The House and Senate are both drafting "rogue sites" legislation that will likely support website blocking at the domain name level and will require online ad networks and credit card companies to stop working with sites on the blacklist. That idea is controversial enough when only the government has the power to pursue the censoring; it gets even more controversial if private companies get the right to bring a censorship action in court without waiting for government to act.

Both houses of Congress are considering such a "private right of action" as they work to review and revise last year's COICA Web censorship bill, but Google can't say strongly enough what a bad idea this would be.

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Atari announced on Tuesday that it is launching Atari's Greatest Hits, a collection of 18 arcade classics and 82 Atari 2600 console games, for iOS. The free app includes the original '70s arcade classic Pong, with the other 99 games available via in-app purchase. The app runs on iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads, and it will be the first to support the iCade mini iPad arcade cabinet set to ship this June.

The game includes access to arcade classics like Asteroids, Centipede, Millipede, Battlezone, Missile Command, Crystal Castles, and Tempest. Additionally, users can play a selection of Atari 2600 games like Combat, Adventure, Night Driver, Star Raiders, Outlaw, all the Real Sports titles, and Yars Revenge. The games come in 99¢ four-packs that are loosely theme-based—the "Super Breakout Pack" includes Super Breakout, Breakout, Off-the-Wall, and Circus Atari, while the "Tic-Tac-Toe Pack" includes 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, A Game of Concentration, Backgammon, and B...

Toyota's Scion brand, known for its basic vehicle designs that buyers can customize with style and performance options, recently offered a custom theme for jailbroken iPhones in order to promote the new 2011 Scion tC. Shortly after the campaign started, however, Toyota had its mobile advertising agency pull the theme and ads promoting it from the Cydia jailbreak store after Apple caught wind of the campaign. The move appears to be an effort to keep high-profile companies like Toyota using official channels, such as iAd, to reach iOS users.

Apple enthusiast site ModMyi.com had been working with Velti, a mobile advertising firm that was also contracted by Toyota to promote the Scion brand online. ModMyi.com founder Kyle Matthews said in a forum post that the two companies had discussions about building a custom iOS jailbreak theme to promote the new tC as far back as April of last year. (Themes are a collection of interface modifications for iOS, which can include custom icons, font...

The developers behind the GNOME project have announced the official release of GNOME 3.0, a significant redesign of the open source desktop environment. The update introduces a new desktop shell that offers a streamlined window management workflow and a more modern look and feel. The new version also represents a major architectural overhaul, with many important enhancements to the GNOME platform's technical underpinnings.

The effort to deliver GNOME 3.0 has a long history. It took the developers years to reach a consensus about how to proceed with the new version, and years more to implement it. The protracted development period has largely paid off in stability and coherence. It's fit for duty out of the starting gate, though there is still plenty of room for further improvement.

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The iconic light cycles from the Tron films aren't necessarily the first thing you'd think of when creating a new board game, but that doesn't mean it can't work. Brett King created a custom game to play with his kids and posted the results on YouTube, and we can't help but be impressed.

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It seems that it's the season for Tevatron data analysis, as a set of papers is doing the rounds based on the full set of data from its most recent run (another run, its last, is in progress that will apparently double the total data). In March came word that there was an odd asymmetry in the production of top quarks that could be explained by a number of particles that have been limited to the realm of theory. Now there's been a paper that suggests the data might contain hints of the decay of something that nobody had predicted, a particle with a mass of about 144GeV that doesn't behave the way theorists predict the Higgs should.

The new work is described in a paper that has been placed on the arXiv preprint server; it has been submitted for peer review and publication, but hasn't passed these hurdles yet. The work builds on an earlier paper in which the data from the CDF detector was scanned to look for the production of the particles that carry the...

University students faced with a sudden Internet and media blackout begin to feel withdrawal symptoms after 24 hours, according to a study conducted by the University of Maryland's International Center for Media & the Public Agenda. The study followed the reactions of 1,000 students around the globe after they were asked to abstain from all forms of media for a day, leading the researchers to believe that Internet addiction is a real phenomenon, even if there's debate about it as a clinical diagnosis.

