Wikimedia Commons

United States copyright regulators are agreeing with Wikipedia's conclusion that a monkey's selfie cannot be copyrighted by a nature photographer whose camera was swiped by the ape in the jungle. The animal's selfie went viral.

The US Copyright Office, in a 1,222-page report discussing federal copyright law, said that a "photograph taken by a monkey" is unprotected intellectual property."The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants. Likewise, the Office cannot register a work purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings, although the Office may register a work where the application or the deposit copy state that the work was inspired by a divine spirit," said the draft report, "Compendium of US Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition." [PDF]

The report comes two weeks after Wikimedia, the US-based operation that runs Wikipedia, announced that the public, not British photojournalist David Slater, maintains the rights to the selfie and the other pictures the black macaca nigra monkey snapped. The monkey hijacked the camera from Slater during a 2011 shoot in Indonesia and took tons of pictures, including the selfie.

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Back in May SanDisk announced the X300s, which is the company's first SED (Self-Encrypting Drive). The X300s is based on the same Marvell platform as SanDisk's client drives but with the differentiation that the X300s is the only drive that supports encryption via TCG Opal and IEEE-1667 (eDrive) standards. Due to the encryption support the X300s is positioned as a business product since the main markets for encrypted drives are corporations and governments that handle sensitive and confidential data on a daily basis. SanDisk includes Wave's EMBASSY Security Center with every purchase of X300s, which allows Opal encryption on systems that are not eDrive compatible. Dive in to read more about the X300s, Wave's encryption software, and SEDs in general!

You can check out any time you'd like, but you can never... well, you know the song. Aurich Lawson

The hapless, rude Comcast employee who was recorded by a customer during what we can only hope was his worst moment couldn’t have imagined what was about to unfold over the next month. Since then, annoyed Comcast customers have been recording calls and publicly shaming the company into giving them what they were unable to get from long, cringe-worthy conversations with customer service representatives.

One of the latest examples came yesterday from Comcast customer Douglas Dixon of Sacramento County, who spoke with a half-dozen Comcast representatives over an hour and a half. Dixon posted a recording on the Internet and described the experience on reddit. After telling employee #6 that he was recording the call and would post it on the Internet if Comcast couldn’t fix his problem, she said, “That’s fine. There’s no need for you to threaten anybody.”

Dixon’s call was spurred by Comcast’s promise to him and other customers that their speeds would be increased. In Dixon’s case, an e-mail from Comcast on August 5 said his service would be boosted from 50Mbps to 105Mbps as soon as he restarted his modem.

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Me, getting kind of sick.

Since the unveiling of the Oculus Rift two years ago, there have been plenty of people willing to embrace the second coming of virtual reality with open arms and open minds. For at least one development team, though, those open minds have been infected with motion sickness as they try to code virtual reality support into their game.

"We are all extremely excited about VR because we believe it brings unparalleled immersion and that is something we would love to be a part of," developer Aaron Foster wrote on a Steam Community update for outer space horror game Routine. "However, at the moment, we have had to slow down our VR integration as we all get extremely motion sick with the current kits. We will take another look at implementing VR closer to release but for now we can’t fully commit to a VR version of Routine."

It's not clear whether Foster and his team are using the original Oculus development kits, which were shipped widely last year, or the newer "DK2" units that have only just begun to be sent to a handful of early pre-orderers in recent weeks. Our early experiences with Rift prototypes left us with a significant queasy feeling during and just after use, but advancements in head-tracking, image persistence, and resolution have mitigated those problems immensely in more recent versions of the headset.

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At left, a .380 ACP pistol is taped above the knee and is undetected by the Rapiscan scanner. At right, the same pistol is sewn to a pant leg. Security Analysis of a Full-Body Scanner

Researchers are delivering a paper at a security conference Thursday highlighting how easy it is to get weapons through the nude body scanners that have been removed from US airports but have been placed at other government installations across the globe.

The report, given at the Usenix Security Symposium in San Diego, highlights the insecurity of the Rapiscan Secure 1000 Single Pose "backscatter" scanner that once was used throughout the nation's airports but are now deployed at US prisons and courthouses, as well as airports in Africa. The paper, "Security Analysis of a Full-Body Scanner," from researchers at the University of California-San Diego, University of Michigan, and Johns Hopkins University, confirms what even laymen researchers had already discovered: hiding weapons on the side of one's body defeats the machine (PDF).

