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Unbeknownst to themselves, some of these apparently happy consumers are actually harbingers of failure. (credit: Flickr user Peter Hilton)

A central premise in marketing seems so obvious that it doesn’t even bear scrutiny: if customers give you positive feedback on your product, that’s good. And if those people buy the product repeatedly, that's even better.

But what if certain customers just don’t have great taste? Or, more precisely, what if their tastes don’t match up with those of the rest of the population? Positive feedback and early sales from these customers might actually not be good news—they could be a sign that the product’s going to tank.

A recent paper in the Journal of Marketing Research has identified a group of customers whose support for a product is a “harbinger of failure,” a signal that the product will eventually flop. “Increased sales of a new product by some customers can actually be a strong signal of future failure,” researchers write. So who are these people?

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The slowest car here is also one we drove for real at COTA, the new Audi TT. It doesn't love being hustled over the curbs but you need to use them to find the lap time. Very easy to balance the car on the throttle through the esses on the throttle. The tires get overwhelmed coming out of the very slow turns 11 and 12. Brakes could be better.

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2015 has been the year of the performance car here at Ars. We've spent some time behind the wheel of some quite powerful and exotic machines, from high-powered luxury sedans like the Tesla Model S P90D and Audi RS7 to mid-engined supercars from McLaren and Lamborghini. With a couple of exceptions though, we've had to be content with driving all of these cars on the road. That's been both informative and fun, but if you want to really get to know a car there's only one place to push it to its limits: the race track. Unfortunately we weren't able to arrange a big track test this year, so we've done the next best thing—we conducted it virtually at the Circuit of the Americas (COTA), using Forza Motorsport 6.

Almost all of the cars we drove in meatspace are digitally recreated in Forza 6, although we are missing the Porsche 991S, Volvo XC90 T8, and BMW i8. For a couple of other models we've had to substitute slightly—Audi's more track-focused TTS stands in for the regular TT, and the Model S P85D represents Tesla, since there's no Forza P90D yet. And finally, we've used two coupes (Chevrolet's Corvette Z06 and the McLaren 650S) where the convertible versions were unavailable.

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Call me old-fashioned or just plain old, but when people blatantly break the law in a public place I find that somewhat bemusing – especially if there is absolutely no gain in doing so.

For instance, while the tell-tale smell of marijuana is hardly worth a second sniff at a music festival, inhaling the same in a shopping mall is an altogether different affair. Stupid, confident or just couldn’t give a damn? Who knows, but it would be non-issue in private, that’s almost certain.

But could it be that smoking weed and other petty ‘crimes’ have become so commonplace that people have forgotten that they should consider hiding their habit? That thought struck me this week when reading a thread on Reddit, oddly enough focused on router manufacturer Netgear.

Netgear’s Genie is software designed to “Manage, Monitor, and Repair your Home Network”. In addition to diagnostic and repair features, users can use Genie to network map and manage wireless connections. Sounds great.

However, in addition to the above, Genie also has a feature called “Turbo Transfer” which allows users to quickly shift files between computers on the same network.

Like all good manufacturers, Netgear provides instructions on how to use this feature but it appears that the author of the tutorial either a) decided to carry on smoking pot at his workstation or b) forgot that Internet piracy is illegal.

Things start off innocently enough with the following diagram.

….but then descend into madness when Netgear’s employee either forgets he’s at work or simply doesn’t care anymore.

For those who haven’t spotted the faux pas, what we’re looking at in the above image is Netgear explaining how its users can send a pirate rip of the Michael Bay movie ‘Pain and Gain‘ across a network.

Possibly making matters worse is the fact that the movie appears to have been acquired from RARBG, one of the world’s most popular torrent sites. Presuming that the file was on a Netgear computer when the tutorial was made, one doesn’t have to be particularly imaginative to work out how it got there.

The tutorial in some form or another appears to have been on Netgear’s site for two years but depending on date format it could’ve been edited as recently as this month – “Updated 12/07/2015 12:13 PM,” Netgear’s site reads.

While unusual, this isn’t the first time a corporation has forgotten to hide its illegal file-sharing habits from the public.

In 2008, John Lewis used aXXo rips to sell iMacs and a year later Saturn, Europe’s largest retailer of consumer electronics, showed pirated films to sell Macbooks.

Then in 2010, electronics giant LG happily showed its customers how to play pirate movies on its TVs.

An archive copy of Netgear’s tutorial, should they take it down before getting the munchies and wondering off, can be found here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

At Washington DC's MAGFest, Sega's Flash Beats bathes players in an otherworldly glow, as they bounce ever-quickening lights back and forth down five parallel tubes.

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The stereotypical image of a gamer is of someone sitting alone in a dark basement, staring at a screen for hours on end. Forget that! Ars Technica's gaming coverage got off the couch plenty this year, visiting events from Washington state to Washington DC, and from Paris, France to Cologne, Germany. In those travels we saw thousands of gamers willing to leave the house and commune with their own kind in crowded convention center hallways, arenas, and trade shows.

