This morning NVIDIA announced a new gaming bundle for their top GPUS. New buyers of GTX 980, 970, 780 Ti, or 780 desktop GPUs qualify for the offer, along with any purchases of notebooks with GTX 980M or 970M GPUs. The bundle features three games from Ubisoft, all of which make use of one or more of NVIDIA's GameWorks libraries and which are part of NVIDIA's The Way It's Meant To Be Played program.

The games in question are Assassin's Creed Unity, Far Cry 4, and The Crew, and since none of the games have shipped yet this presents a nice opportunity to grab some new hardware to power a brand new game for the holidays. What better way to get into the spirit of giving than to buy yourself a new GPU, right? Or I suppose you could give the game and/or GPU to someone else if you're feeling nice. :-)

To quickly run through the games and technologies, Assassin's Creed Unity features support for HBAO+, TXAA, and PCSS. One interesting note regarding Assassin's Creed Unity is that we've heard it will have a frame rate cap of 60FPS, which is unfortunately becoming more and more common on multi-platform releases. Next up, Far Cry 4 also features support for HBAO+, TXAA, and PCSS; it adds NVIDIA's updated Godrays technology along with HairWorks. The Crew is the third option, a racing game that makes use of HBAO+ and TXAA technologies. All of the games also feature "enhanced 4K support", which basically means 4K rendering has been tested and performance optimizations are in place to make it more usable.

For those of you that don't keep up with acronyms, HBAO+ (Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion) is an alternative to SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) that helps with rendering more realistic shadows. TXAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing) is an alternative to MSAA (Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing) or SSAA (Super-Sample Anti-Aliasing) that combines MSAA techniques with custom filters to reduce the appearance of jaggies; in particular it can help with jaggies that aren't on the edges of a polygon. PCSS (Percentage Closer Soft Shadows – PDF link) is a way to improve the look of shadow maps by softening the shadows based on how far an object is from a surface.

Next, we've seen Godrays in various forms for a while, and the latest iteration apparently uses tessellation to project transparent polygons (from the shadow maps) that can then be lit up to provide more realistic looking rays of light. Finally, HairWorks uses tessellation to dynamically render potentially hundreds of thousands of strands of hair in place of detail textures. Also worth note is that while TXAA and HBAO+ are restricted to NVIDIA GPUs, the Godrays, HairWorks, and PCSS libraries are (I believe) GPU platform agnostic.

NVIDIA Current Desktop Game Bundles Video Card Bundle GeForce GTX
980/970/780 Ti/780 Pick Your Path (Far Cry 4/The Crew/Assassin's Creed Unity) GeForce GTX 770/760 N/A GeForce GTX 750/750Ti $150 Free To Play (Strife, War Thunder, Infinite Crisis)

NVIDIA Current Mobile Game Bundles Video Card Bundle GeForce GTX
980M/970M Pick Your Path (Far Cry 4/The Crew/Assassin's Creed Unity) GeForce GTX 800M $150 Free To Play (Strife, War Thunder, Infinite Crisis) GeForce GT/GTX 700M N/A

You can get more information on the Pick Your Path promotion on NVIDIA's site. As for the games, Assassin's Creed Unity is slated for launch on November 11, Far Cry 4 follows a week later on November 18, and The Crew has a release date of December 2 (according to Steam). All three games have a current MSRP of $59.99, so if you're already looking at a GTX 970 and one of these titles that's a nice discount. There's no indication how long the promotion will run, but it's likely a case of "until we run out of codes" and most likely at least through the end of 2014.

Gallery: NVIDIA and Ubisoft Team Up for Pick Your Path Gaming Promotion

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

While playing the original versions of classic games on aging original hardware can sometimes be difficult, it's at least typically possible. That's not the case for many online games, which are functionally inoperable once the developer or publisher decides to shut down the official servers that provide the only way for players to communicate with each other. Unofficial hobbyist projects that try to create new servers for these abandoned games could run afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and its ban on "the circumvention of access control technologies."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wants to change that. In an official exemption request (PDF) filed with the Library of Congress this week, the nonprofit advocacy group asks that users be allowed to modify access controls and online authentication checks in legally obtained games "when the [game] servers authorized by the developer are permanently shut down." In this way, those users can access third-party servers in order to regain "core functionality" that is no longer available through the defunct official servers.

