Month: February 2018

Games like Rainbow Six: Siege are indicative of a new focus on long-lasting "live" games at Ubisoft.

For a long time, Ubisoft was known for cranking out annual or near-annual releases in popular franchises like Assassin's Creed, Just Dance, Far Cry, the Tom Clancy games, and more. Now, though, the company is signaling it is in the middle of a major change in direction, focusing on fewer big-game releases that draw long-term support from both developers and players.

"New releases now only represent a part of our business, which is now focused on longterm engagement with our player communities," Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot writes in a sprawling 256-page annual report released this week. "Our players not only play for more hours at a time, but do so over a period of months or even years. We are thus able to offer them new experiences and content, thereby extending the lifetime of our games."

Guillemot points to Rainbow Six: Siege as the primary example of this new focus; the game saw its player base double between February 2016 and February 2017. But continued developer refinement and player engagement with online-focused titles like The Division, For Honor, and Steep also reflect the company's focus on "live" games, Guillemot says.

Enlarge / Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince at a 2014 TechCrunch Disrupt conference in London. (credit: Anthony Harvey/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

A federal judge in San Francisco has unequivocally ruled against a non-practicing entity that had sued Cloudflare for patent infringement. The judicial order effectively ends the case that Blackbird—which Cloudflare had dubbed a "patent troll"—had brought against the well-known security firm and content delivery network.

"Abstract ideas are not patentable," US District Judge Vincent Chhabria wrote in a Monday order.

The case revolved around US Patent No. 6,453,335, which describes providing a "third party data channel" online. As Ars reported back when the case was filed in May 2017, the invention claims it can incorporate third-party data into an existing Internet connection "in a convenient and flexible way." Blackbird also filed a nearly identical lawsuit against the cloud platform Fastly, which was founded in 2011.

Enlarge / A family of sea-level-measuring satellites. (credit: NASA)

Some people have eyeballed satellite measurements of sea level rise and claimed that there is no sign of acceleration—just a linear increase. Then, ignoring the physics of melting glacial ice and the expansion of warming water, they declare that future sea level rise won’t be a big deal. Many studies have demonstrated accelerating rates of sea level rise over the past millennia, as well as the tide gauge record spanning the 20^th century. But the short satellite record—which only started in 1993—is a slightly different question.

While the global satellite record is in many ways cleaner than coastal measurements that can be affected by processes that raise or lower the ground that the tide gauge sits on, there are still complications to account for. Since the record is still short, a small wiggle of natural variability can have a significant impact on seeing the subtle acceleration. The back and forth between El Niño and La Niña, for example, causes sea level to vary from year to year by changing the amount of precipitation that temporarily shifts water onto continents.

Accounting for all of this is complicated, but that hasn't stopped researchers from trying.

Enlarge / The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

With the recent acquisition of one of HTC's smartphone teams, Google appears more committed than ever to being a smartphone hardware maker. The company still has a long way to go to reach a substantial customer base, though. The research director for IDC, Francisco Jeronimo, shared some interesting smartphone shipment numbers from the IDC's quarterly industry report.

The IDC says Google shipped only 3.9 million Pixel phones in 2017. That's good, in that it is double the previous year's shipments. On the other hand, the IDC says Apple shipped 215.8 million iPhones in 2017, which works out to 4.15 million a week. So Apple ships more phones in a week than Google does in a year.

They make good phones

Google's jump into the hardware arena with self-branded phones began with the first Pixel phone at the end of 2016, and the company still has a ton of work to do. Google has proven it is good at the "phone building" part of being in the smartphone business—the Pixel 2 and 2 XL are easily the best Android phones you can buy. Google hasn't made a lot of progress in the "sales and support" part of the smartphone business, however.

Enlarge / A senior military advisor to Iran's supreme leader claims reptiles can be used for nuclear espionage because they "attract atomic waves." (credit: Dorit Hockman)

The senior military advisor to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei claimed in a press conference in Tehran today that Western nations had deployed reptiles as nuclear spies. Agence France-Presse reports that Hassan Firuzabadi, previously chief of staff of Iran's military, justified the recent arrest of environmentalists by claiming that the West had used scientists and environmental activists to spy on Iran's nuclear program by deploying lizards that could "attract atomic waves."

There has been a recent wave of arrests of prominent Iranian environmentalists. Kavous Seyed Emami, a sociology professor and environmental activist who also held Canadian citizenship, was arrested last month and died in prison this past weekend—reportedly hanging himself while held in solitary confinement. Emami was the founder of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, a group dedicated to protection of Iran's endangered species.

A number of other activists associated with the Foundation were also arrested in the sweep last month, including Iranian-American businessman Morad Tahabaz—a board member—and Hooman Jokar, a vice-chairman of the Foundation and head of the Asiatic Cheetah desk at Iran's Department of the Environment. Kaveh Madani was also arrested and briefly held over the weekend.