This story was written and published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, DC, and is exclusively republished here.

Janice Bowling, a 67-year-old grandmother and Republican state senator from rural Tennessee, thought it only made sense that the city of Tullahoma be able to offer its local high-speed Internet service to areas beyond the city limits.

After all, many of her rural constituents had slow service or did not have access to commercial providers, like AT&T Inc. and Charter Communications Inc.

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});As part of its investigation of municipal broadband, the Center for Public Integrity put together some audio and visual imagery to show just how the fight plays out at the local level.

Large telecommunications companies have bankrolled campaigns to try to defeat referendums that would allow cities to build or expand their own high-speed broadband networks.

First up, two examples of anti-muni broadband robocalls and push polls—one from Longmont, Colorado, and the second from Lafayette, Louisiana.

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JPMorgan Chase was one of at least five US banks hit by a sophisticated attack against its networks that netted the attacker large volumes of bank account data—for an unknown purpose. Joe Mabel

The FBI is reportedly investigating whether a sophisticated attack on JPMorgan Chase and at least four other banks was the work of state-sponsored hackers from Russia. The attacks, which were detected earlier this month, netted gigabytes of checking and savings account data, according to a report by The New York Times.

Update: According to one source Ars contacted who claims to be familiar with the investigation at JPMorgan Chase, the attack on the bank stemmed from malware that infected an employee's desktop computer. It was not clear whether the malware was delivered by a web attack or by an email "phishing" attack. That is contradicted by information shared with Bloomberg, which indicates the attack started with a zero-day exploit of one of JPMorgan's web servers.

In a statement sent to Ars, John Prisco, CEO of the security firm Triumfant said, "The nature of the JPMorgan breach was a persistent threat with a backdoor that enabled the attacker to enter whenever they wanted." He expressed surprise that the breach went undetected for so long, claiming that it was "fairly easy breach to detect."

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Making a good product is hard, and if you don't have a solid vision, there's nothing like iteration to help get you there. Samsung has taken this strategy to heart in the smartwatch category, where, in less than a year, it has released the Galaxy Gear, Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo, Gear Fit, and Gear Live. Late last night, the company took the wraps off of smartwatch #6: The Samsung Gear S.

So what's new this time around? Well, as was rumored, the Gear S has a 3G modem and Wi-Fi—it's a standalone smartwatch. Until now, just about any mainstream smartwatch has been tethered to a smartphone to get internet access. The other big addition to the Gear S is a curved AMOLED display. The 2-inch 360×480 display is one of the biggest ever on a smartwatch; just look at the last two pictures in the gallery below for an idea of the size. It's almost a bracelet instead of a watch.

Other specs include a 1GHz dual-core processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, heart rate monitor, Bluetooth 4.1, 802.11a/b/n, GPS, and IP67 water resistance.

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T-Mobile

Grooveshark, Rdio, Google Play Music, and four other music services will no longer count against data caps on certain T-Mobile US plans. In all, 14 streaming services will be exempt from LTE data caps by the end of the year as part of T-Mobile's "Music Freedom" program.

AccuRadio, Black Planet, Grooveshark, Radio Paradise, Rdio, and Songza should immediately become exempt. Google will be added "later this year," T-Mobile announced today.

"The new services join iHeartRadio, iTunesRadio, Pandora, Rhapsody, Samsung Milk, Slacker and Spotify already included in Music Freedom," the announcement said. "T-Mobile has a vision to add every possible music streaming service to Music Freedom, and any music streaming provider can be part of Music Freedom by applying through T-Mobile’s open submission process."

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The Internt of Things (IoT) revolution is in the process of taking off in a big way with the rising popularity of wearables and home automation platforms. Different vendors have placed their bets on different radios / protocols for IoT. For example, Sigma Designs is heavily promoting Z-Wave, while Freescale and some other vendors are pushing 802.15.4 (ZigBee). Broadcom's play in the IoT market is the WICED (Wireless Internet Connectivity for Embedded Devices) platform. The strategy involves a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, with Bluetooth being the primary focus.

The WICED platform has been around for some time now. A couple of days back, Broadcom announced an update in this category by launching a new development kit, the WICED Sense. In addition to the BCM20737 Bluetooth SiP, the kit also integrates five different MEMS sensors (gyroscope, accelerometer, e-compass, barometer and humidity/temperature measurement).

The kit is already FCC certified. It has a micro-USB connector for simplified application development. Apps exist for both iOS and Android. iBeacon support is also touted. Best of all, this kit is available for around $20, enabling enthusiasts and developers to economically develop and prototype their IoT product concepts.

Along with the product announcement, Broadcom also let us in on a select list of IoT products with communication enabled by their silicon.

