Microsoft to let indie developers self-publish on Xbox Live Arcade (Updated)

FURTHER UPDATE: Microsoft's Marc Whitten tells Kotaku that self-published indie games on Xbox One won't be relegated to a separate section, like the Xbox 360's lightly frequented Xbox Live Indie Games clearinghouse. Instead, "my goal is for it to just show up in the marketplace," with different search "pivots" and curated, featured content to aid in discoverability. "But you shouldn't think of it as there's an indie area and a non-indie area."

Fake memory implanted in mice with a beam of light

If you’ve ever been frustrated by erratic memories, spare a thought for the mice involved in a study published in the journal Science. Researchers have been able to consistently create a “false memory,” making a mouse fearful of a place it has no reason to fear. The memory was implanted by shining blue light into the mouse’s brain, which triggered a carefully chosen group of neurons.

73 percent of Ouya owners haven’t paid for a single game

Most of the time, when you launch a new console, you can be confident that almost everyone who purchases the hardware will buy at least one game. Not so with the Ouya, which CEO Julie Uhrmantells The Verge has only seen 27 percent of its user base drop even a single dime on a game. The news comes after many Ouya developers have gone public with disappointing initial sales numbers on the console, ranging from the hundreds to the low thousands.

Google announces Android 4.3, the latest incremental Jelly Bean update

After weeks of leaks, other leaks, and false starts, Google finally unveiled Android 4.3 at this morning's breakfast event with Android and Chrome head Sundar Pichai.

Hey kids! Learn to be “cyber smart” from the NSA’s youth page!

The National Security Agency wants your kids to know that it's cool to be "cyber smart."

As part of the agency's outreach to promote interest in technology and recruit a future generation of computer security experts, the NSA has links on its homepage to two sites targeted at children and adolescents. The "Kids Page," intended for elementary age children, appears to be down at the moment—either that, or the error code reference (Reference #97.887ffea5.1374616699.dc7bfc5) is an encoded message to grade school operatives that it's time to report in.

NSA head admits the agency made “huge set of mistakes” in 2009

On Thursday, at the Aspen Security Forum—a $1,500-per-head conference held this week in the Rocky Mountains—the head of the National Security Agency (NSA) admitted that the spy agency had been overbroad in its acquisition of telephone data.

NSA Director General Keith Alexander told the assembled crowd at the Aspen forum that when President Barack Obama first took office in January 2009, he called out the agency on its blanket data collection practices.

Tech giants named in PRISM want to see an NSA “transparency report”

A high-powered coalition of civil liberties groups and tech titans—including all but one of the companies involved in the National Security Agency’s PRISM program—is demanding greater transparency about covert government surveillance programs, as well as the growing body of secret law that authorizes them. 

Judge rules anti-child-porn statute doesn’t infringe on sexting adults

Today, a Philadelphia-based federal judge issued an order (PDF) rejecting a First Amendment challenge to the constitutionality of a pair of laws that require creators of sexually explicit media to maintain records certifying that those depicted in their works are 18 or older.

Why It Doesn’t Matter If Edward Snowden Is A Hypocrite

Anti-authoritarian data leaker Edward Snowden is officially seeking the warm embrace of Russia, a country known for disappearing journalists and running a propaganda arm in the guise of a public media station. He’s also deliberately withheld the most damning information about how the National Security Agency actually operates. Yet, even if Snowden joined the Russian KGB, his exposé of highly controversial U.S. spying programs would be just as valuable.

WhatsApp, Finally Goes For A Subscription Model on iOS

While messaging has become a veritable war with apps like Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Path and Facebook Messenger across Asia and Western markets, there’s been one longstanding app that’s presided over the space with very few apparent changes.

Google in talks to create its own streaming live TV service

Google is reportedly looking to create a streaming TV service, according to the Wall Street Journal. Google has been meeting with media companies to negotiate for TV channels streamed over broadband connections, creating competition for TV programming providers like Comcast or Time Warner.

