The idea of copying a successful game concept and profiting off of your own version is practically as old as the game industry itself—just look at the countless Pong clones released in the wake of the Atari original (which itself may have been copied from another source... but that's another story). The idea of game copying has gained added attention in recent weeks, though, as some high-profile social game companies have released games some say are a little too similar to their existing inspirations.

Tiny Tower maker NimbleBit and Bingo Blitz maker Buffalo Studios both took issue with overly familiar titles recently released by Zynga, making their complaints known through large infographics that show near-identical side-by-side screenshots. But Triple Town developer Spry Fox went a step further, actually filing a lawsuit (PDF) against Yeti Town developer 6waves Lolapps, saying the latter company "unabashedly" cloned its popular social game. The lawsuit takes the matter away from the nebulous moral and ethical questions of what constitutes an "original" game idea to the codified legal realm of guilt and innocence. Yet the nature of copyright law as it applies to games, and the existing case law in the area, suggests Spry Fox has an uphill battle in protecting Triple Town in court.

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Siri, Apple's widely advertised voice-activated "intelligent assistant," has so far been limited to the latest iPhone 4S hardware after Apple's acquisition. Though observers have come up with various reasons for the restriction, a newly revealed piece of the puzzle suggests the issue is related to hardware after all. According to recent SEC filings from technology start-up Audience, Apple incorporated an improved version of its background noise filtering technology directly into the A5 processor used in the iPhone 4S—technology that improves Siri's speech recognition capabilities.

Siri was originally a third-party app for the iPhone that ran on devices as old as the iPhone 3GS. Apple later bought the company behind Siri, and integrated the tech directly into iOS 5, which was released to the public in October of 2011. Siri is now only available on the iPhone 4S, however, and Apple subsequently pulled the old app from the App Store when the 4S was released.

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Homogeneous catalysis, in which the catalyst is mixed directly in with the reaction components, sees widespread use in industrial settings. The catalysts themselves are often complex organometallic compounds that contain a precious metal atom/ion—platinum, rhodium, palladium, rhenium—at their molecular center. 

From an engineering standpoint, a reactor for a homogeneously catalyzed reaction can often be described as a catalyst recovery system first, reactor second. The high cost of these precious metals means that recovery and reuse of the catalyst is essential to making the reactions economic. 

A report published in last week's edition of Science discusses the work of a team of chemists who are looking at ways of obviating the need for the precious metals, replacing them with their more ordinary relatives. The paper focuses on chemistry that is important to the silicone industry.

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Apple has begun to take action against iPhone app ripoffs that have been crudding up the App Store. Over the weekend, the company removed a number of apps that bear a striking similarity to ones that are already popular among iOS users—the list includes Angry Ninja Birds, Plant vs. Zombie, and Temple Jump, which correlate to the popular titles Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, and Temple Run (hat tip to Gamasutra). The move is encouraging to developers who have been struggling with knockoffs attempting to steal their business on the App Store, but there's plenty left to do if Apple wants to show it's serious about tackling the problem once and for all.

Apps attempting to clone—or at least ride the popularity wave of—other apps has been a problem for iOS developers for years now. Ars first started covering the phenomenon in early 2009, but examples continue to pop up on both the mobile App Store as well as the Mac App Store.

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Whatever happened to the "six strikes" system that was to help civilize the American Internet?

Three years ago, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) gave up its mass litigation strategy of targeting tens of thousands of alleged file-swappers. Instead, the group announced that it would pursue a "graduated response" system in partnership with Interent providers. Infringement notices would be sent on to subscribers, who would be hit with increasing penalties as the notices stacked up.

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I’m not a big guy. It doesn’t take a tremendous shove to send me crashing to the floor. But what does it take to knock the Earth’s climate off balance? In the case of the Little Ice Age, a recent 400-year cold snap, a new study suggests a few well-timed volcanic eruptions might have done the trick.

