Artists who don’t sign with YouTube’s new subscription service to be blocked

Adele is reportedly one of the artists under fire.

YouTube

YouTube is getting ready to block music videos from artists that haven't agreed to the contract terms for its upcoming subscription service, the Financial Times reported Tuesday. The videos set to get the boot include those from independent record labels and artists including Adele and Arctic Monkeys.

The new subscription service for videos will charge a monthly fee but will let users watch videos on YouTube without ads. FT noted that the service will also allow users to watch videos "even when not connected to the Internet" on any device, suggesting some sort of pinning or downloading infrastructure to go with the platform.

Robert Kyncl, YouTube's head of content and business operations, told FT that record labels representing 90 percent of the music industry have agreed to the contract terms that include provisions for the subscription service. But YouTube will apparently not let the 10 percent that have resisted carry on as ad-supported-only videos, and Kyncl told FT that the blocking will begin in a matter of days.

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Nest Protect smoke alarm returns from sales hiatus with $30 price cut

The original letter from Nest about the Nest Wave problem.

Nest

Back in April, Google-owned Nest reported that it would no longer be selling its Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide alarm. The problem was with a particular feature called Nest Wave, which allowed users to turn the alarm off by waving their hand in front of it—Nest's own testing apparently uncovered "a unique combination of circumstances" that could unintentionally disable the alarm. This is obviously a deal-breaker for a smoke detector, so the company stopped selling the device and issued a software update to Internet-connected Nest Protects that disabled Nest Wave. As of April, 440,000 Nest Protects had already been sold or were sitting on shelves waiting to be sold.

Now the New York Times reports that Nest is ready to resume sales of the Protect, albeit with Nest Wave still disabled. The company is still working to re-enable the feature in a future software update, but in the meantime the Nest Protect will return to store shelves with a new $99 price tag, $30 less than before. The Nest Protect still retains its other "smart" features, including the ability to notify users of alarms via their smartphones.

One other Nest product, the Nest Learning Thermostat, is available through the Google Play Store and traditional retail channels. Now that the Protect is returning to store shelves, it's a safe bet that Google will begin selling it through its own online store as well. Google bought Nest back in January for $3.2 billion, though the company has yet to announce any new products since the acquisition.

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Hubble to seek out new destinations for New Horizons

An artist's conception of New Horizons passing an unrealistically high density of Kuiper Belt Objects while keeping its main antenna pointed towards the distant Sun.

NASA

In 2006, New Horizons became the fastest object that humanity has ever sent away from the Earth, and it has only picked up speed since. Destined for a rendezvous with Pluto next summer, the spacecraft will provide the first ever close-up look at one of the icy bodies that orbit in the outer Solar System.

But the visit to Pluto won't be an extended one. Provided that New Horizons can avoid the dwarf planet's five moons and any associated debris, it will shoot right past Pluto, travelling deeper into the outer Solar System. In an effort to extract more scientific value from the hardware, researchers are hoping to make sure the probe's trajectory will send it past a Kuiper Belt object. The only problem? We don't know of any in the right neighborhood.

In an attempt to rectify that situation, the committee that allocates observation time on the Hubble Space Telescope has agreed to let the Hubble search for new Kuiper Belt objects in the right neighborhood. The plan will start with a set of test observations where the Hubble will rotate to track a patch of space in the Kuiper Belt region. Due to its rotation, any background stars will appear as streaks in the exposure; Kuiper Belt Objects, in contrast, will show as distinct spots. If this succeeds in identifying some Kuiper Belt Objects, then the Hubble will be turned loose on the area along the future path of New Horizons.

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Consumer-grade SSDs actually last a hell of a long time

How long, exactly, do SSDs last? It's a difficult question to answer because estimating an SSD's life requires taking a whole lot of factors into consideration—type and amount of NAND used in the drive, overall write amplification, read/write cycle, and more. When we did our in-depth examination of how SSDs work a couple of years back, we looked a bit at how those factors affect drive life, but TechReport is going even further than that and has been subjecting six drives to a long-term torture test to actually measure, rather than estimate, the drives' service life.

The results are impressive: the consumer-grade SSDs tested all made it to at least 700TB of writes before failing. Three of the drives have written 1PB (that's a thousand terabytes, by TechReport's decimal reckoning, not 1024TB). That's a hell of a lot more writes than the manufacturers' stated drive lifetimes, and that's good news for SSD-buying consumers.

