SceneTap's camera is mounted just above one of the TV screens at Polo Grounds Cyrus Farivar

SAN FRANCISCO—As the Oakland A’s were set to take on the Giants in the adjacent baseball stadium, few in the Polo Grounds bar seemed aware that another event was taking place—the launch party of the controversial social geo-location app, SceneTap.

The Chicago-based startup debuted in the city by the Bay Friday evening after it caused a bit of a stir locally during the week. This is despite the fact that SceneTap has operated previously in several other cities around the country largely without a hitch. Several San Francisco bars that originally agreed to partner with SceneTap said that they have pulled out, largely due to negative media attention and potential privacy concerns.

The app, using facial detection and video cameras, plots bar activity on a Google Map, with pushpins revealing data like: “Crowd: >70% full | Women: 52% | Men: 48%.”

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Chinese authorities approved Google's multibillion dollar purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings. The $12.5 billion sale is thought to be the last step for Google to begin developing its own line of smart phones.

Google announced their plans to acquire Motorola last year and regulators in both the US and Europe approved the acquisition in February. According to a Reuters report, the main condition of the deal is that Android OS stays free and open for five years.

Android is currently the top operating system for Internet-enabled smart phones. Google will now add to that substantially; it gains access to Motorola's 17,000 patents and 7,500 patent applications.

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Cover photo for a 1964 brochure for the PDS 1020 Digital Computer. Computer History Museum Madison Avenue's strategy for popularizing computers shifted from the 1950s through the 1980s. At first pitches focused on reliability and speed, but by the 1960s, advertising brochures put big systems in gardens next to fashion models. When PCs came on the market, the sales pitch changed again. Computing went family friendly, with endorsements from Bill Cosby, William Shatner, and even Charlie Chaplin. Welcome to the Computer History Museum's "Selling the Computer Revolution" exhibit.

In 1983, advertising pioneer David Ogilvy summarized his mission as follows: "I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it 'creative.' I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march against Philip'."

This Hellenic manifesto certainly gets to the point. Unfortunately, Ogilvy's battle cry offers little guidance for helping us view advertising spots from a half century ago—the kind that fans of the AMC series Mad Men see being worked out alongside the personal lives of Don Draper, Peggy Olson, and Pete Campbell. The dictum offers even less aid for considering ads that hawk items so outmoded that even Ogilvy's skills could not inspire us to march on our local electronics store.

Take, for example, sales literature for mainframe computers made and marketed in the 1950s and 1960s. Even after reading a classy three color foldout for a room filling UNIVAC or PDP-5, would you buy one today? No way unless you are a dedicated collector. But now, thanks to the Computer History Museum's wonderful exhibit titled Selling the Computer Revolution, we can appreciate the considerable creative effort that went into making these machines attractive to business owners and consumers.

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The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch was aborted this morning at the last moment—T-minus 0.5 seconds to be exact.

Liftoff was scheduled for 4:55 am EST, but one of the rocket's engines experienced unusually high amounts of pressure. Once the pressure hit a certain level, SpaceX software took over and halted the procedure. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell noted the issue appeared to be with the physical engine and was not a misread by any sensor or software. The iconic countdown actually reached zero, but SpaceX holds its rockets on the launch pad a few seconds after ignition to ensure everything is functioning (protocol that looks even smarter in light of this morning).

The next available launch window for SpaceX occurs this week: Tuesday at 3:44 am EST. Company founder Elon Musk indicated any tweaks would be made with that goal in mind so SpaceX would be prepared for "countdown in a few days."

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Missed this Ryan Montbleau show in Troy, New York? You can listen to every performance nightly at RMBLive.com. Mike Wren

Concert taping is at least forty years old—the First Free Underground Grateful Dead Tape Exchange formed in the early 1970s after all. It was an informal network of Deadheads willing to share tapes with each other in person or via mail, some described it as the original Napster. Les Kippel remembered smuggling in extra batteries, tapes, and microphones so he could capture an entire evening. He started out with a Japanese portable tape machine but insisted the real quality recordings didn't come until '74, when Sony came out with the 152 and the ECM-99 stereo microphones.

Today, firsthand concert audio can be accessed much easier. It's among the first results on any YouTube song search, venue partnerships exist such as NPR's "Live In Concert" series, and you can always find modern incarnations of the tape exchange (like the popular NYCTaper.com).

"As long as we've been a band, we’ve had a good relationship with tapers," said Jason Cohen, keyboardist for blues outfit, The Ryan Montbleau Band. "We've always tried to get good, quality recordings out there. But what’s out there tended to be a pair of mics at the back of the room and it didn’t sound that great. So we wanted control."

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Glassboard: is it a group messaging app? Sort of. Is it a collaboration app? Sure. Is it like a Facebook Group? Maybe. Version 2.0 of the app, released this week, can be as many or as few of those things as you'd like, depending on who you're sharing with and why. On the one hand, it's a way to share notes, photos, files, and other updates with a group of friends. On the other, it could be useful among a group of colleagues working together on a project.

Glassboard 2.0 is now available for iOS and Android, as well as a newly unveiled Web app. The apps are offered by Sepia Labs—the new home of former NetNewsWire developer Brent Simmons—and we thought we'd take a look at the recently updated offerings. "The easiest way to describe Glassboard: as Pair is to the bedroom, as Path is to the rec room, Glassboard is to the boardroom," Simmons told Ars in an e-mail. "It's an app for communicating inside teams (formal or not). I think it's how people will work together in the future—it cuts way down on e-mail."

Indeed, if you are new to small group sharing apps, the idea is like taking Facebook and stripping down all parts of the social network except for the parts where you share privately among clearly defined groups. Or if Google+ allowed everyone in your circle to post to that same circle. The idea is to keep things insular and private. There's no way to blast updates to the whole world like Twitter, and there's no friending or unfriending. You can create or join various groups—close friends, family, coworkers, Ars Technica staffers, cousins, etc.—and post a variety of content to those "boards" as a way to keep each other up-to-date. According to Sepia Labs, Glassboard is supposed to be a digital boardroom.

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The Listening Machine turns the output of 500 Twitter users into music. Photo: Louish Pixel/Flickr

Sonic artist and programmer Daniel Jones and composer Peter Gregson have joined forces with Britten Sinfonia orchestra to create The Listening Machine, a tool that records the social networking activity of 500 people in the United Kingdom and uses algorithms to translate that into music.

The Listening Machine is software that monitors the tweets of 500 people (the team won’t reveal the tweeter's identities to ensure that the musical outcome is not affected by participants becoming aware that they are part of it) selected from eight different fields—arts, business, education, health, politics, science, sport, and technology. Whenever these people post an update, the properties of the tweet are analyzed in terms of the sound and meaning of the words, and the program generates music based on it. Many different elements of the music have been prerecorded as individual musical cells, which are then recombined by the generative software.

The aim of the project is to create a six-month musical installation that is a "live soundtrack to the thoughts, opinions, feelings and conversations of the U.K.’s population, as played out on Twitter."

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This week's top posts to our Apple section included the latest rumors about an updated MacBook Pro, Apple's curious (if only temporary) censorship of the word "jailbreak" in iTunes, a discussion about Apple's "green" initiatives, and more. And don't forget our guide to hardening your iPhone against stalkers, as well as a look at five Mac antivirus apps! Read on if you need to catch up:

• How to harden your smartphone against stalkers—iPhone edition
  Stalkers: sometimes they're coming from inside your phone.
• MacBook Pro rumor rollup: thinner, better, faster, stronger
  As the MacBook Pro update looms, "leaked" info is seeping out of the woodwork.
• Hands-on with five antivirus apps for the Mac
  Which antivirus software is the best for Mac users? It depends on your needs.
• Stars aligning for June Ivy Bridge Mac launch alongside Mountain Lion
  Yet another reason all eyes will be on WWDC.
• According to iTunes, "jailbreak" is a four-letter word
  Is the word "jailbreak" on the same level as "f**k"?
• Judge: Ample evidence that Apple "knowingly joined" e-book conspiracy
  Apple hasn't been found guilty yet, but the judge's comments don't bode well.
• "Swiss Army knife for QuickTime" Perian turning off the lights
  The source code will be made available on Github or Google Code.
• WSJ: production of 4-inch iPhone beginning in June
  There's hope for farsighted iPhone fans.
• What it takes to make a "green" Apple
  Nearly all of Apple's operations will run on renewable power by 2013.
• A Good AirPlay Speaker
  The best tool to listen to iTunes exclusively.

