Month: January 2016

Roku has announced plans to expand their branded TV range with 4K resolution TV sets to arrive in the next few months.

Roku first launched branded TVs last year, with 40 models made by OEM partners, mostly Chinese brands, including Haier, Hisense, and TCL. Sharp and LG also sold Roku branded TV sets, although the latter only offered the 55-inch and-65 inch models for a limited time.

These TVs feature Roku's software interface, which is well known for being responsive and easy to use, and access to its extensive library of digital streaming apps.

Roku's latest announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas shows its ready to jump into the fledgling 4K TV market, with the first sets being made by Chinese electronics giant TCL.

Two lines of Roku 4K TVs, the US5800 and the UP130, will be initially available in sizes ranging from 43-inch to 65-inch. The cheaper US5800 may retail at less than $600, while the more expensive UP130 model will feature an enhanced remote similar to that found on the Roku 4, complete with voice search functionality.

Roku says other manufacturing partners will offer their own Roku branded 4K sets in the future, and that 4K TVs with Dolby Vision and HDR 10 (two competing HDR standards) are also on the cards.

This post was updated at 3:21pm ET to reflect Tuesday's developments.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday announced that the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will require those selling guns—whether at a flea market or online—to register as a firearms dealer and to perform background checks on gun purchasers.

The chief executive's announcement, during a teary-eyed national speech, comes following a spate of mass shootings nationwide and a month after the Senate voted against a measure that would have barred gun sales to people on federal terror watchlists. Another gun-control measure to expand background checks at gun shows, and for online purchases, also failed. Obama met Monday with Attorney General Loretta Lynch and James Comey, the FBI director.

Lenovo announced in November last year that it was teaming up with Razer to build a range of gaming systems, and its consumer line-up contains the first fruits of that collaboration, with a bunch of Razer-branded variants of its Y-series hardware.

The Lenovo ideacentre Y900RE ("Razer Edition") is a Skylake desktop system shipping with up to 32GB RAM and dual Nvidia GTX 970 graphics. The Razer tie-in shows in its accessories—it comes with a Razer BlackWidow keyboard and Mamba mouse—and a case with a painted interior and a window in the side. The Razer peripherals support Razer's "Chroma" feature: they can be lit up with a rainbow of different colors. The system will start at $2,299 and go on sale in June.

A gaming system needs a gaming monitor, and Lenovo has one of those too: the Y27g RE. This is a curved 27 inch 1920×1080 144Hz screen with Nvidia G-sync support and a 4-port USB 3 hub. The Razer-ness comes from Chroma lighting on the back. It'll be $599 in June. If you don't want the Chroma lighting, the same screen without the RE branding will be $549, also in June.

According to a press release from DriveSavers data recovery, information on nearly 200 floppy disks that belonged to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry has been recovered.

The information on the disks belongs to Roddenberry’s estate and has not been disclosed to the general public. DriveSavers notes, however, that Roddenberry used the disks to store his work and "to capture story ideas, write scripts and [take] notes." VentureBeat reports that the disks, containing 160KB of data each, were likely used and written in the '80s.

The circumstances of the information recovery are particularly interesting, however. Several years after the death of Roddenberry, his estate found the 5.25-inch floppy disks. Although the Star Trek creator originally typed his scripts on typewriters, he later moved his writing to two custom-built computers with custom-made operating systems before purchasing more mainstream computers in advance of his death in 1991.

Thanks to an infusion of Congressional funding, NASA has accelerated development of a telescope that could answer some of the most fundamental questions about both the universe and nearby exoplanets. At the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Monday, NASA's Paul Hertz said the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) project will formally begin this year instead of 2017.

Hertz, who directs NASA's astrophysics division, made the announcement after Congress increased funding for the new flagship telescope project to $90 million for fiscal year 2016, far above the president's $16 million budget request. The telescope's 2.4-meter mirror is designed to measure light from nearly 400 million galaxies and 2,600 exoplanets during its primary, six-year mission.

The WFIRST project emerged as a top priority for NASA after astronomers, in their last decadal survey in 2010, said that such a mission would answer some of their most important questions. The project has evolved over time, but it is now being designed to take advantage of a spy satellite donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Observatory in 2012. The mission could launch within about a decade.

Yahoo's push to host exclusive TV and video content appears to have hit a major speed bump, as the company confirmed it had closed its dedicated Yahoo Screen hub site on Monday. Visitors to the Yahoo Screen site, which had hosted archival Saturday Night Live clips, a single NFL online broadcast, and the company's line of 2015 "original" series, are currently being bounced to the vanilla URL of http://yahoo.com.

iOS and Android app shoppers will no longer find the Yahoo Screen app as of today, as well, though Ars was still able to stream episodes of all three original Yahoo series—Community's sixth season and the pilot seasons of Sin City Saints and Other Space—on devices that already had the app installed. As of right now, those series are not promoted at any of Yahoo's major portals in an obvious way; we had to dig around before finding them buried in the Yahoo TV site at an inelegant "originals" URL.

The development follows Yahoo executives specifically citing the company's three TV series projects as money-losers to the tune of a $42 million write-down during a Q3 earnings call in October. At the time, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman told investors that with "certain of our original video content, we couldn't see our way to make money over time." That call came before Yahoo had aired the NFL's first-ever, online-only regular season game, which drew an international audience of 15 million; the broadcast's rights cost Yahoo an additional $10 million.

Highly destructive malware that infected at least three regional power authorities in Ukraine led to a power failure that left hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity last week, researchers said.

The outage left about half of the homes in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine without electricity, Ukrainian news service TSN reported in an article posted a day after the December 23 failure. The report went on to say that the outage was the result of malware that disconnected electrical substations. On Monday, researchers from security firm iSIGHT Partners said they had obtained samples of the malicious code that infected at least three regional operators. They said the malware led to "destructive events" that in turn caused the blackout. If confirmed it would be the first known instance of someone using malware to generate a power outage.

"It's a milestone because we've definitely seen targeted destructive events against energy before—oil firms, for instance—but never the event which causes the blackout," John Hultquist, head of iSIGHT's cyber espionage intelligence practice, told Ars. "It's the major scenario we've all been concerned about for so long."