Month: November 2017

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Justice Elena Kagan in 2010. All three seemed skeptical of the Oil States argument. (credit: Talk Radio News Service)

In Supreme Court oral arguments on Monday, justices seemed skeptical of arguments that a patent office process for challenging patents runs afoul of the Constitution.

The issue matters because the challenged process—which was created by the 2011 America Invents Act—has emerged as a key weapon against patent trolls wielding low-quality patents. Overall, defending a patent lawsuit can easily cost millions of dollars. By contrast, the new process, known as inter partes review, allows a patent to be invalidated for a sum in the low six figures.

That's bad for patent holders—especially those with low-quality patents—because companies accused of infringing a patent can attack the patent before the Patent Office rather than going through the much more expensive route of defending themselves in court.

How long until one of these Lawnmower Man setups is in every home in America? (credit: New Line / Time Warner)

For all the hubbub and sometimes lofty predictions surrounding virtual reality's wide consumer launch last year, the immediate sales figures and impact of the technology have been decidedly muted. As hardware prices come down and software offerings begin to catch up, though, the market for high-end VR headsets is slowly creeping out of the doldrums.

Worldwide shipments for high-end, tethered VR headsets (excluding cheaper "phone holsters" like Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream) exceeded 1 million shipments for the first time in the third quarter of 2017, according to market analysis firm Canalys. Sony's PlayStation VR took a near-majority of the market with an estimated 490,000 shipments, followed by 210,000 for the Oculus Rift and 160,000 for the HTC Vive (140,000 more units went to various other headsets, such as China's DPVR).

The absolute numbers for VR headset sales still aren't all that exciting compared to other successful consumer electronics—both the PS4 and the Xbox One sold a million units in their first day of availability, for instance, and Apple shipped 3.3 million iPhones in its first six months back in 2007.

"Let me just pull all that TS/NOFORN stuff out of that public AWS bucket..." (credit: US Army)

After uncovering a massive trove of social media-based intelligence left on multiple Amazon Web Services S3 storage buckets by a Defense Department contractor, the cloud security firm UpGuard has disclosed yet another major cloud storage breach of sensitive intelligence information. This time, the data exposed includes highly classified data and software associated with the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A), an intelligence distribution platform that DOD has spent billions to develop. Specifically, the breach involves software for a cloud-based component of DCGS-A called "Red Disk."

The Red Disk system was developed under an "urgent operational need" program aimed at delivering intelligence to troops with tablets and laptop computers on the ground in Afghanistan via a cloud computing architecture. The initiative was never fully deployed—and it slowly became a symbol of how defense contractors were mining emergency war funds from the military. DCGS-A continues to be expanded and deployed by the Army after more than a decade of continuous development.

UpGuard's director of cyber risk research, Chris Vickery, discovered the publicly accessible S3 storage "bucket" on September 27 in the AWS subdomain "inscom." INSCOM is the US Army's Intelligence and Security Command, the Army's internal operational intelligence branch based at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. INSCOM is also integrated into the National Security Agency's Central Security Service—connecting the Army's signals intelligence operations to the NSA.

The basics of window management in Windows haven't really changed a whole lot since the days of Windows 3. You can maximize windows to make them take up a whole monitor or you can have them free-floating and arbitrarily sized—that's about it. macOS gives maximized windows a slight twist with its full-screen view, and Windows 7 introduced Aero Snap, a way to get two windows side-by-side, each occupying exactly half the screen (later extended to divide the screen into quadrants, for four windows at a time). While these are both compelling features, the basics still haven't really changed for decades.

But one kind of application has long stood out as an exception; the browser. Browsers add a second dimension to window management through their use of tabs. While browsers probably weren't the first, and certainly aren't the only, apps to have tabs, they're the ones that have done so most successfully. With tabs, we can have multiple pages—multiple discrete activities—all within the same window. We can combine tabs with other window management to, for example, put a bunch of related tabs in a particular window, grouping them up and handling them as a unit.

In a feature announced today, Microsoft is going to bring that same kind of two-level grouping and management to every window and every application. Tabs won't just be for browsers; they'll be for Notepad, or Word, or Visual Studio, or Explorer, or Minecraft. The feature is currently called "Sets," and it'll be coming soon to the Windows Insider Program.

Enlarge (credit: Bose)

It’s the holidays, which means it’s once again time to rack your brain in search of the right gifts for the right people. If someone on your list is into tech, though, we’ve got your back.

For this year’s edition of the Ars Technica holiday gift guide, we’re breaking down our favorites into themes. The following crop of recommendations is centered on travel—from smartphones to headphones to portable batteries, these are the gadgets we’d take with us on our next road trip. Feel free to show your loved ones the list below for your own benefit.

Smartphone gift ideas

Google Pixel 2

Enlarge / Delicious power-ups for your mouth AND your game. (credit: Cerealously / Kellogg's)

We very rarely cover news in the exciting world of cereal marketing here at Ars Technica, so we were unaware until recently that cereal news and review blogs like Cerealously even existed. That said, we were intrigued to find the blog reporting a credible rumor that Kellogg's is planning to launch a Super Mario-themed cereal—simply called "Super Mario Cereal"—in the near future.

The apparent existence of the mixed berry cereal with power-up shaped marshmallows isn't that noteworthy on its own (unless you're a super-fan that's been waiting for a follow-up to the '80s Nintendo Cereal System). No, what caught our interest is the reported on-the-box promise that "this box is a special Amiibo—Try it with Super Mario Odyssey."

A follow-up communication from Kellogg's reprinted by Cerealously clarifies that "a limited number of packages will have an Amiibo powerup sticker that can be used on the Super Mario Odyssey game with the Nintendo Switch gaming console." That's an interesting extension of Nintendo's existing Amiibo cards line, a less-popular but equally NFC-equipped and functional (for gameplay purposes) version of the Amiibo figurines.

Google has announced that the web version of Google Finance is getting a redesign. The new stock tracking interface will primarily live in Google Search, where a new "Finance" tab should be popping up soon as a search type. The existing google.com/finance site will soon start redirecting to this interface, too.

Just like the current Google Finance, you'll get stock prices, historical graphs, and news. A few Google Finance features aren't making the cut, though, namely the portfolio features and the ability to download historical data. There is still a "my stocks" feature that lets you keep an eye on favorite stocks, but there will no longer be a page for your transaction history and current holdings.