Major glacial periods are controlled by the Earth's orbit. Summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere have been on a slow decline for the last 8,000 years as the orbital precession cycle pushed summer closer to aphelion, the point in Earth’s orbit where it’s farthest from the Sun. That’s just the first few steps on the road that would eventually lead us down from the peak of our current interglacial and into the next glacial period. But there have been bumps along this road, the most familiar of them being the "Little Ice Age."

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In the course of building a large framed mirror last month—a process which cemented my belief that doing pro-quality wood staining is a black art best left to necromancers—I visited the website for hardware giant Lowe's. While exploring the site, I came across something peculiar: a short Lowe's "customer care" statement on how other website operators can link to Lowe's.

I know what you're thinking: “there are instructions for this?” Indeed there are; Lowe's has actually drafted three separate legal agreements to cover the practice. Two cover situations in which the linking site might use Lowe's images and marks, and for which some kind of license deal makes more sense. The third says only, "If you're linking to Lowes.com, but not using our mark(s)/logo(s) on your site, download the Version A link agreement."

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Facebook is still working on deleting photos from its servers in a timely manner nearly three years after Ars first brought attention to the topic. The company admitted on Friday that its older systems for storing uploaded content "did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," but said it's currently finishing up a newer system that makes the process much quicker. In the meantime, photos that users thought they "deleted" from the social network months or even years ago remain accessible via direct link.

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Microsoft has published the specification for C++ AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism), its new system for heterogeneous parallel processing in C++. When Microsoft first announced C++ AMP in June last year, it said that it wanted to make the AMP specification open to all.

AMP has been developed by Microsoft with input from AMD and NVIDIA. Microsoft's implementation allows AMP programs to use both the main CPU and Direct3D video cards (via the company's DirectCompute API), though the specification should also permit OpenGL/OpenCL-based implementations.

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Digital forms of Solitaire have been included with Windows since it reached version 3.0, and they may well represent the most widely played video game series this side of Angry Birds, enjoyed by bored cubicle workers and bored, procrastinating students alike. While most serious gamers probably wouldn't put these games top ten picks of all time, you'd be hard-pressed to find a single PC owner that hasn't put in at least a few hours on a machine that has nothing else available.

Plants vs. Zombies and Peggle maker Popcap is targeting this familiar genre with its latest Facebook time-waster, Solitaire Blitz, a supremely addictive and well-crafted offering that adds just the right amount of tension to the zen autonomy of mindlessly clicking cards.

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Every year in late January or early February, two teams take to the field to play a football game that's watched by tens of millions of Americans. And every year, businesses launch ad campaigns to sell a variety of products—televisions, pizzas, soda—in conjunction with the game. And the overwhelming majority of these businesses avoid calling it the "Super Bowl."

Why? They're afraid of getting sued by the National Football League, which holds the trademark for the term and polices it aggressively. The NFL takes the position that no one is allowed to use the phrase "Super Bowl" in an advertisement without writing the NFL a big check first. Every year, the league sends cease-and-desist letters to businesses that stray too close to the line.

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This week, we wrapped up our coverage of the 2012 Macworld|iWorld conference in San Francisco just as Apple issued an update to Final Cut Pro X and gave the AirPort Utility an iOS makeover. Additionally, Tim Cook offered some strong words in response to doubts about Apple's attitude toward worker conditions in China, Neil Young recounted stories about Steve Jobs working towards higher-quality music downloads, and more. Need a recap? You're in the right place.

Rethinking iPhone UI and getting things done with Clear to-do app: Realmac is set to launch an iPhone to-do list app in a few weeks that breaks list making and maintaining down to the barest essentials, eschewing some common iPhone UI elements to make the app as simple as humanly possible.

LandingZone to ease docking for MacBook Air: A new Cupertino startup is launching a clever, well-designed docking solution for Apple's MacBook Air. The first version is set to begin shipping by March, but a planned Thunderbolt-equipped version is on hold pending licensing approval from Intel.

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This week, an animated trailer for an imaginary Zelda game got us wondering why exactly games often can't live up to the thrilling scenes we're shown in pre-release videos. We also looked at the slow redefinition of what an Online Pass can be used for, examined the legality of blocking used games sales, and spent a massively-multiplayer hour as a cat.

