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The latest hole in WiFi security is quite serious, but it's unlikely to cause widespread disruption in the corporate and government networks for which it would have the potential to cause the biggest headaches.

In fact, the exploit continues to demonstrate a lack of any effective method of cracking the WiFi Alliance WPA/WPA2 certified versions of IEEE encryption standards found in WiFi gear starting in 2003. Brute force and dictionary attacks against short passphrases used typically on home and small-business networks remain the only methods for key recovery.

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Microsoft has a long and illustrious history of operating system sales. The model has served the company well on the PC, but if it wants to make money in the phone market, it needs to start thinking like a consumer electronics company. That means selling Microsoft phones.

Microsoft revolutionized the operating system market back in the early 1980s. Indeed, Microsoft created the operating system market back in the early 1980s. Back then, when you bought a computer, it normally had its own special operating system that the vendor bundled (or even sold at extra cost).

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Motorola's Droid X is an impressive new contender in the emerging category of large form-factor touchscreen smartphones. The device's high-end hardware specifications and massive 4-inch touchscreen set it apart from the rest of Motorola's current product lineup. Although the Android-based device has much in common with HTC's recently launched EVO 4G, the Droid X succeeds where the EVO fell short—by matching an excellent feature set with all-day battery life.

The Droid X comes with a new iteration of Motorola's custom Android environment, which offers tightly integrated social networking functionality. It has outstanding power management features and the best support for messaging that we have ever seen on an Android handset—characteristics that make up for the rough edges that are present elsewhere in the user experience.

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Wireless data hotspots are quickly becoming all the rage among travelers and geeks who don't like to be tied down to their homes and coffee shops. Though 3G USB sticks have been growing in popularity for years, the new WiFi hotspot-type units are picking up steam because they allow users to share their wireless data connections among multiple devices or a group of friends, so long as everyone has WiFi.

Two of the most popular ones in the US right now are the Novatel MiFi from Verizon and the Overdrive 4G from Sprint. We managed to get our hands on both to give them a test run, and it turns out that deciding which is better wasn't quite as easy as we expected.

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We recently asked Ars staffers and OpenForum users to list all of the devices that they consider to be part of their home theater setup, excluding core components like receivers, speakers, displays, and DVRs. The idea was to get a sense of what else the early adopters among our staff and forum members are using in their home theater setups—i.e., apart from the obvious candidates for "#1 most popular home theater component," what would come in at #2?

The answers were many and varied—some were very brand-specific, and some were vague, but we lumped them all together in order to poll our broader audience to see just how popular the various devices and device categories are. Now, before we get into the results, a few explanations and caveats are in order.

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One of the most common arguments against a scientific finding is confirmation bias: the scientist or scientists only look for data that confirms a desired conclusion. Confirmation bias is remarkably common—it is used by psychics, mediums, mentalists, and homeopaths, just to name a few. As you may guess from such a list, deliberate use of confirmation bias is held in low esteem by scientists, and allowing confirmation bias to get the better of your results is regarded as a particularly sad form of incompetence.

Yet, whenever science meets some ideological barrier, scientists are accused of, at best, self-deception, and, at worst, deliberate fraud. Examples of this are scattered across the Internet with respect to evolution, gun control, sex education, and, of course, global warming. Let's take a look at three cases: in two cases, scientists were certainly duped by confirmation bias: the case of N-rays and homeopathy. In the last case—sex in Samoan society—we can see how difficult it can be to either establish or refute confirmation bias. I will then follow that up with a story from my own research, which shows how everyday scientific practice is designed to avoid falling into the trap of confirmation bias.

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Last week, I wrote an article about Michael Mann being completely exonerated by the inquiry at Penn State, and, at the time, I said that Phil Jones and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had been cleared by three inquiries. I got that wrong: at the time it was only two. Yesterday, the third inquiry reported back (pdf). And, yes, the science from the CRU has emerged unscathed. But— and its the sort of "but" that is both big and little—the reputation of both the CRU and the University of East Anglia (UEA) have taken a battering as the ugliness of character was there for all to see.

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The Gnomon School of Visual Effects was launched on the premise that those who are actively working in the special effects industry would be in the best position to train others working in the industry, and a classroom setting where pros teach other pros would be the best way to bring about a grand sharing of techniques and ideas. Soon after the school opened for admission, however, it turned out that most of the applications were from folks who wanted to get into the industry—not people who were already in the business and looking to learn new skills. Furthermore, many students entered wanting to work in the world of video games, rather than television or movies. But if you'd like to do any of these things, there are few places better suited to build your skills and find a job.

