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Mr. Universe gets his news from all the sources. (credit: Serenity)

Today in the New York Times op-ed section, Ars Tech Culture Editor Annalee Newitz takes part in a debate over whether Facebook is saving or ruining journalism. She argues that Facebook has changed its attitude toward news a great deal over its history and that in the past two years the company has become less democratic about how it brings outside news sources to its readers.

We can argue for hours about whether Facebook is terrible or awful, but there's no denying that in the '00s it was part of a trend toward opening up definitions of what counts as journalism. The company's incredible audience size meant that information once hidden in obscure parts of the media landscape could be exposed to millions of people at once. As Annalee writes:

The amazing part was that the traffic flood could be directed at anything: It could be an investigative article about corruption from a civil liberties organization, a scientist’s account of her latest discovery, a personal story of addiction, a cat photo, or a movie review in The New York Times. It was radically democratizing and reflected a larger shift happening in the world of journalism. A new generation was challenging what counted as news and who could lay claim to the title “journalist.” Like many social media companies, Facebook helped amplify new voices whose opinions and experiences had never been part of mainstream media before, and there is no doubt that the public benefited from this shift.

But those days are over. Facebook has changed its News Feed algorithm to make it very difficult for outside news sources to get placement in people's feeds. Now media companies and journalists have to pay for placement or cut deals with Facebook to post their work on the site via Facebook Instant or Live. This undermines any good the company might have done in the past:

Safra Catz, co-CEO of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2014 conference in San Francisco. (credit: Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle CEO Safra Catz testified in federal court today that Oracle spends "hundreds of millions" of dollars promoting and supporting Java and that the investment was at risk because of Google and Android.

It's the seventh day of the Oracle v. Google trial, a legal dispute that began when Oracle sued Google for copyright infringement in 2010. In 2012, a judge ruled that APIs can't be copyrighted at all, but an appeals court disagreed. Now Oracle may seek up to $9 billion in damages, while Google is arguing that its use of the 37 APIs constitutes "fair use."

"What's the significance of intellectual property protection to Oracle?" attorney Annette Hurst asked Catz.

(credit: BitTorrent Inc.)

BitTorrent Inc., the company behind the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, is planning to launch a live streaming TV service with both free and paid options. The company claims it will have better performance than existing services that broadcast live channels over the Internet.

Unveiled today, BitTorrent Live is "a multichannel, live, and linear video streaming platform" based on a peer-to-peer live video streaming protocol that BitTorrent has been developing for a few years. No availability date was announced, but BitTorrent said it will be available on Apple TV, iOS, Android, and Mac.

The company's announcement said that today's live streaming services usually use HTTP Live Streaming and are "notorious for latency issues, also known as lag." The BitTorrent Live protocol is an attempt to solve that problem.

Artist's conception of V404 Cygni's accretion disk, which is being fed by its companion star. (credit: Gabriel Pérez, SMM (IAC).)

For 25 years, the black hole V404 Cygni was silent; in June of last year, it suddenly flared up. For the next two weeks, it released an “intensely, violently, variable” barrage of light, as a research team studying the event described it in their paper. Its brightness increased by a million times over a few days, making it the brightest X-ray source in the sky for a short time. And then, unceremoniously, it ended.

Luckily, NASA’s Swift spacecraft detected the strange outburst as soon as it began, and researchers quickly trained the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC) and other instruments on the event, allowing them to examine the spectrum of light emitted by V404 Cyg.

This isn’t the first time a black hole has been observed to have a period of extreme activity. V404 Cyg itself had a similar burst in 1989 before its quarter-century of quiescence. However, this one is different from the others in a few respects: it was much shorter (others have been known to last months to a year) and it stopped abruptly. The study of this event allowed researchers to gain important insights into the processes surrounding black holes.

Not a production still from the actual Tetris movie... but it looks like it could be. (credit: YouTube - Dark Pixel)

When we first wrote about the existence of a live-action "sci-fi" film based on the narrative-free game Tetris a few years ago, we weren't sure if the project would be stuck in development hell forever (like previous Asteroids and Spy Hunter movie projects) or if it would eventually become a bona fide big-budget blockbuster (like the $300 million grossing Battleship). Today brings a bit of news leaning toward the latter possibility, as Threshold Entertainment announced it has secured $80 million in funding for the project.

