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In annual tradition, advertisers cowed by NFL trademark bullying
Every year in late January or early February, two teams take to the field to play a football game that's watched by tens of millions of Americans. And every year, businesses launch ad campaigns to sell a variety of products—televisions, pizzas, soda—in conjunction with the game. And the overwhelming majority of these businesses avoid calling it the "Super Bowl." Why? They're afraid...

Week in Apple: post-Macworld|iWorld edition
This week, we wrapped up our coverage of the 2012 Macworld|iWorld conference in San Francisco just as Apple issued an update to Final Cut Pro X and gave the AirPort Utility an iOS makeover. Additionally, Tim Cook offered some strong words in response to doubts about Apple's attitude toward worker conditions in China, Neil Young recounted stories about Steve Jobs working towards higher-quality m...

Week in Gaming: Misleading game trailers, Online Passes and cat MMOs
This week, an animated trailer for an imaginary Zelda game got us wondering why exactly games often can't live up to the thrilling scenes we're shown in pre-release videos. We also looked at the slow redefinition of what an Online Pass can be used for, examined the legality of blocking used games sales, and spent a massively-multiplayer hour as a cat. Madden NFL and Tecmo Bowl both agree that ...

Week in tech: acting out over ACTA, Firefox 10, and a new KDE tablet
Kindle Fire dwarfs other Android tablets in market share after just three months: After three months, the Kindle Fire has an equal share of the Android tablet market with the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and has already outstripped the Motorola Xoom, Asus Transformer, and Acer Iconia Tab. Firefox 10 arrives with new dev tools and full-screen API: Mozilla has released version 10 of the Firefox Web browse...

Week in science, with unusual amounts of insanity
It was a crazy week for science. Normally, when we say that, we mean there was a lot of important news going on; this week, some of the actual stories involved a fair degree of nuttiness. These included an overt attempt to inject religion into science classes and a theory that attempts to explain everything without even bothering to deal with most of the fundamental particles identified by ph...

Kelihos botnet remains very much dead after all
A spam botnet brought down four months ago, which was once capable of pumping out almost four billion spam messages a day, remains very much dead, two of the companies behind the takedown said. That determination, announced late Friday by Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab representatives, contradicted published reports, including one from Ars, that claimed the network of infected computers had been r...

LibreOffice stats: 400 total contributors, thousands of code commits every month
The Document Foundation (TDF), which launched in 2010 to develop LibreOffice, has published statistics that illustrate the project's rapid growth. Approximately 400 total developers have contributed code to the project. The number of contributors who are active each month generally ranges from 50 to over 100. LibreOffice is a community-driven fork of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The ...

Indiana backing away from bill allowing creation "science" into classrooms
Earlier this week, we reported on efforts by an Indiana state legislator who was interested in getting creationism inserted into the state's science classrooms. He managed to get a modified bill, one that was less sectarian but still overtly promoted religion, passed by the state's Senate. Yesterday, however, the leader of the Indiana House voiced unease about having the state wade into an ar...

FDA whistleblowers say government retaliated with spyware
A group of former FDA scientists who spoke out against the agency's allegedly flawed device-approval process are suing the feds for intercepting Gmail and Yahoo Mail messages by installing spy programs on their work computers. Although the computers were owned by the government, the plaintiffs say they were explicitly granted the right to use them for personal purposes. Back in January 2009, ...

Apple updates iBooks Author EULA to clarify restriction on format, not content
Apple updated iBooks Author to version 1.0.1 on Friday afternoon, the only change being an update to the software's controversial end user license agreement. The updated EULA now specifically only applies distribution restrictions to the interactive .ibooks format files generated by the app. Read the comments on this post

Study of deadly flu sparks debate amidst fears of new pandemic
The 2009 flu pandemic, although not especially deadly, revealed just how quickly a new influenza virus could elude surveillance and spread internationally. It also left health experts eying the disease that many fear could cause the next pandemic: H5N1, the avian flu. According to World Health Organization standards, that virus is phenomenally deadly, killing about half the people that contr...

"I was punched in the face": Kim Dotcom says police used excessive force in raid
Megaupload boss Kim Dotcom (read our in-depth profile) was denied bail on Thursday by a New Zealand court. Dotcom insisted that he had no desire to flee the country and merely wanted to be with his pregnant wife and their three young children. But US attorneys argued the Dotcom posed a severe flight risk, and the court rejected Dotcom's bail request. In court testimony, Dotcom described the dr...