• Galaxy Gear2 by Samsung
  • BCM4334 Single-Chip Dual-Band Combo Device Supporting 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.0+HS & FM Receiver
• Smoke + CO Alarm by Nest
  • BCM43362 WICED 2.4GHz Wi-Fi Controller
• Wi-Fi Smart Thermostat by Honeywell
  • BCM43362 WICED 2.4GHz Wi-Fi Controller
• MyQ Garage Door Controller by Chamberlain
  • BCM43362 WICED 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi Controller, BCM20702 Bluetooth Processor and BCM20732 Bluetooth SMART SoC
• LED Smart Bulb by Lifx (X2)
  • BCM43362 WICED 2.4GHz Wi-Fi Controller
• LeapPad Ultra by Leapfrog
  • BCM4319 single-chip device, with radio, MAC, baseband & integrated power amplifier (PA)
• Halo Hearing Aid by Starkey
  • BCM20732S WICED 2.4GHz Bluetooth SMART SIP Module
• Toy Car by UPRTek
  • BCM20732S WICED 2.4GHz Bluetooth SMART SIP Module 
• iGrill by iDevices
  • BCM20737 WICED 2.4GHz Bluetooth SMART SoC
• Nimbus by Quirky
  • BCM43362 WICED 2.4GHz Wi-Fi Controller
• ViSi Mobile System by Sotera Wireless
  • BCM43341 Quad Combo Dual-Band (2.4 GHz/5 GHz) 802.11 g/n MAC/Baseband/Radio with Integrated Bluetooth 4.0, NFC & FM Receiver
• Wi-Fi Weight Scale by Blip
  • BCM43362 WICED 2.4GHz Wi-Fi Controller

The above list includes some of the hottest IoT products in the market right now. Z-Wave and ZigBee have been around for a long time. But, it is Wi-Fi which is helping IoT products reach out to a larger market. Bluetooth support enables a different kind of IoT use-case where the device is better off communicating with a smartphone or similar mobile device directly. Broadcom seems well set to target this market with a comprehensive solution set for all kinds of IoT developers (from the enthusiast in his garage to companies delivering high-volume products).

When it comes to the game and e-sports streaming scene, Twitch is the 800-pound gorilla. But when it comes to online video as a whole, YouTube is the dominant force, which is why the early reports that Google was going to buy Twitch were a little strange. Google has all the infrastructure and technology to deliver video—including live game streaming—and in fact, Google does the job better than Twitch.

What Twitch has is a very strong brand, as the site people go to for livestreams of people playing games. It wasn't crazy for Google to consider a buyout of that brand and its loyal users, but in the end, it probably wasn't the easiest way for Google to make a play in the space.

It's all a bit moot, since Google backed down its reported plans for a Twitch buyout (reportedly amid antitrust concerns), and Twitch is now a part of Amazon instead. But if Google wants to be a part of the game streaming market—and there are good reasons why it would—it's extremely well positioned, even without Twitch.

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Alan Light

The Obama administration is fighting a federal judge's order requiring it to explain why the government places US citizens who haven't been convicted of any violent crimes on its no-fly database.

The administration is challenging the demand from US District Judge Anthony Trenga, who is presiding over the Virginia federal court case. In asking Trenga to reconsider his August 6 order, the government responded last week: "Defendants request clarification of the purpose of the requested submission so that defendants may respond appropriately."

Trenga's decision is among a series of setbacks to the government's insistence that any serious discussion about the no-fly list—about how people get on or off it—would amount to a national security breach.

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In 2011 AMD took the first step in expanding the Radeon brand and partnered with Patriot and VisionTek to provide AMD branded memory. With the launch of the Radeon R7 SSD AMD is continuing this strategy by jumping into the SSD market. Just as they did with memory, AMD is partnering with a third party that handles the development, manufacturing and support of the product, which in the case of the R7 SSD is OCZ. Based on OCZ's Barefoot 3 controller, the R7 is positioned between the Vector 150 and ARC 100 with its four-year warranty and 30GB/day endurance. Read on to see what AMD's first SSD adds to the market.

PROMISE Technology launched a private Dropbox-like cloud storage solution for enterprise file synchronization and sharing last week. Dubbed 'FileCruiser', this is a comprehensive solution targeting SMBs and SMEs (particularly those who still rely on FTP as a mode of data exchange between users).

As the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend proliferates, mobile apps become an essential part of the enterprise file sharing solution. FileCruiser's apps provides access and sync capabilities across a variety of devices (Android / iOS, Mac / Windows). The IT administrator can set limits on file types and sizes that users can upload to the FileCruiser storage. The platform also provides support for team collaboration, link sharing with password protection and expiry dates. Data security is also important in this market segment. In addition to the standard 256-bit AES encryption, we also have two-factor authentication for mobile apps, audit trail and remote wiping capabilities for lost devices. The FileCruiser app also supports streaming of media files. This avoids the need to download the complete stream to the mobile device prior to playback.

