Greetings, Arsians! Our partners from LogicBuy have a ton of deals this week for your consideration. At the top, we have a bunch of PC gaming equipment from Corsair. There's the Raptor M45 mouse for $33.99, Raptor K30 keyboard for $32.99, and the Corsair Vengeance 1500 headset for $54.99.

Buy all three and you'll save almost a hundred bucks! (Translation: that's more money to blow on the next Steam Sale.)

Featured deals

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Free to download, ready to customize, NetHunter puts the power of a pen-tester's Linux desktop on a Nexus phone or tablet. Kali.org

One of the tools we've leaned on heavily in some of our lab testing of software privacy and security is Kali Linux. The Debian-based operating system comes packaged with a collection of penetration testing and network monitoring tools curated and developed by the security training company Offensive Security. Today, the Kali developer team and Offensive Security released a new Kali project that runs on a Google Nexus device. Called NetHunter, the distribution provides much of the power of Kali with the addition of a browser-driven set of tools that can be used to launch attacks on wireless networks or on unattended computers via a USB connection.

NetHunter is still in its early stages, but it already includes the ability to have the Nexus device emulate a USB human interface device (HID) and launch keyboard attacks on PCs that can be used to automatically elevate privileges on a Windows PC and install a reverse-HTTP tunnel to a remote workstation. It also includes an implementation of the BadUSB man-in-the-middle attack, which can force a Windows PC to recognize the USB-connected phone as a network adapter and re-route all the PC’s traffic through it for monitoring purposes.

A demonstration of NetHunter's HID Keyboard attack on a Windows 8 computer.

In a phone interview with Ars, Offensive Security’s lead trainer and developer Mati Aharoni said that while NetHunter can be compiled to run on Android devices other than the Nexus family, “part of the reason we chose Nexus devices was because of the specific kernel sources we were able to get from Google. "The Nexus devices supported by NetHunter include the Nexus 5 ("hammerhead"), Nexus 7 (both 2012 and 2013 versions), and the Nexus 10 ("mantaray").

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The US Patent and Trademark Office has nullified a troll's app-rotation patent that is the subject of several infringement lawsuits brought against some of the biggest names in the tech sector.

Cloud-computing company Rackspace, a target of a lawsuit from Rotatable Technologies, refused to pay $75,000 to settle a suit and challenged the company's patent, US PAT. No. 6,326,978. Rackspace won, and the patent was declared unpatentable.

"This means that Rackspace will not pay one penny to this troll, nor will Apple, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Target, Whole Foods, or any of the other companies sued by Rotatable for how they use screen rotation technology in their apps," Van Lindberg, a Rackspace vice president, wrote on the company's blog in a post headlined: "Another Patent Troll Slain. You Are Now Free To Rotate Your Smartphone."

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An archival photo from long after the population bottleneck. Library of Congress

Ashkenazi Jews hail from Eastern Europe—"Ashkenaz" is the Hebrew word for Germany—and comprise the bulk of the Jewish population in the US. Their compatriots are Sephardi Jews, who lived in Spain until they were kicked out in 1492, and Mizrachi Jews, who lived in Arab countries for centuries until the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.

Ashkenazi Jews are a genetically distinct population, and the analysis of 128 complete Ashkenazi genomes shows just how distinct they are. Compared to genomes of modern Europeans—in this case, the genomes of 26 Flemish people—the Ashkenazi genomes have 47 percent more novel DNA differences per genome. These DNA variants, while novel, are population specific; sequence sharing, where two individuals have a set of the same variants, is eight percent more abundant among the Ashkenazi Jews than it is between the two populations or even among the Flemish genomes.

Using the length of the shared genetic segments, researchers determined that the current Ashkenazi Jewish population underwent a bottleneck 25-32 generations back, approximately 600-800 years ago. Caused by the Plague in the mid 1300s, perhaps? Or maybe by the decimation of Eastern European Jewish communities by roving bands of Crusaders? Whatever the cause, this bottleneck reduced the founder population to between 250 and 420 individuals.