The EFF gives the specific example of Nintendo's Mario Kart games, which used a proprietary protocol to communicate with Nintendo's servers before Nintendo shut those servers down for the Wii and DS. Reverse-engineering that protocol could be considered "circumvention" in the DMCA's current broad prohibitions, as could modifying the game's code to allow for connection to new, non-Nintendo servers.

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Microsoft and Dropbox today announced a "strategic partnership" to make life easier for people who use Office and Dropbox. In the next few weeks, the Office apps on iOS and Android will include integrated Dropbox support in order to provide direct access to Office documents stored on Dropbox. In early 2015, both Dropbox's Web interface and Office Online will support one another, enabling opening, editing, and sharing.

Microsoft may be making OneDrive ever more appealing by offering Office 365 users unlimited storage, but the company recognizes that Dropbox is for many people the cloud storage solution of choice today. Because of this, Dropbox is already the home to many Office documents—the company claims some 35 billion of them are stored on its platform—and the new integration should make working with those documents a bit easier.

Dropbox for Business users will have a similar featureset available, though they will need an Office 365 subscription to use it.

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GCHQ building at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. UK Ministry of Defence

Writing that "privacy has never been an absolute right," Robert Hannigan, the head of British spy agency GCHG, urged the US tech sector to assist the fight against terrorism and other crimes by opening up their proprietary networks to government authorities.

Hannigan GCHQ Hannigan, in a Financial Times editorial on Monday, suggested that "technology companies are in denial" over the Internet's use "to facilitate murder or child abuse." He wrote that the time was ripe for "addressing some uncomfortable truths" and went on to say the public wouldn't mind if technology companies gave governments backdoor access either.

They do not want the media platforms they use with their friends and families to facilitate murder or child abuse. They know the Internet grew out of the values of western democracy, not vice versa. I think those customers would be comfortable with a better, more sustainable relationship between the agencies and the technology companies.

"Better do it now than in the aftermath of greater violence," Hannigan added.

Hannigan's opinion piece follows similar comments by FBI Director James Comey and US Attorney General Eric Holder. And a day after Hannigan's comments, the Electronic Frontier Foundation of San Francisco released a "Secure Messaging Scorecard" that rated which messaging technologies are "truly safe and secure."

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Fredrik "tiamo" Neij (left) continued to live in Laos, unabashedly defying a Swedish arrest warrant until November 2014. TPB AFK

Thai authorities announced Tuesday that they arrested Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij (aka “Tiamo”) at the northern border with Laos.

Neij famously flaunted a Swedish arrest warrant while publicly living in Laos (although his Facebook profile states he lives in Bangkok) following his conviction for aiding copyright infringement. In 2013, he famously told a Swedish filmmaker: “I can sit here and jerk off for five years. And I will.”

Neij’s arrest marks the third and final member of the remaining Swedish defendants who were originally convicted in 2009 for aiding copyright infringement. All members have lost all their appeals since. The men claim to no longer own The Pirate Bay, and it has continued to remain functional over the years.

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Last week we expanded our enterprise storage coverage with flash arrays and today the coverage continues with Tegile's announcement of the T3600 and T3700. To bring everyone up to the speed, let's start with a brief introduction of the company. Tegile was founded in 2009 by Rohit Kshetrapal, Rajesh Nair, Justin Cheen and Alok Agrawal and operated in stealth mode until 2012. The founders share a history at Perfigo, which was a developer of packaged network access control solutions that was acquired by Cisco in 2004. As a result Tegile's expertise lies in the networking and connectivity aspect of the array, and hence Tegile provides both hybrid and all-flash arrays.