We performed several trials to test different placement and attachment strategies. In the end, we achieved excellent results with two approaches: carefully affixing the pistol to the outside of the leg just above the knee using tape, and sewing it inside the pant leg near the same location. Front and back scans for both methods are shown in Figure 4. In each case, the pistol is invisible against the dark background, and the attachment method leaves no other indication of the weapon’s presence.

In 2012, a Florida man said he filmed himself going through two different US airport security checkpoints using virtually the same method and got metal objects through the scanners undetected. The TSA responded that the "machines are safe."

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The actual game has a lot more text than this screenshot implies.

I've been thinking about depression a lot in the past week or so. The catalyst, as you might expect, was Robin Williams' unexpected death by suicide and the subsequent reports that the famous comedian and actor suffered from severe bouts of depression. That someone who seemed so outwardly successful and happy could succumb to something so dark inside of him was a chilling wake-up call for me and many others to reexamine ourselves and the people close to us.

In the wake of that news, as so often happens with a high-profile suicide, there have been countless explainers, analyses, and ruminations written on the reality of depression and how to deal with it both as a sufferer and a supporter of those dealing with it. These pieces have been illuminating and informative in their own ways, but the coincidentally well-timed release of an unassuming text-based game called Depression Quest has become one of the most gripping and educational views on the subject, at least for me.

Depression Quest has been available as a download for a while now, but it launched on Steam as a free/pay-what-you-want download last week, on the same day as Robin Williams' death (a coincidence creator Zoe Quinn expressed a great deal of ambivalence about). The game plays out like a semi-randomized choose-your-own-adventure book; you read a page of text describing an everyday situation, you choose from a number of decisions for how to deal with it, then you read about the consequences. There are occasional tone-setting still images, some light background music, and ambient noise accents in the background, but for the most part, the game plays out in your imagination.

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Two weeks ago Marvell announced their first PCIe SSD controller with NVMe support, named as 88SS1093. It supports PCIe 3.0 x4 interface with up to 4GB/s of bandwidth between the controller and the host, although Marvell has yet to announce any actual performance specs. While PCIe 3.0 x4 is in theory capable of delivering 4GB/s, in our experience the efficiency of PCIe has been about 80%, so in reality I would expect peak sequential performance of around 3GB/s. No word on the channel count of the controller, but if history provides any guidance the 88SS1093 should feature eight NAND channels similar to its SATA siblings. Silicon wise the controller is built on a 28nm CMOS process and features three CPU cores.

The 88SS1093 has support for 15nm MLC and TLC and 3D NAND, although I fully expect it to be compatible with Micron's and SK Hynix' 16nm NAND as well (i.e. 15nm TLC is just the smallest it can go). TLC support is enabled by the use of LDPC error-correction, which is part of Marvell's third generation NANDEdge technology. Capacities of up to 2TB are supported and the controller fits in both 2.5" and M.2 designs thanks to its small package size and thermal optimization (or should I say throttling). 

The 88SS1093 is currently sampling to Marvell's key customers and product availability is in 2015. Given how well Intel's SSD DC P3700 fared in our tests, I am excited to see more NVMe designs popping up. Marvell has known to be the go-to controller source for many of the major SSD manufacturers (SanDisk and Micron/Crucial to name a couple), so the 88SS1093 will play an important part in bringing NVMe to the client market.

Yesterday, NASA announced that its scientists have studied the unexpected persistence of an ozone-destroying chemical and have come to the conclusion that there must be some unidentified source of the substance. The item in question, carbon tetrachloride (CCl4), was banned in 1989 as part of the Montreal Protocol, which was intended to reduce the levels of ozone-destroying chemicals in the atmosphere.

In general, the protocol has worked; atmospheric levels of the chemicals covered by the treaty have dropped, and there are indications that Antarctica's annual ozone hole has stabilized. Levels of carbon tetrachloride have also dropped. The hitch is that they're not dropping as fast as we think they should, based on what we know of atmospheric chemistry.