FileCruiser can be implemented on multiple hardware platforms, but PROMISE also provides dedicated SKUs combining both hardware and software. The specifications of the FileCruiser VA2600 and VR2600 are presented below.

A study by the National Trust suggests seabirds around the UK coastline are being hit by a "triple whammy" of extreme weather, predators and disturbance by humans.

LG isn't the only company announcing a new smartwatch today. Samsung has announced a new device in their line of Gear smartwatches. Their latest watch is the Samsung Gear S, and it's one of the only smartwatches on the market that sports 3G connectivity. This allows it to function on its own without having to be forever tethered to a smartphone to access notifications and other content.

The other unique feature of the Gear S is its 2" curved OLED display with a resolution of 320x480. Samsung believes that a convex display allows for a more ergonomic and comfortable smartwatch. With its curved rectangular display the form factor of the Gear S is like a cross between fitness bands and smartwatches.

Inside it features an unnamed 1GHz dual core CPU paired with 512MB of RAM and 4GB of NAND. Samsung rates the 300mAh battery inside for two days of usage. Like most of Samsung's other smartwatches, it includes a heart rate sensor and IP67 dust and water resistance rated for 30 minutes of submersion in up to 1 meter of water.

Unlike most other smartwatches, the Gear S runs Samsung's Tizen operating system rather than Google's Android Wear platform. It includes some of Samsung's software like S Health and their smartwatch music player. Between Tizen's built in applications and the watch's support for WiFi and 3G networking, the Gear S may be the first smartwatch that can act as its own device rather than an extension of a user's smartphone.

Samsung will begin sales of the Gear S in early October. Pricing is yet to be announced.

It looks like LG really isn't keen on waiting for IFA to reveal some of its new products. Yesterday we detailed the announcement of the LG G3 Stylus, and today LG is giving a sneak peak at its first smartwatch with a round face. It's called the LG G Watch R, and as you may have guessed, the R stands for round. 

At its core, the G Watch R is basically the same device as the original G Watch. It uses Qualcomm's APQ8026 quad Cortex-A7 part running at 1.2GHz, paired with an Adreno 305 and 512MB of RAM plus 4GB of NAND. It also retains the G Watch's IP67 rating for submersion in water up to 1 meter deep for 30 minutes. The battery receives a small 10mAh bump from 400mAh to 410mAh. A heart rate monitor has been added, taking away one of Samsung's points of differentiation with their Gear Live smartwatch.

The real changes come with the display and the build. The original G Watch has a square display. The G Watch R sports a 1.3" plastic OLED (P-OLED) display with a 320x320 resolution (which likely means the vertical and horizontal resolution at the watch's widest points in those directions) that takes up 100% of the watch face. This contrasts with the yet to be released Moto 360 which has a 1.5" rounded display but has a segment at the bottom which isn't part of the usable display area. The display is surrounded by a stainless steel bezel and frame, and comes with a leather strap.

The G Watch R is the first smartwatch I've seen that really looks like a traditional analog watch. The Moto 360 is definitely up there with it, but for me the gap in the display on the Moto 360 takes away from it significantly.

LG says that the G Watch R will be available in Q4 of this year. There's no word on pricing but it'll likely be higher than the standard G Watch which currently sells for $229. More details about the G Watch R will be revealed soon at IFA Berlin.

Source: LG via Android Police

The Oval Office as it looked at the end of President Reagan's second term, as seen in the replica at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Dhrupad Bezboruah

One thing sits at the heart of what many consider a surveillance state within the US today.

The problem does not begin with political systems that discourage transparency or technologies that can intercept everyday communications without notice. Like everything else in Washington, there’s a legal basis for what many believe is extreme government overreach—in this case, it's Executive Order 12333, issued in 1981.

“12333 is used to target foreigners abroad, and collection happens outside the US," whistleblower John Tye, a former State Department official, told Ars recently. "My complaint is not that they’re using it to target Americans, my complaint is that the volume of incidental collection on US persons is unconstitutional.”

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Back in May of this year, a jury awarded Apple $120 million in damages in its second major patent trial against Samsung. Apple also asked the court to ban the sale of those Samsung phones that infringed on its three patents in question. But today, Northern California District Court Judge Lucy Koh ruled that Apple had not proven to the court that it deserves an injunction against infringing Samsung products.

