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Twitch streamers that want to play music over their gameplay sessions will now be able to choose from a selection of licensed songs made freely available by the service.

Last year, Twitch started muting audio in archived streams when it detected unauthorized, copyrighted music in the background, using an automated system created by Audible Magic to find infringing soundtracks. This move impacted a wide array of streamers, who often like to play music over gameplay or in between matches. The muting even covered licensed songs that appear inside the streamed games themselves in some cases.

Today's introduction of music.twitch.tv seems to be a compromise solution to this problem, offering streamers 500 fully licensed songs that "will not be flagged by the audio recognition system implemented in 2014 to protect audio copyright holders and Twitch broadcasters alike," as Twitch puts it. Twitch says the song selection comes from "established and burgeoning labels," but you won't find songs from major pop music conglomerates like Sony BMG, Universal Music, EMI, or Warner among the choices. Instead, labels like Mad Decent, Dim Mak, Spinnin Records, OWSLA, Monstercat, and Fools Gold provide the tunes.

Comcast users in various parts of the country have already gotten (or may soon get) a lovely holiday present from their ISP—a seemingly inexplicable increase in the cable modem rental fee, from $8 to $10 per month.

Eric Studley, of Boston, who posts on reddit as Slayer0606, first pointed out the increase on Tuesday. After reading Studley’s post, Ars encouraged readers who rent Comcast modems to check their bills and found that the increases seem to have taken place as far back as October 2014, while others took effect as of December 20, 2014 and January 1, 2015.

The company did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

NASA is going to try to disable some faulty flash memory on the Opportunity rover, which is over a decade into its planned three-month mission to explore Mars. Defects in one of the rover's seven banks of flash memory are causing a series of reboots and "amnesia" events that are making it difficult for the rover to continue its scientific mission.

Opportunity uses a combination of volatile memory and flash memory. The volatile memory is used to store data obtained by the scientific instruments, which is sent back to Earth prior to nightfall, when power is cut from the rover's solar panels. The flash memory is used to store telemetry and command information, which allow the rover to continue its mission as the next day starts. If the flash memory is faulty or unavailable, the rover has to do a reset and wait for new commands from Earth.

This started occurring with regularity by early December, prompting NASA to reformat the flash memory. Problems continued, however, and technicians eventually localized the issue to one of the banks of on-board flash memory that provide Opportunity with 2GB of storage. So NASA started to plan for a software patch that would deactivate that bank and allow the rover to function with the remaining six.

The FCC is currently getting public feedback about the possibility of regulating Internet service providers under Title II of the Communications Act. Cable companies are stridently opposed to such rules, but a relatively new competitor in the space, Google, sees an opportunity.

In Google's public comment, filed yesterday with the FCC, the company emphasizes that any such regulation must be careful to confer the benefits of such regulation along with the responsibilities.

The benefit most interesting to Google? Access to utility poles and other infrastructure.

Tesla Motors has recently been focused on improvements to its flagship electric vehicle, the Model S, giving it a second motor and Knight Rider-like self-driving capabilities. But Tesla was only able to build the Model S in the first place because of the practical experience it gained from constructing and selling the sedan’s predecessor, the Tesla Roadster. The Lotus-derived Roadster has mostly left the spotlight after its limited production run ended in 2012, but Tesla will be giving a late Christmas present to Roadster owners: existing Roadsters will be upgraded with changes that will boost the car’s range by 40 to 50 percent, up to a maximum of 400 miles on a single charge.

The upgrades are described in a post on the Tesla Motors blog and are a combination of an upgraded 70kWh battery pack, a new aerodynamic kit to lower the Roadster’s drag coefficient from 0.36 to 0.31 (still far higher than the Model S’ streamlined 0.24), and new tires to lower the Roadster’s rolling resistance. When combined with a specific "set of speeds and driving conditions" that Tesla says it will demonstrate in early 2015, the Roadster should be able to travel considerably farther per charge than its younger Model S sibling.

After the announcement, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that a similar battery pack upgrade isn’t coming any time soon for the Model S, but that it "obviously will happen long-term." The tweet has since been deleted.

While most parts of the US have to make do with Internet speeds of less than 100Mbps—in many cases much less than 100Mbps—some residents of Minneapolis will soon have access to a ludicrously fast fiber-to-the-home speed tier: 10 gigabits per second.

The service is offered by US Internet, the company that already provides "a couple thousand" Minneapolis residents with 1Gbps service for $65 per month. The 10Gbps service will be available immediately to existing customers willing to pay the $400-per-month fee, though US Internet expects the number of customers who take them up on the deal to be relatively small. All together, US Internet has "a little over 10,000" fiber-to-the-home customers at different speed tiers, all located on the west side of Interstate 35W.

This summer, the company plans to widen its service area to the east side of I-35W, which will encroach further into incumbent Comcast’s territory. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Comcast offers 50Mbps service for $77 and 25Mbps service for $65 in that area; US Internet by contrast prices its 100Mbps service tier—the company’s most popular—at just $45 per month. The gigabit plan at $65 gives customers about 40 times the bandwidth of Comcast’s 25Mbps plan for the same price.

It only took an international crisis to find out, but apparently one can make a lot of money releasing a big-budget movie on the Internet.

Sony released its Christmas Day comedy The Interview online last week, when it couldn't get major theater chains to carry the film following threats. The comedy about two TV hosts sent to assassinate the North Korean leader is the first major-studio motion picture to be distributed online the same day it launched in theaters.

The studio has now revealed it made more than $15 million in online sales and rentals, mostly through Google Play. Add in $2.8 million in box-office sales from the 331 theaters that would carry the movie, and Sony has made nearly the $20 million it was hoping for from the traditional release method.

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