Students from 10 countries—including the US, Mexico, China, Argentina, the UK—all reported distress, isolation, confusion, boredom, and a feeling of addiction when they had to go 24 hours without any form of media, including Internet, music, games, news shows, and their cell phones. However, the numbers were not all equal—students from the US and China (mainland and Hong Kong) showed the highest percentages of feeling addicted, at 23 and 22 percent respectively.

Outlook for Mac will soon be able to sync calendars, notes, and tasks with your iOS device. Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it plans to release Office for Mac 2011 Service Pack 1 (SP1) next week, which will bring the new syncing support to Outlook along with other stability and security updates to the suite. But while users will be able to sync their Outlook calendars to their iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches, they won't be able to sync them easily with Apple's own MobileMe service.

According to Office for Mac's senior director of Product Management Pat Fox, iOS device syncing has been one of the Mac Business Unit's top feature requests ever since releasing Outlook for Mac in 2010. The SP1 update will enable Outlook to interface with Apple's own Sync Services, which will in turn allow the data to show up on an iOS device without any extra effort on the user's part.

The company does warn, however, that calendars and tasks won't be synced with Mobi...

There is very little color in Mayhem 3D, as the game is presented entirely in black, white, and a red that looks like dried blood. Such a limited palette may hurt lesser games, but Mayhem treats it like a middle finger aimed at more serious racing games. Remember: The Ramones only knew a few chords, and they changed the face of rock n' roll. 

When racing or smashing up other cars, the screen is framed in a thick white border, making the world look like an animated comic book. The game even comes with two pairs of red and blue 3D glasses, and you can turn on the primitive 3D effect to make everything look even more surreal and outrageous.

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In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly-launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our question bag, provide our own take, then tap the wisdom of our readers. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.

Question: I rent an apartment where I can't do any substantial modifications to the rooms. There are a ton of WiFi networks competing for the same spectrum, so doing stuff like streaming video across the home network is choppy. In a perfect world, I'd run CAT-6 cable through the place and set up a gigabit Ethernet network, but that's not practical. There is coax running to each room, and I'm vaguely familiar with powerline networking. What are my networking options, and what is the performance of these technologies like?

Fortunately for you, there are multiple technology alliances and advocacy groups working at developing alternative methods for spreading the Internet to all cor...

Universities increasingly outsource e-mail and other services to companies like Google—but if Google's software isn't usable by all students, are the schools breaking the law?

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the largest and oldest nationwide organization for those with blindness, has filed a complaint with the Department of Justice alleging that New York University, Northwestern University, and certain Oregon public schools are violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. The complaints, sent March 15, call upon the DOJ to investigate the schools’ use of Google’s education software, and they include videos describing the accessibility problems.

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In early 2009, then Federal Communications Commission Chair Michael Copps offered a frank assessment of the agency's website, fcc.gov. "The Commission has a wealth of resources on its website," Copps observed. "Some of it is easy to find and use; much of it is, unfortunately, difficult to locate and even more difficult to use—for us at the Commission, and, worse, for the public at large. The Commission must update its website to be more user-friendly."

A few months earlier, we had said the same. "Let's face it, fcc.gov still looks like it was thrown together six weeks after Netscape went public over a decade ago," our post complained. "The result: the only people who can really access it are telecom lawyers [and] public interest groups with their autoforms."

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The Penrose Triangle is as elegant as it is impossible—much like M.C. Escher’s drawings, it presents a two-dimensional illusion that the eye interprets as three-dimensional. The task of effectively creating this illusion in three dimensions, without resorting to hidden openings or gimmicky twists, seemed daunting until a Netherlands-based designer named Ulrich Schwanitz succeeded in printing the object recently. But Schwanitz, who posted a YouTube video of his design achievement in action, wouldn’t share his secret with the world. Instead, he made his “impossible triangle” available for purchase through Shapeways, a company that fabricates custom 3D designs, for $70.