SanDisk and Western Digital (i.e. HGST) are strategic investors in the company, which guarantees Tegile access to the latest SSDs at competitive prices. Currently all Tegile's arrays use SAS SSDs, for which SanDisk and HGST both have extensive lineups, but as the industry moves towards PCIe Tegile will be making the transition as well. Tegile is already evaluating some of Fusion-io's PCIe SSDs now that the company is under SanDisk, but there are no finalized plans for a product yet.

The T3600 and T3700 are additions to Tegile's all-flash arrays and bring smaller capacity points to the lineup. The existing T3800 started at 48TB raw, but Tegile told me that many customers were looking for something around 10-20TB in capacity and the T3800 was too beefy (read: expensive) for that. The T3600 and T3700 have 9.6TB and 24TB of raw flash respectively, which can be extended by using expansion shelves.

The expansion shelves are basically just a bunch of drives that connect to the array and use its logic, but it should be kept in mind that the shelves are their own units and thus eat up rack space. 2U and 4U expansions are available with the T3600 and T3700 having support for either four 2U (ESF-10/25/50) or two 4U (ESF-145) expansions. The maximum effective capacity is achieved with two ESF-145 expansions that are 144TB each and a 5x multiplier from compression and de-duplication, which Tegile claims is the typical increase in usable capacity. Obviously, the actual multiplier depends on the stored data and some workloads are inherently more compressible than others, so the 5x multiplier is merely an ideal guideline.

The T3400 is different from the rest in the sense that it supports the HDD-based 72TB ES4000 expansion shelf, whereas the other T3000 series models don't. The reason lies in the architecture as the T3400 utilizes a pool of very low latency SSDs (likely SLC-based) that are used for metadata handling. The way Tegile handles metadata is actually one of its core advantages because Tegile stores the host and meta data separately, which is essential for efficient data de-duplication and also prevents the metadata from fragmenting. The usage of lower latency SSDs in the T3400 makes sense because all the meta data IOs need to be offloaded from the HDDs, but since that is not a problem with the rest of the T3000 lineup, high density eMLC SSDs are used in other models. All drives in the array are Self Encrypting Drives (SEDs) with AES-256 support.

On the connectivity side, all T3000 series models have 14 1Gbps Ethernet ports with two of them dedicated to management. Additional connectivity options include dual-port 4/8 Fibre-Channel, 10Gbps Ethernet and quad-port 1Gbps Ethernet. Protocol support includes iSCSI, FC, NFS, CIFS and SMB protocols.

Along with the T3600 and T3700 releases, Tegile has updated its IntelliFlash OS to 3.0. The provisioning process has been streamlined and the provisioning profiles have been enhanced. The idea behind the provisioning profiles is to give IT administrators an easy way to set up provisioning based on the workload because not all IT administrators necessarily understand the complex storage architectures and what is the optimal provisioning for their workload.

Tegile is also releasing cloud-based IntelliCare customer support, which automatically collects various data points from the array and sends them to Tegile's servers for analysis. The analysis allows Tegile to inform the customer about any potential component failures or other issues, and what's interesting is that Tegile customers can view metrics of another customer's Tegile array. Hence IT administrators can compare their array against other Tegile arrays in the wild and can see if there are any settings that could be toggled for more optimized performance.

The T3600 and T3700 are both available now and start at $220,000 (~$23/GB) and $300,000 ($12.50/GB) respectively.

Using a remote-controlled vehicle disguised as a penguin helps researchers study shy emperor penguins up close.

Ron Amadeo

You would think that a brand new Nexus tablet would be in high demand for the MSRP, but HTC is selling the Nexus 9 for just $199 on its website right now. Or at least, it is at the time of writing. By the time you read this, it will probably be sold out, or the site will be down. But for a bit, HTC was selling its $400 tablet for $200.

Ron Amadeo

We've seen widespread complaints about the new "premium" pricing strategy for the new Nexus devices, and to make matters worse, the Nexus 9 didn't really live up to the "premium" price. With a price cut this deep just a day after launch, we have to wonder if the Nexus 9 is really worth $400. On Google Play, the device is still going for $400, but this is definitely an eyebrow-raising move by HTC.

