Talynebear

Comic by: whatdoyoumeanthatnameisalreadinuse (via Biter Comics)

Net neutrality protest at the White House in November 2014. (credit: Stephen Melkisethian)

Senators Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) today said they will try to preserve the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules in a budget standoff with Republicans.

A Republican budget proposal that came out in June would prevent the FCC from enforcing its net neutrality rules until Internet providers who are suing the commission have exhausted all their legal options.

"ISPs are certainly free to file their suits but until they prevail, and I don’t believe they will, there is no basis for Republicans blocking the FCC from doing its job," Franken said in a press conference today.

Hey, how did that get there? (credit: NeoGAF / MMaRsu)

Yesterday morning, NeoGAF user MMaRsu turned on his PlayStation 4 and saw an icon for Destiny expansion "The Taken King" sitting in the menu. That wouldn't be all that noteworthy, except for the fact that MMaRsu says he never actually purchased "The Taken King."

That icon wasn't a surprise gift from the Destiny fairy (or Sony, Activision, or Bungie, for that matter). It was more of an advertisement that, when selected, provided MMaRsu the opportunity to buy and play the game from the PlayStation store. And MMaRsu wasn't alone; Twitter users and other message board posters began complaining about the same unwanted icon appearing on their systems yesterday.

This kind of marketing intrusion into the home menu is new to most PS4 users, but it's not actually a novel thing for the system. In fact, the groundwork was laid over a year ago, when PS4 System Update version 1.75 added the capability for "featured content from the PlayStation Store [to be] automatically downloaded while the PS4 system is either powered on or in standby mode."

(credit: Emw)

Australia's highest court has ruled unanimously that a version of a gene that is linked to an increased risk for breast cancer cannot be patented. The case was brought by 69-year-old pensioner from Queensland, Yvonne D'Arcy, who had taken the US company Myriad Genetics to court over its patent for mutations in the BRCA1 gene that increase the probability of breast and ovarian cancer developing, as The Sydney Morning Herald reports. Although she lost twice in the lower courts, the High Court of Australia allowed her appeal, ruling that a gene was not a "patentable invention."

The court based its reasoning (PDF) on the fact that, although an isolated gene such as BRCA1 was "a product of human action, it was the existence of the information stored in the relevant sequences that was an essential element of the invention as claimed." Since the information stored in the DNA as a sequence of nucleotides was a product of nature, it did not require human action to bring it into existence, and therefore could not be patented.

Although that seems a sensible ruling, the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry has been fighting against this self-evident logic for years. The view that genes could be patented suffered a major defeat in 2013, when the US Supreme Court struck down Myriad Genetics' patents on the genes BRCA1 and the similar BRCA2. The industry was hoping that a win in Australia could keep alive the idea that genes could be owned by a company in the form of a patent monopoly. The victory by D'Arcy now makes it highly likely that other judges around the world will take the view that genes cannot be patented.

Longtime AT&T customer Evan Shapiro still has one of the carrier's old unlimited data plans, but AT&T seemingly doesn’t want him to keep it.

Shapiro received a letter from AT&T last month telling him that he needs to either stop tethering or move to a limited data plan that allows him to tether. (Tethering shares a phone’s Internet connection with another device, such as a laptop.)

One problem: Shapiro says he’s never tethered. He provided Ars a screenshot from his phone which shows that he can’t use the device's built-in tethering functionality unless he contacts AT&T to enable the feature. 

@Hikarun___ There's no further SNES games coming from us. Nintendo has moved on to other classic systems.

— Natsume Inc. (@Natsume_Inc) October 5, 2015

It's hard to believe that it's been nearly nine years since Nintendo first launched the Virtual Console, finally offering a legal way to download select games from out-of-print consoles on the Wii (and, later, the 3DS and Wii U as well). That means gamers have been spending nearly nine years now complaining about the limited selection of classic titles that are available for download on the service and the slow pace of those downloadable rereleases.

Now, there are some indications that Nintendo is completely finished rereleasing digital games for some of its classic systems. In a pair of recent tweets, niche publisher Natsume (perhaps best known for the Harvest Moon series) said that Nintendo has "moved on" from publishing Virtual Console games from the original Game Boy and Super NES, specifically. "There's no further SNES games coming from us," one tweet reads. "Nintendo has moved on to other classic systems."

Natsume has been a big supporter of the Virtual Console and is currently in the process of bringing eight older Game Boy Advance titles to the Wii U. So they'd seem to be in some position to know Nintendo's thoughts on the matter. Speaking to Ars Technica, though, Natsume VP of Operations Graham Markay made it clear that "we don't know what Nintendo's plans are," and that the tweets weren't based on any insider information or official notification from Nintendo.