Hackers claiming to have the source code for Symantec's PCAnywhere and Norton Antivirus software attempted to extort $50,000 from the company, according to e-mail transcripts posted on February 7.

But the point of contact for the hacker group involved in the code exposure claimed in an e-mail conversation with Reuters that they never intended to take money from Symantec, and that the negotiations were a scam in themselves to embarrass the company. And according to the transcript, it was Symantec that set the price of the hackers' destruction of the code, along with a demand that the hackers publish a statement saying that they had lied about obtaining the code.

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The strange case of Hard Drive Productions versus "anyone that the video company's lawyers suspect of illegally downloading its pornographic movies" has taken a new and interesting twist. One of the nearly 1,500 "Does" being sued for allegedly sharing a Hard Drive film online has resorted to what seems, at first glance, like a novel defense. In addition to her insistence that she never actually downloaded "Amateur Allure Jen," Liuxia Wong of Solano County, California argues that copyright law doesn't even apply to smut clips. They are not copyrightable, and therefore no infringement occurred.

The matter is quite simple, Wong's petition for declaratory relief explains to the federal court in San Francisco. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution defines the purpose of copyright: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

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There's renewed buzz about support for "retina" displays on Apple's portable Macs thanks to higher-resolution cursor images showing up in Mac OS X 10.7.3. Noticed by a handful of Mac developers, there are new UI images for things like the Safari finger, the Mail gripping hand, and one of the screenshot camera cursors, among (undoubtedly) several others.

It's reasonable to assume that Apple might want to add these new UI elements into the OS for those using higher-resolution external displays. However, as noted by Daring Fireball, those who have Mac minis connected via HDMI to TV sets observed recently that their machines rebooted directly into HiDPI mode after upgrading to 10.7.3 last week without prompting, which could indicate plans to release future MacBooks with HiDPI displays.

Talk of a "retina" display MacBook Pro has been popping up more and more over the last six months or so. We acknowledged in December that we may end up seeing Apple release such a thing in 2012, and a thread in our forums indicates that users believe it will happen eventually—it's just a matter of when. As Chris Foresman wrote recently: "Apple is expected to have similar resolution displays ready for the iPad 3 in early spring, and the same technology would likely be used to make such a high-resolution display suitable for the MacBook Pro." Combined with the expected Ivy Bridge processors from Intel later this year, Apple could take the opportunity to upgrade the Pro line with new processors and higher-resolution displays in one fell swoop.

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Major Hollywood studios are still reeling from last month's resounding defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act. The latest sign of the studios's changed posture is a letter that Paramount Pictures has sent to a number of professors around the country seeking an opportunity to discuss the challenges of fighting online copyright infringement on campus.

"We at Paramount have been humbled by the strong public opposition to the proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation," wrote Paramount's Alfred Perry in a letter dated February 2 and obtained by infojustice.org. "The extent of the negative reaction surprised us."

Perry wanted to "exchange ideas about content theft, its challenges, and possible ways to address it. As these last few weeks made painfully clear, we still have much to learn. We would love to come to campus and do exactly that."

Perry asked to come to campus and "give a formal presentation followed by an open discussion period." He said he would also be happy to "join for a session of an existing course or seminar."

If Paramount wants to learn from and dialogue with its critics, more power to the company and its executives. But that attitude doesn't seem to go all the way to the top of the corporate ladder. Philippe Dauman, CEO of Paramount's parent company Viacom, last week lashed out at the "mob mentality" that killed the Senate's PROTECT IP Act. (We recently covered Dauman's record-breaking $50 million pay raise for 2010.)

"It became almost religious dogma that any legislation that might emerge through the process built around the Senate bill would have broken the Internet, created censorship around the world," he said at last week's D:Dive into Media conference. "The fact of the matter is I think the bill that would have emerged would have been very reasonable."

Media and technology companies, he said, "should be working together. If you have a legitimate argument with a particular provision, it should be discussed rationally and then you get legislation."

Of course, "working together" is relative. Both SOPA and PIPA began life as tough bills catering almost exclusively to major rightsholders, rather than emerging from some kind of stakeholder dialogue. And Dauman's allies in the recording industry have shown little interest in improving the OPEN Act, an alternative to SOPA that gives accused website operators greater due process rights. Last week the Recording Industry Association of America called for the legislation to be scrapped rather than amended.

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I love science. The joy of discovery in pure research combines with applied science to leave me fantasizing about future technology. Add in the occasional WTF moment and the comedy inherent in poorly prepared presentations, and you have the perfect occupation. Unfortunately, science sometimes attracts people who pull the wings off a cockroach, pin it on its back, and stick electrodes inside it to use it as a mini-electricity generator.