We were able to buy one and actually got a confirmation e-mail. We'll update this report should any new information on the situation become available.

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Just 30 or so of the 900+ games available on The Internet Arcade. The Internet Archive

As part of its continuing mission to catalog and preserve our shared digital history, the Internet Archive has published a collection of more than 900 classic arcade games, playable directly in a Web browser via a Javascript emulator.

The Internet Arcade collects a wide selection of titles, both well-known and obscure, ranging from "bronze age" black-and-white classics like 1976's Sprint 2 up through the dawn of the early '90s fighting game boom in Street Fighter II. In the middle are a few historical oddities, such as foreign Donkey Kong bootleg Crazy Kong and the hacked "Pauline Edition" of Donkey Kong that was created by a doting father just last year.

The site's new arcade offerings are the work of curator Jason Scott, who has previously archived thousands of classic console and PC games as part of the Internet Archive's software collection. Like that previous work, the Arcade collection is built on top of JSMESS, a version of the open-source Multi Emulator Super System project designed to run in Javascript-compatible browsers. Adding MAME-based arcade game support to the Internet Archive's JSMESS environment "turned out to be easy. Very, very easy," Scott writes on his personal blog.

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IPCC

Over the weekend, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a final draft of the “Synthesis Report” that caps the long road taken to produce its fifth assessment report, which has been released in chunks over the last year. The Synthesis Report, as you might guess, pulls together the main points from the body of the massive report. You won’t find any new information here—the goal is just to summarize the report in the most simple and succinct language possible. Technical, scientific writing is not known for gripping the non-expert reader, so the authors clearly made an effort to communicate the big picture explicitly and frankly.

That big picture, of course, is one in which Earth’s atmosphere and oceans have clearly warmed, with consequences for the hydrologic cycle, the planet’s icy regions, and some weather extremes. Statistically speaking, the report estimates with at least 95 percent confidence that more than half of this warming is due to human activities. The implications for the future are serious. “Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.”

The report reiterates that we’ve already burned about two-thirds of the carbon necessary to warm the Earth 2°C above preindustrial temperatures—a milestone that the international community has agreed to avoid. Staying under 2°C warming will require slashing annual emissions to 40-70 percent below 2010 levels by 2050 and reaching zero emissions by 2100. Most of the scenarios analyzed that achieve this goal rely on some form of Carbon Capture and Sequestration (like pumping CO2 captured from power plants into underground reservoirs) to reduce the impact of the fossil fuels we continue to use.

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With Android 5.0 debuting on the Nexus 9 and Nexus Player, Google has pushed out the newest Android source code to the public Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository. Anyone who wants to download the source code of the Lollipop platform is now free to do so.

Next up on the docket after the AOSP code drop should be system images for Nexus devices, but it's hard to tell if Google will hold those until after the release of the upcoming Nexus 6.

We have the Android Lollipop code. We'll be updating the HTC One (M8) & (M7) within 90 days from today. #HTCAdvantage pic.twitter.com/VJ0wB1jQbm

— HTC (@htc) November 4, 2014

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A new draft proposal published Tuesday at the Unicode Consortium outlines a way of diversifying the mostly white people who populate your emoji keyboard. The system, presented by Google software engineer Mark Davis and Apple software engineer Peter Edberg, would combine existing emojis with a smaller set of color swatches on the back end so the characters would be displayed with new skin colors.

Emoji users have been clamoring for years for a more diverse palette for the people characters, one that goes beyond the small, vaguely stereotypical subset of man-characters like Man With Turban and Man With Gua Pi Mao. The Unicode Consortium introduced 250 new emoji in June, but it received criticism at the time for not using that opportunity to address the character set's lack of diversity.

The proposal notes that emoji can technically already be rendered in two palettes: in color ("emoji representation") or in black and white ("text presentation"), depending on what the environment calls for. "Any Unicode character can be presented with text presentation," states the proposal, while emoji presentation is currently up for interpretation by the artist employed by the app or platform within certain constraints ("It would be unexpected to represent U+1F36F HONEY POT as a sugar cube, for example.")