Refurbished Motorola Xooms came with private data from previous owners
Motorola facilitated the sale of a bunch of refurbished Xoom tablets with former owners' data still on them, the company announced in a press release Friday. The Xooms were part of a deal on flash sale site woot.com last fall, and of the thousands sold, 100 were shipped out to new owners with information the previous owners had left on them, including passwords, account information, photos, and...

ACTA on the edge in Europe? Poland suspends ratification, Greece gets hacked
Anger at last month's decision by the European Union and 22 of its member states to sign the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has led to widespread protests, hacked Web sites, and legislators backing away from the treaty. The anti-ACTA protests that saw Polish politicians don Guy Fawkes masks in parliament have borne fruit. After experiencing a considerable backlash in Poland, Prime ...

Boom to bust: THQ's "revolutionary" uDraw now filling warehouse shelves
Back in the long-ago days of the 2010 holiday season, it looked like THQ had a hit on its hands with its out-of-left-field uDraw Game Tablet, a slate-like controller that used a stylus to let players draw on the TV. The company sold 1.7 million of them to Wii owners by early 2011, beating expectations and leading some to speculate that the uDraw might be the biggest game control revolution this...

IPhone, iPad injunction lifted in Germany, but Apple still faces iCloud action
Apple will be able to sell its iPad 2 with 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4 via its online store in Germany after all, thanks to a temporary extension courtesy of a German court. As noted by the BBC, an appeals court lifted the ban on certain iOS devices just after Apple was forced to remove them from its German online store earlier on Friday. Still, not all is going Apple's way, as a Mannheim Regi...

Anonymous pokes fate bear, leaks FBI conference call about Anonymous
Anonymous has begun taunting its police pursuers in ever-more aggressive ways, upping the ante today by releasing an internal FBI conference call in which agents from across the country and police in the UK share status updates on their investigations of the group—and reveal that major new action is coming soon. Much of the call is taken up by a UK investigator from the Metropolitan Pol...

How to watch the Super Bowl on the biggest and littlest screens
For the first time, the NFL is providing live streaming video of the Super Bowl, both on Web browsers and through a smartphone application. Now you'll have any number of viewing options and combinations: sit in front of an HDTV with a laptop or tablet to gain DVR controls and extra camera angles not available on the main NBC feed. If you can't get to a TV or browser (or if someone is blocking y...

Ars and nature.com at the American Museum of Natural History: good stuff
For nearly a year now, Ars has worked with nature.com to organize a monthly panel discussion called Science Online NYC. We're pleased to announce that, in February, we'll also be working with the American Museum of Natural History to organize a special program entitled "Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication with Social Media," which will be part of the global Social Media Week. The ...

Hands-on with Node.js support in Komodo IDE 7
ActiveState has released a major new version of the Komodo integrated development environment (IDE). The update, which is called Komodo 7, introduces several useful new features and support for additional programming languages. Komodo is a high-end commercial development tool for programmers who work with scripting languages such as Python and Ruby. It's especially well-suited for developing l...

Mozilla developing Web push notification system for Firefox
Mozilla is developing a push notification system for the Firefox Web browser. It will allow users to receive notifications from websites without having to keep those sites open in their browser. The system will also be able to relay push notifications to mobile devices. The project is part of Mozilla's broader effort to ensure that the Web is a competitive platform that can match the capabilit...

AMD sets out its plans for 2013, hints at a possible ARM future
AMD today laid out its plans for the next couple of years at its Financial Analyst Day. The plans are a mix of familiar and logical extensions of the company's current products, but contained some more surprising elements: specifically, AMD opened the door to future processors that include ARM CPUs. The underlying themes to AMD's plans are faster iteration—a GPU-like 18-24 months between...

The route to a Kindle owner's heart goes through the wallet
A customer satisfaction survey of Kindle Fire owners shows that while the vast majority are satisfied with their purchase, it is mainly the low price fueling their happiness. ChangeWave Research asked a sample of new Kindle Fire owners how they were enjoying their device so far; slightly more than half reported being "very satisfied," and 59 percent said the $199 price of the Kindle Fire was wh...

Book Review: The Infinity Puzzle
The Infinity Puzzle sounds like one of those wooden gadgets that you can play with for a few minutes before wanting to hurl it across the room in frustration, but the infinity puzzle of this book's title actually refers to a mathematical quandary that stumped particle physicists for the first half of last century. The story of how physics moved beyond this roadblock has now been told by Frank C...

EFF ready to sue if "innocent customers" can't get Megaupload data back
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today officially asked all parties involved in the Megaupload criminal case to refrain from deleting any data stored on servers once leased by the file-hosting service—and it suggested it was willing to sue over the matter. Read the comments on this post