Out of all the books I read for my formal education, one bit, from one slim paperback, has lodged the deepest into my brain.

William Blundell's The Art and Craft of Feature Writing offers a "selective list of what readers like." It starts with a definitive No. 1: "Dogs, followed by other cute animals and well-behaved small children." People, Blundell writes, are your second-best option, providing they are doing or saying something interesting.

I have failed to provide Ars Technica readers with a dog story during nearly three years here. Today, I intend to fix that. This is a story about a dog, but also a rare optimistic take on a ubiquitous "smart" product, one that helped out a very good girl.

Read full article

Comments

© Humane Rescue Alliance

Self-hosting is having a moment, even if it's hard to define exactly what it is.

It's a niche that goes beyond regular computing devices and networks but falls short of a full-on home lab. (Most home labs involve self-hosting, but not all self-hosting makes for a home lab.) It adds privacy, provides DRM-free alternatives, and reduces advertising. It's often touted as a way to get more out of your network-attached storage (NAS), but it's much more than just backup and media streaming.

Is self-hosting just running services on your network for which most people rely on cloud companies? Broadly, yes. But take a look at the selfh.st site/podcast/newsletter, the r/selfhosted subreddit, and all the GitHub project pages that link to one another, and you'll also find things that no cloud provider offers.

Read full article

Comments

© Aurich Lawson

When my colleague Kyle Orland submitted Tetrisweeper for a list of Ars' favorite 2024 games not from 2024, I told him, essentially: "Good for you, not for me." I'm a pedestrian Tetris player, at best, so the idea of managing a whole different game mechanic, while trying to clear lines and prevent stack-ups, sounded like taking a standardized test while baking a three-layer cake.

And yet, here I am, sneaking rounds of Drop Duchy (Steam, Epic, for Windows/Linux via Proton) into lunch breaks, weekend mornings, and other bits of downtime. Drop Duchy is similarly not just a Tetris-esque block-dropper. It also has you:

• Aligning terrain types for resources
• Placing both your troops and the enemy's
• Choosing which cards to upgrade, sell, and bring into battle
• Picking between terrain types to leave behind
• Upgrading a tech tree with achievements
• Picking the sequence of battles for maximum effectiveness

Drop Duchy is a quirky game, one that hasn't entirely fused together its various influences without some seams showing. But I keep returning to it, even as it beats me to a pulp on Normal mode, based on decisions I made five rounds ago. It feels like a medium-deep board game, played at triple speed, with someone across the table timing you on how fast you arrange your tiles.

Read full article

Comments

© The Arcade Crew

Nextcloud, a host-your-own cloud platform that wants to help you "regain control over your data," has had to tell its Android-using customers for months now that they cannot upload files from their phone to their own servers. Months of emails and explanations to Google's Play Store representatives have yielded no changes, Nextcloud wrote in a blog post.

That blog post—and media coverage of it—seem to have moved the needle. In an update to the post, Nextcloud wrote that as of May 15, Google has offered to restore full file access permissions. "We are preparing a test release first (expected tonight) and a final update with all functionality restored. If no issues occur, the update will hopefully be out early next week," the Nextcloud team wrote.

A notice in Nextcloud's Android app regarding file uploads. Credit: Nextcloud

Ars has reached out to Google for comment, both before and after Nextcloud's update, and will update this post if we get a response.

Read full article

Comments

© Joan Cros/NurPhoto via Getty Images

It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally found the thing I want generative AI to do for me: program a damn fine cup of coffee.

Program, that is, but not make—that’s the job of the Fellow Aiden, a coffee maker that crafts automated, precision pour-overs in a countertop-ready cube. Thanks to other folks who love their Aidens, as well as API tweaking and large language model training, I can hand this mechanical robot a GPT-generated recipe and get impressive coffee out of it.

Strictly speaking, absolutely none of this is necessary. Humans can make great coffee with fresh beans, decent gear, time, patience, and experience. Experiments will reveal the differences in light and dark roasts, Ethiopian and Venezuelan, washed and honey-processed beans, or how often one agitates the grounds. But faced with something brand new, even an experienced brewer can be stumped and spend a good deal of time and none-too-cheap beans trying to get everything just right.