I was invited to tour the school during my time in Los Angeles for E3, and I jumped at the chance to check out where the people who make games are trained. My tour guide was Alex Alvarez, the Gnomon's founder and director. I said that I could give up a few hours early in the morning before E3 began, and the PR rep seemed a little taken aback. "Alex is an artist," I was told. "He's not going to like getting up that early." Alvarez met me at Gnomon at 8:30 in the morning, bleary eyed, holding a cup of coffee as if it were a life preserver. 

The school's stats are impressive: 350 students, and a 98 percent placement rate. The instructors are all working professionals from studios, so they know how the industry is now, not what it was like before they left it to begin teaching. "Every night they're driving in from Sony or Blizzard or Activision," Alvarez tells me. "Dreamworks, Digital Domain..." This is something that is constantly stressed: you are being taught by people in the industry.

Let's take a look at what makes Gnomon School of Visual Effects so special.

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Google is rolling out Android 2.2, codenamed Froyo, to Nexus One handsets. The new version of the operating system brings an extremely noticeable performance boost, a handful of impressive new features, some minor user interface enhancements, and useful new APIs for developers. The additions in Froyo fill some of the gaps in the platform and augment its competitiveness relative to rivals.

Froyo was unveiled at at the Google I/O developer conference in May during a keynote presentation by Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra. Stabilizing the platform for an official Nexus One release took Google a little bit longer than expected, but the software is now being made available to users through an over-the-air update. We took it for a test drive to see how it compares to the previous version.

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The now-dead KIN was not a bad idea (read our hands-on with the platform). Microsoft's ambitions with the KIN were sound. As much as the iPhone and, lately, Android handsets garner all the press attention, smartphones represent only a minority of phone sales—a growing minority, but a minority all the same. There are many, many people who don't have a smartphone, and don't even particularly want one, and they easily outnumber smartphone users.

Redmond wanted to be a part of this broader market. The company was already a big player in the smartphone market with Windows Mobile; the KIN was a product of its ambitions beyond that space. So rather than starting from scratch, in 2008 Microsoft bought Danger, the company behind the T-Mobile Sidekick line.

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Femtocells sound vaguely like a cross between a Feynman diagram and a biology class, but they're the latest piece of gear that millions of people will soon want in their homes without having missed them before. A femtocell is a small cellular base station designed to provide superior, short-range, indoor cellular coverage in a home or office. The idea behind femtocells is simple: the hardware tries to capture the ease of setup of a Wi-Fi network while allowing seamless connectivity for existing cell phones.

Woojune Kim, the vice president of technology at Airvana, a mobile broadband and femtocell equipment maker, explained the thinking behind femtocells. "Can you take the economics of the last 10 to 20 years, where we're able to make very small wireless transmitters like Wi-Fi base stations—can you make cellular base stations small enough and at that price point so that each of us can have our personal base station?" The answer, after years of trying, is yes.

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Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive offers 25GB of storage in the cloud, for free. It has a range of neat features: shared photo albums, integration with the new Hotmail and Office Web Apps, and RSS feeds. OneNote 2010 integrates directly into SkyDrive, making your notes available wherever you are—all sorts of good stuff.

Microsoft's Live Mesh offers the ability to sync a couple gigabytes of data with cloud storage, and provides remote desktop-like access to PCs in the "mesh."

Microsoft's Windows Live Sync offers file syncing directly between machines, supporting large files and quantities of data. It even provides access to non-synced files, enabling remote access to files over the Web.

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Astronomy. What's the first thing you think of when you read that word? The many beautiful vistas returned from Hubble? A family in a backyard huddled around a small telescope? Giant research observatories such as the Keck? Whatever may come to mind, it usually involves a telescope. But the very nature of telescopes has changed over the centuries, with different arrangements of lenses dominating for decades before succumbing to some combination of basic physics or technical limitations.  We'll (somewhat belatedly) celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescope by taking you on a quick tour of four centuries of progress and frustration.

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In April, the Supreme Court's most senior justice, John Paul Stevens, announced his retirement. Since then, hundreds of articles have been written about his career and his legacy. While most articles focus on "hot button" issues such as flag burning, terrorism, and affirmative action, Stevens's tech policy record has largely been ignored.

When Justice Stevens joined the court, many of the technologies we now take for granted—the PC, packet-switched networks, home video recording—were in their infancy. During his 35-year tenure on the bench, Stevens penned decisions that laid the foundation for the tremendous innovations that followed in each of these areas.

For example, Stevens penned the 1978 decision that shielded the software industry from the patent system in its formative years. In 1984, Hollywood's effort to ban the VCR failed by just one Supreme Court vote; Stevens wrote the majority opinion. And in 1997, he wrote the majority opinion striking down the worst provisions of the Communications Decency Act and ensuring that the Internet would have robust First Amendment protections.

