According to a new report from Cheddar, Apple is planning a Netflix-like subscription service for games. "The service would function like Netflix for games, allowing users who pay a subscription fee to access a bundled list of titles," reports Cheddar. "Apple began privately discussing a subscription service with game developers in the second half of 2018, said the people, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss unannounced plans." From the report: It's unclear how much the subscription will cost or what kind of games Apple will offer. The service is still in the early stages of development, and Apple could ultimately decide to abandon it. The company has also discussed partnering with developers as a publisher, according to two people familiar with the talks, which could signal Apple's ambition to assume distribution, marketing, and other related costs for select games. While it's unclear what kinds of games would be included, a subscription service for App Store games could provide a boost to Apple's recurring revenue at a time when iPhone sales are slowing and gaming and esports are booming. Mobile gaming is expected to become a $100 billion industry by 2021, according to the gaming and esports intelligence firm Newzoo.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Piracy isn't always the vile market bogeyman it's portrayed to be by the entertainment industry, a new joint study by Indiana University has found. Indiana University Researchers like Antino Kim say that online piracy can sometimes have a positive impact on markets, and being overly-aggressive in the policing and punishing of pirates may sometimes be counterproductive. As an example, Kim's study ("The 'Invisible Hand' of Piracy: An Economic Analysis of the Information-Goods Supply Chain") points to the hit HBO show Game Of Thrones, which routinely breaks piracy records thanks to heavy file sharing on BitTorrent. The researchers found that piracy often acts as a form of invisible competition, keeping both the manufacturer (HBO) and the cable operator (say, Comcast) from raising prices quite as high as they might otherwise. Raise prices too high, for example, and users will just flee to piracy, creating even higher losses. The researchers are clear to note their findings have their limits, and that they're not openly advocating for companies to fully embrace piracy. They do, however, argue that if you understand the benefits of piracy as a form of invisible competition, you'll find that overly-aggressive anti-piracy efforts can actually harm the market. "Our results do not imply that the legal channel should, all of a sudden, start actively encouraging piracy," researchers said. "The implication is simply that, situated in a real-world context, our manufacturer and retailer should recognize that a certain level of piracy or its threat might actually be beneficial and should, therefore, exercise some moderation in their anti-piracy efforts."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Pelco, a California-based security camera maker, set lofty sales targets last year for a model with sharper video resolution and other cutting-edge features. That was until Congress derailed its plans. In August, updated legislation barred the U.S. military and government from buying tech gear from firms deemed too close to authorities in China. When the bill surfaced, Pelco scrapped any thought of providing its new GPC Professional 4K camera to the U.S. government and lowered its sales goals. The reason: The device uses parts from HiSilicon, the chip division of Huawei.

[...] Most of the focus is on Huawei telecom gear that helps run communications networks all over the world. But chips from the HiSilicon unit are also sparking concern because they power about 60 percent of surveillance cameras. That means Chinese chips process video from cameras that sit in places as varied as pizzerias, offices and banks across the U.S.

Google may have discontinued the sale of Google Glass years ago, but die hard fans have not given up. From a report: Glassholes still exist, just not as boogeymen haunting the tech section of your newspaper. There's a small group of fans still talking and updating and buying and selling on Reddit. Somebody who picked up a pair for $150 and wants help using the device to display sheet music; somebody with questions about installing an older operating system onto Glass Enterprise; another person looking for foldable frames; somebody else trying to fix a broken device; people looking to buy, as well as a number of people asking if it's even worth it to spend any money on the now-defunct tech. (Spoiler: survey says it's not.) There is also, weirdly, somebody asking if Google nixed Google Glass "because 'someone' was made aware of the book 'The Circle' by Dave Eggers?"

Reading through the forum, it seems wrong to regard the dwindling frequenters of /r/googleglass as Glassholes. On the contrary, they seem to bust out their devices at incredibly appropriate moments. "I pretty much only use Glass for taking pictures/video while running/hiking or anywhere I don't have access to a phone or don't want to carry one," writes one Redditor. "It's a great way to capture highlights of a marathon, for instance, without having to stop and pull out a phone." "Text notifications. Phone calls whilst driving, pix and video while on the go," writes another.

It's been nearly two years since news blog MusicBusinessWorld kicked off a global conversation over 'fake artists' on Spotify. That debate is about to roar back into life. From a report: Multiple Spotify users have been complaining that their official listening history on Spotify appears to have been infiltrated by acts that they don't simply recognize. The trend was spotted by the BBC, which reported on Friday that plays of 'mystery' tracks from artists such as Bergenulo Five, Bratte Night, DJ Bruej and Doublin Night were being credited within individual Spotify user accounts -- despite these same users knowing nothing about this music.

