Month: December 2016

A single Firefox process. (credit: Roger)

With Firefox 50, Mozilla has rolled out the first major piece of its new multi-process architecture. Firefox 50 is also Firefox's current stable release.

Edge, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari all have a multiple process design that separates their rendering engine—the part of the browser that reads and interprets HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—from the browser frame. They do this for stability reasons (if the rendering process crashes, it doesn't kill the entire browser) and security reasons (the rendering process can be run in a low-privilege sandbox, so exploitable flaws in the rendering engine are harder to take advantage of).

Moreover, these browsers can all create multiple rendering engine processes and use different processes for different tabs. This means that the scope of a crash is narrowed even further, typically to a single tab. Internet Explorer and Chrome both implemented this long ago, in 2009.

(credit: Photo by Tim Duckett)

Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent have launched a major legal attack on Apple, filing lawsuits in Germany and the US that accuse Apple of infringing 32 patents.

According to Nokia's statement, the patents cover technologies that include display, user interface, software, antenna, chipsets, and video coding. The US lawsuit includes 10 patents and was filed in federal court in East Texas, a venue that's long been favored by patent owners. Most of the patents originated at Nokia, but at least one originated at Lucent Technologies. Nokia agreed to buy Alcatel Lucent in 2015 and completed the deal last year.

The new lawsuit (PDF) appears to be a major revival of the patent battles Apple and Nokia fought between 2009 and 2011. Back then, the two companies were also engaged in litigation that spanned the globe. All that was put to rest with a settlement in 2011, which analysts estimated at the time may have been worth hundreds of millions of euros to Nokia. Despite those payments, Nokia said in a statement today that Apple refused to license "other of its patented inventions which are used by many of Apple's products."

Enlarge / White on rice. (credit: Ruocaled - Flickr.com)

One of the interesting things about working at Ars is that I occasionally discover that scientists are working to solve problems I didn't even know existed. That was the case this week when I came across a paper about efforts to cut down on the amount of phosphorus that plants put into rice grains.

On the surface, cutting down phosphorous seems absurd. Phosphorus, in the form of the phosphate molecule, is central to life on Earth. It's part of the backbone of DNA and takes part in countless signaling pathways. Phosphate bonds power pretty much everything our cells do. Why would we want less of it in our food?

It turns out that much of the phosphorus in plant seeds is utterly useless to us. It's stored in a compact form, the chemical phytate, which is a six-carbon ring with phosphates hanging off each of the carbons. And, despite having been exposed to phytate for countless years, most mammals have never evolved a means of digesting it. Phytate passes through our digestive systems as if it weren't there. So most of it ends up in sewage or, if the crops are fed to livestock, agricultural waste. Both of which contribute to environmental upsets in our waterways.

A fan-made Pokémon ROM hack in the works for eight years was set to launch this Sunday. But a letter sent by Nintendo's Australian law firm on Wednesday has stopped those plans in their tracks.

According to Adam "Koolboyman" Vierra, developer of the fan-made Pokémon Prism project, Nintendo's Australian law firm sent him a cease-and-desist letter, which he uploaded to Google Drive with identifying information redacted. (American representatives for Nintendo were not able to confirm the letter's authenticity as of press time.) The request alleges that Koolboyman's project, which alters the source ROM of the 1999 game Pokémon Gold to create an entirely new adventure, violates multiple Australian laws.

Even though Vierra's public profile says he lives near San Francisco and Nintendo has headquarters and legal firms in America, Vierra clarified on his Twitter account that the game's planned launch site, Rijon.com, is hosted in Australia. Nintendo's Australian law firm, Addisons, has taken action against downloaders of commercial Nintendo products before, but the firm appears to have done little-to-nothing about makers of Nintendo-infringing software.

Enlarge (credit: D Sharon Pruitt)

The mountain of scientific studies about the harms of excess dietary sugar is really just a house of cards—a flimsy stack of weak conclusions based on low-quality data. And the international dietary guidelines based on those studies—the ones urging people to cut back on sweets and sugary drinks—are disingenuous and cannot be trusted.

At least, that’s what a review out this week would have you believe. To get to those bold claims, the authors used questionable methods, subjective assessments, and money from the food and beverage industry. One of the lead authors is even on the scientific advisory board of Tate & Lyle, one of the world’s largest high-fructose corn syrup producers.

Health experts and researchers were quick to criticize the review—and its blatant bias. “Although scrutiny of dietary guidelines is warranted, we believe that this review is an example of the ‘politicization of science,’” Dean Schillinger and Cristin Kearns, health experts and researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in an accompanying editorial. “Politicization occurs when an actor overly accentuates inherent uncertainties of science to cast doubt on the scientific consensus.”

In the world of video game streaming, Amazon-owned Twitch is still the 800lb gorilla. But that world is wide open for disruption by those with the right technology. Google launched YouTube Gaming last year, and Microsoft's Beam has just been given a substantial upgrade.

Microsoft bought startup Beam earlier this year and announced plans to integrate it into the Xbox One and Windows 10 as part of the Creators Update that's due in spring 2017.

YouTube Gaming's major strengths over Twitch are its strong support for archiving—many Twitch streamers already depend on YouTube for saving historic videos—and its much better playback experience. With YouTube, you can pause and rewind live streams for up to four hours. This enables convenient as-live viewing of tournaments, even accounting for bathroom breaks or weird timezones. Beam's angle is its interactivity: the stream has a latency of around 200 milliseconds on average, enabling streamers to interact with viewers in a way that's awkward at best on Twitch, with its multi-second delays. To enhance this interactivity, Beam has various gamification options that allow viewers to interact, not just with the streamer, but with the game they're playing (spawning enemies, making volcanoes erupt, or whatever else a game developer might choose to integrate).