That situation implies that we have one of two things wrong: either there are sources of the chemical that are still leaking it into the atmosphere, or our understanding of what's going on in the atmosphere is wrong. But NASA scientists have now taken data about existing sources and plugged them into a chemistry-climate model and concluded that the data best fits an unknown source. By their own admission, the scientists are mystified about what that source could be. Qing Liang of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center was quoted as saying, "It is now apparent there are either unidentified industrial leakages, large emissions from contaminated sites, or unknown CCl4 sources."

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Chromebox is Chromebox. Acer

In the last year or two, we've seen the diversity of the Chromebook ecosystem expand as more PC companies have gotten on board. There are Intel Chromebooks, ARM Chromebooks, convertible Chromebooks, small Chromebooks, and big Chromebooks. These devices are all appreciably different from one another.

It's more difficult to do that with a Chromebox, as Acer's newly announced Chromebox CXI shows. Acer will sell you a system with a Haswell-based 1.4GHz Intel Celeron 2957U, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi, and a decent port selection for $179.99, or $219.99 for a 4GB version. This is, incidentally, the same list of features you can already get from Asus' Chromebox, which also costs $179.99.

Both boxes are VESA-mountable and can support two displays via their HDMI and DisplayPort connectors—the only real difference is that Acer's box is designed to sit on its side, while Asus' is intended for horizontal use. The box measures 6.51 by 5.12 by 1.3 inches, slimmer than Asus' entry but taller and deeper. It's up to you to decide which one best suits your needs.

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Mark Zuckerberg in front of his original "The Facebook" profile. Niall Kennedy

Prosecutors say it took decades for Bernard Madoff to pull off one of the largest financial scams in US history to the tune of $65 billion, an elaborate Ponzi scheme perpetrated against the upper crust of society.

But perhaps there's an even bigger scam afoot, and it involves the ownership of Facebook. The social networking site is valued at $190 billion and used by billions of people daily across the globe.

Unlike Madoff's intricate accounting scheme that netted him a life sentence in 2009, the criminal proceedings surrounding the ownership of Facebook, at its core, rely on a two-page document—a contract that is either forged or worth billions of dollars. Either Facebook Chief Mark Zuckerberg, as an 18-year-old Harvard University student, promised half of his company to a rural New York man named Paul Ceglia, or he didn't.

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Tuberculosis, an often fatal bacterial infection of the lungs, was a scourge in the days before antibiotics. It's caused by a species of Mycobacteria, most of which live harmlessly in watery environments. Understanding how some of these have managed to make the leap to human lungs has turned out to be rather complicated. Further evidence of this comes from a study published Wednesday that suggests that infectious strains of the bacteria managed to cross the Atlantic before the first European strains did—carried in the lungs of seals.

Getting things wrong about the history of tuberculosis seems to be a regular pastime of the people who study infectious diseases. Originally, due to some genetic similarities, people had proposed that we had picked it up from farm animals. But a careful study of evolutionary trees recently showed that it's likely that cows actually picked up tuberculosis from us, rather than the other way around.

Similarly, the study of the strains found in the Americas had suggested that all of the bacteria present here had been derived from the European version. Which suggested that, along with other lovely gifts like smallpox, the disease was brought to the New World by the first European settlers.

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While benchmark optimization has been a hot topic, recently it has faded into the background as the industry adjusted. Previously, we saw changes such as an automatic 10% GPU overclock that was almost never achieved in normal applications, and behavior that would automatically plug in all cores and set the CPU frequency to maximum. Now, most OEMs have either stopped this behavior. Even if an OEM hasn't stopped such behavior, there are options that make it possible to use the altered CPU/GPU governor in all applications.

Unfortunately, I have to talk about a case where this isn't true. While I've been working on reviewing the Ascend P7 and have found a lot to like, I am sure that the Ascend P7 alters CPU governor behavior in certain benchmarks. For those that are unfamiliar with the Huawei Ascend P7, it's considered to be Huawei's flagship smartphone. As Huawei's flagship, it's equipped with a Kirin 910T SoC, which has four Cortex A9r4 CPUs running at a maximum of 1.8 GHz, and two gigabytes of RAM. As a flagship smartphone, it also has a five inch display with a 1080p resolution.

To test for differences in governor behavior, we'll start by looking at how the P7 normally behaves when faced with a benchmark workload. I haven't seen any differences in GPU behavior as the governor seems to stay clocked at an appropriate level regardless of the benchmark. At any rate, the behavior is noticeably quite reluctant when it comes to reaching 1.8 GHz. For the most part this only happens in short periods, and there is a great deal of variation in clock speeds, with an average of about 1.3 GHz throughout the test.

