Month: May 2017

Enlarge / A Nokia store in Helsinki, Finland, in 2013. (credit: Tomi Setala/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A litigation brawl between Nokia and Apple over intellectual property has ended just five months after it started.

The companies said today they have settled all outstanding litigation and agreed to a patent license. While exact financial terms are confidential, Apple will be making an up-front cash payment to Nokia, followed by additional payments over the course of the agreement.

"This is a meaningful agreement between Nokia and Apple," Maria Varsellona, Chief Legal Officer at Nokia, said in a statement. "It moves our relationship with Apple from being adversaries in court to business partners working for the benefit of our customers."

Enlarge (credit: Noj Han)

The Wikimedia Foundation has won another day in court challenging the National Security Agency over the government's so-called "Upstream" surveillance program that was disclosed by Edward Snowden.

While there's still an uphill battle for the surveillance to be declared unconstitutional, as Wikimedia alleges, the decision Tuesday by the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals is important nevertheless. That's because a lower court had ruled that Wikimedia didn't even have a right to sue. The lower court said the foundation that runs the online encyclopedia Wikipedia could not demonstrate that the digital communications of the Wikipedia community editors and Wikipedia staff were being vacuumed up by the congressionally approved, large-scale surveillance.

The suit asserts that the surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment because the massive monitoring of the Internet backbone, authorized by a secret court known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, does not require probable cause or individualized suspicion. The suit also alleges a First Amendment violation—that the mere existence of the program chills speech and prevents those associated with Wikimedia from communicating electronically.

(credit: epSos.de)

If federal fuel economy rules aren’t weakened, US drivers could consume 1.2 million fewer barrels of gasoline per day in 2025 than today. That’s the projection of the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the energy statistics branch of the US Energy Department.

Today, the administration posted some numbers from its “Annual Energy Outlook 2017” report concerning light-duty vehicle fuel efficiency and how it could affect gas consumption out to 2025 and 2040. The EIA noted that by 2040, more cars than ever will be on the road, and billions of miles will be added to the collective miles traveled in the US by car per year. But if automakers meet current fuel-economy standards out to 2025, the US light-duty fleet could actually reduce the amount of gasoline that it collectively burns.

But the EIA’s numbers are based on a report completed in January 2017. Since then, things have changed. At the beginning of the year, the Obama-era EPA finalized the 2025 fuel-economy rules ahead of schedule, just before the Trump administration took office. Once in charge, Trump and his new EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt bowed to automaker pressure to re-open the review process for those 2025 fuel-economy rules, saying the rules would place an unnecessary cost burden on manufacturers (although third-party research organizations contest this).

Enlarge (credit: Chaos Computer Club)

Hackers have broken the iris-based authentication in Samsung's Galaxy S8 smartphone in an easy-to-execute attack that's at odds with the manufacturer's claim that the mechanism is "one of the safest ways to keep your phone locked."

The cost of the hack is less than the $725 price for an unlocked Galaxy S8 phone, hackers with the Chaos Computer Club in Germany said Tuesday. All that was required was a digital camera, a laser printer (ironically, models made by Samsung provided the best results), and a contact lens. The hack required taking a picture of the subject's face, printing it on paper, superimposing the contact lens, and holding the image in front of the locked Galaxy S8. The photo need not be a close up, although using night-shot mode or removing the infrared filter helps. The hackers provided a video demonstration of the bypass.

Starbug, the moniker used by one of the principal researchers behind the hack, told Ars he singled out the Samsung Galaxy S8 because it's among the first flagship phones to offer iris recognition as an alternative to passwords and PINs. He said he suspects future mobile devices that offer iris recognition may be equally easy to hack. Despite the ease, both Samsung and Princeton Identity, the manufacturer of the iris-recognition technology used in the Galaxy S8, say iris recognition provides "airtight security" that allows consumers to "finally trust that their phones are protected." Princeton Identity also said the Samsung partnership "brings us one step closer to making iris recognition the standard for user authentication."

Enlarge / Finally, a good alternative to the standard Switch Joy-Cons and Pro Controller. (credit: 8bitdo)

For all the known issues with Bluetooth wireless devices, it's pretty incredible to have a single standard that lets devices connect wirelessly to all sorts of different hardware. Case in point: the 8bitdo line of classic controllers which, thanks to a new firmware update today, is now compatible with the Switch in addition to classic consoles like the NES and SNES, plus PCs and mobile phones to boot.

Of course, the classic consoles don't support wireless controllers natively—for that you'll need to invest in a Retro Receiver that plugs in to the appropriate controller port. With those attached, though, it's now possible to take a single controller from a Nintendo system released in 1985 to one released in 2017 without even dealing with any wires.

We tested the basic NES30 edition of the controller with the Switch this afternoon, and we found the controller more than up to the task of playing games like Mario Kart 8 and Puyo Puyo Tetris. The controller's design, which mimics the old NES controller pretty accurately, makes it infinitely more enjoyable to use than the tiny Switch Joy-Cons, which we've found hand-crampingly awful when held horizontally as individual game pads.

Enlarge / The LHC's ATLAS detector while under construction. (credit: Brookhaven National Lab)

Believe it or not, particle physics has a season, just like baseball. Running a massive particle collider takes a lot of energy, so operators schedule downtime for periods when local energy demand tends to be high. For Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, located on Long Island, that means summer air-conditioning season is to be avoided. For CERN's Large Hadron Collider, demand for winter heating is what sets the seasons.

And, as those in the Northern Hemisphere may have noted, the winter is now over. It's particle season again, and today marks the first stable proton beams of 2017 in the LHC.

The 2016/2017 winter break was much shorter than the two-year downtime that saw the LHC upgraded to handle collisions at energies of 13 Tera-electronVolts. Still, the people who run the hardware use the winter breaks to do maintenance and typically some minor upgrades. So, each spring, they go through the process of recommissioning the hardware and making sure it's all working properly before starting any collisions.

Enlarge (credit: PayPal v Pandora)

Some heavy tech hitters have been in the spotlight lately for haggling over their trademarks. Ars recently reported about Google, which successfully defended its mark amid accusations that the term "google" is no longer eligible for legal protection because it has become too generic of a word for "searching the Web."

Now comes two more companies battling over a different area of trademark law. PayPal is suing music-streaming company Pandora on accusations that Pandora's latest logo looks a lot like PayPal's and hence causes consumer confusion. Pandora launched the new logo in October as part of its campaign to turn its free listeners into paid subscribers.

"Pandora's recent adoption of a new 'P' logo, which is unlawfully similar to PayPal's logo, threatens the interests of PayPal's customers and disrupts their user experience. PayPal brings this action to remedy the harm Pandora is causing to the PayPal user experience and the PayPal brand," the payment company said in its federal intellectual property lawsuit filed in New York federal court.

(credit: Getty Images | hidesy)

A Comcast vendor sent a cease-and-desist letter to the operator of "Comcastroturf.com," a website that helps people find out if their names were used by bots that have flooded the Federal Communications Commission with anti-net neutrality comments.

Fight for the Future, the advocacy group that operates the site, issued a press release accusing Comcast of censorship and posted an image of the letter that accuses the group of trademark infringement. The letter was sent by LookingGlass Cyber Security Center on behalf of its client, Comcast, and demands that Fight for the Future "take all steps necessary to see that the Domain Name [Comcastroturf.com] is assigned to Comcast."

The Comcastroturf website violates a law against "using domain names that are identical or confusingly similar to someone else's trademark," the letter said.