Now, I hate cockroaches as much as anyone, and there is a certain satisfaction in extracting revenge for all those restless nights in rooms that, shall we say, rustled, but... Surely there was a good reason for this?

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The first model of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's low-cost Linux computer will likely be available for purchase later this month. The organization announced today that manufacturing on the first batch is set to complete on February 20.

The $35 computer, which is a bare board the size of a deck of playing cards, has a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM. A second model with lower specs will eventually be released for $25. According to a statement issued today by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the $35 model will probably be available for purchase by the end of the month unless there are additional production delays.

We reported on the Raspberry Pi computer last month when manufacturing was set to begin. Completion of the first batch was delayed because the manufacturer had difficulty sourcing a component. The issue was resolved and production resumed.

In addition to announcing the expected ate of completion for the first batch, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has also announced the availability of technical documentation from Broadcom with details about the SoC used in the Raspberry Pi board. The document is available for download as a PDF file.

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Barnes & Noble received a boost in its patent infringement case against Microsoft after staff attorneys at the US International Trade Commission recommended that ITC Judge Theodore Essex find that the book company had not infringed on three Microsoft patents, reports Bloomberg.

Microsoft brought the case against Barnes & Noble in March of last year, claiming that the NOOK and NOOK Color tablets infringed on five patents. In the run up to the eventual hearings, Redmond dropped two of the patents from the case, with three remaining.

Essex discarded Barnes & Noble's affirmative defense in which the company alleged that Microsoft's attempt to assert patents against Android was a breach of antitrust law, leaving subsequent discussion to revolve around the validity and applicability of Microsoft's patents. The ITC lawyers, acting as an independent third party and giving their own assessment of the evidence presented, argue that there is no infringement case to answer.

After Essex has reviewed the relevant evidence presented by Microsoft, Barnes & Noble, and the ITC's own lawyers, he is expected to release his findings on April 27th. This initial determination will then be reviewed by an ITC panel, which will make the final decision on the case's outcome.

The software giant is downplaying the significance of the ITC lawyers' position. In a statement, a company representative said, "This was a preliminary argument by the Office of Unfair Import Investigations ('OUII') staff attorney, which was filed before the presentation of the evidence at the hearing has occurred. The OUII staff may change its position after the hearing. Additionally, the administrative law judge will hear the evidence and arguments at the hearing and will come to his own conclusion."

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Google's Chrome browser will stop relying on a decades-old method for ensuring secure sockets layer certificates are valid after one of the company's top engineers compared it to seat belts that break when they are needed most.

The browser will stop querying CRL, or certificate revocation lists, and databases that rely on OCSP, or online certificate status protocol, Google researcher Adam Langley said in a blog post published on Sunday. He said the services, which browsers are supposed to query before trusting a credential for an SSL-protected address, don't make end users safer because Chrome and most other browsers establish the connection even when the services aren't able to ensure a certificate hasn't been tampered with.

"So soft-fail revocation checks are like a seat-belt that snaps when you crash," Langley wrote. "Even though it works 99% of the time, it's worthless because it only works when you don't need it."

SSL critics have long complained that the revocation checks are mostly useless. Attackers who have the ability to spoof the websites and certificates of Gmail and other trusted websites typically have the ability to replace warnings that the credential is no longer valid with a response that says the server is temporarily down. Indeed, Moxie Marlinspike's SSL Strip hacking tool automatically supplies such messages, effectively bypassing the measure.

"While the benefits of online revocation checking are hard to find, the costs are clear: online revocation checks are slow and compromise privacy," Langley added. That's because the checks add a median time of 300 milliseconds and a mean of almost 1 second to page loads, making many websites reluctant to use SSL. Marlinspike and others have also complained that the services allow certificate authorities to compile logs of user IP addresses and the sites they visit over time.

Chrome will instead rely on its automatic update mechanism to maintain a list of certificates that have been revoked for security reasons. Langley called on certificate authorities to provide a list of revoked certificates that Google bots can automatically fetch. The time frame for the Chrome changes to go into effect are "on the order of months," a Google spokesman said.

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The Document Foundation (TDF) announced plans last year to create mobile and cloud versions of LibreOffice. A preliminary iOS porting effort that was undertaken earlier in 2011 demonstrated the viability of the project and showed that the open source office suite could have a future beyond the desktop.

In a presentation this week at the FOSDEM conference, SUSE developer Michael Meeks shed some light on the current status of the porting project. The presentation slides, which he published on his blog, offer insight into some of the underlying technical details and the rationale for some of the high-level design decisions.

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Jonathan Riddell, the lead developer of the Kubuntu project, announced today that his work on the KDE-based Ubuntu variant will no longer be funded by Canonical after the upcoming 12.04 release. Kubuntu will be developed entirely by volunteers, much like other community-maintained variants of Ubuntu.