In a court ruling on Wednesday, Koh wrote:

First and most importantly, Apple has not satisfied its burden of demonstrating irreparable harm and linking that harm to Samsung’s exploitation of any of Apple’s three infringed patents. Apple has not established that it suffered significant harm in the form of either lost sales or reputational injury. Moreover, Apple has not shown that it suffered any of these alleged harms because Samsung infringed Apple’s patents. The Federal Circuit has cautioned that the plaintiff must demonstrate a causal nexus between its supposed harm (including reputational harm) and the specific infringement at issue. Apple has not demonstrated that the patented inventions drive consumer demand for the infringing products.

This is the second time that Koh has ruled against an injunction for Apple after the jury ruled that Samsung's products infringed the iPhone maker's patents. Back in 2012, Apple won a whopping $1.05 billion in damages from Samsung, but months later, Judge Koh denied an injunction against Samsung. Then, as now, the judge ruled that Apple hadn't shown the court that its design patents had caused irreparable harm to the company.

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Over the decades tonnes of disposed tents, spent oxygen cylinders and bottles have been left behind on Mount Everest by people trying to scale it. Now authorities are urging them to bring the waste back down with them to recycle it.

A simulated map of the WiFi signal in Jason Cole's two-bedroom apartment. Jason Cole

A home's Wi-Fi dead zones are, to most of us, a problem solved with guesswork. Your laptop streams just fine in this corner of the bedroom, but not the adjacent one; this arm of the couch is great for uploading photos, but not the other one. You avoid these places, and where the Wi-Fi works becomes a factor in the wear patterns of your home. In an effort to better understand, and possibly eradicate, his Wi-Fi dead zones, one man took the hard way: he solved the Helmholtz equation.

The Helmholtz equation models "the propagation of electronic waves" that involves using a sparse matrix to help minimize the amount of calculation a computer has to do in order to figure out the paths and interferences of waves, in this case from a Wi-Fi router. The whole process is similar to how scattered granular material, like rice or salt, will form complex patterns on top of a speaker depending on where the sound waves are hitting the surfaces.

The author of the post in question, Jason Cole, first solved the equation in two dimensions, and then applied it to his apartment's long and narrow two-bedroom layout. He wrote that he took his walls to have a very high refractive index, while empty space had a refractive index of 1.

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Partial patent image from US Patent No. 7,496,943. US Patent Office

In January, Google won a jury trial against a so-called "patent troll" called Beneficial Innovations, which sued dozens of media companies over online ad patents.

But it wasn't a defensive win in which Google lawyers were laying out arguments about why they didn't infringe a patent. Instead, Google had gone on the offensive and said that Beneficial's 2011 patent lawsuit against a dozen major media companies was a breach of contract.

Google had already paid for a license, and then Beneficial went ahead and sued lots of companies that were simply users of Google's Doubleclick ad tech. (Beneficial's targets included Advance Publications, which owns Conde Nast and is the parent company of Ars Technica.)

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The Luigi Death Stare will be back for more, DLC-fueled fun in November and May. But why hasn't Nintendo gone to the DLC well more before now? Nintendo

Our official review of Mario Kart 8 is mixed, but my feelings about the game are not. I can't make as much time for games as I once did, but I devoted a substantial amount of time to getting gold cups in every Grand Prix in every speed class in the game. I also beat all of Nintendo's built-in Time Trial records and explored every track to uncover their secrets. It's probably my favorite Mario Kart game since Mario Kart DS, maybe even since Double Dash (liking Double Dash so much is apparently controversial in some circles, but that's another article).

This being 2014, I harbored hopes that the game's now-standard 32 tracks would be bolstered by more, released later on as DLC. Given Nintendo and its mostly deserved reputation for being behind the times on all things downloadable, however, I couldn't treat it as a given. Mario Kart Wii and Mario Kart 7 are both the same games they were the day they were released, give or take a patch. Why should the Wii U version be any different?

Yesterday Nintendo laid my fears to rest with the announcement of two separate pieces of DLC, both of which will add additional characters and tracks to the game. I can't imagine why it took Nintendo so long to start doing this with its games. 

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The former acting cybersecurity director for the US Department of Health and Human Services, Tim DeFoggi, was convicted yesterday on three child porn charges.

As reported by Wired, DeFoggi is the sixth suspect to be caught by the FBI's Operation Torpedo, which used controversial methods of defeating the Tor anonymizing software in order to find child porn suspects.

One site frequented by DeFoggi was PedoBook, hosted by Aaron McGrath—a Nebraska man who was convicted earlier for his role in the operations. The websites were only accessible to users who installed Tor on their browsers. DeFoggi used names such as "fuckchrist" and "PTasseater" to register on the sites, where he could view more than 100 videos and more than 17,000 child porn images.

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