Threshold's Larry Kasanoff is no stranger to video game adaptations. He worked on the halfway decent Mortal Kombat film back in 1995, which grossed $70 million. Asian media mogul Bruno Wu, who set up a $1.6 billion media fund late last year, will serve as co-producer on the film, seemingly ensuring that the movie will be able to sustain any unplanned budget overruns.

Deadline reports that filming is planned for 2017 with Chinese locations and a Chinese cast, though "the goal is to make world movies for the world market," according to Kasanoff. The film could even be the basis for a trilogy, the producer says, with a plot that's "not at all what you think; it will be a cool surprise." Back in 2014, Kasanoff told the Wall Street Journal that "this isn't a movie with a bunch of lines running around the page. We’re not giving feet to the geometric shapes... What you [will] see in Tetris is the teeny tip of an iceberg that has intergalactic significance."

An artist's rendering of the orbital rings of Space Belt—a private data network built on laser-linked satellites set to start launching next year.

Cloud service providers frequently tout the physical security of their data centers. But Scott Sobhani's company is getting ready to launch what is perhaps the most physically secure cloud platform ever (literally). Sobhani is CEO and co-founder of Cloud Constellation Corporation, the company behind Space Belt—a network of communication, compute, and data storage satellites that is aiming to provide more than an exabyte of storage in orbit by 2025.

Led by a team of satellite industry and cloud computing veterans, Cloud Constellation launched three years ago in "stealth mode" to find a way to provide customers—particularly government and international enterprises—with a really secure and highly available global cloud.

"You can clearly see that today's Internet and other systems that are supporting cloud operations and cloud storage are very leaky and very prone to cyber attack at every junction as well as delays," Sobhani told Ars. "The information superhighway is very enabling, but it is also very risky, and IT directors and CIOs are subject to a lot of pressure and loss of sleep at night over all the issues that can happen, because what they buy today to [secure their systems] may not be adequate for the future."

The Shoreline Amphitheatre, the new location of Google I/O 2016. It's right in Google's backyard. (credit: Shoreline Amphitheatre)

It's almost time for Google's biggest show of the year, Google I/O. I/O serves not just as a developer conference; it's also the time when Google opens up and shows the world what it has been working on. The show kicks off on Wednesday, May 18 with the keynote, and we'll be there to report on everything as it happens.

We've already gone over the possible projects we could see at Google I/O—in short, expect lots of augmented and virtual reality talk. It sounds like we'll get a good look at the first consumer Project Tango phone, built by Lenovo. The schedule says Google is going to talk about virtual reality, hopefully revealing a piece of hardware that isn't made out of cardboard. We should also hear plenty about the already-released Android N Developer Preview, and there might even be some other surprises along the way.

For the first time ever, the show is at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, a huge outdoor stadium with a capacity of 22,500 people. We'll be outside pretty much all day, so we'll pack sunscreen and pray for some good California weather. The party starts at 10am PDT (1pm EDT, 6pm BST, 7pm CEST) Wednesday. Follow along by clicking the "View liveblog" link above.

Work on the unreleased Happily Ever After got far enough that box art was actually produced.

It's not every day that a previously unseen game comes out for the Nintendo Entertainment System (hipsterish modern ports notwithstanding). One of those days occurred late last week, though, as a long-lost playable prototype ROM of Happily Ever After was released on the Internet 25 years after its original creation.

Nintendo Player goes into extensive detail on the game's creation, which was based off of a movie of the same name by TV cartoon production company Filmation (creators of He-Man). The Happily Ever After film, a pseudo-sequel to the famous fairy tale, was originally planned for 1991 but didn't come out until 1993 due to legal and financial issues. When the movie promptly flopped (and when its distributor became embroiled in an SEC fraud investigation), the accompanying NES game that had been developed by Japanese studio SOFEL (Wall Street Kid, Casino Kid) was shelved.

Though a very different SNES version was released by a different developer in 1994, the NES game was thought lost forever, save for a few stray screenshots in magazines and reports from Consumer Electronics Shows past. That is until Sean McGee (who previously unearthed a long-lost Super Mario Bros. 2 sample cartridge) found and purchased a prototype from an Austin-area private seller. Rather than selling the rare game to the highest bidder, as is common with many discovered NES prototypes, McGee dumped the ROM to allow everyone to play this lost gem free on an emulator.