Month: July 2016

For a while now, a certain subset of authenticity-obsessed nostalgic NES player has been disappointed with noticeable color-matching issues and blurriness evident in Nintendo's official Virtual Console NES re-releases on the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS. That problem led many to worry that the recently announced NES Classic Edition mini-console would suffer from the same issues.

Today, though, Nintendo released an online trailer for the $60 plug-and-play system. Amid a lot of '80s style marketing glitz, the video briefly showed some NES Classic Edition games in action, displaying what seems to be much crisper and more accurate HD emulation of the NES cartridges you remember.

You can see the improvements directly in the above gallery, with the NES Classic version on the left and the Wii U Virtual Console version on the right (images were sourced from official Nintendo trailers whenever possible to avoid issues with capture fidelity). As you can see, the NES Classic Edition versions are altogether brighter and crisper, with solid colors and well defined corners on the square pixels. It's the kind of high-fidelity ROM recreation that players on PC-based emulators are already used to, but Virtual Console players may be surprised by it (especially if they last played these games through the low-definition output of the Wii).

This is the July 2015 "Flying Gun" video. (credit: Hogwit)

A federal judge in Connecticut has ruled against a young drone operator and his father. They will now have to turn over a slew of documents and materials as part of a Federal Aviation Administration investigation.

The two men and their legal team argued that the FAA lacks authority to regulate drones, but the FAA clearly disagrees with this assessment.

As Ars reported previously, the case dates back to July 2015. The pilot, Austin Haughwout, posted a video of his drone rigged up with a handgun. By early November 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration sent the two Haughwouts an administrative subpoena seeking a substantial amount of records, including purchase records and an accounting of what monies, if any, were gained from the "Flying Gun" YouTube video.

A conceptual rendering of a “battery case” style introspection engine for an iPhone6. (credit: https://www.pubpub.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection)

Mobile devices have without a doubt brought convenience to the masses, but that benefit comes at a high price for journalists, activists, and human rights workers who work in war-torn regions or other high-risk environments. Now, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has designed an iPhone accessory that could one day be used to prevent the devices from leaking their whereabouts.

Working with renowned hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, Snowden has devised the design for what the team is calling the "Introspection Engine." For now, it's aimed only at iPhone 6 models, but eventually the pair hopes to create specifications for a large line of devices. Once built, the "field-ready" accessory would monitor various radio components inside the phone to confirm they're not transmitting data when a user has put the device into airplane mode. The hardware is designed to be independent from the mobile device, under the assumption that malware-infected smartphones are a fact of life in high-risk environments.

Detecting intoxicated smartphones

"Malware packages, peddled by hackers at a price accessible by private individuals, can activate radios without any indication from the user interface," Huang and Snowden wrote in a blog post published Thursday. "Trusting a phone that has been hacked to go into airplane mode is like trusting a drunk person to judge if they are sober enough to drive."

Is there a patent on the formula that helped generate this beautiful scene?

With No Man's Sky's highly anticipated release just weeks away, a Dutch company is objecting to the game's alleged use of a patented "superformula" to generate landscapes and terrain.

The brewing conflict, first reported earlier this week by Dutch newspaper Telegraaf (Google translation), centers on a geometric transformation formula developed by University of Antwerp professor Johan Gielis in the early 2000s.

The formula's penchant for creating naturalistic shapes with gentle curves using just a few parameters led some to nickname it a "superformula." Gielis received a patent on the superformula in the European Union in 2002 and a US patent was granted in 2009 (in addition to a few other related patents). He then founded Genicap to monetize the formula by "develop[ing] innovative technologies and products for today’s and tomorrow’s world," according to its corporate webpage.

Bubble Zoom in action. (credit: Google)

Reading comic books on a smartphone is a bit of a bummer. Comic books are designed to be read on a 7×10.5" page, which doesn't translate very well to a ~5-inch screen. It's usually pretty hard to see the entire page and read the text, which leads to lots of zooming and panning.

Google is tackling this problem the way it seems to be tackling every problem lately: with machine learning. Google has taught its army of computers to detect the speech bubbles in comic books, allowing you to zoom in on them with just a tap. The bubbles lift off the page and get bigger without affecting the underlying image. This lets you see the entire page while still reading the text. Google calls the feature "Bubble Zoom."

Bubble Zoom is available today in Google Play Books for Android. We'd guess an iOS version is coming later. For now, Bubble Zoom is just a "technical preview" but all Marvel and DC collected volumes are supported. Google says it hopes to eventually bring the feature to "all the comics and manga ever made."