"Apart from being musically unremarkable, they generally have a few things in common: short songs with few or no lyrics, illustrated with generic cover art, and short, non-descriptive song titles," said the Beeb of these acts -- some of whom had managed to rack up tens of thousands of plays. Albums from these artists contained more than 40 songs apiece, with each track just a minute or two in duration. After the BBC alerted Spotify to the trend, all of these artists disappeared from its platform entirely.

The FBI, together with authorities from several European countries, have seized the domains and servers of xDedic, a notorious online marketplace where cyber-criminals would sell and buy access to hacked servers. From a report: The site has been around since 2014, but it became widely known after a Kaspersky report published in June 2016. According to the report, the site was operating as a registration-based online marketplace where several criminal groups would either put up for sale or buy hacked servers, usually in the form of compromised RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) accounts. At the time, Kaspersky said the site listed nearly 70,000 hacked servers, for prices as little as $8 per server. [...] In Europol and FBI press releases published today, authorities announced that they've seized both the domains and the servers hosting the marketplace, effectively shutting down the site and gaining access to its list of customers.

In Venezuela, where media is controlled by the government, figuring out what is truth, rumor or propaganda has always been difficult. NPR reports: In recent days it's gotten even more confusing. President Nicolas Maduro has refused to cede power to the opposition party. There have been widespread protests and looting -- and the rumor mill has been churning on social media. But many Venezuelans have found a way to use social media in their favor.

Javier Rojo owns a pharmacy in the capital city of Caracas. As the chaos started, he gave his workers the day off, went home and turned on the TV -- only to find nothing was being reported. "Independent media has been gradually attacked or shut down over time," says professor Gregory Weeks, who teaches Latin American politics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "So that in general social media becomes the means by which you learn what's going on, on an ongoing basis."

Back at his house, Rojo says he started getting messages on WhatsApp like this one from from one of his employees: "Tanks are rolling into the park. They are launching tear gas." But then, Rojo started receiving WhatsApp messages with rumors from people he doesn't even know. One man, who says his aunt's husband is a military officer, swore that Maduro has resigned. Professor Raisa Urribarri researches technology and politics at Universidad de Los Andes in Venezuela. She says it's hard to trace the origins of some messages in Venezuelan social media. They can be from panicked citizens, the opposition or the government.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Well timed with a report from The New York Times today that explained why Apple is unlikely to manufacture more of its products in the United States, Apple has published a press release highlighting how several components it uses are manufactured by U.S. suppliers such as Finisar, Corning, and Broadcom. Apple says it spent $60 billion with 9,000 American component suppliers and companies in 2018, an increase of more than 10 percent from the year before. Apple says this spending supports more than 450,000 jobs in the United States.

With Windows 7 reaching its end of life in less than a year, developers are likely to begin retiring features for the operating system. Kicking off the process of retiring features is Microsoft, which is retiring a feature in Windows Media Player, according to updated support documentation on its website. From a report: New metadata for music, TV shows and movies, will not be added to Windows Media Player. This means that additional information such as cover art, directors, actors, and more, will not display on Windows Media Player. This change also affects Windows Media Center on Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.

An update of the Bluetooth specification released today enables location services accurate to within 10 centimeters thanks to a new direction-finding capability. From a report: It arrives as a separate draft standard is nearly ready for an even faster and more accurate capability using ultra-wideband (UWB) radio, geared for use in smartphones. Bluetooth 5.1 describes ways to determine location using multiple antennas at either the transmitter or receiver. It uses measures of signal phase and amplitude to measure location, though profiles for application developers are still being finished.

In mid-March, the IEEE 802.15.4z standard for UWB should be in a stable draft form, opening the door for silicon designs. It enables location measures within a single centimeter and resolves in a nanosecond, a rate faster than Bluetooth. Smartphone giants Apple and Samsung have been active in the .4z meetings also attended by Huawei, leading some to suggest that the capability could be integrated in handsets within two years. NXP has also been active since the group started a year ago, giving rise to speculation that UWB could come into phones though an integrated NFC chip.

