While thousands of tech vendors frantically demoed new gadgets and apps at the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a debate over the future of the Internet and how the government may regulate distribution of (often pirated) content was taking place down the hall. As Ars readers know, bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN) offer competing approaches to cracking down on piracy. [......]
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments today for FCC vs Fox Television Stations . The case pits the television networks against the Federal Communications Commission, the latter fighting for its right to regulate "fleeting" expletives and brief nude scenes on over-the-air TV. [......]
Tablet PCs have flirted with mobile gaming, and there are some fun titles out there that are playable on higher end Android and iPad devices. But it's not a true gaming platform, at least not yet. [......]
Today marks the end of an era for both Microsoft and the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. CES isn't shutting its doors -- not that we know of, anyway -- but the keynote Steve Ballmer delivered is Microsoft's final one[......]
While copyright owners test the legal limits of website takedown processes and push legislation greatly expanding powers to limit file sharing on the open Internet, a company that helps corporations protect intellectual property argues there is a better way: create more user-friendly services for acquiring legitimate content. Envisional, a firm familiar to Ars readers because of a study funded by NBC Universal 12 months ago, has produced data that content owners might say is an argument in favor of pending legislation like Protect-IP and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which have been criticized by many advocates of Internet freedom[......]
It’s increasingly becoming a wireless world, folks. Just check out the headlines from the past week or so. [......]
It’s CES time! You know what that means: a ton of new, awesome looking tech is going to be unveiled this week, some of which will never actually see the light of day, and the things that actually end up launching won’t hit the streets for a while yet. Before we dive too deeply into the future, let’s take a look at something that’s actually in the here and now[......]
Trojans—they're not just for hackers anymore. German police, for instance, love them; a scandal erupted in Parliament last year after federal investigators were found to be using custom spyware that could potentially record far more information than allowed by law. The story made headlines, but it lacked a certain sense of the bizarre[......]
For those of you who prefer not to roll your own gaming machines and would rather have a boutique system builder do it for your, Maingear, based out of New Jersey, announced it has begun equipping its Shift and F131 rigs with AMD's new Radeon HD 7950 and 7970 graphics cards (check out our performance preview of the 7970 here ), and will soon be offering them in its Vybe series. "'No Compromise’ and 'unmatched performance' are understatements when it comes to what we are seeing in the Maingear Labs," said Wallace Santos, CEO and Founder of Maingear. "With AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, gamers looking for a true over the top gaming experience will find what they are looking for." Maingear's Shift series is available in three different foundations, including Intel X79 and Z68 platforms, and AMD 990FX[......]
The Righthaven.com domain name went for $3,300 at auction today. Read More: The auction site Read the comments on this post [......]
A court in Paris, France has fined Google $65,000 because its search engine's autocomplete feature brings up the French word for "crook" when users type the name of an insurance company. Google had been sued by insurance company Lyonnaise de Garantie, which was offended by search results including the word "escroc," meaning crook, according to a story posted Tuesday by the Courthouse News Service . "Google had argued that it was not liable since the word, added under Google Suggest, was the result of an automatic algorithm and did not come from human thought," the article states[......]
We don't advocate real-world violence, but if you catch someone claiming PC gaming is dead, feel free to give them a wedgie, especially if he's quoting numbers that don't include online game sales. Take Steam for example. The ultra popular online PC (and Mac) gaming platform increased its year-over-year sales by 100 percent in 2011, and lest anyone chalk that up as an anomaly based on a rash of hit titles, this is the seventh straight year Steam has doubled its sales figures. [......]
Google’s Chrome browser has had a feature for the last few months that pre-loads web pages when you are searching on Google. [......]
Though a deeply divided Congress is currently considering Internet website censorship legislation, the US has no such official policy—not even for child porn, which is voluntarily blocked by some ISPs. Nor does the US have a government-backed "three strikes" or "graduated response" system of escalating warnings to particular users accused of downloading music and movies from file-sharing networks. Yet here was the ultimatum that the US Embassy in Madrid gave the Spanish government in February 2008: adopt such measures or we will punish you[......]
There’s no denying that SSDs are blazing fast and an all-around pleasure to have in your system, but for many folks, being limited to 128GB or 256GB just isn’t going to cut it. Enter Crucial: today, the memory maker announced the “Adrenaline Solid State Cache Solution,” which hopes to solve that problem (as the name implies)[......]
