, and all the hours people put into it disappear when the publisher finally pulls the plug on the servers. The Matrix Online has been shut down, but at least players had one last party before things all went away. The Matrix Online offered a weirdly meta experience, as real people created virtual players to go online in a virtual world pretending to be a virtual world. The story continued where the movies left off, but the game never caught on with players; the most impressive thing about its death over the weekend was that it was still going up until then to begin with. Players enjoyed parties, talked about their time in the game, and the developers had fun adding neat effects to the sky and the environment for players to enjoy. The game was remembered fondly before the plug was pulled, but now... it's all over. When death comes, we only remember the good times. The game's characters were smashed into tiny balls before the servers were shut down. 
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| This week in game releases: August 3-9, 2009
August 3, 2009 at 10:05 am
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|   Pick of the week: SingStar Queen (PS2, PS3) While Rock Band and Guitar Hero may get all the glory when it comes to the rhythm game genre, we here at Opposable Thumbs have a soft spot for Sony's SingStar karaoke series. There's just something great about getting a bunch of friends together, and then looking (and sounding) like idiots while playing the game. The series has taken a turn towards artist-themed games, starting with ABBA, and continuing with the release of SingStar Queen. The tracklist is impressive, and boasts such great tunes as "Don't Stop Me Now," "Fat Bottomed Girls," and, of course, the perfect sing-a-long tune, "Bohemian Rhapsody." It may not break any new ground, but for fans of both Queen and karaoke, it's about as perfect as you can get.
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| Breakin' up is hard to do: Schmidt leaves Apple board
August 3, 2009 at 9:18 am
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|   After months of controversy over possible conflicts of interest between Google and Apple, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has resigned from Apple's Board of Directors. The decision comes after the FTC launched a probe into the two companies to see whether competition between them had been reduced thanks to Schmidt's (and Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson's) presence on Apple's board. Continuing concerns from shareholders have forced Schmidt to discuss the issue with the board, apparently resulting in his decision to leave. "Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. "Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric's effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple's Board."
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| Network neutrality in Congress, round 3: Fight!
August 3, 2009 at 9:00 am
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|   The war over network neutrality has been fought in the last two Congresses, and last week's introduction of the "Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009" (PDF) means that legislators will duke it out a third time. Should the bill pass, Internet service providers will not be able to "block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade" access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device. ISPs would also be forbidden to "impose a charge" on content providers that goes "beyond the end-user charges associated with providing the service to such a provider." In other words, AT&T doesn't have to let Google "use its pipes for free," but it can only collect the money is owed through customary peering and transit arrangements.
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| Google reveals plans for Chrome cloud synchronization
August 3, 2009 at 7:30 am
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|   Google has revealed plans for a Chrome cloud service that will allow users to synchronize browser data with their Google accounts. The synchronization framework, which is still at an early stage of development, will arrive in Google's open source Chromium project later this week. Google says that a Chrome build with the sync feature enabled could be made available through a dev-channel update this month. In a message posted to the Chromium developer group, Google engineer Tim Steele described the process through which the feature will be integrated into the browser. Google has also published a design document that provides a high-level overview of the synchronization architecture.
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| The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world
August 3, 2009 at 12:04 am
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|   I was having dinner with friends the other day and we started talking about word processing programs we'd all used in office jobs. "You know, I've been using Word for over 20 years," I said, and immediately felt older than dirt. But it was true. The first word processor I ever used was a combination of the PIE text editor and the TEXT formatter, both for CP/M, almost thirty years ago, back when computers were powered by tiny pterodactyls in cages. From there I jumped to DOS machines and the famous WordStar, once the most popular word processor of all time. Around 1987 I switched to Microsoft Word for DOS, version 3.0. I used to laugh at the WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS people, with their silly keyboard templates and inscrutable function-key combinations—I had proper menus and italic text that really looked italic! Of course I also had slow scrolling speeds in graphics mode to view those italics, and bizarre text transitions that would happen when I deleted invisible formatting commands. Word for Windows 1.1 was a delight, with the transition to a GUI interface, then Word for Windows 2.0 both pleased me with a bevy of new features and frustrated me because it took twice the RAM just to get up in the morning. (Macintosh Word 6 users, I'm sure, have no sympathies). Word 95 was really just Word 6 with red squiggle spell checking and long filenames, and after that things pretty much stayed the same until Word 2007, when Microsoft changed the entire user interface because it was getting too hard to find all the new features they kept cramming in. Jensen Harris has a great series of posts examining the history of Word's user interface and the reasoning for the UI rewrite. It's actually somewhat astonishing to learn how many features Microsoft added in each version.
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| NetNewsWire beta beginning of transition to Google Reader (Updated)
August 2, 2009 at 10:46 pm
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|   NetNewsWire developer Brent Simmons has released the sixth beta of version 3.2, finally adding the Google Reader integration that users have been requesting for some time. However, the release was also accompanied by an announcement from NewsGator that the company would discontinue its online feed reading and syncing service, instead opting to transition all of its clients—including the popular Feed Demon for Windows—to Google Reader for syncing. NetNewsWire is arguably the most popular RSS reader on Mac OS X, and is a favorite here in Orbiting HQ. The software was developed by Simmons for his independent Ranchero Software in 2002, but was later acquired by NewsGator, then a popular online feed reader. The company eventually made its online reader, which originally had paid subscriptions, as well as its NetNewsWire and FeedDemon desktop clients, available for no charge. Instead, NewsGator intended to make money on its enterprise and server software, and its clients would fuel ubiquity of RSS use.
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