Read full article

Comments

© Kevin Purdy

Intel's i486 was the first "computer number" I ever really understood. Sure, my elementary school computer lab had both the Apple IIGS and Apple IIc, and one of them was slightly more useful, for reasons unexplained to me. But soon after my father brought home his office's discarded Gateway desktop with a 486DX 33 MHz inside, I was catapulted into my first Intel sorting scheme. I learned there was an x86 before this one (i386), and there were models with different trailing numbers (16–100 MHz) and "DX" levels. This was my first grasp of what hardware I was actually using and what could improve inside it.

More than 36 years after the release of the 486 and 18 years after Intel stopped making them, leaders of the Linux kernel believe the project can improve itself by leaving i486 support behind. Ingo Molnar, quoting Linus Torvalds regarding "zero real reason for anybody to waste one second" on 486 support, submitted a patch series to the 6.15 kernel that updates its minimum support features. Those requirements now include TSC (Time Stamp Counter) and CX8 (i.e., "fixed" CMPXCH8B, its own whole thing), features that the 486 lacks (as do some early non-Pentium 586 processors).

It's not the first time Torvalds has suggested dropping support for 32-bit processors and relieving kernel developers from implementing archaic emulation and work-around solutions. "We got rid of i386 support back in 2012. Maybe it's time to get rid of i486 support in 2022," Torvalds wrote in October 2022. Failing major changes to the 6.15 kernel, which will likely arrive late this month, i486 support will be dropped.

Read full article

Comments

© SSPL/Getty Images

Many horses, including Spotify and Amazon's Kindle Store, have already left the barn. But Apple is moving quickly to shut the external payments door opened by last week's ruling that the company willfully failed to comply with court orders regarding anticompetitive behavior.

In an emergency motion filing late Wednesday (PDF), Apple described US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers' "extraordinary Order" as including an injunction that "permanently precludes Apple from exercising control over core aspects of its business operations, including charging for use of its property and protecting the integrity of its platform and in-app purchase mechanism." A certificate (PDF) accompanying the emergency filing states that the order "fundamentally changes Apple's business and creates destabilizing effects" for App Store customers.

The restrictions, "which will cost Apple substantial sums annually," are not based on the company's conduct, Apple claims, but "were imposed to punish Apple for purported non-compliance" with the 2021 injunction. In her ruling (PDF), Gonzalez Rogers described Apple as conducting an "obvious cover-up" and said that Apple "at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option."

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

"A threshold has been reached. We are effectively being DDoSed. If we could, we would charge them for this waste of our time," wrote Daniel Stenberg, original author and lead of the curl project, on LinkedIn this week.

Curl (cURL in some realms), which turned 25 years old in 2023, is an essential command-line tool and library for interacting with Internet resources. The open source project receives bug reports and security issues through many channels, including HackerOne, a reporting service that helps companies manage vulnerability reporting and bug bounties. HackerOne has fervently taken to AI tools in recent years. "One platform, dual force: Human minds + AI power," the firm's home page reads.

Stenberg, saying that he's "had it" and is "putting my foot down on this craziness," suggested that every suspected AI-generated HackerOne report will have its reporter asked to verify if they used AI to find the problem or generate the submission. If a report is deemed "AI slop," the reporter will be banned. "We still have not seen a single valid security report done with AI help," Stenberg wrote.

Read full article

Comments

© Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

After a federal court issued a scathing order Wednesday night that found Apple in "willful violation" of an injunction meant to allow iOS apps to provide alternate payment options, app developers are capitalizing on the moment. Spotify may be the quickest of them all.

Less than 24 hours after District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found that Apple had sought to thwart a 2021 injunction and engaged in an "obvious cover-up" around its actions, Spotify announced in a blog post that it had submitted an updated app to Apple. The updated app can show specific plan prices, link out to Spotify's website for plan changes and purchases that avoid Apple's 30 percent commission on in-app purchases, and display promotional offers, all of which were disallowed under Apple's prior App Store rules.

Spotify's post adds that Apple's newly court-enforced policy "opens the door to other seamless buying opportunities that will directly benefit creators (think easy-to-purchase audiobooks)." Spotify posted on X (formerly Twitter) Friday morning that the updated app was approved by Apple. Apple made substantial modifications to its App Review Guidelines on Friday and emailed registered developers regarding the changes.

Read full article

Comments

© NurPhoto via Getty Images

Getting the hang of through-hole soldering is tricky for those of us tinkering at home with our irons, spools, flux, and, sometimes, braids. It's almost reassuring, then, to learn that through-hole soldering was also a pain for a firm that has made more than 60 million products with it.