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An exploded Nexus 9. It's apparently pretty hard to dismantle. iFixit

We weren't as impressed by HTC and Google's new Nexus 9 as we wanted to be, and diving deeper into the tablet is giving us more reasons to be unexcited. The teardown experts at iFixit have opened the tablet up and found it harder to open and repair than previous Nexus tablets: it has been given a repairability score of three out of 10, lower than the 2012 or 2013 Nexus 7 (both seven out of 10) or the Nexus 10 (six).
The plastic back of the tablet is apparently easy to remove, but you run the risk of accidentally disconnecting the rear camera from the motherboard when you lift it off. The camera itself is decidedly unremarkable, and it uses the same shooter as the midrange HTC Desire 610. iFixit also complained of the tablet's small front-facing speakers, something we noticed in our review. The site says the speakers "look a lot more like low-volume earpiece speakers than the far-heftier speakers found in the latest iteration of the iPad Air."

iFixit's biggest problem with the tablet is adhesive. The site frequently complains when glue is used to hold devices together (as opposed to plastic clips or screws, for instance), and both the 6700mAh battery and the tablet's screen are stuck on with copious amounts of glue. The battery can be pried up with patience, but separating the (fused) display panel and front glass from the body of the tablet apparently requires a lot of heat. Finally, the "maze of tape and thin, delicate cables" inside the tablet makes repairs "difficult and perilous."

Though it may be of small comfort to Nexus 9 buyers, iFixit considers the Nexus 9 more repairable than either the iPad Air 2 or iPad Mini 3, which each scored only two points out of 10 on the repairability scale. Heck, the Surface Pro 3 scored just one point out of 10. It's pretty hard to find a tablet that's easy to fix.

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David Chiu in 2012. Mark

Last month, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed a law that threw out the city’s longstanding ban against short-term rentals. The legislation finally legitimized Airbnb, the home-sharing start-up that became a mainstay of the "sharing economy" when it was created six years ago.

The 7-4 vote on the bill, signed into law last week, might have been the end of a long debate—but it wasn't to be. The vote took place smack-dab in the middle of election season, and the acrimonious debate has spilled into one of California’s most hotly contested legislative contests.

Two SF supervisors, one on each side of the Airbnb vote, are striving toward statewide office. A committee supporting board president David Chiu, who pushed through the Airbnb bill, has been showered with money—about $750,000 in all—from two big Airbnb investors, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Ron Conway.

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Have an iPhone 4S running iOS 8? You're due for a speed increase. Andrew Cunningham

Late yesterday, Apple released the first beta build of iOS 8.1.1 to developers. The first update to iOS 8.1 will include customary bug fixes, but the preliminary release notes suggest a far more interesting development: the update promises to improve performance on the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, two of the oldest devices that support iOS 8.

This would address one of our biggest criticisms of iOS 8, which in our testing was significantly slower on these older devices than iOS 7 was. Apps took longer to launch, and the user interface was often jerky and inconsistent in ways that it wasn't before. Apple has a long history of speeding up new iOS versions on old hardware post-release—iOS 4.1 on the iPhone 3G, iOS 7.1 on the iPhone 4, and now iOS 8.1.1. It would be nice if performance on older hardware was better optimized in the first place, but newer hardware obviously takes precedence.

When the final version of iOS 8.1.1 is released, we'll throw it on an iPhone 4S and iPad 2 to see how much the performance really improves. Although they're not mentioned by name in the release notes, we'd also expect the improvements to help the original iPad Mini and the fifth-generation iPod Touch, which are internally similar to the 4S and iPad 2.

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Wikia

Researchers have discovered new capabilities in the BlackEnergy crimeware tool that significantly extend its reach. The ability to run on network devices, steal digital certificates, and render infected computers unbootable are just a few of new-found weapons in its arsenal.

BlackEnergy emerged as a tool for launching denial-of-service attacks. It later morphed into crimeware used to funnel banking credentials and most recently was observed as a refitted piece of software for espionage that targeted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Ukrainian and Polish government agencies, and a variety of sensitive European industries over the last year. In this last incarnation, BlackEnergy in some cases was installed by exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability in Microsoft Windows systems.

