Andrew

Broderick

As happens from time to time, the suggestion has been made that Microsoft cancel Windows Phone, and instead fork Android. It's not the first time this suggestion has been made. It's probably not the last, either.

It's a poor idea. Google has worked to make Android functionally unforkable, with no practical way to simultaneously fork the platform and take advantage of its related strengths: abundant developers, and abundant applications.

The outline of the "Microsoft should fork Android" argument is as follows: Windows Phone doesn't have huge developer buy-in or sales success, but Android has both. By forking Android, Microsoft could provide unique value—corporate integration with things like Exchange, Active Directory, and System Center or InTune; full Office support; a polished user experience—and make the platform depend on its own cloud services (Bing, Bing Maps, Azure) rather than Google's. But simultaneously, it would still have access to all the Android applications that people depend on.

Satya Nadella, speaking during a Microsoft webcast Tuesday, sees software as Microsoft's strength in the "mobile first, cloud first" world.

Microsoft's lengthy search for a new CEO is over, and after all the waiting, the end result isn't that much of a surprise. Satya Nadella, formerly executive vice president of Cloud and Enterprise, is the company's new CEO.

Of all the names the rumor mill threw up, both internal and external, Nadella's was one of the most compelling: he has a strong software background (unlike, for example, Ford's Alan Mulally), and he knows Microsoft well (unlike Skype's Tony Bates or Nokia's Stephen Elop). Moreover, in a company that has historically been riven with in-fighting and politics, Nadella is widely liked and respected. Past and present insiders from across the company appear unanimous—both in public and in private—in their approval.

A natural pick

Nadella was born in Hyderabad, India. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in India, a master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, and an MBA from the University of Chicago. After a stint at Sun Microsystems, he joined Microsoft as a program manager in the Windows developer relations group.

Bill Nye and Ken Ham square off at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.

Eric Bangeman / Ars Technica

PETERSBURG, KENTUCKY—A brightly lit auditorium was packed with young adults wearing bow-ties, young-Earth creationists, and a gaggle of media there to maybe see sparks fly. The sparks could have been generated by Ken Ham, president/CEO of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum, and Bill Nye the Science Guy, but instead, they mostly talked past each other for two-and-a-half hours on a snowy Kentucky night. The topic was one near and dear to both debate participants: the nature of acceptable scientific discourse. More specifically, they attempted to answer the question “is creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern scientific era?”

Ham and Nye both led off with short five-minute statements followed by 30-minute presentations punctuated by PowerPoint slides, video clips, and graphics intended to buttress their cases. Unsurprisingly, Ham’s starting point was Genesis, and he kept coming back to the assertion that God’s word as revealed in the first two chapters of Genesis is the definitive authority. All scientific inquiry should therefore begin with and proceed from there.

To make the case that science and creationism were compatible, he showed short video clips of scientists from around the world who believed in a literal six days of creation. "People are going to see what we really believe tonight," Ham promised. "I believe science has been hijacked by secularists" who seem to indoctrinate folks in the "religion of naturalism."

This is BFL's top-of-the-line bitcoin miner, selling for over $22,000.

Butterfly Labs

One of the world’s most mysterious Bitcoin-related companies is now facing its first civil lawsuit in a United States federal court, with many more likely on the way.

Last summer, Ars reported on Butterfly Labs (BFL), which makes ASIC-based Bitcoin miners. In other words, BFL builds little boxes with specialized chips that do nothing but compute hashes in the Bitcoin blockchain—a process which can lead to real money for the miners. Given that the value of Bitcoin has skyrocketed in recent months (hovering around $820 per bitcoin as of this writing), mining coins when their value is lower is clearly profitable.

Martin Meissner, a German-Polish man who lives in China, placed an order for a BFL miner back in March 2013 but ultimately never received his order. He alleges that he spent over $62,000 to order two 1500 gigahash-per-second Bitcoin miners. To date, he has not received a refund for his payment. His lawsuit, filed in December 2013, accuses BFL of breach of contract, fraud, and negligent representation.

Asus' new Chromebox is a nice step up from Samsung's model.

Asus

Google's Chrome OS continues to show up on more and more devices, and while the majority of them are laptops, it looks like desktop users are going to have quite a few options as well. Joining LG's upcoming Chromebase all-in-one is the Asus Chromebox, a headless mini-PC that goes on sale in March for $179. At 4.88" by 4.88" by 1.65", it's similar to but slightly larger than Intel's more versatile NUC desktop in every dimension.

Despite its desktop-shaped package, the Chromebox is the same on the inside as many recent Intel Chromebooks, including the Acer C720. The base model includes a 1.4GHz dual-core Celeron 2955U based on Intel's Haswell architecture, integrated Intel graphics, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of solid-state storage, dual-band 802.11n with Bluetooth 4.0, and an SD card reader and Kensington lock slot. AnandTech reports that the Chromebox will also be available in higher-end variants with a 1.7GHz Core i3-4010U and a 2.1GHz (3.3GHz Turbo) Core i7-4600U and up to 4GB of RAM across its two DIMM slots. The Core i7 version apparently won't be available on American shores, though.