Raspberry Pi boards have a combination of surface-mount devices (SMDs) and through-hole bits. SMDs allow for far more tiny chips, resistors, and other bits to be attached to boards by their tiny pins, flat contacts, solder balls, or other connections. For those things that are bigger, or subject to rough forces like clumsy human hands, through-hole soldering is still required, with leads poked through a connective hole and solder applied to connect and join them securely.

The Raspberry Pi board has a 40-pin GPIO header on it that needs through-hole soldering, along with bits like the Ethernet and USB ports. These require robust solder joints, which can't be done the same way as with SMT (surface-mount technology) tools. "In the early days of Raspberry Pi, these parts were inserted by hand, and later by robotic placement," writes Roger Thornton, director of applications for Raspberry Pi, in a blog post. The boards then had to go through a follow-up wave soldering step.

Read full article

Comments

© Raspberry Pi

You wouldn't steal a car, right? So you shouldn't pirate a movie, either.

That was the gist of the infamous "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" anti-piracy campaign from the Motion Picture Association of America during the mid-2000s. But questions are now being asked about just how carefully the MPAA followed its own anti-piracy principles when designing the campaign. Specifically: Did the MPAA rip off a key font?

The answer to that question is, like many matters involving typefaces, fonts, and copyright, somewhat complicated.

Read full article

Comments

© Aurich Lawson

Wizards of the Coast has released the System Reference Document, the heart of the three core rule books that constitute Dungeons & Dragons' 2024 gameplay, under a Creative Commons license. This means the company cannot alter the deal further, like it almost did in early 2023, leading to considerable pushback and, eventually, a retreat. It was a long quest, but the lawful good party has earned some long-term rewards, including a new, similarly licensed reference book.

Dungeons & Dragons owner Wizards of the Coast (WotC) put the core D&D rules into an Open Gaming License in the early 2000s, inspired by Richard Stallman's GNU General Public License. The idea was that by making the core mechanics, classes, spells, races, and monsters available for anyone to build on, royalty-free, more versions of games would draw more people into the tabletop roleplaying sphere, and perhaps back to the core D&D games and rule books. It also likely didn't do much harm to WotC's properties, as these basic aspects of the game, and bits taken from existing fantasy works, were going to be difficult to copyright.

WotC considered that the Open Gaming License (OGL) was open to revisions, however, and the company proposed changes to the OGL that would require that anyone making certain amounts of money had to report it (over $50,000 per year) or start paying royalties (over $750,000). A leaked version of that license put the higher-level royalties at 25 percent, and only covered printed materials and static PDFs, leaving virtual tabletop and software makers questioning where they might fit in.

Read full article

Comments

© WotC/Hasbro

The developer says his open source app could “seriously threaten” the viability of CrossOver, the popular paid app. Both programs help macOS users get Windows games running on their Macs.

Whisky, a gaming-focused front-end for Wine's Windows compatibility tools on macOS, is no longer receiving updates. As one of the most useful and well-regarded tools in a Mac gamer's toolkit, it could be seen as a great loss, but its developer hopes you'll move on with what he considers a better option: supporting CodeWeavers' CrossOver product.

Also, Whisky's creator is an 18-year-old college student, and he could use a break.

"I am 18, yes, and attending Northeastern University, so it's always a balancing act between my school work and dev work," Isaac Marovitz wrote to Ars. The Whisky project has "been more or less in this state for a few months, I posted the notice mostly to clarify and formally announce it," Marovitz said, having received "a lot of questions" about the project status.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

Popular NAS-maker Synology has confirmed and slightly clarified a policy that appeared on its German website earlier this week: Its "Plus" tier of devices, starting with the 2025 series, will require Synology-branded hard drives for full compatibility, at least at first.

"Synology-branded drives will be needed for use in the newly announced Plus series, with plans to update the Product Compatibility List as additional drives can be thoroughly vetted in Synology systems," a Synology representative told Ars by email. "Extensive internal testing has shown that drives that follow a rigorous validation process when paired with Synology systems are at less risk of drive failure and ongoing compatibility issues."

Without a Synology-branded or approved drive in a device that requires it, NAS devices could fail to create storage pools and lose volume-wide deduplication and lifespan analysis, Synology's German press release stated. Similar drive restrictions are already in place for XS Plus and rack-mounted Synology models, though work-arounds exist.

Read full article

Comments

© Synology

The creators of Sunderfolk wanted to make a video game that would help players “Rediscover game night.” By my reckoning, they have succeeded, because I am now regularly arguing with good friends over stupid moves. Why didn’t I pick up that gold? Don’t you see how ending up there messed up an area attack? Ah, well.

