Sure, it’s a little early to call winners, but not many tech companies will be able to top Google’s genuinely clever, fun, and novel approach to April Fools Day 2012. Any other gag will seem a little half-hearted after Google’s 8-bit maps view, which reminds the nostalgic of games like early Dragon Quest or Final [...]
During the weekend, even Ars takes an occasional break from revisiting the history of Sealand or discovering crazy game jams inspired by Twitter accounts. Weekend Ar(t)s is a chance to share what we’re watching/listening/reading or otherwise consuming this week. The key word for Weekend Ar(t)s this week is consuming. Usually, any excuse is good enough [...]
Facebook pushed its Timeline profile to all brand pages on Friday, a major aesthetic revamp to the face of businesses representing themselves on Facebook. Introduced in September, the Timeline feature is a running list of your interactions with Facebook. Status updates, photos and app posts are displayed in reverse chronological order below a large cover [...]
This Q&A is part of a biweekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 80+ Q&A sites. Lord Torgamus asks: I want to join an open source project for the same reasons as anyone else: I want to help create something [...]
As everyone continues to recover from new iPad overdoses, our top Apple coverage from the week was mostly populated by non-iPad news. We did take a look at the state of styli on the iPad, but we also examined how iPhones leak the IDs of wireless routers they’ve connected to, whether Ars readers still use [...]
This week saw rumors of yet another console maker that might be planning to implement a technical solution to the used game “problem” for its next system, prompting a controversial editorial where I suggest such a move wouldn’t be the end of the world for the video game market from an economic perspective. We also [...]
Death of a data haven: cypherpunks, WikiLeaks, and the world’s smallest nation: Rumors suggest that WikiLeaks might try to avoid government power by putting its servers out to sea, but the idea isn’t a new one—it already failed miserably a decade ago. Ars takes you inside the collapse of HavenCo. Gun-shy TSA gets critic booted [...]
March 31 is World Backup Day, the day that the storage tech industry exhorts us all to back up our digital possessions and practice good data hygiene. But there’s one thing that’s just as important as backing up your data in the first place, or possibly more so: properly getting rid of your old backups [...]
Lightning strikes shift a spectacular amount of electricity around, but we’ve really only fully appreciated their power in recent years, as we’ve discovered that they also produce antimatter and—as described this week—free neutrons. As if that isn’t enough to make the Earth seem like a scary place, this week featured stories on what basic demographics [...]
The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a brief on behalf of an Ohio man in a federal court case brought by the United States against Kim Dotcom, founder and owner of the file-sharing locker Megaupload. The brief requested that Kyle Goodwin, and users like him, be allowed access to the files they had stored on the [...]