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(credit: Uber)

On Thursday, Uber settled with New York state authorities, paying a $20,000 fine to end investigations into two data breach incidents from 2014 and 2015.

The first was in October 2014, when Valleywag reported on Uber’s real-time "God View" map of 30 of its "notable users" at a launch party in Chicago. One of those users on the map found out he was being tracked when an attendee of the party began texting him his Uber car's exact location. The following month, an Uber executive suggested that the company begin hiring opposition research to target journalists who reported unfavorably on the company.

The second incident, from February 2015, was when the company alerted the New York Attorney General to a data breach incident from months earlier. That resulted in 50,000 driver’s license numbers and driver names being stolen.

Marc Laidlaw helped write these Half-Life characters into existence; should they return to video games, it won't be under his guidance. (credit: Valve)

It's almost like clockwork, the semi-annual chirping of non-news related to the never-announced, never-canceled notion of a new Half-Life video game. Instead of a vague statement or a weird, hidden file, Friday's update comes from a Valve staffer's surprisingly long response to a fan's e-mailed question.

A series fan exchanged e-mails with longtime series scribe Marc Laidlaw, and the messages were copied to reddit then confirmed by Gamasutra as legitimate. The e-mail began with a charged question: "Why can't you just publicly announce that Valve will never release the infamous Half-Life 3?" Laidlaw, a Valve designer and writer responsible for both major Half-Life games' stories, then responded with a lengthy, Q&A-styled announcement of his retirement from Valve. He led off by expressing hope that "this will explain why I cannot answer your questions."

Laidlaw's e-mail includes nine answers to a fictitious interviewer, including why he retired ("an outwardly obvious reason is that I'm old") and what he's going to do now ("I will almost certainly get back to writing stories of my own"). Of most interest to series fans is his answer to the question, "What does this mean for Half-Life?" which, admittedly, is open to wild interpretation.

Developers are ready to wait until this scene is really common enough for big game sales.

When Oculus started taking preorders for its Rift headset at $599 on Wednesday, plenty of potential consumers experienced a bit of sticker shock, thanks in part to Oculus founder Palmer Luckey's admittedly poor job of setting price expectations. While VR consumers can wait for the Rift to come down in cost, though, that launch price could have a much more immediate impact on another group: developers.

"I'm expecting a smaller audience than before [the price was revealed], which isn't good news, but it's no catastrophe either," indie VR developer E McNeill (Darknet, Tactera) told Ars in an e-mail interview.

McNeill said he had been expecting a $499 launch price for the Rift and hoped that it would somehow come in lower than that. "I think the low prices of the dev kits ($300 and $350) had anchored my expectations for the final product."

Cellular Data.

The Verge has spotted a mysterious app in the Windows Store. Published by Microsoft, the "Cellular Data" app "allows you to connect to a trusted nationwide mobile data network using only your Microsoft account."

The app, which seems to work in the UK, US, and France, says that connectivity bought this way requires no contracts or long-term commitment, allowing short-term access to LTE data at your convenience. This will be a useful addition for systems like the Surface 3, which come with integrated LTE support.

While this seems useful already, the unusual part is a sentence in the app's description: "This app is designed to work solely with specific Windows 10 devices and requires a Microsoft SIM card" (emphasis ours). The implication here is that Microsoft will be offering some kind of carrier-independent SIM card, with the app providing the necessary configuration to plumb it in to a network. This sounds similar to what Apple started doing when it updated the iPads in late 2014, though Microsoft has yet to formally announce any intent to offer anything comparable.

(credit: UVA Medicine)

People suffering from type 1 diabetes may soon be able to ditch constant finger pricks and manual insulin injections—if they have a smartphone on hand, that is.

Combined with a tiny sensor and wearable insulin pump, a smartphone can stand in for a pancreas, automatically monitoring blood-sugar levels and delivering insulin as needed, researchers report. The system, backed by a $12.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, will enter two final phases of international trials this year.

“We’ve been working on this specific artificial pancreas as it’s called since 2006,” lead researcher Boris Kovatchev, director of the UVA Center for Diabetes Technology, told Ars. And 10 years ago, Kovatchev said, the common wisdom in the field was that such an external system would never work. “We show that it’s not only possible, but it can run on a smartphone.”