Month: February 2016

Fig. 1: PS4's record-setting holiday quarter shipments easily outpaced estimates for Xbox One shipments over the same time.

4 more images in gallery

The last time we checked in on the sales battle between the big name video game consoles, Microsoft had seen its annual sales increase, but not fast enough to catch up to the still-surging PS4. The same trend was apparent in 2015's all-important holiday quarter, which saw Sony continuing to extend its sales lead over the competition.

In recent earnings reports for the fourth calendar quarter last year (October through December), Sony announced shipments of 8.4 million PS4 units to retailers (Fig. 1), a record for the system and a 2 million unit improvement from the 2014 holiday quarter (more on the difference between shipments and "sell-through" below). Nintendo, however, announced 1.87 million shipments of Wii U hardware. That marks the system's second straight year of slight decreases in holiday performance, which came despite the availability of well-regarded 2015 releases like Splatoon and Super Mario Maker.

(credit: Hernán Piñera)

Europe's highest court is considering whether every hyperlink in a Web page should be checked for potentially linking to material that infringes copyright, before it can be used. Such a legal requirement would place an unreasonable burden on anyone who uses hyperlinks, thereby destroying the Web we know and love.

The current GS Media case examining hyperlinks builds on an earlier ruling by the European Union's Court of Justice (CJEU) in 2014. In that case, known as Svensson, the court decided that netizens didn't need a licence from the copyright holder to link to an article that had already been posted on the Internet, where previous permission had been granted by the copyright owner.

Although that was good news for the online world, it left open a related question: what would the situation be if the material that was linked to had not been posted with the copyright owner's permission? Would it still be legal under EU law to link to that pirated copy? Those are the issues that the latest CJEU case seeks to resolve for the whole of the 28-member-state bloc, and its 500 million citizens.

Protesters and attendants at an Aliso Canyon community meeting. (credit: Cal OES)

In late January, an elderly woman with lung cancer died in the community of Porter Ranch just north of Los Angeles. Shortly thereafter, her family sued Southern California Gas Company (PDF) for wrongful death in connection with a massive natural gas leak that started in the area in late October.

The woman, Zelda Rothman, was diagnosed in spring 2015, several months before the leak started. While the family isn’t asserting that Rothman’s lung cancer was caused by the gas leak, they claim that the leak hastened her death.

Rothman lived less than three miles from the leak, the complaint states, attributing her alleged undoing to her proximity. “Continuously leaking gas exacerbated Ms. Rothman’s condition and disrupted her already fragile health. The gas replaced precious oxygen in the air that she breathed, causing her to suffer from difficult and labored breathing.” Eventually, Rothman had to be placed on an oxygen tank 24 hours a day. The gas also allegedly caused “intense headaches and migraines, among other symptoms.”

Do not be trying to get aerial shots of Peyton Manning. Thanks, the FAA. (credit: Kevin Baird)

Hey, all you newly minted unmanned air vehicle enthusiasts out there (and especially those of you in the San Francisco Bay area)! The Know Before You Fly campaign has an important message for you: don't bring (or fly) your drone to Super Bowl 50. The campaign—a joint effort of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA), and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)—is urging drone and model aircraft owners to respect the temporary flight restrictions (TFR) covering everywhere in a 32-mile radius around Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, on February 7.

The FAA usually places restrictions on the airspace around any major event with attendance of 30,000 people or more, including sporting events and concerts. But because of its high-security profile, the Super Bowl is getting a much larger no-fly zone than usual. The Super Bowl TFR, which lasts from 2:00pm Pacific Time until midnight, covers almost all of the Bay Area, including all of San Francisco and Oakland to the north and Santa Cruz and most of the northern Monterey Bay coast to the south.

Super Bowl Sunday's flight restriction zone (the two red concentric circles) are a no-fly zone for drones or model aircraft of any kind.

The Know Before You Fly campaign, which operates the website for registering new drones under the FAA's recently announced regulations, is part of a broader effort by the FAA and its industry and nonprofit partners to reduce the risk of drones interfering with commercial and government aircraft or injuring people on the ground. The FAA has also launched a mobile app, called B4UFLY, to allow drone operators to check for TFRs where they are, based on geolocation data. Hint: if you live in a major urban area, you are probably in a restricted flight area, since any hospital or other facility with a helicopter pad qualifies as an "airport" for FAA purposes. The app is in Apple's iOS App Store, and an Android version is in testing now through the Google Play Store (though Ars was unable to access the test version).