That kind of friendly friction, inside dedicated social time, only gets harder to come by as you get older, settle into routines, and sometimes move apart. I’ve hosted four Sunderfolk sessions with three friends, all in different states, and it has felt like reclaiming something I lost. Sunderfolk is a fun game with a lot of good ideas, and the best one is convincing humans to join up in pondering hex tiles, turn order, and what to name the ogres who shoot arrows (“Pointy Bros”).

Maybe you already have all the gaming appointments you need with friends, online or in person. Sunderfolk, I might suggest, is a worthy addition to your queue as a low-effort way to give everyone a break from being the organizer. It does a decent job of tutorializing and onboarding less experienced players, then adds depth as it goes on. Given that only one person out of four has to own the game on some system, and the only other hardware needed is a phone, it’s a pretty light lift for what I’m finding to be a great payoff. Some parts could be improved, but the core loop and its camaraderie engine feel sturdy.

Read full article

Comments

© Dreamhaven

Synology, maker of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, will seemingly remove advanced features from its Plus devices that are not using hard drives provided by, or certified by, Synology itself, starting with its 2025 lineup.

A report on the German site HardwareLuxx (translated by Google) and a press release on Synology's German-language website appear to confirm Synology's strategy. The company, which sees "significant benefits" to its "proprietary hard drive solution" (also per Google's translation), will be "expanding [its] integrated ecosystem to the Plus series." For those Plus series models released in 2025, only Synology's own hard drives, and third-party drives certified by Synology, will offer "the full range of functions and support." Synology's release states that it can provide the "highest levels of security and performance, while also offering significantly more efficient support."

Ars has contacted Synology's US offices for comment and will update this post with any response.

Read full article

Comments

© Synology

The Common Vulnerability and Exposures, or CVE, repository holds the answers to some of information security's most vital questions. Namely, which security issue are we talking about, exactly, and how does it work?

The 25-year-old CVE program, an essential part of global cybersecurity, is cited in nearly any discussion or response to a computer security issue, including Ars posts. CVE was at real risk of closure after its contract was set to expire on April 16. The nonprofit MITRE runs CVE and related programs (like Common Weakness Enumeration, or CWE) on a contract with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). A letter to CVE board members sent Tuesday by Yosry Barsoum, vice president of MITRE, gave notice of the potential halt to operations.

"If a break in service were to occur, we anticipate multiple impacts to CVE, including deterioration of national vulnerability databases and advisories, tool vendors, incident response operations, and all manner of critical infrastructure," Barsoum wrote.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

Razer, maker of green-hued gaming hardware and accessories, has entered the game-streaming space with its new—but not entirely new—app, PC Remote Play. It's based on very good existing streaming tech and makes connecting a PC to mobile devices fairly simple. It's worth checking out unless you have a hard-and-fast policy about avoiding software "utilities" from RGB-obsessed gaming companies.

That, or you're already using and comfortable with Moonlight. Moonlight and Sunshine are the open source game-streaming client and server that wonderfully picked up where Nvidia's Gamestream left off. PC Remote Play is based on Moonstream's open source code, and Razer has made much of its own version's code available.

You're getting a few small upgrades when using PC Remote Play:

Read full article

Comments

© Razer

Radio signal broadcasts have their usefulness, but they eventually end (except, perhaps, for SETI). Every so often, we mark the public end of a once-essential wavelength, such as 3G cellular, analog television, or the Canadian time check. One of the most weirdly useful signals will soon end in the United Kingdom, with notable consequences if its transition is not properly handled.

Beginning in the early 1980s, UK homes could have electrical meters installed with a radio teleswitch attached. These switches listened for a 198 kHz signal from the BBC's Radio 4 Long Wave service, primarily broadcast from the powerful Droitwich Transmitting Station. These switches listened to 30 messages per minute, waiting for a certain 50-bit data packet to arrive that signaled that electricity was now at cheaper, off-peak rates ("tariffs" in the UK).

With this over-the-air notice, homes that bought into Economy 7 or Economy 10 (7 or 10 hours of reduced-price power) could make use of ceramic-stuffed storage heaters that stayed warm into the day, prepare hot water heaters, and otherwise make use of off-peak power. How the electrical companies, BBC, and meters worked together is fascinating in its own right and documented in a recent video by Ringway Manchester (which we first saw at Hackaday).

Read full article

Comments

© Richard Harvey (Public domain)