Here, we can see a significant difference in the CPU frequency curve. There's far more time spent at 1.8 GHz, and the frequency profile is incredibly tight outside of the beginning and end. The average frequency is around 1.7 GHz, which is significantly higher than what we see in the renamed version of the benchmark.

While this graph is somewhat boring, it's important as it shows that only three cores are plugged for the full duration of the test. Any noticeable deviation from this pattern would definitely be concerning.

When running the same workload on the Play Store version of GFXBench, we see that four cores are plugged for almost the entirety of the test. While I'm not surprised to see this kind of behavior when combined with altered frequency scaling, it's a bit disappointing. Strangely, this policy doesn't seem to be universal either as I haven't seen evidence of altered behavior in Huawei's Snapdragon devices. This sort of optimization seems to be exclusive to the HiSilicon devices. Such behavior is visible in 3DMark as well, although it doesn't seem to happen in Basemark OS II or Basemark X 1.1.

Huawei Ascend P7 Performance   Play Store Renamed Perf Increase GFXBench T-Rex 12.3 10.6 +16% 3DMark Ice Storm U/L 7462 5816 +28.3%

While normally such optimizations have a small effect, in the case of the affected benchmarks the difference is noticeable and quite significant. Needless to say, it's not really acceptable that Huawei is doing this, and I'm disappointed that they have chosen this path.

In response to this issue, Huawei stated the following:

"CPU configuration is adjusted dynamically according to the workload in different scenarios. Benchmark running is a typical scenario which requires heavy workload, therefore main frequency of CPU will rise to its highest level and will remain so for a while. For P7, the highest frequency is 1.8GHz. It seldom requires CPU to work at the highest frequency for long in others scenarios. Even if the highest level appears, it will only last for a very short time (for example 400 ms). Situation is the same for most devices in the market."

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how this statement explains the situation, as two identical workloads performed differently. While I was hoping to see an end to rather silly games like this, it seems that this path before OEMs stop this kind of behavior will continue on for longer than I first expected. Ultimately, such games don't affect anyone that actually knows how to benchmark SoCs and evaluate performance, and one only needs to look to the PC industry to see that such efforts will ultimately be discovered and defeated.

 

MSI has several lines of gaming notebooks catering to different types of users. At the high-end is the GT series that supports the fastest mobile CPUs and GPUs while the GE series caters more towards the cost-conscious buyers. Somewhere in the middle is the GS line, which offers similar (or slightly higher) specifications to the GE series but delivers everything in a refined and more attractive chassis. Read on to find out how the GS60 with a 3K display compares to the other gaming laptops.

Patrick Talbert

Dozens of UPS stores across 24 states, including California, Georgia, New York, and Nebraska, have been hit by malware designed to suck up credit card details. The UPS Store, Inc., is a subsidiary of UPS, but each store is independently owned and operated as a licensed franchisee.

In an announcement posted Wednesday to its website, UPS said that 51 locations, or around one percent of its 4,470 franchised stores across the country, were found to have been penetrated by a “broad-based malware intrusion.” The company recorded approximately 105,000 transactions at those locations, but does not know the precise number of cardholders affected.

UPS did not say precisely how such data was taken, but given the recent breaches at hundreds of supermarkets nationwide, point-of-sale hacks at Target, and other major retailers, such systems would be a likely attack vector. Earlier this month, a Wisconsin-based security firm also reported that 1.2 billion usernames and passwords had been captured by a Russian criminal group.

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The history of human evolution has been completely rewritten with the discovery that modern human beings and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe for much longer than previously thought.

DonkeyHotey

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is going to have a fight on his hands if he tries to preempt state laws that limit the growth of municipal broadband networks.

Matthew Berry, chief of staff to Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai, argued today that the FCC has no authority to invalidate state laws governing local broadband networks. In a speech in front of the National Conference of State Legislatures, Berry endorsed states' rights when it comes to either banning municipal broadband networks or preventing their growth. He also argued that the current commission, with its Democratic majority, should not do something that future Republican-led commissions might disagree with.

