Month: June 2016

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LOS ANGELES—Oculus may be the best-known name in the virtual reality gaming space, but it's still lacking in one key category: motion controllers. The HTC Vive has proven how fun those devices can be in a VR game or app, and Oculus' answer, the "Touch" set of motion-tracked controllers, still doesn't have a price or a release date.

Thankfully, Oculus Touch is getting closer to a "fall" launch, and at this year's E3, Oculus Studios gave Ars a chance to try two brand-new games in wildly different genres—to prove how serious the company is about hand-tracking gaming.

The DJ Cat logo will remain associated with the Napster brand.

Rhapsody announced yesterday that it will be forsaking its given name (well, its second given name, as the music streaming service started as Listen.com back in 2001) in favor of the name "Napster." Yep, Napster is coming back (again), 17 years after it debuted and caused a culture war over peer-to-peer music downloads and file sharing.

It seems that nothing is changing about Rhapsody except the name and the branding—in fact, Rhapsody already sells its streaming service under the Napster name in countries outside the US. But the company may be looking for a new way to compete in a packed music streaming market, and pulling on the heartstrings of millions of now-grownups who gleefully marvelled at the ease with which they were able to download music in the new millennium might be just the ticket.

Of course, Rhapsody-now-Napster will still cost money: $1 for the first three months and then $9.99 every month after that to stream music from the company's library. But then, that's what keeps it "100% legal," as Rhapsody's website proclaims.

(credit: YouTube/CNN)

A hacker the US authorities have labeled as the leader of an overseas Internet hacking group—the Kosova Hacker's Security—pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to charges of providing material support to the US enemy. It was the first known prosecution of a hacker joining forces with a terror group in a bid to carry out terrorism, the government said.

The defendant, a Kosovo citizen named Ardit Ferizi, was arrested in Malaysia last year and was accused of stealing data on US military personnel by hacking US corporate computers and then providing that data to the Islamic State terror group.

"Ferizi admitted to stealing the personally identifiable information of over 1,000 U.S. servicemembers and federal employees, and providing it to ISIL with the understanding that they would incite terrorist attacks against those individuals," said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin. "The case against Ferizi is the first of its kind, representing the nexus of the terror and cyber threats."

The latest version of the Android N Developer Preview is out, and the Developer Preview Program is really starting to wrap things up. Version 4 brings finalized APIs and the final SDK for developers, so the time for serious bug fixing is right now. After this preview, there's just one more version to go until the final release in "Q3 2016."

With the final SDK, the Play Store is also ready to accept apps that are targeting API 24 (the API level of Android N). Devs are encouraged to test backward compatibility on their Alpha or Beta channels and then push full N-ready apps to the Play Store. (Developers, you're totally going to do this, right?)

On the consumer side of things, Google has added a silly joke to the hidden Android N version screen. If you go to the "About Phone" screen and mash on the Android version number section, you'll get the usual "N" logo to pop up. Long press on the "N" logo and instead of an Android version of Flappy Bird, you'll now get an "N" logo with "Namey McNameface" written across it. We're guessing that's not going to be the final "N" name.

(credit: trophygeek)

Despite brimming data showing that drinking coffee can be good for your health, there has been a lingering black stain on the popular drink’s reputation—the 1991 assessment by the World Health Organization that classified coffee as a possible carcinogen. Today, that stain got scrubbed away.

In a Wednesday announcement and an accompanying article in the journal The Lancet Oncology, the WHO reversed that 1991 classification, striking coffee from the Group 2b list of foods and beverages that are “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” That initial classification was based on “limited evidence of an association with cancer of the urinary bladder from case-control studies, and inadequate evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals.” According to 23 health experts who met in May to review more than 1,000 new and old human and animal studies on coffee, that limited evidence didn’t stand up. The experts concluded that coffee is a Group 3 agent, which is “not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans.”

Moreover, amid their review, the experts also noted that several studies provided evidence that coffee drinking may reduce the risk of cancers of the liver and uterine endometrium. For more than 20 other types of cancers, the effect of coffee drinking was inconclusive, the experts found.

Exploring the female themes in Game of Thrones season 6. Edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

There was something gnawing at me after so many critics panned the first episode of Game of Thrones season 6. Many considered it "boring" or "tedious" since there was so much exposition, and some felt the season was headed nowhere. I realized a few episodes in what that pestering feeling was—EACH STORYLINE IS ABOUT A STRONG WOMAN. If that’s "tedious," I’m all for the bland.

This is a logical story progression, not a plot to pander to a sense of diversity. If you consider what Joseph Campbell has written about the structure of epic stories, you'll start to see what’s going on here. Emerging from the bloody battles and men on the many thrones of power, each storyline has seen a strong heroine prevail or at least scheme to dominate her opposition. What we're seeing here is the classic Campbellian emergence of the mother—the ethos of nature, life, and resurrection—rising to fight the darkness, the winter, and the ruin in this hero cycle. In this video, we explore each storyline and track the journey of this female ethos.