Tellingly left out of this old Nintendo flow chart: the part where it becomes an actual product.

Remember a little over a year ago when Nintendo announced it was taking some of its focus off of making video games and consoles to develop a "Quality of Life" sensor that monitors your sleep? That was weird, right? Apparently, Nintendo has come to this conclusion too, and the company has officially put the effort on hold.

"In regards to the Quality of Life [device], which was not mentioned in any of today’s questions, we do not have the conviction that the sleep-and-fatigue-themed [device] can enter the phase of actually becoming a product,” Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima said during an investors Q&A session (translated by Wired). "We no longer have any plans to release it by the end of March 2016."

The remarks echo similar comments Kimishima made to the Japanese newspaper Asahi (as translated by Kotaku), where he said the sleep-tracker is "not yet at the level of a Nintendo product. If we can release it, we’ll release it. If we can’t, then we’ll examine things further."

The speaker-equipped Android Wear devices: The Huawei Watch (left) and ASUS ZenWatch 2 (49mm) (right). (credit: Google)

The Android 6.0 Marshmallow update for Android Wear is back. The update debuted on the disastrous LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE in November, but due to "image quality issues" LG pulled the watch from the market after only six days. The Marshmallow Android Wear update seemed to go down with the Watch Urbane, and the update went missing in action for the last two months. According to a post on the Official Android Blog, it's now back and will now roll out to "all Android Wear watches over the next few weeks."

Other than the update to a new base of Android, the new version of Android Wear adds the ability to send an instant message with your voice while specifying the service you want to use. For instance, it's now possible to command "OK Google, Send a WhatsApp message to Nathan: I’ll be right there." Google notes you can currently call out Google Hangouts, Nextplus, Telegram, Viber, WeChat, and WhatsApp by name.

The other big update feature will require extra hardware: Android Wear now supports speakers. If you have a watch with a speaker, you can listen to audio messages and make calls directly from the watch. (There's no word on audio notifications, though.) Some watches currently on the market actually planned ahead for this and included speakers. Both the Huawei Watch and ASUS ZenWatch 2 (49mm) have included dormant speakers for instance, and with the update these should wake up and function.

If you're a gamer (or anyone else), this is not a screen you want to see. (credit: Bromium Labs)

It's still not clear how, but a disproportionately large number of websites that run on the WordPress content management system are being hacked to deliver crypto ransomware and other malicious software to unwitting end users.

In the past four days, researchers from three separate security firms have reported that a large number of legitimate WordPress sites have been hacked to silently redirect visitors to a series of malicious sites. The attack sites host code from the Nuclear exploit kit that's available for sale in black markets across the Internet. People who visit the WordPress sites using out-of-date versions of Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Reader, Microsoft Silverlight, or Internet Explorer can then find their computers infected with the Teslacrypt ransomware package, which encrypts user files and demands a hefty ransom for the decryption key needed to restore them.

"WordPress sites are injected with huge blurbs of rogue code that perform a silent redirection to domains appearing to be hosting ads," Malwarebytes Senior Security Researcher Jérôme Segura wrote in a blog post published Wednesday. "This is a distraction (and fraud) as the ad is stuffed with more code that sends visitors to the Nuclear Exploit Kit."

The battle for the next big thing in virtual reality isn't just raging among headset makers; there's also a battle over the 3D engines that power those experiences. Though most of the leading 3D engine makers offer robust support for burgeoning VR platforms, our anecdotal experience has seen creators leaning heavily toward the Unity engine. In total, 11 out of the 12 demos we tried out at last week's major HTC Vive Pre VR event took that route.

Epic Games, the creators of the popular Unreal Engine, want in on that action. On Wednesday, the company announced an ace up its sleeve: full inside-of-VR support. The feature, which will receive its first public demo during March's Game Developers Conference, will allow any owner of a motion-tracked VR system on a PC (meaning, HTC Vive or Oculus Touch) to warp into their in-development 3D worlds and edit them using nothing more than those systems' handheld controllers.

"As soon as we got our hands on the first Oculus, we were intrigued by the possibilities," Epic Technical Director Mike Fricker said in an interview with Ars. "[Co-founder] Mark Rein came to us in 2013 with the first Oculus DK1 and asked about getting an editor in VR."