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Elaine Adolfo

This weekend, Hollywood insider's news source Deadline reported that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is in talks to play security-contractor-turned-leaker Edward Snowden in an upcoming film directed by Oliver Stone. The film will be called The Snowden Files, sources say.

According to the Los Angeles Times, which confirmed that Gordon-Levitt was a shoe-in for the Snowden role, Sony is also working on a film based on Glen Greenwald's book No Place to Hide. Sony acquired the rights to that book earlier this year and named Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli as the producers. (The two also happen to be the producers of the James Bond franchise.)

Stone has purchased the rights to two books about the Snowden drama, which began in June 2013 when The Guardian published the first leaked documents revealing that federal authorities had been collecting vast amounts of metadata on phone calls through Verizon. One of those books is by Guardian journalist Luke Harding, called The Snowden Files: The Inside Story Of The World’s Most Wanted Man. The other is called Time of the Octopus by Snowden’s Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena.

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Free Press

AT&T and Verizon have been fighting to preserve 4Mbps as the nation’s definition of “broadband,” saying the Federal Communications Commission should abandon plans to raise the minimum to 10Mbps.

The companies also argue now that the FCC should not consider data caps when deciding whether an Internet service qualifies as broadband.

Verizon does not impose any caps on its home Internet service. AT&T advertises 150GB and 250GB monthly limits with financial penalties when consumers use more than that. While AT&T sends notices to customers about heavy usage, it generally hasn’t enforced the financial penalties.

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Luke Lai

As many as 77 members of Congress are warning federal regulators that allowing passengers to speak on their mobile phones at 30,000 feet could threaten the flight.

"The nature of an aircraft cabin would make it impossible for passengers to remove themselves from loud or unwanted conversations and disputes. Instead of focusing on required safety-related tasks, flight attendants may be forced to intervene in or mediate disputes between passengers on appropriate content and volume of voice calls, thus distracting their attention from other passengers and job responsibilities," the lawmakers wrote (PDF) Monday to the leaders of the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, the Justice Department, and Federal Communications Commission.

"Additionally, when noise and distraction levels rise because of talking passengers, the ability to hear important safety announcements, either from the cockpit or cabin, will be impaired and crucial information may be missed."

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Sonny Vleisides (right), is Butterfly Labs' co-founder and largest shareholder. A federal judge told him in January 2014 that there was a "strong smell" of fraud with respect to his company. Nasser Ghosieiri

The Federal Trade Commission has filed a civil lawsuit against Butterfly Labs (BFL), an embattled Kansas-based Bitcoin miner manufacturer. The FTC alleges that the company engaged in fraudulent and deceptive practices.

Federal authorities believe that the three named members of the company’s board of directors—Jody Drake (aka Darla Drake), Nasser Ghoseiri, and Sonny Vleisides—spent millions of dollars of corporate revenue on all kinds of things, including saunas and guns, while ignoring many customer orders that went unfulfilled or were significantly delayed.

The case was filed in federal court last week in Missouri and unsealed late Monday, and it comes over a year after Ars first reported on the company and began testing its initial round of specialized computers designed to do nothing but mine for Bitcoin.

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The iPhone 6 (left) and iPhone 6 Plus (right) have kicked small phones to the curb. Andrew Cunningham

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Big-screened iPhones are what the people want, and Apple has acquiesced. After months of part leaks and rumors, you can finally buy the newer, bigger, faster iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and it looks like plenty of people are doing so.

Any review of the new phones needs to spend an extensive amount of time with these screens, since they're the headlining feature and the one that the most people will notice. We're going to spend a lot of time with them, too, but there's a lot more going on here than just big displays—Apple has upgraded the phones' cameras, expanded their batteries, and replaced last year's 64-bit A7 chip with the brand-new A8. iOS 8, a large release even if you're not upgrading your phone this year, has picked up some features (and some challenges) unique to these new phones.