Performing that many writes takes time—in fact, TechReport has been torturing the drives to death since last August. The six drives chosen to die for science are Corsair's 240GB Neutron GTX (with 19nm MLC NAND), Intel's 240GB 335 (with 20nm MLC NAND), two of Kingston's 240GB HyperX 3K drives (with older 25nm MLC NAND), and two Samsung drives—one 256GB 840 Pro (with 21nm MLC NAND) and one 250GB 840 (with 21nm TLC NAND). The Intel and Kingston drives use SandForce controllers, the two Samsung drives use Samsung's own controllers, and the Corsair drive uses a controller from Link_A_Media Devices.

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Report: Amazon’s 3D smartphone to be AT&T exclusive

Amazon's teaser video for its upcoming 3D phone.

Amazon is due to unveil its long-rumored smartphone tomorrow, and if a report from The Wall Street Journal is to be believed, customers won't have their pick of US carriers. The outlet is reporting that Amazon's phone will be available exclusively on AT&T's network.

The two companies have a history of working together. AT&T's network provides Internet access to Kindle tablets and e-readers, and the hope is that Amazon's new 3D phone will boost subscriber rates for AT&T's network. Amazon's phone is expected to have a normal LCD screen that provides a 3D effect via head tracking. Four cameras are reportedly embedded in the front of the device; they will track the user's head and change the image on the screen accordingly.

The event is tomorrow, and we'll have boots on the ground and a liveblog going to bring you all the news about Amazon's latest.

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This top turns see-through if you leave personal data exposed

X.pose

A Brooklyn-based designer has created a 3D-printed sculptural boob tube to spark social commentary on the state of privacy in a data-driven world—by making the top gradually more sheer.

X.pose's striking black webbed rubber structure was engineered using a Stratasys printer, molded to the body to ensure comfort and very much inspired by creator Xuedi Chen's previous work, Invasive Growth (moss-grown jewelry based on the parasitic cordyceps fungus). But underneath, its layers tell another story about our lack of control and veritable vulnerability when it comes to who uses our data, what for, and how much they take.

"By participating in this hyper-connected society while having little to no control of my digital data production, how much of myself do I unknowingly reveal?" asks Chen, who created X.pose in around three weeks with fellow artist Pedro Oliveira. "To what degree does the aggregated metadata collected from me paint an accurate portrait of who I am as a person? What aspects of my individuality are reflected in this portrait?"

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Hands-on with Canonical’s Orange Box and a peek into cloud nirvana

Looking down into the Orange Box. The ten naked NUCs are vertically mounted to the walls, while the central cavity includes a power supply, gigabit Ethernet switch, and shared storage.

Lee Hutchinson

Take ten high-end Intel NUCs, a gigabit Ethernet switch, a couple of terabytes of storage, and cram it all into a fancy custom enclosure. What does that spell? Orange Box.

Not the famous gaming bundle from Valve, though—this Orange Box is a sales demo tool built by Canonical. There are more than a dozen Orange Boxes in the wild right now being used as the hook to get potential Canonical users interested in trying out Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS), Juju, and other Canonical technologies. We got the chance to sit down with Canonical's Dustin Kirkland and Ameet Paranjape for an afternoon and talk about the Orange Box: what it is, what it does, and more importantly, what it is not.

The rear of the Orange Box, showing Ethernet connections (they're attached to the internal switch and are used to expand the Orange Box—like if you wanted to cluster it with a twin), power, USB, and HDMI. The USB and HDMI connect to the control node.

Lee Hutchinson

First off, Canonical emphasized to Ars multiple times that it is not getting into the hardware business. If you really want to buy one of these things, you can have Tranquil PC build one for you (for £7,575, or about $12,700), but Canonical won't sell you an Orange Box for your lab—there are too many partner relationships it could jeopardize by wading into the hardware game. But what Canonical does want to do is let you fiddle with an Orange Box. It makes for an amazing demo platform—a cloud-in-a-box that Canonical can use to show off the fancy services and tools it offers.

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Wikipedia creates new rules, forcing editors to disclose if they’re paid

The Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and related projects, explained yesterday that it will establish new rules covering paid editing.

The heart of the change is that anyone who is paid to edit the site must "add your affiliation to your edit summary, user page, or talk page, to fairly disclose your perspective," according to Wikimedia's explanation of the change. The organization has also published an FAQ on paid editing.

The changes come after some high-profile commotions over paid editing. In October, Wikipedia deleted more than 250 accounts believed to be connected to a PR firm that was writing articles on the site. In January, the Wikimedia Foundation fired an employee who was accused of taking paid editing gigs.

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Use A Fork When Grating Potatoes To Avoid Scraped Knuckles

If you use a standard grater to shred potatoes, you've probably scraped your knuckles or fingers on occasion. Instructables suggests using a fork to hold the potato. More »