Riddell will continue to be employed by Canonical, but working on Kubuntu will be confined to his free time. In order for the Kubuntu project to continue operating, Riddell says that community members will have to take a more active role in doing unpopular tasks such as ISO testing.

"The practical changes are I won't be able to work on KDE bits in my work time after 12.04 and there won't be paid support for versions after 12.04," he wrote. "This is a rational business decision, Kubuntu has not been a business success after 7 years of trying, and it is unrealistic to expect it to continue to have financial resources put into it."

Riddell and the Kubuntu team have done extraordinary work over the years to make Kubuntu a competitive Linux distribution. The quality and maturity of the distro have risen sharply over the past few years—it now rivals the best KDE distributions and has displaced openSUSE as our preferred environment for KDE testing. Although Kubuntu has managed to attract an audience, it has never been a commercially successful product for Canonical.

KDE's underlying Qt toolkit was recently added to the default Ubuntu installation. There are a lot of areas where Qt's integration with the rest of the Ubuntu environment could potentially be improved. It makes sense for Canonical to work on making Qt a first-class citizen in Ubuntu rather than funding a KDE variant of the distribution.

Kubuntu users who want to join the development effort and participate in testing and maintaining the distribution can learn more about how to get involved at the project's website.

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A Miami journalist has recovered video of police officers arresting him after it was deleted from his camera. The man was covering a police effort to evict Occupy Miami protestors. He plans to file a complaint with the police department and with the United States Department of Justice.

On January 31, Miami police evicted Occupy Miami protesters from their downtown campsite. On hand to cover the action was photojournalist Carlos Miller. Along with protestors and other journalists, he was pushed down the street by a line of police in riot gear. He tried to circle around the block to return to his car, but he found his path blocked by a second line of police officers.

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The website of a law firm that represented a US Marine accused of leading a massacre that killed 24 Iraqi civilians remained inaccessible on Monday, three days after hackers with Anonymous took credit for an attack that compromised the site and exposed almost 3GB of confidential e-mails.

The breach of Puckett & Farajcame to light on Friday when Russian news site RT.com reported it was defaced to protest the firm's successful defense of Marine Sgt. Frank Wuterich. He was recently convicted on reduced charges of dereliction of duty in what was once a manslaughter case involving the death of 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq.

"As part of our ongoing efforts to expose the corruption of the court systems and the brutality of US imperialism, we want to bring attention to USMC Sgt. Frank Wuterich who along with his squad murdered dozens of unarmed civilians during the Iraqi Occupation," a message left on the firm's vandalized homepage read. "Can you believe this scumbag had his charges reduced to involuntary manslaughter and got away with only a pay cut?"

Anonymous members claimed to have retrieved gigabytes worth of confidential e-mails sent by the firm's employees, and as proof, they posted messages online that purportedly came from employees responding to their discovery of the breach.

"This may completely destroy the Law Firm," an employee named Marcy Atwood wrote in an email.

It has been a busy few days for hackers affiliated with Anonymous. Recently, hundreds of law enforcement officers in Texas saw their names and addresses published. And websites for police in Salt Lake City and Boston have been defaced. A conference call between FBI agents and their counterparts in the UK was also leaked late last week.

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Apple continues to hold the title for some of the top-selling smartphone models, with the iPhone 4S being the best selling handset in the US last quarter, according to a new report by market research firm NPD. But while the iPhone has repeatedly made Apple the top smartphone vendor in the US, Android still appears to be attracting more new users.

Apple had three iPhone models available for sale in the fourth quarter of 2011: the just-released iPhone 4S, the iPhone 4, which Apple continues to sell as a lower-cost entry-level model, and the nearly three-year-old iPhone 3GS, which AT&T still offers as essentially a $0 bargain smartphone. Collectively, all iPhones sold accounted for 43 percent of smartphone sales in the US for the quarter.

According to NPD analyst Ross Rubin, Apple sold nearly two iPhone 4S models for every iPhone 4 sold, and five iPhone 4S models for every iPhone 3GS sold. And despite the large disparity in numbers, the iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, and iPhone 3GS ended up being the top three smartphones sold in the US.

But even with the top Android smartphone (Samsung Galaxy SII) being outsold more than five to one in the US, Android handsets in aggregate still accounted for 48 percent of US smartphone sales last quarter, accord to NPD's data. Perhaps more alarming for Apple, users buying their first smartphones chose an Android device 57 percent of the time, and an iOS device just 34 percent of the time.

While Android has been criticized for its platform fragmentation and the complexity it presents to users, the platform's wide carrier support, growing app selection, and variety of models available from several vendors attracts a generally wider audience. Particularly in the US, Rubin noted, Android is the only choice for users who want to take advantage of LTE networks from Verizon and AT&T or Sprint's WiMAX network.