Within weeks of Schwanitz’s “discovery,” however, a 3D modeler (and former Shapeways intern) named Artur Tchoukanov watched the video and figured out how to recreate the shape. He then uploaded instructions to Thingiverse, an open-source repository of 3D models and content. BoingBoing picked up the story (well, p...

Google already warns users of its search engine if the page they're about to click on is likely to be malware. The company also has an API, the Safe Browsing API, to allow Web browsers to check if a URL is bad or not. This API is already used by Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. 

Google has just announced that it's going to take this protection even further in its Chrome browser and apply it to executable downloads. Click a link that downloads a program Google's Safe Browsing API regards as hostile and you'll see a warning, along with an option to cancel the download.

Initially, malicious Windows programs will be the target. Such programs are unfortunately commonplace and generally depend on social engineering tricks—rather than outright security flaws—to lure users into installing them, with fake video codecs and bogus anti-virus software both being popular approaches.

A similar security system, designed for a similar purpose, was included in Internet Explorer 9. In that system, each d...

Symantec detected more than three billion malware attacks from 286 million malware variants last year, according to the 2010 edition of its annual Internet Security Threat Report, published today. Web-based attacks were up 93 percent on 2009, and you were most likely to come across a malicious Web site if you were on the hunt for pornography; 49 percent of malicious sites found through Web searches were pornographic.

Overall, the report paints a grim picture of the Internet threat landscape. Software flaws are abundant. In 2010, 6,253 software vulnerabilities were reported, higher than in any previous edition of the report. 14 vulnerabilities were used in zero-day attacks, including four different Windows zero-days used in the Stuxnet attack. 

Though data breaches are still relatively rare—457 in 2010 according to aggregator DataLossDB—they still put many at risk. About 61,000 identities were compromised on average, with breaches in the finance sector particularly big, at an average...

Workers in Japan are still struggling to limit environmental contamination at the Fukushima plant. The latest problem has been a break that is allowing heavily contaminated water flow directly into the ocean, a leak that has continued despite two attempts to plug it. Meanwhile, worries persist about the state of the reactor cores on the site.

Update:  TEPCO, which runs the reactors, has announced the leak has been stopped. The New York Times has also obtained an assessment of the Fukushima reactors performed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that highlights some of the challenges facing the cleanup effort.

We'll start with the ocean. As we said in our previous coverage, all indications are that the cooling system for at least some of the reactors is no longer a closed loop. In order to keep the reactors cool, workers at the site are pumping prodigious amounts of water into the cooling system of some of the reactors, where it's either being vaporized into steam, or leaking bac...

It has been five years since the AMD/ATI merger promised us the "Fusion" of a CPU and GPU onto a single die, and on Monday AMD finally made good on that promise with the shipping of the company's first true multicore CPU/GPU combo parts, codenamed "Llano." Sure, the Brazos platform launch was technically the first time that AMD put a CPU and GPU onto the same die, but Llano is supposed to be what the company originally intended with Fusion—a combination of CPU cores and vector hardware that's somehow more "integrated" than a normal on-die GPU. (The exact way in which the latter is true is not clear to me; if anyone knows, feel free to enlighten.)

The picture above is from AMD's blog post announcing that Llano is shipping to OEMs, and it shows the workers in the company's Singapore factory surrounding a box that presumably contains one of the first batches of Llano processors.

AMD is calling Llano's combination of a CPU and GPU on the same die an ...

Update: an earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that the joint resolution had passed; in reality, it's only the rules for that resolution that have passed.

The House of Representatives has approved procedures for passing H.J. Res 37 (PDF), a joint resolution that, if enacted by Congress and signed by the president, would undo the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules, enacted in December. The bill reads as follows:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Congress disapproves the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission relating to the matter of preserving the open Internet and broadband industry practices (Report and Order FCC 10-201, adopted by the Commission on December 21, 2010), and such rule shall have no force or effect.

The legislation was first approved along partisan lines in the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications, th...

Sony may be forced to postpone the release of its new PlayStation portable, codenamed NGP, until next year due to production disruptions resulting from the tsunami and earthquake that hit Japan in March. This may be good news for the platform's developers, allowing them more time to flesh out their titles, but will also give other portable systems a bigger window to entrench themselves in the minds of consumers.