Through all that travel, we had our cameras at the ready, set to document the state of gaming culture around the world and share it with you on this very site. As 2015 winds to a close, here's a quick look back at some of the most memorable imagery from the hundreds of photos we took at gaming events this year.

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This is the view you'd have if you were imprisoned in the Flash's secret extrajudicial detention center. (credit: The CW Network)

Marvel is fast becoming synonymous with the superhero—a pair of blockbusters and two critically praised Netflix shows just this year will have that effect. But they aren't the only game in (cape)town.

DC Comics might not have anything as coherent as a cinematic universe road-mapped out to the end of the decade, and Batman's box office success has yet to rub off on the Green Lantern or a 21st-century Superman. But the company is making a serious go at competent TV series as of late, particularly The CW series The Flash. However, as much as I've found myself enjoying the adventures of Barry Allen and his comrades, it can hold my peace no longer. It's time for someone to say it: Science in Central City is in desperate need of some ethical oversight.

Time and again, the Flash and his team—all trained scientists—ignore fundamental protections of research subjects and a disregard for human rights. That's no small quibble for a tentpole superhero supposedly interested in justice and doing good. But, as I'll explore, there are real-world historical precedents for many of these transgressions.

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Late last week millions of pirates cheered behind their computers as the “screener season” finally got underway.

High quality copies of some of the hottest Hollywood productions appeared online, with some titles even beating their official theatrical release.

Just a few hours ago, on Christmas day, another prominent DVD screener was uploaded to various torrent sites, James Bond’s ‘Spectre.’ (nfo).

The torrent first appeared on several private sites before it leaked to more public venues such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, where thousands of users welcome the unexpected Christmas gift.

At the time of writing over more than 10,000 people are sharing a copy of the leaked screener, which is bound to hit over a million downloads before the end of the weekend.

For Hollywood, however, the latest leak is casting a dark shadow over the festive season.

A lot has been said and done about the first leaks appeared a week ago. The FBI is trying to catch the perpetrators and hs already traced The Hateful Eight leak back to a Hollywood executive.

In addition, various movie companies have started to issue thousands of takedown requests in the hope that this will prevent at least some people from downloading their films without permission.

What it truly unique about the recent leaks, however, is that most can be traced to the same source: The Hive and CM8.

Hive-CM8 is a so-called release “group,” but not one that belongs to The Scene. Instead it’s a partnership of independent releasers which, unlike The Scene, proudly share their work with the rest of the world.

While little is known about Hive-CM8, sources inform TorrentFreak that less than a handful of people are involved. A relatively small operation, but one that has managed to ruin Christmas for a billion dollar industry.

Through its sources Hive-CM8 got their hands on many screener copies, of which it has published 11 so far, with Spectre being the most recent. However, in movie release notes they write that there are 40 titles in total, which means that more are on the way.

To our knowledge this is rather unprecedented. While screeners leak every year, we have never seen a batch of 40 copies being released by a single source in such a short period of time.

This “achievement” puts Hive-CM8 on the map, and not just among the cheering pirate crowd. The FBI is also watching the latest developments with interest and will try to find out who these pirates are.

That’s a risk Hive-CM8 is apparently willing to take, as evidenced by the recent release spree show.

Thus far the list of screeners released by the group is as follows: Spectre, The Hateful Eight, Legend, In The Heart of The Sea, Joy, Steve Jobs, Spotlight, Creed, Concussion, The Danish Girl, Bridge of Spies,

Many are wondering what else is in store. In particular, whether there’s a Star Wars screener in the batch. This can be ruled out though, as there is no known screener copy of the film out, and it would have certainly be one of the first screeners Hive-CM8 released.

If there are indeed 29 more screeners waiting in a queue then the following titles are among the likely contenders:

45 Years, Son of Saul, Love the Coopers, Krampus, The Night Before, Point Break, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, Burnt, Black Mass, Trumbo, The Last Witch Hunter, Victor Frankenstein, The Big Short, Sisters, Secret in Their Eyes, Daddy’s Home.

For Hollywood the hopes for a good Christmas now depends on the box office numbers reported after the weekend. One thing’s for certain, any and all setbacks in ticket sales will now have a clear scapegoat.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

HAL 9000 in the film 2001.

The concept of inhuman intelligence goes back to the deep prehistory of mankind. At first the province of gods, demons, and spirits, it transferred seamlessly into the interlinked worlds of magic and technology. Ancient Greek myths had numerous robots, made variously by gods or human inventors, while extant artefacts like the Antikythera calendrical computer show that even in 200 BCE we could build machinery that usefully mimicked human intellectual abilities.

There has been no age or civilisation without a popular concept of artificial intelligence (AI). Ours, however, is the first where the genuine article—machinery that comfortably exceeds our own thinking skills—is not only possible but achievable. It should not be a surprise, then, that our ideas of what that actually means and what will actually happen are hopelessly coloured by cultural assumptions ancient and modern.

We rarely get it right: Kubrick’s 2001 saw HAL 9000 out-thinking highly trained astronauts to murderous effect; Bill Gates’ 2001 gave us Clippy, which was more easily dealt with.

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