Buckle up, because we've gotten our hands on the new phones, and we've been torture-testing them during every waking moment since. Wondering what the iPhone 6 Plus' optical image stabilization does for your pictures? Want to know more about the Apple A8 and which of Apple's promises about the chip stand up to scrutiny (hint: not all of them)? Need to know what your apps are going to look like and how they're going to work in this brave new big screen world? Read on, because we've got all that and more.

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Planck, and the image of the sky that it has given us. ESA

Earlier this year, researchers who used a telescope based at the South Pole called BICEP announced that they obtained evidence for gravity waves caused by the Big Bang itself. The results would provide direct evidence that a model of the Universe's origin called inflation had left its mark on the present-day Universe.

But in reporting on the results, our own Matthew Francis suggested that the discovery was not as definitive as it might be, writing "the story of BICEP2, inflation, and primordial gravitational radiation is just beginning." And since then, it became clear that there was a complicating factor—dusty material in our own galaxy—and that the BICEP team's way of controlling for it left a little something to be desired (it involved using processed data obtained from a PDF used in a conference presentation).

Yesterday, the team that put the PDF together in the first place released its own analysis. And they've determined that BICEP was probably staring at dust, rather than the earliest moments of the Universe.

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Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. JD Lasica

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt today said it was a “mistake” to support the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that has said human-created climate change could be “beneficial” and opposes environmental regulations. Schmidt said groups trying to cast doubt on climate change science are "just literally lying."

Google’s membership in ALEC has been criticized because of the group’s stance on climate change and its opposition to network neutrality rules and municipal broadband. Earlier this month, Google refused to comment after 50 advocacy groups called on the company to end its affiliation with ALEC.

That changed today when Schmidt appeared on The Diane Rehm Show and was asked by a listener whether Google is still supporting ALEC. The listener described ALEC as “lobbyists in DC that are funding climate change deniers.”

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Beats' message upon acquisition; unclear if sunsetting Beats Music was on the table at the time. Beats Audio

Dueling reports from TechCrunch and Recode Monday suggest that Apple is likely to bring changes to Beats Music, the streaming music service owned by Beats Audio. TechCrunch cites five anonymous sources from both Beats and Apple as saying that Apple plans to shut the service down, but Recode cites Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr as saying TechCrunch's report is "not true," and that while the brand may fade away, Apple will keep it around and "modify it over time."

Apple originally acquired Beats Audio back in May, and the company has remained fairly quiet about the future it sees for the company's various components. Beats Music was mentioned exactly once during Apple's September iPhone and Apple Watch event, and a Beats Music app was notably absent from the Apple Watch interface that debuted there.

TechCrunch writes that Beats Music CEO Ian Rogers was put in charge of iTunes Radio back in August and has been "splitting his time" between the two services. Apple does not currently offer à la carte streaming service like Beats Music; one possible course of action would be to roll the service's functionality into iTunes to make it more directly competitive with Spotify and Rdio. Recode's story fits with this approach a bit more: the site writes that "Apple won't shutter the streaming service," but may change it, and one of those changes may be to alter its branding.

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Malicious ads appears on Last.fm after advertising network Zedo serves up malicious content. Courtesy Malwarebytes

Google shut down malicious Web attacks coming from a compromised advertising network on Friday. The move follows a security firm's analysis that found the ad platform, Zedo, serving up advertisements that attempted to infect the computers of visitors to major websites.

In an attack that ended early Friday morning, visitors to Last.fm, The Times of Israel, and The Jerusalem Post ran the risk of their computers becoming infected as Zedo redirected visitors' systems to malicious servers. Because the advertisements hosted on Zedo's servers were distributed through Google's Doubleclick, the attack reached millions of potential victims, Jerome Segura, senior security researcher at Malwarebytes Labs, told Ars.