Court Will Reportedly Declassify Yahoo’s Fight Against PRISM

Yahoo will be allowed to prove that it fought against the National Security Agency’s internet spying program, PRISM. A secret court ruled on Monday that the government should investigate how it can declassify the legal battle,

Gesture In The Picture, As Intel Reportedly Picks Up Omek But PrimeSense Dismisses Apple Acquisition Rumors

Yet more exits for Israeli startups, with the latest two developments a throwback to the hardware and engineering muscle that raised the tech profile of the region in the first place, before theWaze’s of the world got us thinking about Israel as a hotbed of consumer internet companies, as well as an indication that gesture-based controls such as those in Microsoft’s Kinect system are likely going to become even more prevalent. Today, reports leaked out that Intel has acquired Omek Interactive, a company it had already invested in that makes technology for gesture-based interfaces.

The NES turns 30: How it began, worked, and saved an industry

We're right on the cusp of another generation of game consoles, and whether you're an Xbox One fanperson or a PlayStation 4 zealot you probably know what's coming if you've been through a few of these cycles. The systems will launch in time for the holidays, it will have one or two decent launch titles, there will be perhaps a year or two when the new console and the old console coexist on store shelves, and then the "next generation" becomes the current generation—until we do it all again a few years from now.

Volcanic earthquakes produce a “seismic scream” just before eruption

Volcanic activity is intimately associated with seismic activity. You simply can't force molten or semi-molten rock through a mountain without cracking a few faults in the process. If we were ever able to understand how to read the seismic activity correctly, it could provide valuable advanced warning about impending eruptions.

Disgruntled Google users try to live a low-Google lifestyle

Google’s services are undergoing some shape-shifting lately, with new features in places likeHangouts and the Latitude redundancy. Other services, like Reader, are simply disappearing.

Given the breadth and depth of Google's services, many people use at least one of them. But a pair of writers have become uncomfortable with how the company has not only permeated their lives, but how it keeps rearranging itself. Over the last few days, these two have laid out their plans for moving on.

USB 3.0 continues to steal Thunderbolt’s thunder

For Thunderbolt fans hoping that the high-speed interface will catch on, we've got more bad news: an Acer representative talking to CNET has said that the company has no plans to support Thunderbolt in its PCs this year. Acer's Aspire S5 Ultrabook was one of the few Windows laptops to include Thunderbolt support when it was introduced in early 2012.

Ars Technicast, Episode 30: How to ruin a NASA capsule with a sandwich

In this episode of the Ars Technicast we talk about NASA in light of next week’s 44th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. We are excited to welcome special guest Amy Shira Teitel, a journalist who specializes in the history of NASA. According to Teitel, the Apollo 11 trip warped our perception of space travel. The mission set up the expectation that space travel was only limited by our imaginations, but the facts and requirements of actual space travel tell a different story, Teitel says.

Virus removal squad: Ars readers talk security measures

 Let's say you work for a government agency and it becomes apparent that many computers on your network may be infected with some malware. What do you do? Well, if you're the Economic Development Administration, you cut your network off from the rest of the world, hire an outside security contractor, and then physically destroy $170,500 worth of equipment.

Team wins 33-year-old competition to build a human-powered helicopter

Look, ma—no strings!

Wired UK

A competition set up in 1980 for the first successful controlled flight of a human powered helicopter has finally been won by a Canadian team.

Your App Is Slow Because Our World Is Ending

The meatiest article I ran across on the Internet this week was also–maybe–a harbinger of doom for life as we know it. I mean Drew Crawford’s superb piece Why mobile web apps are slow. It’s long, and somewhat dense, but definitely worth reading if you’re technical enough to follow along.

Bootstrapped Startup Ampush Joins Facebook’s Elite Ranks Of Marketing Developers

Ampush, a bootstrapped social media marketing platform, was named a FacebookStrategic Preferred Marketing Developer(sPMD) today.

Facebook says being an sPMD is the “highest distinction of excellence,” and that companies are selected if they are “driving outstanding positive impact in our marketing developer ecosystem.”

With Plug, Create A Personal, Subscription-Free Dropbox With Your USB Drives

Plug just launched a Kickstarter campaign for its $69 adapter. It will transform your USB drives into a personal Dropbox for all your devices. Thanks to a deep integration in your filesystem, you won’t have to move your files to a special folder or a virtual hard drive. After launching Plug’s app, everything is transparent and you won’t have to change your workflow. Except that all your devices will now have the same files.