NASA is making a new, and perhaps final, attempt to restore contact with the Mars rover Opportunity, which has not communicated with the Earth for more than six months. From a report: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Jan. 25 that it was transmitting a new set of commands to address what it acknowledged are "low-likelihood" events that could have kept the rover from contacting Earth. These new efforts are in addition to the months-long "sweep and beep" campaign of transmitting other commands and listening for a reply from the rover.

The new commands address scenarios where the rover's primary X-band radio has failed or both the primary and backup X-band radios have failed, as well as cases where Opportunity's internal clock has an offset affecting its timing. The commands direct the rover to switch to the backup X-band radio or use its UHF transmitter to contact Earth, as well as resetting its clock. Those scenarios could explain why the rover has failed to contact Earth, but project officials acknowledge that those scenarios are unlikely. "A series of unlikely events would need to have transpired for any one of these faults to occur," JPL noted in the statement about the new campaign.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Despite a trade war between the United States and China and past admonishments from President Trump "to start building their damn computers and things in this country," Apple is unlikely to bring its manufacturing closer to home. A tiny screw illustrates why. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.]

In 2012, Apple's chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, went on prime-time television to announce that Apple would make a Mac computer in the United States. It would be the first Apple product in years to be manufactured by American workers, and the top-of-the-line Mac Pro would come with an unusual inscription: "Assembled in USA." But when Apple began making the $3,000 computer in Austin, Tex., it struggled to find enough screws, according to three people who worked on the project and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.

In China, Apple relied on factories that can produce vast quantities of custom screws on short notice. In Texas, where they say everything is bigger, it turned out the screw suppliers were not. Tests of new versions of the computer were hamstrung because a 20-employee machine shop that Apple's manufacturing contractor was relying on could produce at most 1,000 screws a day. The screw shortage was one of several problems that postponed sales of the computer for months, the people who worked on the project said. By the time the computer was ready for mass production, Apple had ordered screws from China.

An anonymous reader writes: The Japanese government approved a law amendment on Friday that will allow government workers to hack into people's Internet of Things devices as part of an unprecedented survey of insecure IoT devices. The survey will be carried out by employees of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) under the supervision of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

NICT employees will be allowed to use default passwords and password dictionaries to attempt to log into Japanese consumers' IoT devices. The plan is to compile a list of insecure devices that use default and easy-to-guess passwords and pass it on to authorities and the relevant internet service providers, so they can take measures to alert consumers and secure the devices. The survey is scheduled to kick off next month, when authorities plan to test the password security of over 200 million IoT devices, beginning with routers and web cameras. Devices in people's homes and on enterprise networks will be tested alike

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is adding a new device to its suite of miniature computers for industrial and enterprise customers. From a report: The charity today unveiled the Pi Compute Module 3+ (CM3+), successor to the two-year-old Compute Module 3 (CM3). The Pi Compute Module 3+ comes in four variants, starting at $25. The Raspberry Pi Compute Module is derived from the CM3 board but offers better thermal behavior under load. That's possible because of the Broadcom's 64-bit BCM2837B0 application processor, which was also used in last year's Raspberry Pi 3B+, and 1GB of LPDDR2 RAM. The difference between the four variants resides in their storage limits. The CM3+ Lite does not offer a built-in eMMC Flash, whereas other variants include 8GB ($30), 16GB ($35), and 32GB ($40) of eMMC Flash. These eMMC flash chips are more reliable and robust than normal SD cards, the foundation claims.

A reader shares a report from Business Insider: Arthur Ashkin, the world's oldest Nobel Prize winner, [...] has turned the bottom floor of his house into a kind of laboratory where he's developing a solar-energy-harnessing device. Ashkin's new invention uses geometry to capture and funnel light. Essentially, it relies on reflective concentrator tubes that intensify solar reflections, which could make existing solar panels more efficient or perhaps even replace them altogether with something cheaper and simpler. The tubes are "dirt cheap," Ashkin says -- they cost just pennies to create -- which is why he thinks they "will save the world." He's even got his eye on a second Nobel Prize.

Ashkin's lifelong fascination with light has already saved countless lives. He shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics for his role in inventing a tiny object-levitating technology called optical tweezers, which is essentially a powerful laser beam that can "catch very small things," as Ashkin describes it. Optical tweezers can hold and stretch DNA, thereby helping us probe some of the biggest mysteries of life. [...] Ashkin has already filed the necessary patent paperwork (he holds at least 47 patents to date) for his new invention, but said he isn't ready to share photos of the concentrators with the public just yet. Soon, he hopes to publish his results in the journal Science.