Month: April 2017

Nearly one year later, we're still not tired of using this image of Ars UK's Seb Anthony to illustrate Vive stories.

For nearly a year now, HTC's SteamVR-based Vive headset has remained stubbornly set at its launch price of $800. That will change for a single day on Wednesday, when HTC has announced it will lower the Vive's price to $700 in celebration of the headset's first anniversary (down from £689 to £589 in the UK).

The one-day sale comes a month after Oculus permanently lowered the price of its Rift headset from $600 to $500. While the pricier Vive package comes with a pair of hand-tracking controllers, Oculus also lowered the price of its own Touch controllers from $200 to $100 last month, making the Rift package significantly cheaper in an apples-to-apples basis.

Alongside the brief price drop, HTC will also be rolling out a new subscription-based software program on April 5. For $7/£7 a month, a Viveport subscription will let players "choose five titles from an ever-growing library of curated content," on HTC's Viveport platform (which is distinct from the SteamVR interface many Vive owners use). Viveport users can try a free one-month trial of the service and choose from among 50 different titles to start.

Enlarge (credit: Novocure)

An electric skull cap designed to zap cancer cells trying to grow in the brains of wearers proved useful at improving patient survival in a five-year clinical trial.

When combined with standard chemotherapy, the cap more than doubled five-year survival rates of brain cancer patients—from 5 percent to 13 percent—researchers reported Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research being held in Washington, DC. The trial involved 695 patients newly diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer called glioblastoma multiforme.

The modest survival improvement is exciting for such a nasty form of cancer, researchers said. “Glioblastoma is the deadliest primary malignancy of the central nervous system for adults,” Dr. Roger Stupp, professor of neurological surgery at Northwestern, said in a press release. “The last time any form of treatment was shown to improve survival for patients with this disease was more than 10 years ago."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Gary Waters)

While the US government is giving ISPs free rein to track their customers’ Internet usage for purposes of serving personalized advertisements, some Internet users are determined to fill their browsing history with junk so ISPs can’t discover their real browsing habits.

Scripts and browser extensions might be able to fill your Web history with random searches and site visits. But will this actually fool an ISP that scans your Web traffic and shares it with advertising networks?

Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Technologist Jeremy Gillula is skeptical but hopes he’s wrong. “I'd love to be proven wrong about this,” he told Ars. “I'd want to see solid research showing how well such a noise-creation system works on a large scale before I trust it."

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Google has shut down Google Map Maker. A support page went up over the weekend declaring that Map Maker is closed but that "many of its features are being integrated into Google Maps."

Map Maker was a Wikipedia-style Map editing service that launched in 2008. The site created a sandbox version of Google Maps and gave users powerful editing tools, allowing them to build roads, terrain, landmarks, and buildings from scratch. The edits were sent to a moderation queue, and if the community members deemed the edits to be correct, they were pushed to the production version of Google Maps.

While Google notes that it has "started to graduate functionality from Map Maker to Google Maps on both desktop and mobile," for now there is a huge functionality gap between Google Maps and Map Maker. Maps has several "editing" features to change existing content but none of the "build it from scratch" features of Map Maker.

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Ubisoft has made it easier to unlock content without paying money in For Honor, rolling out an update that heavily increases the drop rate for the in-game "Steel" used to access new items and abilities.

The update, which launched on Friday, increases the amount of Steel generated by in-game matches, Daily Orders, Side Orders, and Community Orders by anywhere from 25 to 200 percent. All told, Ubisoft estimates the changes will "raise your daily first two hours income by as much as 45 percent."

That increase might seem like a drop in the bucket for a game that previously required about 5,200 hours of gameplay to unlock everything (without paying money, that is). That said, the rebalancing should make it much easier to at least earn some of the pricier cosmetic items and "emotes" for a few preferred character. And as For Honor director Damien Kieken put it in a recent interview, "we never had an intention for you to unlock everything in the game."