“Okay Maps” Easter Egg Brings Offline Mode Back To The New Google Maps App

The new Google Maps for Android just started shipping late last night, but folks are already bein’ all grumpy about the sudden disappearance of one of Maps’ old features: offline map mode. In previous releases of Maps, users could save chunks of the map for later use (like when you’re traveling abroad on a roaming plan and downloading a few megabytes of data would cost you somewhere between seven and eight billion dollars.) In new Maps, you can’t.

Dropbox Now Has 175 Million Users, Up From 100M In November 2012

“Today is about making life easier for all of you” said CEO Drew Houston to launch his company Dropbox’s conference. The company now has 175 million users, up from 100 million in November 2012. DBX also saw the launch of several new APIs for the 100,000 apps on the Dropbox platform

Hippflow Brings Its ‘Twitter For Startups’ To Google Glass

Hippflow, which pitches itself as a ‘Twitter for startups’ with a service that makes it easy to update investors, mentors, team members and other stakeholders on a startup’s progress and future plans, has added support for Google Glass. The new Glass app brings Hippflow updates — pushed on the hour so as to help manage the ‘noise’ — to Google’s wearable computer once a user has linked their Hippflow and Google Glass account.

To Take On Google, Facebook’s Graph Search Engine Needs More Data, Better Signals

As Facebook begins rolling out its Graph Search engine more broadly to its U.S. English-language user base today, it faces new challenges that were perhaps not at the forefront of our minds when the service was officially announced. Currently, the on-site search engine aims to make the people, places, photos and other interests posted to Facebook more easily discoverable, but for it to succeed in scraping away a subset of user queries that can be answered using social data — things like restaurant recommendations or new albums to listen to, for example — Graph Search will need to gain access to more data.

With Today’s Updates, Twitter Apps Finally Sync The ‘Read’ Status Of Your Direct Messages

Twitter announced updates to its Android, iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps today, as well as its desktop and mobile websites, plus TweetDeck. The main improvement isn’t a huge change, but it does eliminate one of the most annoying aspects of the apps — namely, the fact that they couldn’t tell if you had read a Direct Message on a different device or app.

Samsung Said To Launch Four Versions Of The Galaxy Note III By The End Of The Year

Talk about trying to cover bases. Korean news outlet ETNews reports that Samsung’s Galaxy Note III isn’t going to be an only child when it launches later this year — instead,

Facebook Slowly Making Home More Livable With Customizable Launcher Dock And Now Folders

When Facebook Home launched, its launcher was awful. No dock, no folders, no widgets — basically none of the personalization Androiders know and love. Even if they wanted their friends to come first, few were willing to sacrifice their customized home screen. But with last month’s new favorites dock and today’s added ability to drag apps into folders, Home’s biggest cracks are getting patched.

Why Twitter Finally Killed The “Auto Follow” For Good

Fresh on the heels of a spam report that painted Twitter as the network with the largest underground economy for the buying and selling of fake followers, the social network has finally taken steps to crack down on one of the tools often used by those attempting to game its service: the Auto Follow. In Twitter’s parlance, an auto follow refers to an immediate and programmatic means of following another user back after they follow you.

Jelly Bean Tips Past Majority Adoption Among Android Users With 37.9% Share

Google updated its Android version usage stats today, and for the first time Jelly Bean has pulled ahead as the most-used operating system. That’s probably been helped by a number of OEMs pushing out Jelly Bean updates to their handsets recently, including the AT&T Galaxy S2. Gingerbread is still a close second, however, indicating a lot of older devices are still in use.

Nokia Lumia 1020 Hardware And Camera Details Surface Ahead Of Official Launch

In case you’re somehow immune to all of Nokia’s incessant teasing, the company’s going to unveil a shiny new smartphone on Thursday in hopes that a tremendous camera will endear the thing to the masses.

Scientific 7 Minute Workout Makes Your Android Phone an Exercise Guide.

Android: You're probably familiar with the seven-minute, whole-body workout. We've shown you instructional videos and a timer to help, but if you're away from your computer, Scientific 7 Minute Workout for Android can help you get your exercise in anywhere, anytime.

Google Chrome's some useful shortcut keys

Nice Picture. I hope like you the natural photo.