Month: February 2016

Microsoft's hardware—Surface, HoloLens, and Xbox—is "absolutely essential" to its future, according to former CEO Steve Ballmer in a new interview with Business Insider. That's because of the interrelationship between devices and the cloud: so many devices are supported by and dependent on cloud software, Ballmer feels that the company needs to participate both on the cloud side and on the device side.

Consistent with this idea, Ballmer continues to believe that mobile is an essential part of this hardware lineup. He says he "put the company on a path" toward having its own mobile devices and platform but that current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has "certainly changed that" by firing most Nokia staff and greatly scaling back Microsoft's phone-building ambitions. In the ex-Microsoft man's view—one shared by industry watchers, including this author—the new CEO "needs to have a clear path forward." Ballmer is "sure he'll get there," but he's not there yet.

The lack of mobile vision becomes particularly acute with Nadella's "mobile first, cloud first" slogan, which Ballmer describes as an "important perception point" which Nadella has done a "brilliant job on." He says that he meets with Nadella "four or five times a year," both to "brainstorm" and in his role as a shareholder. His position as a large shareholder affords a certain level of access to the company, but he says he's now an outsider: no longer working at Microsoft, he isn't privy to any confidential data.

Verizon, which acquired AOL last year, is now reportedly interested in taking on Yahoo as well.

According to Bloomberg, the wireless telecom giant has tasked AOL CEO Tim Armstrong with figuring out how to make it happen.

As Ars reported late last year, Yahoo announced that it would reverse course and not sell its Alibaba investment. Rather, the board of directors said Yahoo would now work to spin off its core businesses, keeping the original company as a holding entity for the Alibaba shares. The company explained that the tax climate for spinning off Alibaba holdings was simply unfavorable for investors. CEO Marissa Mayer also noted that the move would give more "transparency" to the operations of Yahoo’s core businesses, and analysts believed that implied Yahoo would be selling itself off bit by bit.

Unravel Creative Director Martin Sahlin described the game at its unveiling at last year’s E3 as a metaphor for what binds people together. Just minutes after starting the game, it’s obvious to see how that metaphor plays out, and it's fairly easy to guess where the game is headed. As for the reality within the game, however, not everything happens exactly as expected.

More than just colorful

A large part of the game's appeal is Yarny, the cloyingly named mascot that seems to have captured so many people’s imaginations. As his name and the game’s title imply, Yarny is composed entirely of yarn, and he trails a thin line of fabric behind him wherever he goes. While this apparently limits his powers of personal expression, it does offer a bevy of convenient platforming tricks.

Besides using his omnipresent lifeline to rappel up and down cliffs, Yarny can lasso, swing from, and anchor to specially marked locations and objects in each level. When Unravel is operating at its peak, these abilities tie together obviously and quickly. You swing from one branch to the next to reach a soiled tuna can, drag it back over a yarn bridge tied between two docks, then step over it to reach the next target of your trusty lasso. The majority of the game’s puzzles are in this simple mold, asking you to rely on your assortment of yarn-based traversal to get Yarny or other detritus from one location to another.

The White House announced Monday that it is requesting $1.8 billion in emergency funding to respond to and combat the Zika virus, which is currently spreading in more than two dozen countries and territories throughout the Western Hemisphere.

“There shouldn’t be a panic on this,” President Barak Obama said in an interview aired Monday on CBS This Morning. “The good news is, this is not like Ebola,” he said. “People don’t die of Zika.” But, he went on to mention the troubling link with Zika infections and birth defects in some babies, namely microcephaly, a condition of shrunken heads and skulls. “There’s enough correlation that we have to take this very seriously,” he said of the risk for pregnant women and women planning to become pregnant.

In its Monday announcement, the White House explained that the requested funds, if approved by Congress, will “accelerate our ability to prevent, detect and respond to the Zika virus and bolster our ability to reduce the potential for future infectious disease outbreaks.”

