Month: February 2016

Lookit that imp fly!

11 more images in gallery

Everything about Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 seems designed to get in the way of the thing it gets right: giant, instantly accessible team battling on the Internet. If you're looking for an enjoyable evolution of the Team Fortress formula, complete with diverse, complementary character classes and 22-minute battles across staggeringly large maps, this one's pretty danged good—and easily the most kid-friendly team-battling game of its kind.

But boy, do EA and Popcap seem to have it in for players in search of that content. GW2 does a lousy job inviting players into its universe, because it wallops them over the head with a sloppily curated single-player campaign, a confusing meta-structure, and a ridiculous focus on grinding for content unlocks. In short, everything good about the original 2014 game has gotten better, and everything bad about it has gotten worse.

Rambo-styled cobs of corn

GW2's core concept remains the same as the original—meaning the series barely resembles the popular, accessible tower-defense game it's named after. Instead of hovering over a garden and placing amped-up plants to defend against a variety of silly, undead fighters, you now take direct control of a single creature on either side of the conflict and engage in one of a few types of online, third-person-shooter battling. Each character comes with its own primary, unlimited-ammo weapon and three recharge-to-use, class-specific powers, ranging from rocket launchers to acrobatic maneuvers, bombs, healing powers, and more.

Sonny Vleisides (right), is Butterfly Labs' cofounder and largest shareholder. A federal judge told him in January 2014 that there was a "strong smell" of fraud with respect to his company. (credit: Nasser Ghosieiri)

On Thursday, all-but-defunct Bitcoin miner manufacturer Butterfly Labs (BFL) finally settled with the Federal Trade Commission in a lawsuit that has dragged on since September 2014. The case had been scheduled to go to trial in Kansas City next month.

For the last two and a half years, Ars has followed BFL as it has gone from being a curious hardware startup in a nascent Bitcoin mining industry to the target of a federal investigation. Customer orders totaling millions of dollars were significantly delayed or never fulfilled. Back in 2013, Ars received an early model of a BFL miner and successfully used it to mine $700 worth of bitcoins, which we sold for cash and then donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Any miners that shipped now, though, are largely worthless, as Bitcoin mining has moved to the cloud and away from individuals.

Under the terms of the new agreement, which is expected to be formally certified by the federal judge overseeing the case, BFL must pay the FTC more than $38.6 million. However, that sum will be suspended as soon as the company pays a largely symbolic $15,000 and co-founder Sonny Vleisides pays $4,000.

The iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6S, and 6S Plus don't like it when you replace their TouchID sensors. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple is issuing a special version of iOS 9.2.1 today that is designed to unbrick iPhones affected by Error 53, according to TechCrunch. The company will also be posting a support document later today to detail the causes of and fixes for Error 53.

Error 53 crops up when you use iTunes to update an iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6S, or 6S Plus with a TouchID button that has been repaired or replaced by a third party rather than an Apple-authorized repair center. Every iPhone is paired to the TouchID sensor that it ships with, and replacement TouchID sensors installed by third parties can only work as Home buttons and not as fingerprint scanners—this is primarily a security measure meant to detect and disable fraudulent fingerprint sensors. Phones stuck in a reboot loop because of Error 53 will be restored to otherwise normal operation by today's iOS update.

From Apple's statement on the issue:

(credit: Canonical)

A new long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu is coming out in April, and Canonical just announced a major addition that will please anyone interested in file storage. Ubuntu 16.04 will include the ZFS filesystem module by default, and the OpenZFS-based implementation will get official support from Canonical.

ZFS support was already available "as a technology preview" in Ubuntu 15.10, where it's installable via an apt-get command and has to be compiled from source code first. This is no longer the case in 16.04, though you'll still need to download and install the zfsutils-linux package to create and manage ZFS volumes. Putting an official, installed-by-default, fully supported version into an LTS version of Ubuntu is a big vote of confidence, especially since people running Ubuntu-based servers often stick to LTS releases for maximum stability.

ZFS is used primarily in cases where data integrity is important—it's designed not just to store data but to continually check on that data to make sure it hasn't been corrupted. The oversimplified version is that the filesystem generates a checksum for each block of data. That checksum is then saved in the pointer for that block, and the pointer itself is also checksummed. This process continues all the way up the filesystem tree to the root node, and when any data on the disk is accessed, its checksum is calculated again and compared against the stored checksum to make sure that the data hasn't been corrupted or changed. If you have mirrored storage, the filesystem can seamlessly and invisibly overwrite the corrupted data with correct data.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, here are some great deals for you to consider.

Dell is having a big sale on expensive laptops that includes a powerful gaming laptop at the lowest price we've seen in a long time. You can get the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 laptop for just $699, which is a steal compared to its list price of $1,049. This laptop is perfect for gaming and watching videos with its Intel Core i7 processor, FHD display, 4GB GTX960m GPU, and extra cooling technology to handle that powerful graphics chip.

Check out the complete list of deals for today below.

(credit: Mr.TinDC)

The Federal Communications Commission today approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that seeks to give consumers more choices in the set-top boxes they use to watch cable TV.

The vote was 3-2, with Chairman Tom Wheeler and fellow Democrats Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel voting in favor of the proposal, while Republicans Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly voted against. An NPRM is not a final vote. Instead, this will kick off a months-long public comment period leading up to a final vote that is likely to happen before the end of this year.

The FCC is essentially trying to create a software-based replacement for CableCard. Pay-TV operators from the cable, satellite, and telco industries would have to provide content and programming information to makers of third-party hardware or applications. Theoretically, customers could then watch their TV channels on various devices without needing to rent a set-top box from their cable company and without buying equipment that is compatible with a physical CableCard.