In addition to the USB ports on the front, the box includes two more USB 3.0 ports on the back, one gigabit Ethernet jack, one full-size HDMI port, and one full-size DisplayPort.

Asus

The Asus Chromebox includes many of the features of Samsung's $329 Chromebox originally introduced in 2012 but at a substantially lower price. Samsung's model had more display outputs but lacked HDMI, and its Sandy Bridge Celeron CPU also needed a cooling fan that the Asus version doesn't need.

Inside Facebook's Blu-ray storage rack.

Facebook

Facebook's hardware guru thinks Blu-ray discs might have a brighter future in the data center than in consumers' homes.

We wrote on Wednesday about how Facebook has developed a prototype storage system that uses 10,000 Blu-ray discs to hold a petabyte of data. After that story posted we were able to talk to Frank Frankovsky, VP of hardware design and supply chain operations at Facebook, to find out just why he's so excited about the project.

While the Blu-ray storage system is just a prototype, Facebook hopes to get it in production sometime this year and share the design with the Open Compute Project community to spur adoption elsewhere. If Facebook and others start using Blu-ray discs for long-term archival storage, Blu-ray manufacturers will see a new market opportunity and pursue it, Frankovsky said.

Soylent

In a blog post two weeks ago, Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart noted that the company had decided to produce a single 2,000-kilocalorie version for its initial production run; beta versions (including the 0.89 Beta formula we tried) came in male and female variants. The single launch formula means that a single nutritional label can be applied to all the packages of Soylent going out the door.

In its shipping form, a three-serving bag of Soylent clocks in at 2,010 kcal, with 630 kcal from fat—that's with the combined package of canola and fish oil added into the mix. Altogether, a full day's worth of Soylent 1.0 will give you 1,050 mg of sodium, 3,465 mg of potassium, 252 total grams of carbs (including 24 g dietary fiber and 6 g of sugars), and 114 g of protein. There's no cholesterol in the dry ingredients; the oil mix adds about 15 percent of your daily recommended cholesterol intake (specific numbers on the oil aren't included as part of the label).

Wikipedia

Widely used management software running on Target's internal network may have given an important leg-up to attackers who compromised 40 million payment cards belonging to people who recently shopped at the retail giant, according to an article published Wednesday by KrebsonSecurity.

As journalist Brian Krebs reported two weeks ago, malware that infected Target's point-of-sale terminals used the account name "Best1_user" and the password "BackupU$r" to log in to a control server inside the Target network. The malware used the privileged insider access to temporarily stash payment card data siphoned out of the terminals used in checkout lines so it could then periodically be downloaded to a different service for permanent storage. In Wednesday's post, Krebs filled in some intriguing new details that suggest a poorly secured feature inside a widely used server management program may have played a role. Krebs explained:

That “Best1_user” account name seems an odd one for the attackers to have picked at random, but there is a better explanation: That username is the same one that gets installed with an IT management software suite called Performance Assurance for Microsoft Servers. This product, according to its maker — Houston, Texas based BMC Software — includes administrator-level user account called “Best1_user.”

This knowledge base article (PDF) published by BMC explains the Best1_user account is used by the software to do routine tasks. That article states that while the Best1_user account is essentially a “system” or “administrator” level account on the host machine, customers shouldn’t concern themselves with this account because “it is not a member of any group (not even the ‘users’ group) and therefore can’t be used to login to the system.”

“The only privilege that the account is granted is the ability to run as a batch job,” the document states, indicating that it could be used to run programs if invoked from a command prompt.

Krebs went on to quote a part of the BMC article that said:

Facebook has built a prototype cold storage system that uses Blu-ray Discs instead of traditional drives. "The Blu-ray system reduces costs by 50 percent and energy use by 80 percent compared with its current cold-storage system, which uses hard disk drives," the IDG News Service reported, based on a talk given by Facebook VP of infrastructure engineering Jay Parikh at yesterday's Open Compute Summit.The prototype storage cabinet reportedly holds 10,000 Blu-ray Discs for a petabyte of data. The idea is to store rarely accessed files, such as backups of users' photos and videos, and not the primary copies that need to be on faster storage systems so they can be accessed immediately.

Facebook expects to eventually increase the capacity of each cabinet to 5 petabytes. According to GigaOm, Parikh also revealed that "the first site is now in production and storing 30 petabytes of data, but a second will be coming online soon. Within a couple of months, Facebook expects to have 150 petabytes of data in cold storage, which is just a fraction of the 3 exabytes each facility is designed to house."

The design of the Blu-ray system will likely be made public through the Open Compute Project, which Facebook created to share hardware designs. IDG reports: