Month: December 2017

Enlarge / The eruptions being studied are marked in pink, with the white numbers showing the age of each eruption in millions of years. (credit: Zhou et al/Nature Geoscience)

The weird thing about volcanic activity in the Western United States is that it’s actually quite difficult to explain. The Cascade volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest are one thing—standard tectonic plate boundary volcanoes like the rest of the Pacific Ring of Fire—but they are far from alone.

There is Yellowstone, of course, which has a history of frighteningly massive eruptions stretching across Idaho and into Wyoming. And neighboring the Cascades, a fair share of Washington and Oregon are blanketed by tremendous lava flows that erupted around 15 million years ago, while southeastern Oregon is home to Newberry Caldera and a line of related volcanoes. Nevada, meanwhile, is dotted by a string of smaller eruptions. (And we’re leaving out the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Southwest entirely.)

There’s a lot of talk about a plume of hot mantle rock rising up beneath Yellowstone, which is what explains volcanic chains like the Hawaiian Islands. (The mantle plume stays in one place while the tectonic plate slides overhead.) But there is actually real disagreement about Yellowstone. Ultimately, this is because the last 50 million years in this region have been geologically wild, from the building of the Rocky Mountains to the stretching out of Nevada like an inhaling accordion and the creation of the San Andreas Fault. It’s… complicated.

Enlarge / OKCupid would rather you use real names for its dating service than use anonymous handles. But its open letter announcing the change didn't address possible privacy ramifications. (credit: OkCupid)

Over the past year, online dating service OkCupid has shaken up a few of its core features, and the changes have all pushed the service far closer to resembling rival dating app Tinder. Thursday's big change, however, sees the site borrowing a subtler Tinder "feature" that has long enraged users of other online platforms: a real-name policy, coming before year's end.

"We all have real names," the company's open letter states while listing a variety of goofy-sounding handles that the unnamed author insists are taken from real dating accounts. "We know, this is tough to hear. It’s because, like the recent goodbye we said to AIM screen names, it’s time to keep up with the times. We want you, BigDaddyFlash916, to go by who you are, and not be hidden beneath another layer of mystique."

The feature will only display first names, and OkCupid says no outside-service verification will be used to confirm that the name matches your actual identity. An OkCupid spokesperson tells Ars Technica that the only requirements are a two-letter minimum without numbers, symbols, or emojis and that it will operate a "banned word" list, whose contents it did not disclose.

Enlarge / Dots, dots everywhere! (credit: Apple)

iPhone X owners have found that Face ID isn't available as an authentication method for the "Ask to Buy" feature, which allows parents to approve their kids' iOS purchases and downloads. Instead, the parent (or any other "family organizer," as Apple terms it) must enter their entire Apple account password to approve each individual purchase attempt.

Users are frustrated because equivalent functionality was available on Touch ID devices, and that functionality has been lost in the transition to the iPhone X. Face ID can be used as an authentication method for other purchases, just like Touch ID before it—but Touch ID also worked for "Ask to Buy," and Face ID doesn't.

Apple has touted Face ID's ability to replace Touch ID in interactions for which Touch ID was previously used. In fact, we found when reviewing the iPhone X that third-party apps using Touch ID automatically used Face ID instead on that device, with no action needed from Apple. It was a slick, seamless transition, so it's all the more surprising that it doesn't work for an iOS feature offered by Apple itself. Apple's documentation of the feature makes no mention of either Touch ID or Face ID.

Enlarge / An iPhone 6's battery, courtesy of iFixit. (credit: iFixit)

Since news broke that Apple deliberately slows down the processor speed of iPhones as they age, the company has now been sued three times in various federal courts nationwide.

These proposed class-action lawsuits allege largely the same thing: that over time certain iPhones exhibited lower performance and that Apple fraudulently concealed this fact from owners. If those customers went to an Apple Store to investigate, they were encouraged to simply buy a new iPhone.

"Had Plaintiffs been informed by Apple or its technical/customer service support staff that a battery replacement would have improved the performance of the above devices, they would have opted to replace the batteries instead of purchasing new phones," one of the lawsuits, Abdulla et al v. Apple, which was filed Thursday in federal court in Chicago, alleges.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. The holiday shopping rush is just about over, so today's list is a bit short and sweet. Still, there are a few bargains worth checking out, including discounts on iTunes and Google Play gift cards. You can check out the rest of the list below.

(credit: TechBargains)

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Featured Deals

Enlarge / You wouldn't really want to use Nvidia's $3,000 Titan V with a 32-bit operating system anyway. (credit: Nvidia)

While most people have probably made the switch by now, yet another reason to drop 32-bit operating systems and move to 64-bits is coming. Version 390 of Nvidia's graphics drivers, likely to arrive in January, will be the last to contain support for 32-bit versions of Windows (7, 8/8.1, and 10), Linux, and FreeBSD.

There will be another year of security updates for 32-bit drivers, but all new features, performance enhancements, and support for new hardware will require the use of a 64-bit operating system and 64-bit drivers.

Reasons to stick with 32-bit Windows are at this point few and far between. 64-bit Windows has superior security to 32-bit, and while it varies with workload, 64-bit applications can run somewhat faster than 32-bit counterparts; for workloads that won't fit within the constraints of 32-bit software, the difference is of course enormous. Generally, those who continue to use the 32-bit operating system tend to be subject to some kind of legacy constraint. 32-bit drivers won't work in 64-bit Windows, so obscure but mission critical hardware can extend the life of 32-bit systems.

Enlarge / 26th December 1936: Father Christmas getting a kiss under the mistletoe. (credit: Getty | E. Dean)

‘Tis the season to be frisky. According to a new study this week in Scientific Reports, Christmas in the US often sees a spike in Google searches for sexy time topics and a surge in Tweets dripping with language denoting happy, care-free moods. The online frolicking is followed by a seasonal uptick in births about nine months later in September. And the US isn’t alone in this trend: the study shows other majority-Christian countries see similar climaxes in Internet romping around celebrations of the birth of Jesus. And majority-Muslim countries see them around Eid-Al-Fitr, a joyous religious celebration marking the end of Ramadan.

The authors of the study suggest that the online data may show, once and for all, that cultural factors—i.e. happy holidays—explain the yearly cyclical patterns of human reproduction. For decades, researchers have debated whether we’re seduced en masse by such cultural factors or whether collective moods are swayed by biological factors—responses to changes in daylight, temperature, and so on—or if it’s actually some mix of the two.

Global explanations for baby boom cycles have been tricky to figure out. Many countries have spotty data on births, and the study authors note it’s difficult to glean conclusions from things like condom sales and upticks in sexually transmitted diseases. But the advent of Google and Twitter data, they say, is a gift to human reproductive studies.

Video shot by Joshua Ballinger, edited and produced by Jing Niu and David Minick. Click here for transcript. (video link)

Our "The Greatest Leap" series is all about the triumph of humankind's first lunar landing, but putting the events surrounding Apollo into the right historical context necessarily requires a peek at what NASA is doing today and how the agency's modern approach to leaving low-Earth orbit mirrors—and differs from—what we did fifty years ago. Perhaps surprisingly to some, the near future of human space flight belongs not to orbiters and space planes, but to the old tried and true space capsule.

There are many reasons for this, but they tend to come down to the fact that at least with the current state of the art in materials science and aeronautics, the design attributes for the "plane" part tend to make it a terrible vehicle for atmospheric re-entry, and the attributes that make it a better re-entry vehicle tend to make it a terrible plane. Capsules, on the other hand, are essentially perfect space vehicles, sacrificing a spaceplane's "land almost anywhere if the runway is long enough" convenience for massively increased safety and predictability during re-entry (capsules are self-righting in the atmosphere, for example, while the Space Shuttle required constant active control as it returned to Earth).