According to a report published Monday by security firm Kaspersky Labs, the breadth of BlackEnergy goes even further. A host of extensions customized for both Windows and Linux systems contain commands for carrying out DoS attacks, stealing passwords, scanning ports, logging IP sources, covertly taking screenshots, gaining persistent access to command and control channels, and destroying hard drives. Researchers Kurt Baumgartner and Maria Garnaeva also acquired a version that works on ARM- and MIPS-based systems and uncovered evidence BlackEnergy has infected networking devices manufactured by Cisco Systems. They are unsure precisely what the purpose is for some plugins, including one that gathers device instance IDs and other information on connected USB drives and another that collects details on the BIOS, motherboard, and processor of infected systems.

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Individual under-the-desk workstations are an integral part of modern society. Normally a work PC is either thought-limited or throughput-limited, but depending on the type of business and financials of that business, something in the middle might be required. Lenovo’s ThinkStation P300 is set up for that intersection, featuring a quad core Haswell Xeon, ECC memory and a Quadro K4000 under the hood. Our sample came with a downgrade to Windows 7, 8GB of DRAM and a 1TB 7200RPM SSHD drive for just over $2100.

One of the many interesting ways in which motherboard companies diversify their product ranges is with networking opportunities. In most product stacks, manufacturers use Realtek and Intel network ports with reckless abandon, while a few also use wireless connectivity or Killer network solutions to add value to their product. MSI has now added another potential into their mix with their ‘ACK’ branding. The acronym can be described as 802.11ac + Killer, with both solutions coming from Qualcomm Atheros’ networking solutions. What makes this combination new, aside from using an Atheros WiFi solution, is that MSI is allowing ‘Killer Smart Teaming’ which allows the wired and wireless network to act together, offering a 1.867 Gbps maximum network throughput.

The ACK feature will come to their highest end motherboards first – the Z97 Gaming 9 ACK and the X99S Gaming 9 ACK should be available in the market shortly with the WiFi/software updates. Both of these boards also feature a stylistic upgrade on their rear IO panels, as shown above. Aside from this, both motherboards are the same as their non-ACK counterparts.

Unfortunately, MSI’s marketing is a little misleading. In order to take advantage of the teaming effort as proposed, with the wireless data taking video streaming and the wired taking the gaming, there is no thought made to the data actually travelling out of the home and down the cables. For example, my 16 Mbps connection will still only run at 16 Mbps outside of my home, even if I connect the machine with both wired and wireless to my router. It also relies on the router also prioritizing this data over other machines on the network, or being able to handle the data in an appropriate fashion.

One of the reasons I personally like the myriad of networking options on motherboards today is because it becomes more important for home networking, allowing greater speeds and greater ranges wherever the system is placed. This is especially important when a user (or multiple users) are streaming from a home NAS. Trying to use a form of hybrid teaming to deal with data travelling outside the home for gaming purposes might be a misplaced venture. While it means that data is separated and we’re not dealing with the windows stack/software to prioritize the data through one network connection, it is still limited by the router's prioritization protocols and external data rate. The best use case for this might be someone with Google Fiber, although one network connection should still be able to deal with streaming and gaming at the same time.

iko

On Tuesday, three judges at one of the nation’s most powerful appellate courts will hear oral arguments in the only legal challenge to result in a judicial order against the National Security Agency’s (NSA) vast telephone metadata collection program. That order was put on hold pending the government’s appeal in this case.

The District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals could overturn last year’s unusual lower court ruling that ordered an end to the program, or the court could confirm it.

The lawsuit, known as Klayman et al v. Obama et al, pits a longstanding conservative lawyer, Larry Klayman, against the American government and its intelligence apparatus. If Klayman wins, the suit is likely to be eventually appealed further to the Supreme Court.

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Gardeners should use their lawnmowers less often to protect Britain's bees and other pollinating insects.