The Star Wars universe has inspired all matter of unofficial tribute music, but the series has never come with official albums full of "inspired by" pop music from modern hitmakers. That changed on Monday with the announcement of Star Wars Headspace, a full-length dance album "infused with Star Wars sound clips and effects" launching on "all digital storefronts" on February 19 ahead of a CD release in March.

Chances are good that anybody old enough to have seen the original trilogy in theaters will not recognize a single musical contributor on Headspace, save that of its leading producer Rick Rubin—the man who helmed the Beastie Boys' Licensed To Ill sessions, among many, many other albums. His label American Recordings will release the album; the album's roster is otherwise stacked with a surprisingly hip collection of electronic producers, including Rokysopp, Flying Lotus, and Bonobo.

For the modern-techno uninitiated, this album's contributors tend more toward down-tempo, instrumentally intricate beats as opposed to the predictable climax-and-fall electric-fuzz snoozedom of Skrillex, but it's hard to pin the 15 contributors to a single electronic subgenre. From the sound of the three preview songs that Apple Music posted today, the young batch of contributors may take very different cues from their Star Wars inspirations as well. Flying Lotus' contribution sounds like a DJ Shadow beat with the sole special addition of R2D2 noises scattered all over the place, while Baauer's cut, "Cantina Boys," chops and screws the first film's cantina tunes with a big-beat drum line and liberal use of Darth Vader's breathing.

Just about everyone who has experienced urban living also has experienced some unwanted urban visitors: cockroaches. These agile beasts can make their way into locations that seem sealed off from the world outside the apartment. When found, they scramble out of sight with remarkable speed.

Researchers have subjected cockroaches to obstacle courses and full-body stress tests that would turn lesser animals to jello. The results show that despite their hard exoskeleton, roaches are remarkably flexible and use that flexibility to navigate spaces that are a fraction of their normal body size. Inspired by their results, the authors have built the first generation of a robot series based on cockroach mechanics.

We tend to portray exoskeletons as hard, rigid surfaces. And compared to skin, they are. But as anyone who has ever smashed a roach will tell you, they don't break with a crispy, snapping sound—it's more of a squish. To find out just how much give the exoskeletons have, a new paper by authors Kaushik Jayarama and Robert Full of Berkeley studied the American cockroach. "We selected the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana, because of its high speed, maneuverability, robustness, and tenacity to enter and leave spaces," they write.

To appreciate how malware targeting banks and other financial institutions is adopting sophisticated techniques once reserved for state-sponsored spies using so-called advanced persistent threats, consider the recently discovered Metel crimeware package.

It contains more than 30 separate modules that can be tailored to the computer it's infecting. One of the most powerful components automatically rolls back ATM transactions shortly after they're made. As a result, people with payment cards from a compromised bank can withdraw nearly unlimited sums of money from ATMs belonging to another bank. Because the Metel module repeatedly resets card balances, the criminals never pass the threshold that would normally freeze the card. Last year, the rollback scheme caused an unnamed bank in Russia to lose millions of rubles in a single night.

Metel usually gains an initial foothold by exploiting vulnerabilities in browsers or through spear phishing e-mails that trick employees to execute malicious files. Members of the Metel hacking gang then use legitimate software used by server administrators and security researchers to compromise other PCs in an attempt to further burrow into the targeted network. They will often patiently work this way until they gain control over a system with access to money transactions, for example, PCs used by call center operators or IT support.

In 2014, Nvidia filed its first-ever patent lawsuit. The target was Korean smartphone giant Samsung. Predictably, Samsung struck back—but a jury's verdict that came out on Friday shows neither side is getting traction.

Nvidia claimed that Samsung Galaxy phones and tablets containing Qualcomm’s Adreno, ARM’s Mali, or Imagination’s PowerVR graphics architectures all infringed its patents on core GPU technologies.

Almost a year and a half later, the litigation hasn't produced great results for either side. In October, an International Trade Commission judge rejected Nvidia's complaint, finding its three asserted patents were all infringed or invalid. The decision must be approved by the full commission to take effect.