Have a wonderful weekend, folks!

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This week readers were really excited about a tiny new Linux box. They also wanted to know how to make their Android smartphones more secure. Also on the Android beat, folks were interested in learning how Android fragmentation is driving developers nuts. It's your top 10 stories from the IT and Security beats.

• New $74 Android mini computer is slightly larger than a thumb drive
  This little Linux box packs a 1.5GHz ARM CPU and 512MB of RAM.
• How to harden your smartphone against stalkers—Android edition
  With great power comes great responsibility, so lock up that smartphone.
• Android fragmentation: one developer encounters 3,997 devices
  Android devs miss out on market share by not casting a wide support net.
• How much bandwidth does your office really need?
  Quite a lot, if you watch Netflix. But even e-mail may surprise you.
• Dawn of a new wireless: first 802.11ac router available today
  Buffalo surprisingly beats its competitors to market.
• Private: some search engines make money by not tracking users
  DuckDuckGo and Ixquick take a tiny bite out of Google.
• Best Buy's surprisingly insecure approach to new PC setup
  Somewhere in the march toward "easy," security got blindsided.
• Build versus buy: one company's decision to go it alone
  Do you build your own technology in-house, or buy/license from someone else?
• Microsoft will remove the bloatware from your PC, for a price
  $99 and a trip to a Microsoft Store will get you a clean Windows install.
• Massive DDoS attack keeps The Pirate Bay offline for over a day
  Angry Anons may be behind the attack.

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As we wait for a verdict in the Oracle v. Google patent phase, ponder these top 10 stories from Law & Disorder.

• FBI comes looking for child porn, so man stabs his computer
  If you're going to thrust a samurai sword into your computer, aim well.
• Prosecutors: "pedodave69" was former top FBI agent
  Life as a digital cop: a little file-swapping, a little wardriving.
• Top judge: ditching software patents a "bad solution"
  Former Federal Circuit Judge Paul Michel sees no "magic bullets" for patent reform.
• Admitted file-swapper begs Supreme Court for help
  Says RIAA sought huge damages to create an "urban legend."
• Those $22,600 W. Virginia routers were "economical"
  Congress wants to know how enterprise routers end up in rural libraries.
• Oracle v. Google patent phase wraps up
  Oracle is handed another small win by the judge—along with a warning.
• FCC to Verizon: what's wrong with that spectrum you never built out?
  Verizon wants to sell spectrum it never bothered to use, and buy some more.
• Justice Dept. defends public’s constitutional ‘right to record’ cops
  The DoJ sent a letter to the attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department.
• Oracle v. Google: the road ahead
  Several variables could color the outcome of the giant IP case.
• Was Righthaven right to sue an Ars author?
  A new article sort-of makes the case; Nate Anderson raises a giant eyebrow of skepticism.

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The top of this week's stories featured two developments that sounded more like science fiction than science news. Implanted electrodes created the world's first photovoltaic retinal implant, translating incoming light to nerve impulses. And a second implant translated nerve impulses from paralyzed patients into the control of a robotic arm, allowing one woman to use the arm to take a drink of coffee.

• Paralyzed woman controls robotic arm, sips coffee
  Electrodes implanted in the brain were used to control mechanical motion.

• Wireless, photovoltaic retinal implants could recharge sight
  Laser goggles would also be used to stimulate the implant.

• American consumers prepared to pay more for clean energy
  Republicans, unaffiliated voters are less inclined to pay extra for green power.

• East coast wind grid gets a go ahead
  The wind is always blowing somewhere.

• Sheets of virus generate electricity when squished
  The biomaterial could one day power electronics using our body movements.

• Cambrian shutter of doom becomes sucker of worms
  The mouth of this segmented invertebrate has been a puzzle for many researchers.

• It's (just barely, sort of) alive!
  Below the ocean floor, microbes are surviving on 100,000 oxygen molecules a day.

• The state of particle physics—a report from Pheno 2012
  The Standard Model isn't perfect, but the alternatives now look worse.