Indeed, Justice Stevens probably deserves more credit than any other justice for the innovations of the last three decades. And given how central those technologies have become to the American economy, Stevens' tech policy work may prove one of his most enduring legacies. In this feature, we review Justice Stevens's tech policy decisions and salute the justice who helped make possible DRM-free media devices, uncensored Internet connections, free software, and much more.

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The iPhone 4 is Apple's "biggest leap since the original iPhone," at least according to Steven P. Jobs speaking at the WWDC 2010 keynote. Indeed, in the three years since Apple first introduced the iPhone, the device has come quite far. At the same time, the basic concepts behind the iPhone have remained very consistent over the years. Despite regular modifications to the OS and yearly hardware upgrades, the iPhone 4 is very much a more modern, more capable version of that original device that made such a splash in the industry back in 2007.

We're not living with our heads in the sand: if you have come to hate the iPhone, walled gardens for developers, and everything Apple stands for, you will likely hate the iPhone 4 and there's nothing anyone can say to change your mind. Luckily for you, Apple is no longer competing against the saddest of the sad: there are now plenty of solid phones from other manufacturers that have multitouch screens, app stores of their own, great cameras, and much more extensible OSs. If you are curious about Apple's latest offering, however, read on. The iPhone 4 is not without its flaws—some of them more serious than others—but the device remains a really cool evolution in Apple's lineup.

(We have already reviewed the majority of the OS, now called iOS 4, in a separate review. If you're looking to read about our impressions of the features in iOS 4, go read that one first and come back. This review is focused on the hardware of the new iPhone and on specific parts of iOS 4 that are limited to the iPhone 4.)

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It is no secret that, in general, i.e. outside of dedicated science reporting venues and the occasional medical report on the evening news, the scientific community does a craptastic job of communicating with the general public. While I think we at Nobel Intent do it admirably, we are but an infinitesimal sliver in the pie of science. A report that appeared in a recent edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences highlights a case study of effective science communication and deconstructs it to show what parts may be generally applicable to other areas of science.

"More effective communication is badly needed at almost every level of science," said Kirsten Grorud-Colvert, a research associate in the Department of Zoology at Oregon State University. "It doesn't have to be expensive, but we have to get out of the ivory tower, away from our scientific jargon and work more closely with our various audiences."

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The HTC EVO 4G is arguably one of the most ambitious smartphones ever to ship with Google's Android mobile operating system. Exclusive to Sprint, the device is one of the first to deliver 4G network connectivity. Its appeal is boosted by impressive hardware specs and a roster of outstanding capabilities, like support for high-definition video capture. It comes loaded with HTC's unique user interface enhancements and custom applications, which round out its feature set nicely.

Despite its strong assortment of merits, the device falls short of greatness due to mediocre battery life and a handful of other limitations. In this review, we'll take a close hands-on look at the EVO 4G.

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After a public beta and the release of Camera RAW 6 over a month ago, Lightroom 3's feature set wasn't the best-kept secret. Nevertheless, anticipation has been high for this release because of the notable improvements in noise reduction. Lightroom 3 may not be knee-deep in new features, but the Camera RAW 6 stuff alone has the potential to save people a lot of time. Let's jump right in and see what else Lightroom 3 has to offer.

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iOS 4, previously known as iPhone OS 4, is a major update to Apple's mobile OS which brings a handful of significant changes—namely Apple's implementation of "multitasking" plus the opening up of thousands of APIs to third-party developers—while the rest of the improvements are basically tweaks to existing functionality.

We'll say up front that we like the update. For iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 3G users (as well as second- and third-generation iPod touch users), iOS 4 will add useful functionality that will make your device more useable than ever. There are, however, some obvious downsides, and we'll address those in this review.

Because iOS 4 is launching ahead of the new iPhone 4 (and it runs on more devices than just the new iPhone), we're reviewing it separately from the phone itself. There is some functionality that is specific to the iPhone 4, which we'll address in that review when it comes out. For the purposes of this review, though, we used iOS 4 on an iPhone 3GS—the most current iPhone available ahead of the iPhone 4 launch.

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Sometime this August, librarians at the University of Illinois will finish archiving over a dozen famous computer games, then step back to consider where to go next with their project. These programs go back over four decades, and include a 1993 version of Doom, various editions of Warcraft, and even MIT's Spacewar! circa 1962.

We wondered, given the gaming nature of most of the software being preserved, why the venture is calling itself the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. So we called up the project's coordinator, Jerome McDonough, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, to ask him about the name.

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