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While DRM schemes are designed to make sure only legitimate purchasers can play a game, the opposite will be true starting tomorrow for some Ubisoft titles. That's when a planned server migration will temporarily disable the DRM servers for some of the company's Mac and PC titles, making it so only pirates with cracked, DRM-free versions of the games will be able to play.

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A few weeks ago, Stephen Hawking celebrated his 70th birthday. The famous cosmologist (who is probably more widely known than any other living scientist) has written several popular books including A Brief History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell, and most recently, The Grand Design. A documentary series he created for the Discovery Channel in 2010, titled Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, was recently released on Blu-ray, and Discovery sent us a copy of the set to check it out. Hawking hosts the program, but Benedict Cumberbatch (who played Hawking in a 2004 BBC movie) does the majority of the narration as Hawking’s inner voice.

The three-part series starts off with an episode on the tantalizing possibility of life elsewhere in the Universe. It covers the usual ground (looking for water and the right temperature range to make it liquid) before moving on to more speculative endeavors. There are some enjoyable (and fairly well-animated) attempts to imagine strange forms of animal life, but the program also allows that evolution might hit upon similar structures to those that arose on Earth.

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The idea of copying a successful game concept and profiting off of your own version is practically as old as the game industry itself—just look at the countless Pong clones released in the wake of the Atari original (which itself may have been copied from another source... but that's another story). The idea of game copying has gained added attention in recent weeks, though, as some high-profile social game companies have released games some say are a little too similar to their existing inspirations.

Tiny Tower maker NimbleBit and Bingo Blitz maker Buffalo Studios both took issue with overly familiar titles recently released by Zynga, making their complaints known through largeinfographics that show near-identical side-by-side screenshots. But Triple Town developer Spry Fox went a step further, actually filing a lawsuit (PDF) against Yeti Town developer 6waves Lolapps, saying the latter company "unabashedly" cloned its popular social game. The lawsuit takes the matter away from the nebulous moral and ethical questions of what constitutes an "original" game idea to the codified legal realm of guilt and innocence. Yet the nature of copyright law as it applies to games, and the existing case law in the area, suggests Spry Fox has an uphill battle in protecting Triple Town in court.

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Siri, Apple's widely advertised voice-activated "intelligent assistant," has so far been limited to the latest iPhone 4S hardware after Apple's acquisition. Though observers have come up with various reasons for the restriction, a newly revealed piece of the puzzle suggests the issue is related to hardware after all. According to recent SEC filings from technology start-up Audience, Apple incorporated an improved version of its background noise filtering technology directly into the A5 processor used in the iPhone 4S—technology that improves Siri's speech recognition capabilities.

Siri was originally a third-party app for the iPhone that ran on devices as old as the iPhone 3GS. Apple later bought the company behind Siri, and integrated the tech directly into iOS 5, which was released to the public in October of 2011. Siri is now only available on the iPhone 4S, however, and Apple subsequently pulled the old app from the App Store when the 4S was released.

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Homogeneous catalysis, in which the catalyst is mixed directly in with the reaction components, sees widespread use in industrial settings. The catalysts themselves are often complex organometallic compounds that contain a precious metal atom/ion—platinum, rhodium, palladium, rhenium—at their molecular center. 

From an engineering standpoint, a reactor for a homogeneously catalyzed reaction can often be described as a catalyst recovery system first, reactor second. The high cost of these precious metals means that recovery and reuse of the catalyst is essential to making the reactions economic. 

A report published in last week's edition of Science discusses the work of a team of chemists who are looking at ways of obviating the need for the precious metals, replacing them with their more ordinary relatives. The paper focuses on chemistry that is important to the silicone industry.

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Apple has begun to take action against iPhone app ripoffs that have been crudding up the App Store. Over the weekend, the company removed a number of apps that bear a striking similarity to ones that are already popular among iOS users—the list includes Angry Ninja Birds, Plant vs. Zombie, and Temple Jump, which correlate to the popular titles Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, and Temple Run (hat tip to Gamasutra). The move is encouraging to developers who have been struggling with knockoffs attempting to steal their business on the App Store, but there's plenty left to do if Apple wants to show it's serious about tackling the problem once and for all.

Apps attempting to clone—or at least ride the popularity wave of—other apps has been a problem for iOS developers for years now. Ars first started covering the phenomenon in early 2009, but examples continue to pop up on both the mobile App Store as well as the Mac App Store.

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Whatever happened to the "six strikes" system that was to help civilize the American Internet?

Three years ago, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) gave up its mass litigation strategy of targeting tens of thousands of alleged file-swappers. Instead, the group announced that it would pursue a "graduated response" system in partnership with Interent providers. Infringement notices would be sent on to subscribers, who would be hit with increasing penalties as the notices stacked up.

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