"If the history of American politics teaches us anything, it is that one political party will not remain in power for perpetuity. At some point, to quote Sam Cooke, 'a change is gonna come,'" Berry said. "And that change could come a little more than two years from now. So those who are potential supporters of the current FCC interpreting Section 706 [of the Telecommunications Act] to give the Commission the authority to preempt state laws about municipal broadband should think long and hard about what a future FCC might do with that power."

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401(k) 2012

On Wednesday, reddit banned a recently created subreddit posted by a brazen new US dollar counterfeiting operation touting high-quality “supernotes." Such advertisements moved within the past few weeks from sketchy online forums to reddit, according to well-known security journalist Brian Krebs.

Krebs wrote Wednesday that such sites “sell everything from stolen credit cards and identities to hot merchandise, but until very recently one illicit good I had never seen for sale on the forums was counterfeit US currency.” Similar links and ads have turned up in posts on various other websites in recent months.

When contacted by Ars, Erik Martin, reddit's general manager, said that this was the first he’d heard about this subreddit, but he seemed unconcerned. “We’re not a marketplace. It’s not like we’re handling the transactions for whatever this is,” Martin said. “If we get a request to remove it, we will remove it. It’s a subreddit no one goes to.”

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In early July, a group of cyber criminals released a modified version of the Gameover ZeuS banking trojan, using a technique known as a domain generation algorithm (DGA) to make disrupting the botnet more difficult.

But the same technique has made it easier for researchers to track the botnet's activity, and they watched as it quickly grew from infecting hundreds of initial systems to 10,000 systems in two weeks. Then a funny thing happened: Gameover ZeuS stopped growing. Now, almost six weeks after researchers first detected signs of the program, the group behind the botnet keeps the infections between 3,000 and 5,000 systems, according to security services firm Seculert.

The group undoubtedly wants to grow the botnet again because cyber crime is typically a game of large numbers. When a coalition of law enforcement officials and industry players took down the botnet in late May, it comprised some 500,000 to 1 million machines. Now they're laying low, Seculert CTO Aviv Raff told Ars.

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Intel is facing an uphill battle in the mobile space from a marketshare perspective, but there's an additional challenge: the bulk of mobile apps are compiled targeting ARM based CPU cores, not x86. With the launch of Medfield on Android, Intel introduced a binary translation software layer to enable running existing ARM based Android apps on x86. Binary translation is a useful fix for enabling compatibility but it does come with a performance and power penalty. Enabling native x86 applications is ultimately the goal here, BT is just used as a transitional tool. 

As far as I can tell, none of the big game engines (Unity, Unreal Engine) were ported to x86 on Android. As a result, any game that leveraged these engines would be ARM code translated to run on x86. This morning Intel and Unity Technologies announced a native x86 version of the Unity game engine for Android. Selected developers have access to the x86 version today, and it'll be made available to everyone else by the end of the year. There's no charge for the update. Note that this only applies to the Android Unity port, the engine under Windows and all Windows tools are already obviously compiled for x86.

Intel's press release mentions support for both Core and Atom families. I clarified with Intel that the Core reference mainly applies to any Core M (Broadwell Y or Skylake Y) Android tablets, and not a push into Core based smartphones. 

Intel is also working on enabling other game engines, but we'll have to wait to see those announcements. 

Spam be gone!

To work at Ars is to interact constantly with Twitter, both as a source for developing news and also as a way to goof off with coworkers and other tech journalists (folks who follow the Ars staff on Twitter should be more than familiar with our long-winded late night multi-Tweet antics). But as with any electronic medium, spam on Twitter is a nagging problem—Twitter’s real-time messaging means crafty spammers can blast their messages out to large numbers of people before getting hammered by spam reports.

However, several months back, Twitter went on the offensive against spammers, rolling out a set of anti-spam features collectively referred to as "BotMaker." In a blog post today, Twitter explained that the various components of BotMaker have been operational for about six months, and in that time Twitter has recorded a significant drop in tweetspam—up to 40 percent by its internal metrics.

Twitter’s real-time nature poses trouble for a traditional monolithic spam-checking system that might add many seconds onto the delivery of a tweet to followers. Rather than maintaining such a monolithic system (something akin to SpamAssassin, a widely deployed e-mail anti-spam application), Twitter’s BotMaker lets Twitter engineers quickly establish simple sets of conditional rule-based actions (which they call "bots"—hence "BotMaker") and apply them to tweets both during and after the posting process.

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