Condé Nast Publications (which owns Wired, Wired.com, and a whole bunch of major magazines) has agreed to purchase Ars Technica for an undisclosed sum.

According to TechCrunch, Ars will be placed under the Wired Digital umbrella under CondéNet, which was made whole with the 2006 acquisition of Wired.com, and may be combined with Wired and Wired.com. The sale will be announced some time in the next week, Mashable has confirmed.

Ars looks to be a good fit for Wired and Wired.com, especially given the similar styles of tech reporting available on on both networks. Both include traditional professional feature style reporting on technology and trends. Wired will benefit from the addition of the new writing staff and Ars will gain a new outlet from its reporting. We wouldn't be surprised to see their work appearing in other publications across the Condé Nast house. The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and even GQ (all Condé Nast publications) could stand to benefit from Gear and Gadgets and some of the other ongoing reporting from Ars Technica.

We don't like to make political statements too often here at DLS. It just seems a lot less complicated to fight over software, or whether or not something is Web 2.0, or pirates and ninjas. Every once in a while, though, something comes up that's just a little too out of line not to mention.

Wired reports that back in November, the FBI paid a visit to The Internet Archive and served founder Brewster Kahle with a National Security Letter. The NSL (.pdf link, be warned) is a funny sort of document. It is a subpoena that can be issued without a judge's watchful eye. It usually comes with an order to not tell anyone that the person in question has received it, excepting, of course, their lawyer. So Kahle couldn't tell board members, or his staff, or his teddy bear without legal repercussions.

NSLs aren't really new, but they've blossomed since the USA Patriot Act was enacted. According to Wired, though the FBI guidelines don't encourage frequent use, Congressional audits and the FBI itself reveal that it is likely that hundreds of thousands have been issued in the past seven years. It's likely, because, you know, the FBI doesn't actually seem to track how many they've used. Oh, whoops.

The other dimension to this drama is that the Internet Archive is more of a library than an ISP/communications provider. It seems, in light of that, that the NSL used was actually not the proper document to request the sort of things it was requesting from that institution. Whoops again.

This week, the government and The Internet Archive reached a settlement in regards to the NSL issue. The issued NSL is officially off the table. The Internet Archive can't say anything about what the information was that got the FBI so riled up in the first place.

Seeing that the Internet Archive archives public information, that anonymous browsing is allowed, and all that's required to sign up for an account is an email address, username and password (Kahle says IP addresses aren't logged) it doesn't seem as though the FBI will really find much helpful information. They will find a whole lot of Grateful Dead recordings, if that's any consolation.

[via LISNews via Wired]

We can't deny some of us here at Download Squad love open source software. But there's not a damn fool here that will disagree with the statement: "Bill Gates is an extremely intelligent man." We won't disagree that he's done amazing things for technology as a whole. And yes, we even wish heartily we had the faith in ourselves to say if we had that much moolah, we'd be even half as charitable with it.

But right now we're all kind of standing around scratching our heads and saying, "Wha?"

Today Techdirt points out a nice little quote by the venerable Mr. Gates in a Wired article. It seems as though Gates says that open source created a licensing situation "so that nobody can ever improve the software." All right, now, that would be a self-defeating license, wouldn't it? What have the brain-sucking aliens done with the Bill Gates we all know and love whose intellect we respect greatly?

Of course, we're willing to throw poor Bill a bone. The Wired quote is not a complete quote. It very well could be out of context. They then quote him saying that pharmaceutical companies who invent drugs should be able to charge for them. Well, yeah. Duh. And people who develop open source applications can also charge for them.

Open source doesn't necessarily mean it's free as in beer. Conversely, just because the local brewery is giving away free lager, it doesn't mean you'll get anywhere asking for the recipe.

We're wondering if Wired slipped up, or if Bill Gates is truly puzzled about the distinctions between free software and open software? Has he read the GPL? There are quick versions on their site... so even those of us who aren't as smart as Gates can get the general idea.

[via Techdirt and Wired]

I think it is time we in the software industry step up to the plate and offer our help. With what we know about artificial intelligence (AI), genetic algorithms, and natural-language parsing, it should be possible to develop a software program where TV scripts are created based on previous episodes.

What we need are:

• Characters in the series and their attributes (gender, personality, etc.)
• Tons of previous scripts
• The series formula, e.g. The new clue to solve the case between minutes 39 and 40 in Law & Order, or CSI.
• A genetic algorithm that learns the characteristic of the series through all the existing episodes, e.g. how each character behaves, their favorite catchphrases, and how the general plot line evolves. For many shows, just the catchphrase would suffice.
  
• A software bot to trawl the net for bizarre news as seed to generate new stories.

The scripts generated by this AI program would probably not very good at first -- but hey, neither was Seinfeld -- they might not make sense at all. But, after some teaching sessions by a human -- perhaps volunteers from the audience? It's all about crowd-sourcing these days, right? -- some reasonable scripts should result.

Granted this strategy would not work for proper drama like 24, Dexter, Weeds, etc. which all have major story arcs running through entire seasons but, it should work great for formulaic shows such as Law & Order, CSI, Numbers, Psych, where almost everything stays the same from episode to episode with only minor plot device differences in between.

How much effort would it take to develop this AI program? I don't have the faintest idea. I just suggest stuff, it's up to other people to handle the sticky details of implementation. I can imagine modifying an existing AI algorithm to accept TV scripts instead of whatever scientific research data, let it run on some beefy servers (may be run it as adistributed project like SETI@home? New TV shows are at least as important as finding aliens, maybe moreso.), and see what comes out at the other end.

Remember, this idea is hardly new. It has already been done with financial news by Thomson Financial as reported by Wired back in 2006. Is it such a big leap from news to formulaic drama?

Come on, doesn't this sound like a fantastic final year college project? Surely the prospect of getting your final assignment done and being the hero who breaks the Writer's Strike deadlock sounds appealing to someone?

More interesting question is: Which one is smarter? Law & Order, or an artificial intelligence program? With Fred Thompson dropping out of the presidential race, our money is on the AI.

Aimed at being a "multimedia editing flavor of Ubuntu for the Linux audio, video, and graphic enthusiast or professional", Ubuntu Studio was announced this week, with the goal of building a solid multimedia distribution based on Ubuntu's custom flavored Gnome environment. Planned packages include the Soma Suite, Cinelerra, Jahshaka, and Wired, so far. I'm sure, or at least hope, that other popular tools such as Audacity and Blender will be included as well.

This is not the first media-oriented Linux distribution (see dyne:bolic, Studio to Go!, and 64 Studio) and hopefully not the last. Democratization of media editing tools, especially in regards to user-friendly Linux distros, is a good thing in my book. Have you used any open source media creating tools, and if you have what has your experience been? What areas do you think some are better than their commercial counterparts, or where can they improve?

[via Slashdot]

Everyone is aquiring everyone on this spooky Halloween. Google bought JotSpot, now Condé Nast, the owners of Wired magazine, have bought Reddit. Similiar to Digg, Reddit is a website that lists what the popular news is online, by users voting, and submitting articles. Michael Arrington scooped the news of the deal, and that Reddit employees will be packing up and moving from Boston to the Wired headquarters in San Francisco and merging into Wired Digital. Should be interesting to see how a traditional publishing company will beef up Reddit and aim to make it a Digg killer. If thats in the plan. No news has been released as to other terms of the deal.