• Cosmic forensics: signs of a Tunguska meteorite?
  A group of researchers thinks a small Siberian lake may be an impact crater.

• Record-setting 2012 warmth largely confined to North America, western Europe
  Most of the rest of the world has seen little change from 2011.

 

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Russian social media site vKontakte—a platform with 135 million accounts across Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus—has lost its court appeal seeking to overturn an earlier ruling against it stating that the company was infringing copyright by allowing file-sharing services to integrate with vKontakte's user-uploaded media libraries.

On May 17, Russia's Commercial Court of St. Petersburg reaffirmed a lower court's January ruling in favor of SBA Music Publishing and Gala Records, a Russian subsidiary of EMI, which claimed that vKontakte was liable for all the copyright infringement taking place on its site. The Facebook-like site (even down to the design) will most likely be required to shutter or severely restrict its file-sharing services.

vKontakte is more popular in Russia than Facebook is, and the company has been valued at $1.5 billion to $3 billion, according to a release provided by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (which sided with SBA and Gala in the court proceedings). According to PaidContent, vKontakte's advantage over other similar platforms in Eastern Europe has been this music-sharing function.

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The US International Trade Commission today ordered an import ban on Motorola Mobility Android products, agreeing with Microsoft that the devices infringe a Microsoft patent on “generating meeting requests” from a mobile device.

The import ban stems from a December ruling that the Motorola Atrix, Droid, and Xoom (among 18 total devices) infringed the patent, which Microsoft says is related to Exchange ActiveSync technology. Today, the ITC said in a “final determination of violation” that “the appropriate form of relief in this investigation is a limited exclusion order prohibiting the unlicensed entry for consumption of mobile devices, associated software and components thereof covered by claims 1, 2, 5, or 6 of the United States Patent No. 6,370,566 and that are manufactured abroad by or on behalf of, or imported by or on behalf of, Motorola.”

ITC rulings such as this one are subject to a 60-day Presidential review period, during which time Motorola is required to post a bond of 33¢ “per device entered for consumption.” Motorola is on the verge of being acquired by Google, with the acquisition having been approved by every jurisdiction except China.

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SceneTap uses facial detection technology to output stats on bar attendance.

On Friday afternoon, about 20 bars around San Francisco are set to have special "facial detection" cameras turned on as part of a new smartphone app by Chicago-based startup SceneTap.

The cameras, which are mounted above the door of their client bars, scan patrons’ faces as they enter and exit the bar. The company’s software then immediately determines whether the person is male or female, and counts how many of each are in the bar, divides that by the known capacity of the bar, and then outputs something like: "Crowd: >90% full | Women: 58% | Men: 42%."

San Francisco bar patrons are unlikely to know that their faces are being scanned, however—the company has only put SceneTap stickers in the windows, but does not explain to customers in an obvious way what exactly is going on.

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Photo: ToastyKen/Flickr

LOS ANGELES—Federal regulators considered testimony Wednesday here at UCLA Law School on whether to allow citizens and filmmakers to legally crack DVD encryption meant to protect the discs from being copied.

Filmmakers, video mixers and others have petitioned the U.S. Copyright Office for the ability to continue to use DVD decryption tools to copy short clips of DVDs from motion pictures to put into their own films. The issue isn't whether they have a fair-use right to the material, but whether they can utilize decrypting tools to make the best reproduction for film-making purposes.

Another proposal for the first time calls for the public at large to be authorized to make copies of their own DVDs without breaching the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which makes it unlawful to circumvent encryption technologies in items that you buy.

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The Dragon/Falcon 9 combination on their way to the launch pad. NASA

After being pushed back several times, the first launch of a private vehicle to the International Space Station (ISS) is now set for early tomorrow morning (based on the timezone where the launch will take place). The Dragon capsule is set on top of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, and the assemblage was raised to a vertical launch position overnight. If all goes well, the vehicle will be sent to low-Earth orbit at 4:55am EDT tomorrow morning. For those of you located overseas (or willing to wake up early in the morning), NASA will have live coverage available via NASA TV.