Madden NFL and Tecmo Bowl both agree that the Giants are going to win the Super Bowl this weekend. Personally, I'm rooting for stadium collapse.

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Kindle Fire dwarfs other Android tablets in market share after just three months: After three months, the Kindle Fire has an equal share of the Android tablet market with the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and has already outstripped the Motorola Xoom, Asus Transformer, and Acer Iconia Tab.

Firefox 10 arrives with new dev tools and full-screen API: Mozilla has released version 10 of the Firefox Web browser. The update includes improved development tools and a new API for displaying page elements in fullscreen mode.

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It was a crazy week for science. Normally, when we say that, we mean there was a lot of important news going on; this week, some of the actual stories involved a fair degree of nuttiness. These included an overt attempt to inject religion into science classes and a theory that attempts to explain everything without even bothering to deal with most of the fundamental particles identified by physics. Still, there was some good science, including a very selective graphene membrane and some bacteria engineered to turn seaweed into biofuels.

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A spam botnet brought down four months ago, which was once capable of pumping out almost four billion spam messages a day, remains very much dead, two of the companies behind the takedown said.

That determination, announced late Friday by Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab representatives, contradicted published reports, including one from Ars, that claimed the network of infected computers had been resurrected. There's no evidence that control of Kelihos, which also went by the name Hlux, has returned to the control of its creators, the companies said.

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A group of former FDA scientists who spoke out against the agency's allegedly flawed device-approval process are suing the feds for intercepting Gmail and Yahoo Mail messages by installing spy programs on their work computers. Although the computers were owned by the government, the plaintiffs say they were explicitly granted the right to use them for personal purposes.

Back in January 2009, nine scientists known as the "FDA Nine" anonymously wrote to the leader of then President-elect Barack Obama's transition team "pleading with him to restructure the agency," the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. Among other things, the Food and Drug Administration scientists complained that the agency approved devices in a flawed process that ignored science, and was driven by political lobbying.

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Apple updated iBooks Author to version 1.0.1 on Friday afternoon, the only change being an update to the software's controversial end user license agreement. The updated EULA now specifically only applies distribution restrictions to the interactive .ibooks format files generated by the app.

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The 2009 flu pandemic, although not especially deadly, revealed just how quickly a new influenza virus could elude surveillance and spread internationally. It also left health experts eying the disease that many fear could cause the next pandemic: H5N1, the avian flu. According to World Health Organization standards, that virus is phenomenally deadly, killing about half the people that contract it. So far, however, almost all the known cases came from people who were in direct contact with poultry; the flu doesn't seem to spread among mammals.  

The great unanswered question was whether we could continue to rely on H5N1's limited transmission. Recently, some researchers set out to answer that question, and came up with a disturbing answer: it was relatively easy to evolve a form of H5N1 that spread in ferrets, another mammalian species, without it losing any of its virulence. Two labs identified the exact mutations that enabled this new host range, and were preparing to publish their results in Science and/or Nature. At that point, the US government's National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) responded by requesting that the journals delay publication and limit the content released. That, in turn, prompted the viral research community to put a two-month hold on further research.

That's where things stood on February 2, when the New York Academy of Sciences hosted a panel discussion on H5N1 and other dual-use research (research that has both public benefit and weapons applications). The panel included two members of the NSABB, representatives from both Science and Nature, a number of virus researchers, a public health expert, and a member of the Defense Department, and they spent two hours in a lively and sometimes contentious discussion of how to handle our current situation.

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Megaupload boss Kim Dotcom (read our in-depth profile) was denied bail on Thursday by a New Zealand court. Dotcom insisted that he had no desire to flee the country and merely wanted to be with his pregnant wife and their three young children. But US attorneys argued the Dotcom posed a severe flight risk, and the court rejected Dotcom's bail request.

In court testimony, Dotcom described the dramatic raid on his home by law enforcement. Dotcom told the court that he didn't know the people invading his home were police officers, so he fled to a secure "panic room." Once he realized they were police officers, he decided to stay where he was rather than risk surprising officers and getting shot.

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