Month: September 2016

Enlarge / We hope Blizzard taps Ars' own Aurich Lawson for graphic-design duties on what we assume will be a new logo for the renamed Battle.net. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

If you've touched PC gaming over the last two decades, chances are good that you've logged into the Battle.net service at least once. Blizzard Entertainment's hugely popular online-gaming network has connected every one of the developer's PC games since 1996, and while the service has expanded and added myriad options over the years, its name has held on—which we at Ars think is awesome, considering "dot net" sounds delightfully dated.

Apparently, 1996 called, and it wants its old-sounding domain name back.

Blizzard used its World of Warcraft blog to announce the name-change news on Wednesday, where an unnamed representative confirmed that the company's online-matchmaking services will soon be dubbed "Blizzard tech." The company didn't offer a firm date for the name change other than indicating that we can expect the change "over the next several months."

Tesla may have made column inches earlier this month with the announcement that the P100D is one of the fastest-accelerating production cars in the world, but when it comes to sheer electrifying speed, the Musk-mobile has nothing on the Venturi Buckeye Bullet-3. You may remember reading about VBB-3 back in February; it's a land-speed-record car built in a collaboration between Monegasque electric vehicle company Venturi and The Ohio State University. Well, the team has been out on the Bonneville Salt Flats the past few days, and on Monday it set a new land speed record for electric vehicles with a two-way average of 341mph (548km/h)!

We spoke to team leader David Cooke last Thursday, when the team was bedding in the car and getting ready for the record attempt. "We're ready to go fast," Cooke told Ars, despite the fact that the condition of the salt was less than ideal. Mechanically, the car was much the same as when we saw it last, following a previous land speed record attempt that had to be shelved due to extreme vibrations caused by poor conditions at Bonneville.

"From the beginning we have been fighting the complexity of the powertrain and electronics," Cooke said. In particular, getting the battery packs and the inverters all talking to each other properly had consumed a lot of time. "We're very conservative so reliability has been a big focus; we've redone all the wiring from the ground up, implementing some new techniques and concentrating on the wiring connections," he said.

Enlarge / Software engineer Travis Lerol takes aim with an unloaded Liberator handgun in 2013. (credit: AFP / Getty Images News)

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday against Defense Distributed, the Texas organization that promotes 3D-printed guns, in a lawsuit that it brought last year against the State Department.

In a 2-1 decision, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals was not persuaded that Defense Distributed’s right to free speech under the First Amendment outweighs national security concerns.

The majority concluded:

When the En-Gedi scrolls were excavated from an ancient synagogue's Holy Ark in the 1970s, it was a bittersweet discovery for archaeologists. Though the texts provided further evidence for an ancient Jewish community in this oasis near the Dead Sea, the scrolls had been reduced to charred lumps by fire. Even the act of moving them to a research facility caused more damage. But decades later, archaeologists have read parts of one scroll for the first time. A team of scientists in Israel and the US used a sophisticated medical scanning technique, coupled with algorithmic analysis, to "unwrap" a parchment that's more than 1,700 years old.

(credit: Science Advances)

Found in roughly the same area as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the En-Gedi scrolls were used by a Jewish community in the region between the 8th century BCE and 6th century CE. In the year 600 CE, the community and its temple were destroyed by fire. Archaeologists disagree on the exact historical provenance of the En-Gedi scrolls—carbon dating suggests fourth century, but stratigraphic evidence points to a date closer to the second. Either way, these scrolls could provide a kind of missing link between the biblical texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the traditional biblical text of the Tanakh found in the Masoretic Text from roughly the 9th century. As the researchers put it in a paper published in Science Advances:

Dating the En-Gedi scroll to the third or fourth century CE falls near the end of the period of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls (third century BCE to second century CE) and several centuries before the medieval biblical fragments found in the Cairo Genizah, which date from the ninth century CE onward. Hence, the En-Gedi scroll provides an important extension to the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls and offers a glimpse into the earliest stages of almost 800 years of near silence in the history of the biblical text.

How to read a burned scroll with computers

But it wasn't until University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales developed a technique he calls volume cartography that archaeologists actually got that "glimpse." Seales had previously worked on a project to read fire-damaged scrolls from the library of a wealthy Roman whose home in Herculaneum was destroyed in the Pompeii eruption. He suggested that Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Pnina Shor scan the scrolls using X-ray micro-CT, which is essentially a very high-resolution CT scan of exactly the same type you might get in a hospital. Indeed, Shor explained in a press conference that her team used a medical imaging facility to produce digital scans that she sent to Seales to analyze in Kentucky.

Enlarge / The iPhone 6S and 6S Plus and the sixth-generation iPod Touch were all introduced in Q4. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

A non-practicing entity called MobileMedia Ideas LLC won a patent lawsuit against Apple today, with a Delaware federal jury finding that Apple should pay $3 million for infringing MobileMedia's patent RE39,231, which relates to ring-silencing features on mobile phones.

MobileMedia is an unusual example of the kind of pure patent-licensing entity often derided as a "patent troll." It is majority-owned by MPEG-LA, a patent pool that licenses common digital video technologies like H-264, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. Minority stakes in MobileMedia are owned by Sony and Nokia, which both contributed the patents owned by the company. MobileMedia also has the same CEO as MPEG-LA, Larry Horn.

The report of the verdict comes from legal newswire Law360. The verdict form wasn't immediately available from PACER, the federal courts database.

Enlarge / McLaren's HQ in Woking, England. That lake provides water used to cool the wind tunnel. The round building next to the lake is where the F1 team is based; the one to the right is the production center where the company builds road cars. (credit: McLaren)

On Wednesday, the Financial Times reported that Apple has been in talks to either buy or invest in McLaren, the UK-based F1 team and supercar maker. The report, which cites three unnamed sources, says that the deal would be worth between $1 billion and $1.5 billion.

Apple's possible interest in McLaren is not hard to fathom. Beyond the F1 team and those carbon-fiber sports cars, McLaren has a successful consulting business, a wealth of engineering expertise, and a hefty patent portfolio. What's more, Apple is sitting on quite a lot of cash (although much of it is tied up), and since McLaren is not based in the US, Apple would presumably not need to first repatriate—and therefore pay tax on—those funds.

But we're not sure there's any smoke to this fire. According to the FT, "Apple’s interest in the Woking-based company centres on its technology, engineering prowess and patent portfolio, according to people briefed on the talks. However, those people cautioned that it was unclear if a deal would go ahead following a recent shift in Apple’s car strategy."

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If you're the sort of PlayStation owner who likes to pay for the privilege of playing online—and get free games every month to boot—today is a good day to spend some money. That's because, after today, the price of an annual PlayStation Plus subscription is increasing from $50 to $60 (yes, we mentioned this back in August, but some of you may not have marked your calendars).

It's not that much of an increase, when it comes down to it. Thanks to inflation, the $50 that Sony originally charged for PlayStation Plus when it launched in 2010 is equivalent to just over $55 in 2016 dollars. And the new $60 price matches what Microsoft has been charging for the highly similar Xbox Live Gold since 2010.

Still, there's no reason you should pay for the increase before you have to. If you purchase an additional year's subscription today (which stacks on top of any current subscription time), you can lock in the current $50 price until the next time you have to renew. That's $10 you can put toward one of the many interesting indie games on the PS4. Or, um, toward a couple of cups of coffee, I guess? Look, you use your fungible savings however you want, OK?