Month: August 2017

Enlarge (credit: Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Is the term "google" too generic and therefore unworthy of its trademark protection? That's the question before the US Supreme Court.

Words like teleprompter, thermos, hoover, aspirin, and videotape were once trademarked. They lost the status after their names became too generic and fell victim to what is known as "genericide."

What's before the Supreme Court is a trademark lawsuit that Google already defeated in a lower court. The lawsuit claims that Google should no longer be trademarked because the word "google" is synonymous to the public with the term "search the Internet."

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that August 21 will treat much of the United States to a partial or total solar eclipse. The total eclipse will be visible along a path that stretches from the Oregon-Washington border to South Carolina.

But even if you're not on the path of totality, you'd have to be in northern Maine to see more than half the Sun during the eclipse. New York City is over 1,000 kilometers from South Carolina, but we're still going to have over 70 percent of the Sun hidden.

Rather than rehash all the details—or warning you again not to look at the Sun without protection—we here at Ars are simply going to urge you to stop what you're doing and step outside if you're anywhere in North America. Even if it's cloudy. Even if you haven't gotten organized enough to obtain eclipse glasses.

NASA

Sunday marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 2 which, at the time, confused the heck out of the press and public because it actually launched before Voyager 1. Why did they launch the second probe first? Because Voyager 2 was going to follow a longer trajectory to reach the Jupiter system, allowing it to fly by Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Voyager 1 launched 16 days later on a faster track optimized to fly by Jupiter, Saturn, and make a relatively close pass of Saturn's intriguing moon Titan.

The missions, of course, were smashing successes. Voyager 1 reached Jupiter on March 5, 1979, about four months before its twin. Scientists weren't sure what they would find out there. Pioneer 10 and 11 had given them some insights about Jupiter and Saturn as gas giants, but little information was known about the many moons of these worlds. Most scientists thought they would probably be a lot like the cold, dark, and lifeless moons of Earth and Mars.

A scene like this doesn't exactly scream "2017 video game." And yet...

Night Trap might not seem like a game that would be especially cumbersome to port to modern consoles. Among the first in the oft-forgotten early-’90s trend of “FMV (full motion video) games,” the title was nothing more than a lightly interactive series of pre-recorded videos.

But after years of effort to get the project off the ground, months of coding and delays, and time spent navigating the grueling certification process for modern console launches, independent game designer Tyler Hogle was ready to be done in late summer 2017. Pressing through exhaustion, Hogle's target release date was days away—but so was the birth of his child. On top of it all, after a last-minute patch to add extra language support, he noticed that he'd accidentally broken his own game and needed a patch out. Fast.

An accidental piece of history

Long before Hogle's dilemma, the original Night Trap was an unlikely standard-bearer in the debate on violence in video games. Originally filmed in the mid-’80s for Hasbro’s canceled VHS-based NEMO console, Night Trap featured big names of the time including child star Dana Plato (of Diff'rent Strokes fame). By the early ‘90s, though, it had already been delayed and reworked to be a relatively tame riff on teen slasher horror. When the game first hit the Sega CD in 1992, it already looked and felt quite dated. It didn’t help that the Sega CD’s limited hardware struggled to render even a low-resolution, low frame-rate version of the original film—don't even ask if it responded snappily for the interactive bits.

Enlarge / Thomas Homan, Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, seen here during a February 2016 Senate hearing. (credit: Al Drago/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images News)

The acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency charged with deportations, has confirmed in a new letter that it does not use cell-site simulators, also known as stingrays, to locate undocumented immigrants.

In the August 16 letter, which was sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), acting Director Thomas Homan wrote that, since October 2015, ICE has followed similar guidelines put in place by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security a month earlier, which require a warrant before deploying a stingray.

As Ars has reported for years, stingrays determine a phone’s location by spoofing a cell tower. In some cases, they can also intercept calls and text messages. Once deployed, the devices intercept data from a target phone along with information from other phones within the vicinity.