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Enlarge (credit: Google Fiber)

Google Fiber has been battling AT&T over access to utility poles for a few years now. During a dispute in Austin, Texas late in 2013, AT&T said it could deny access to its poles because Google wasn't a "qualified" telecom or cable provider.

Things have gone a bit smoother since then because the companies signed a nationwide agreement granting Google Fiber access to AT&T poles on a city-by-city basis. But in Nashville, Tennessee, Google Fiber construction has stalled partly because the new ISP still has problems getting access to AT&T poles. AT&T confirmed to Ars earlier this month that the terms of the previous nationwide agreement cover Nashville, but it declined to explain why there are still holdups.

An AT&T executive has now detailed the telco's objections in an interview with FierceTelecom. Google Fiber has been making mistakes in engineering drawings that it needs to submit before attaching fiber to AT&T poles, according to Joelle Phillips, president of AT&T Tennessee.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have many great deals to share that are part of Dell's Early Labor Day sale. Now you can get an XPS Core i7 desktop for $685, a $100 gift card on a PlayStation 4 Call of Duty bundle, and nearly $100 off a Dell UltraSharp monitor plus a $75 gift card. Those are just some of the steals going on during the sale, so be sure to check them all out.

Take a look at the full list of deals below.

Dell Early Labor Day Sale

One of a set of three new mouse lemur species described this year. Microbus ganzhorni hails from Madagascar—as do all lemurs. (credit: Giuseppe Donati.)

Read any estimate of the number of species present on Earth, and you'll notice two things: the numbers vary wildly, and they're always well above the number of species we actually know about. It's tempting to think we've exhausted the exploration of the Earth, that there's nothing new to see. But one area that we've barely scratched the surface of is the biological diversity that we're a part of.

There are several reasons for this. One is that some habitats, like the deep ocean, are both vast and hard to get to. Others, like caves and islands, isolate populations and generate species at a phenomenal rate. Finally, there's just a tendency to view, say, all ants as being roughly the same. That can allow species to hide in plain sight, with nobody taking the time to look for the details that distinguish them from their close relatives. DNA sequencing is also telling us that some populations that look identical to us haven't actually interbred in a very long time, and may be separate species.

As researchers gradually look more closely, the results are a steady stream of new discoveries. We thought we'd share some with you. We set a few simple guidelines for inclusion. The first is that the species had to be discovered this year. The second is that it has to be still living—paleontologists find new species almost as often as biologists do. The final thing is that we had to be able to come up with a decent photo of it.

(credit: Amazon)

Last week, we learned that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update caused trouble for many webcam users. Today, it's the turn of Kindle owners to cry foul, with numerous reports that plugging a Kindle into a Windows 10 machine with the update will make the PC crash with a Blue Screen of Death.

This problem has more than a hint of the same feeling as the webcam issue: it's the kind of thing that shows up quickly when using Windows 10 on a primary system but is going to be much more obscure if you only tested the Windows Insider previews in a virtual machine or secondary system—such systems are much less likely to be plugged in to all the many peripherals and gadgets that primary machines are. Microsoft's own advice is that the Insider previews should not be installed on your "everyday computer." That's good advice; the quality of the builds released to the Insider program is far too inconsistent to make it a good option for a machine that you depend on. But that has consequences: the Insider program is going to consistently miss this kind of hardware interaction.

Investigation of the issue and development of a fix is apparently underway.

It took roughly two years for crackers to put the first dents in Denuvo's surprisingly robust anti-piracy protection for PC games. Now, a Denuvo-protected game has been cracked just six weeks after its release, seemingly presaging an increased pace of efforts against the DRM scheme.

TorrentFreak reports on the new crack for indie critical darling Inside, which hit the scene earlier this week. The crack comes courtesy of CONSPIR4CY (aka CPY), the same group responsible for a crack of Denuvo-protected Rise of the Tomb Raider earlier this month.

While CPY's ROTTR crack came nearly seven months after the game was released, Inside's protection was broken about six weeks after it launched on the PC. This is an important distinction, since the bulk of a game's legitimate sales tend to come in the first few months after release (or during sales much later in their lifecycle). If crackers can manage to get the wait time for a Denuvo crack down to a matter of days, the protection's value to developers and publishers could wither.

(credit: Andrew Cunningham)

WhatsApp will do what it once said would never happen: let businesses use the messaging app to serve ads to users.

In a move that was inevitable once it was acquired by Facebook for $22 billion in 2014, WhatsApp has put its users on notice that it will soon begin sharing their phone numbers, and selected other data, with its parent company.

This information will then be used to offer customers "more relevant" Facebook ads, new "ways for people to communicate with businesses" via the app, and new friend suggestions, the blurb reads.