As 2011 winds to a close, let’s look back at the stories that were the most popular with Ars Technica’s readers. These are ranked one through ten in order of the number of pageviews; no other criteria were used to compile this list, which contains a bit of Apple, a bit of Anonymous, and a [...]
The best smartphones to carry with you into 2012: Looking to upgrade your phone with some unexpected holiday cash? Here are our picks for the best high-end and budget handsets of 2011. There’s no such thing as Android, only Android-compatible: Even to call Android “fragmented” assumes that it was or ought to be unified and [...]
The slow week between Christmas and New Year is finally almost over, but it wasn’t a boring week in Apple news here at Ars. We compared five different podcast apps for iOS, discussed potential fixes to the problem of iMessages going to stolen iPhones, discussed Apple’s latest patent award from the USPTO, and did a [...]
On Thursday, wireless telecom giant Verizon Wireless said it would begin charging consumers a $2 “convenience fee” for some bill payments starting January 15. That decision, which Verizon said was necessary to cover the costs of processing some payments, caught the attention of the Federal Communications Commission. Verizon then decided the fee wasn’t such a [...]
What we wouldn’t give to watch a “Blue Busters,” a company video made by Apple employees—yes, including Steve Jobs—posing as IBM-fighting Ghost Busters. Such a video does exist, and it’s currently housed at Stanford University’s Silicon Valley Archives as part of a collection donated by Apple and its employees. The location of the archive is in the [...]
A federal appeals court on Thursday reinstated a closely watched lawsuit accusing the federal government of working with the nation’s largest telecommunication companies to illegally funnel Americans’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency without court warrants. While the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals revived the long-running case brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, [...]
How do you look back on a year of gaming and try to find a common thread? I tried to look for something that connected the stories that are presented here as being some of the best—or most interesting—investigations into different aspects of gaming and the surrounding culture. Some stories were obvious, others were more [...]
We may not have heard much about patent licensing firm Lodsys in recent months, but independent app developers are still working together to fight the patent bully. The Appsterdam Legal Defense team—a growing group of iOS developers pooling their ideas and resources to fight back against Lodsys—has continued to take steps to protect themselves from [...]
A French computer reseller has filed a lawsuit against Apple, claiming the company is unfairly undercutting its partners with its own retail operations. Francois Prudent, CEO of France’s largest Apple reseller eBizcuss, told French newspaper Le Figaro (hat tip to GigaOm) that Apple is withholding its most popular products to stock its own stores and offering [...]
On December 27, the Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a warning about a vulnerability in wireless routers that use WiFi Protected Setup (WPS) to allow new devices to be connected to them. Within a day of the discovery, researchers at a Maryland-based computer security firm developed a tool that exploits that vulnerability, [...]