Month: May 2016

There’s a common thread in Joe Hill’s works: one way or another, they all break your heart. Needless to say, The Fireman continues this gut-wrenching tradition.

A colossal read at 768 pages, the post-apocalyptic opus opens at the beginning of the end:

Harper Grayson had seen lots of people burn on TV, everyone had, but the first person she saw burn for real was in the playground behind the school.

The book doesn’t pull its punches. Even the prologue comes quick and sharp, with a feint and nasty uppercut. First, we’re introduced to our protagonist, Harper, a school nurse with some endearing idiosyncrasies, including a Mary Poppins lunchbox and a penchant for happy musicals. Then, while Harper fusses over a first-grader, The Fireman brings in the next act. A pathogen is blazing across the country. Its scientific name is Draco Incendia Trichophyton, but people just call it Dragonscale.

Mr. Universe gets his news from all the sources. (credit: Serenity)

Today in the New York Times op-ed section, Ars Tech Culture Editor Annalee Newitz takes part in a debate over whether Facebook is saving or ruining journalism. She argues that Facebook has changed its attitude toward news a great deal over its history and that in the past two years the company has become less democratic about how it brings outside news sources to its readers.

We can argue for hours about whether Facebook is terrible or awful, but there's no denying that in the '00s it was part of a trend toward opening up definitions of what counts as journalism. The company's incredible audience size meant that information once hidden in obscure parts of the media landscape could be exposed to millions of people at once. As Annalee writes:

The amazing part was that the traffic flood could be directed at anything: It could be an investigative article about corruption from a civil liberties organization, a scientist’s account of her latest discovery, a personal story of addiction, a cat photo, or a movie review in The New York Times. It was radically democratizing and reflected a larger shift happening in the world of journalism. A new generation was challenging what counted as news and who could lay claim to the title “journalist.” Like many social media companies, Facebook helped amplify new voices whose opinions and experiences had never been part of mainstream media before, and there is no doubt that the public benefited from this shift.

But those days are over. Facebook has changed its News Feed algorithm to make it very difficult for outside news sources to get placement in people's feeds. Now media companies and journalists have to pay for placement or cut deals with Facebook to post their work on the site via Facebook Instant or Live. This undermines any good the company might have done in the past:

Safra Catz, co-CEO of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2014 conference in San Francisco. (credit: Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle CEO Safra Catz testified in federal court today that Oracle spends "hundreds of millions" of dollars promoting and supporting Java and that the investment was at risk because of Google and Android.

It's the seventh day of the Oracle v. Google trial, a legal dispute that began when Oracle sued Google for copyright infringement in 2010. In 2012, a judge ruled that APIs can't be copyrighted at all, but an appeals court disagreed. Now Oracle may seek up to $9 billion in damages, while Google is arguing that its use of the 37 APIs constitutes "fair use."

"What's the significance of intellectual property protection to Oracle?" attorney Annette Hurst asked Catz.

(credit: BitTorrent Inc.)

BitTorrent Inc., the company behind the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, is planning to launch a live streaming TV service with both free and paid options. The company claims it will have better performance than existing services that broadcast live channels over the Internet.

Unveiled today, BitTorrent Live is "a multichannel, live, and linear video streaming platform" based on a peer-to-peer live video streaming protocol that BitTorrent has been developing for a few years. No availability date was announced, but BitTorrent said it will be available on Apple TV, iOS, Android, and Mac.

The company's announcement said that today's live streaming services usually use HTTP Live Streaming and are "notorious for latency issues, also known as lag." The BitTorrent Live protocol is an attempt to solve that problem.

Artist's conception of V404 Cygni's accretion disk, which is being fed by its companion star. (credit: Gabriel Pérez, SMM (IAC).)

For 25 years, the black hole V404 Cygni was silent; in June of last year, it suddenly flared up. For the next two weeks, it released an “intensely, violently, variable” barrage of light, as a research team studying the event described it in their paper. Its brightness increased by a million times over a few days, making it the brightest X-ray source in the sky for a short time. And then, unceremoniously, it ended.

Luckily, NASA’s Swift spacecraft detected the strange outburst as soon as it began, and researchers quickly trained the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC) and other instruments on the event, allowing them to examine the spectrum of light emitted by V404 Cyg.

This isn’t the first time a black hole has been observed to have a period of extreme activity. V404 Cyg itself had a similar burst in 1989 before its quarter-century of quiescence. However, this one is different from the others in a few respects: it was much shorter (others have been known to last months to a year) and it stopped abruptly. The study of this event allowed researchers to gain important insights into the processes surrounding black holes.

Not a production still from the actual Tetris movie... but it looks like it could be. (credit: YouTube - Dark Pixel)

When we first wrote about the existence of a live-action "sci-fi" film based on the narrative-free game Tetris a few years ago, we weren't sure if the project would be stuck in development hell forever (like previous Asteroids and Spy Hunter movie projects) or if it would eventually become a bona fide big-budget blockbuster (like the $300 million grossing Battleship). Today brings a bit of news leaning toward the latter possibility, as Threshold Entertainment announced it has secured $80 million in funding for the project.

Threshold's Larry Kasanoff is no stranger to video game adaptations. He worked on the halfway decent Mortal Kombat film back in 1995, which grossed $70 million. Asian media mogul Bruno Wu, who set up a $1.6 billion media fund late last year, will serve as co-producer on the film, seemingly ensuring that the movie will be able to sustain any unplanned budget overruns.

Deadline reports that filming is planned for 2017 with Chinese locations and a Chinese cast, though "the goal is to make world movies for the world market," according to Kasanoff. The film could even be the basis for a trilogy, the producer says, with a plot that's "not at all what you think; it will be a cool surprise." Back in 2014, Kasanoff told the Wall Street Journal that "this isn't a movie with a bunch of lines running around the page. We’re not giving feet to the geometric shapes... What you [will] see in Tetris is the teeny tip of an iceberg that has intergalactic significance."