Month: February 2016

(credit: British Columbia Emergency Photos)

The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington state has sued the Tacoma Police Department (TPD) on behalf of four community leaders, claiming that TPD has not adequately responded to their public records requests concerning the use of cell-site simulators, or stingrays.

The Thursday lawsuit comes nine months after Washington imposed a new warrant requirement for stingray use in the state and about 15 months after local Pierce County judges imposed stricter guidelines for their use.

Stingrays are in use by both local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide. The devices determine a target phone’s location by spoofing or simulating a cell tower. Mobile phones in range of the stingray then connect to it and exchange data with the device as they would with a real cell tower. Once deployed, stingrays intercept data from the target phone along with information from other phones within the vicinity—up to and including full calls and text messages. At times, police have falsely claimed that information gathered from a stingray has instead come from a confidential informant.

(credit: Kārlis Dambrāns)

In a new letter, Apple has asked a judge to finally rule in a case where the government is trying to force the company to unlock a seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7. Currently, United States Magistrate Judge James Orenstein has been sitting on the case for nearly three months.

In the Friday letter, Apple attorney Marc Zwillinger says that ruling now is important, as the government plans to make similar requests of Apple in the future. Prosecutors have invoked the All Writs Act, an 18th-century federal law that simply allows courts to issue a writ (or order) that compels a person or company to do something. For some time now, prosecutors have turned to courts to try to force companies to help in situations where authorities are otherwise stymied.

As Zwillinger wrote:

Shake 'em up, boss. (credit: Berkeley Seismological Laboratory)

Imagine you’re a seismologist. In addition to studying data from earthquakes after the fact, you’d like to get out warnings to help save lives the moment one hits. To do that, you’re going to need enough seismometers to guarantee that you have one near the epicenter.

Seismometers cost money to install and operate properly—but everyone with a smartphone has a passable one in their pocket. Harness enough of them and you’ve got yourself a crowdsourced earthquake-detection network that could work absolutely anywhere.

Researchers have played with similar ideas in the past but have mainly had to rely on dedicated devices, along with volunteers who were willing to connect them to their computers. But in a paper published today in Science Advances, a group led by University of California-Berkeley’s Qingkai Kong describes an Android app (available now) that’s up to the task.

(credit: Ars Technica/Aurich Lawson)

Ubisoft's latest earnings report shows that the French mega-publisher is making significantly more money from selling PS4 games than Xbox One games. That's not surprising, considering that the PS4 is handily outselling the Xbox One worldwide. What is somewhat surprising is that the Xbox One owners appear to be spending more on Ubisoft games on a per user basis (as VentureBeat noticed).

Ubisoft didn't break out this per-user stat in its most recent earnings report, but it did report that 41 percent of its holiday quarter 2015 revenue came from PS4 game sales versus 27 percent of revenue from Xbox One games. So in their entirety, the PS4 market is currently worth about 52 percent more to Ubisoft than the Xbox One market (all of Ubisoft's recent games have come out for both platforms).

The best available hardware sell-through estimates, though, suggest that there were 35.9 million PS4s in homes worldwide at the end of 2015 compared to 19.1 million Xbox One units. Based on those figures, the size of the PS4 market should be 88 percent bigger than the Xbox One market all things being equal (the ratio changes only slightly if you look at estimates for consoles shipped to stores by the end of the year).

(credit: Wikipedia)

Well-known copyright lawyer Marc Randazza used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to delete an online article about a dispute between his former employer and himself.

Randazza says he sent the notice on behalf of Xbiz.com, a porn-industry news site that he represents. Last July, Xbiz (NSFW) published an article about Randazza's legal dispute with a former employer, gay porn publisher Liberty Media. The brouhaha with Liberty Media was also featured here at Ars in a story titled "Bribery, gay porn, and copyright trolls: the rise and fall of lawyer Marc Randazza." It describes how an arbitrator found that Randazza—the Nevada lawyer once championed for helping bring down copyright troll Righthaven—solicited a bribe in a bid to settle a copyright case for Liberty. Randazza soon found himself under investigation by the State Bar of Nevada.

A blog called Fight Copyright Trolls (FCT) mentioned the arbitration award as well. The blog's owner, who goes by "SJD," also noticed that the Xbiz article had been changed—but he had kept an original copy, saved and published as a PDF file on his site. On Feb. 1 nearly seven months after the FCT blog published the Xbiz article and related commentary, SJD was on the receiving end of Randazza's copyright takedown request. The FCT blog had re-published the entire Xbiz story, and Randazza claimed that made it a piratical, infringing copy.

(credit: g4ll4is)

Broadband industry lobby groups urged the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday not to impose privacy rules that dictate "specific methods" of protecting customer data, since that would prevent "rapid innovation."

ISPs should have "flexibility" in how they protect customers' privacy and security, said the letter from the American Cable Association, Competitive Carriers Association, Consumer Technology Association, CTIA, the Internet Commerce Coalition, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, and USTelecom. Together, these groups represent the biggest home Internet service providers and wireless carriers such as Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, Charter, Sprint, T-Mobile, and many smaller ones.

"Rules dictating specific methods quickly become out of date and out of step with constantly changing technology, and will only hamper innovation and harm consumers," they wrote.

The Samsung Gear VR.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google is developing an "all-in-one" virtual reality headset that doesn't rely on a computer or smartphone to function.

You might have a bit of deja vu reading this post, since earlier this week we posted about Google's supposed other VR headset in the works, a plastic "successor" to Google Cardboard. This would be a plastic shell with lenses and a few extra sensors, with the display and processing coming from a slotted-in smartphone—basically a Samsung Gear VR competitor. This new VR headset from Google would be a completely standalone device, with the screen, processor, and storage permanently embedded in the headset. The Journal backed up this earlier report, and says that Google is working on both the smartphone-centric and standalone headsets.

A VR headset in this form factor this hasn't really been announced by any other major players. The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive both strap a screen and sensors to your head, but require a PC to run. Google's headset would essentially be a game console for your face.