When Sony initially announced the NGP in January, it was planning a release in time for this year's holiday shopping season in multiple regions, Jack Tretton, president of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, told Bloomberg. Tretton said one of the three main regions—Europe, the US, and Asia—may still receive the NGP by the end of the year, but he declined to say which one.

A report released by Nomura Securities last month showed Sony was not in good shape following the disasters in Japan. Production at seven different plants has been suspended or curtailed, includ...

Google’s Android platform has been steadily growing since its release in 2008. Now, one out of every three US smartphone owners is using Android-based devices, according to a recent report.

So why aren’t developers more excited about the platform?

Of the 69.5 million Americans who owned smartphones as of the end of February, 33 percent of them were Android devices, according to a report from ComScore. It’s a leap of seven points in a period of only three months.

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The European Union's new point person on copyright policy won't take up her post until mid-April, but she's already stirring up controversy. That's because Maria Martin-Prat spent years directing "global legal policy" for IFPI, the global recording industry's London-based trade group, before moving back into government. The appointment raises new questions about the past private-sector work of government officials, especially those crafting policy or issuing legal judgments on the same issues they once lobbied for.

Martin-Prat isn't a lifelong music industry employee; she worked for the EU, left for IFPI, and then rejoined the EU several years ago. She's currently working for DG MARKT, the Internal Market branch of the European Commission. She runs MARKT's distinctly non-glamorous-sounding unit E.1, "Free movement of services and establishment I, Services Directive," and she makes sure that EU countries don't enact illegal barriers to halt the free movement of service professionals...

The Antarctic's ozone hole forms in the stratosphere every winter. It's a region of low ozone concentrations that puts the local population at risk of heightened UV exposure when the sun returns. Fortunately, the local population is tiny, and the hole dissipates considerably before reaching populated areas of the Southern Hemisphere. Although the atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere tends to limit the formation of a similar hole in more populated areas, this past year's conditions proved to be an exception, and a large area of depleted ozone has formed over Scandinavia, resulting in a warning about UV exposure from the World Meteorological Organization.

The discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole is credited with generating the political will to push through a phase out of the chemicals that are thought to be responsible for its depletion. Despite the success of the Montreal Protocol, which called for the phase out of chloroflourocar...

Students who use technology for self-promotion tend to be more narcissistic than those who simply use technology to connect to others. That's according to a research paper by Flagler College psychology professor Meghan M. Saculla and Western Kentucky University psychology professor W. Pitt Derryberry, who set out to discover whether there was a correlation between moral judgment development, narcissism, and technology use. The paper will be presented at the 2011 American Educational Research Association conference, which begins at the end of this week.

The researchers observed 279 students' use of Electronic Media and Communication Devices (EMCD) to make posts and upload content to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. They also surveyed the students' about their own perceived usage patterns to see whether the data matched up. The researchers focused on narcissistic and self-promoting behavior, as well as moral development based on the research of Lawrence Kohlberg.

Games from PopCap tend to be sent to the press a good while before they're released, and you can tell when the new addiction lands on our collective desk: the bleary-eyed looks of exhaustion are industry-wide. If you work PR for PopCap you're more like a dealer, but even the dealers need to switch things up every now and again. That's why PopCap created 4th and Battery, a sort of indie label within the company.

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The latest mobile phone user survey from market research firm ChangeWave reveals similar levels of overall satisfaction between iPhone 4 users on Verizon versus those on AT&T. However, Verizon iPhone 4 users seem to suffer from dropped calls far less often than their AT&T peers, supporting early anecdotal evidence from Verizon iPhone users.

"In terms of overall satisfaction the two iPhones are virtually indistinguishable," according to ChangeWave vice president of research Paul Carton. In March, 82 percent of Verizon iPhone 4 users reported being very satisfied with the device, while 80 percent of AT&T iPhone users reported the same. Only two percent reported any dissatisfaction with the device on either carrier.

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