Month: September 2017

Enlarge / These Miis look remarkably happy about the destruction of their gathering place...

On November 7, another piece of Nintendo's short online history will go away forever. That's when Miiverse, the artwork and message sharing service embedded into many Wii U games, will be shutting down because, as Nintendo puts it, "among other reasons, many users are shifting to social networking services." While users can request an archive of their own Miiverse posts and drawings, the millions of memes, bad jokes, incisive game criticism, and more currently hosted on Miiverse will be removed from Nintendo's public servers in a few months (some features of certain Wii U games will also be impacted, as detailed in this FAQ).

That massive purge of player-created data wasn't acceptable to professional Web developer Tim Miller. Shortly after Nintendo announced the Miiverse shutdown last week, Miller started up an effort to permanently archive the network's public contents, complete with a GitHub page and the support of the Web preservationists at Archive Team.

"Any time a social network goes down, we lose a ton of data," Miller told Ars in an IRC chat. "Part of history, our culture, is lost. In Miiverse, especially in the art section, you can see people really investing a lot of their time and energy in it. And being able to save that for others to see and experience is extremely important.

Enlarge / The way the suspension and dampers work on these off-road trucks really is something else. (credit: Ford)

Trucks have been no more immune than cars when it comes to suffering from automotive bloat. The F-150 of today is a beast of a thing compared to the ones I rode around in at the turn of the century, and that's the smallest truck Ford will sell us here in the US. Life is better for the small truck fan living in Australia. For whatever the reason, the small truck never died out in the Antipodes, and Ford's Asia Pacific region will still sell you Ranger, albeit one that's still bigger than any Ranger we remember.

While I'm not the biggest truck afficionado, I bring this up because Ford does in fact plan to bring the Ranger back to these shores (along with cult favorite Bronco), and when it does, it needs to make sure that includes the Ranger Raptor. The truck people reading this will probably not require any further explanation. For everyone else, imagine a Focus RS, but it's a truck, and it's for driving in the desert. That's certainly my take-home from the video teaser that Ford just put out:

The Ranger Raptor is due out next year—if you live down under. The US won't get any Rangers at all until 2019, so we've got no idea whether this spicy version will ever be seen with the steering wheel on the left. Somehow I imagine Ford's going to get a few phone calls today saying it needs to do just that.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto/Getty Images)

The Recording Industry Association of America, the British Recorded Music Industry, and other industry lobbyists have sent piracy site Youtube-mp3.org down the memory hole. The site facilitated illicit stream-ripping for the masses.

The site, which shuttered to settle a US copyright infringement suit in Los Angeles, allowed pirates to drop a YouTube music video URL into a field on the site. Minutes later, users would get a fresh download of the music from the video. The site, according to the RIAA, was home to 60 million visitors a month.

"One of the world’s most egregious stream-ripping sites has shuttered. Sites like these undermine the health of the legitimate marketplace and the livelihoods of millions of music creators worldwide," Cary Sherman, the RIAA chairman and CEO, said in a statement Thursday.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Drew Angerer )

Opioid makers have been accused—and in many cases convicted—of doing all sorts of shady things to get people on highly addictive, often deadly opioid pain medications and spurring the devastating epidemic the country is now facing. They’ve allegedly greased doctors into writing unnecessary prescriptions, hidden and misled everyone on the drugs’ addictiveness, and looked the other way as large orders of opioids made their way to the black market.

But an investigation led by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), the top-ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, adds a new seedy tidbit to the list: posing as doctors' offices and straight-up lying to insurers to get deadly, powerful opioids covered for patients who don’t need them. In an audio file and report (PDF) released Wednesday by McCaskill, that’s exactly what you can hear a representative of Insys Therapeutics doing.

In the recording, the Insys rep is working to circumvent a so-called “prior authorization process” that insurers use to weed out unnecessary or abusive prescribing. In this case, the Insys rep wanted to get the Insys drug, Subsys, approved and covered for a patient in New Jersey named Sarah Fuller.