The Dragon capsule will only be carrying supplies on this mission—food, clothing, batteries, and a laptop, according to NASA. But the journey should give both the company and NASA the chance to test out the capsule's sensors and control systems as it approaches—and assuming all those check out—docks with the ISS. This will provide an essential validation of a system that is intended to ultimately carry astronauts on a similar journey. Dragon capsules are in the process of being certified for human use.

The launch window for reaching the ISS from a site in Florida is fairly narrow, so everything will have to go off without a significant hitch for the launch to take place. In other words, if you set your alarm that early and wind up with nothing to watch, don't blame us. We warned you.

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Enlarge / Apple's Maiden, North Carolina data center will be largely powered by Apple's own solar panel arrays and methane-powered fuel cells. Apple, Inc.

Apple has gone into detail about how it sources energy for its data centers, explaining its plans to reach 100 percent renewable energy for all of its data centers by 2013. The company is adding an additional large solar panel farm in North Carolina, sourcing hydro power for its upcoming center in Oregon, and transitioning its existing data center in California to renewable sources. Apple is planning to power much of its other operations with renewable energy as well.

But Apple isn't alone in adopting "green" energy and design for its data centers and operations. Microsoft recently announced plans to make all its data centers and operations "carbon neutral" by July 2012. Google has invested heavily in outfitting its data centers and operations facilities with solar panel roofs and sourcing wind and other renewable energy. The overall trend toward greater data center efficiency began in earnest around 2008, when "performance-per-watt" began to trump raw gigahertz speed as the top concern for IT operations, just after Google helped found the Climate Savers Computing Initiative in 2007.

Cutting coal in North Carolina

Apple has already confirmed that a 20MW solar array and a 5MW fuel cell array are being built adjacent to its Maiden, North Carolina data center. The company is also planning an additional 20MW solar array just a few miles away. Each solar panel array is capable of generating 42 million kWh of clean energy annually. The fuel cells, which run on waste methane generated by a nearby landfill, will produce another 40 million kWh.

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Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson

WiFi has easily been one of the most useful technologies of the past decade—so many of our daily tasks and the devices we use rely on it. But it’s on the verge of getting a whole lot better.

Technology upgrades we’ll see within the next year or so will make WiFi much smarter and more efficient in how it distributes signals. It’ll be so fast, and integrated into so many devices, that you may finally get to dump a lot of those cables cluttering your living room.

We talked about some of these upcoming advancements a few months back. Evolving WiFi standards were also a hot topic at last week’s Interop Las Vegas conference, where panelists and tech experts we interviewed updated us on the progress of the new standards and technologies that will improve our wireless lives.

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Third time's the charm?

Let's draw a distinction between a “sequel to a game” and an “installment in a franchise.” In a sequel, the developers examine what made the original game work and then expand on those ideas. Sometimes that work produces stark differences. The near-decade between Fallout II and Fallout III, for example, saw that game switch the perspective from isometric to first-person, the combat change from turn-based to real-time with pauses, and the setting move from California to Washington, DC. In other cases, a decade of work results in an installment that is much more about incremental refinement.

The original 1996 Diablo was a successful, simple title—a real-time, single-player role-playing game with randomly generated dungeons and loot along with minimal plot and character development. You clicked on things to kill them while delving deeper into a dungeon until you arrived at the very gates of Hell and found the titular villain Diablo.

The 2000 sequel, Diablo II, made everything about its source material bigger and better. The core concept of clicking on bad guys until they died remained intact, but very little else stayed the same. Instead of a single setting, the town of Tristram, Diablo II took players across its world both above and below ground, from the European-like forests and fortresses of the first act to Arabian-style deserts in the second, etc. The plot was detailed in a series of cutscenes, where a witness to the game’s events recounted the key moments from an insane asylum.

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Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has been tapped to serve as an on-set "tutor" for the upcoming movie based on Walter Isaacson's biography Steve Jobs. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin will consult with Woz on technical details related to computers, as well as personal details about Jobs himself.

Sorkin is known for recent films The Social Network and Moneyball, as well as the political TV series The West Wing. He insists the film won't be "a straight ahead biography."

"Drama is tension versus obstacle. Someone wants something, something is standing in their way of getting it. They want the money, they want the girl, they want to get to Philadelphia—doesn't matter... And I need to find that event and I will. I just don't know what it is," Sorkin said during a news conference.

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