Distributing malware through legitimate advertising networks, a technique known as "malvertising," has become an increasingly popular way to compromise the systems of consumers and workers alike.

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Unless you already own Vita memory cards, you're probably better off ponying up for the bundle, which includes a measly 8GB (but better than nothing). Sony Computer Entertainment of America

Sony's latest gaming hardware product, the PlayStation TV, received a release date announcement on Monday, months after its official E3 unveiling this summer. Starting October 14, fans in the US will be able to buy the hardware by itself for $99 or purchase a "bundle" that includes a DualShock 3 controller, an 8GB memory card, and a free copy of The LEGO Movie Videogame for $40 more.

The PlayStation TV, which launched in Japan nearly one year ago as the Vita TV, essentially doubles as a Vita system that plugs into your HDTV. Just like the Vita, the system can play both physical and downloaded Vita games (along with PS1 titles and other fare sold via PlayStation Network). It can also serve as a PlayStation 4 streaming device via the Remote Play feature, and it supports the PlayStation Now streaming service, which serves PlayStation 3 games to your hardware by way of the cloud.

One of PSTV's limitations is its lack of touch, microphone, and motion support for Vita games, since neither the DualShock 3 nor DualShock 4 perfectly emulates Vita's features, meaning Vita-exclusive standouts like Tearaway are essentially unplayable (and other games' touch support requires some awkward joystick-clicking-and-aiming moves to emulate the Vita's taps). And while Vita games are upscaled to 720p resolution on the PlayStation TV, so are Vita video apps like Netflix and Hulu Plus. This limits them compared to the 1080p set-top competition.

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"Perhaps you should switch to another cable company… oh, that's right, we're the only one in town." Viacom

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has made it clear he thinks there isn’t enough broadband competition in America, but Comcast is trying to convince the FCC that it faces enough competition right now. Already the largest pay-TV and broadband company in the US, Comcast is seeking permission to buy Time Warner Cable.

Comcast and Time Warner Cable don’t compete for customers in any city or town, despite being the nation’s two largest cable companies, which helps explain why US residents have so few viable options for cable and high-speed Internet service. But in response to merger-related questions from the FCC, a Comcast filing points to a broad range of competitors and says it’s easy to switch to a different provider (though a horde of angry customers might disagree).

Comcast said it faces competition from municipal broadband networks, though the telecom industry has pushed state governments to pass laws that restrict municipal broadband growth. Wheeler has said he will try to preempt those state laws, saying they prevent competition.

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rocalabs.com

A Florida company selling an obesity product is suing a consumer website for hosting negative reviews of its dietary product. Roca Labs wants the US courts to award it in "excess" of $1 million in addition to blocking pissedconsumer.com from continuing the practice.

The lawyer for the New York-based online review site told Ars on Monday that the lawsuit [PDF] was "bunk," that its demands amount to a prior restraint of speech, and that the site itself is protected from defamation charges under the Communications Decency Act because it hosts the online review forum for others to use.

"Essentially, what they are saying, is my client is defaming them by allowing these negative reviews to be published. And that my client is engaged in tortious interference with their relationships with their customers, and that my client is practicing unfair and trade-deceptive practices," said attorney Marc Randazza in a telephone interview.

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"We sell hammers" was the justification Home Depot managers gave for cheaping out on security to IT employees. WestportWiki

When Home Depot suffered a breach of transaction data that exposed as many as 52 million credit card transactions earlier this year, the company reportedly suffered from lax computer and network security measures for years. Apparently, the company wasn’t helped much by its selection of a security architect either. Ricky Joe Mitchell was hired by Home Depot in 2012, and in March of 2013, he was promoted to the position of Senior Architect for IT Security at Home Depot, in charge of the entire company’s security architecture. In May of 2014, Mitchell was convicted of sabotaging the network of his former employer.

When Mitchell learned he was going to be fired in June of 2012 from the oil and gas company EnerVest Operating, he “remotely accessed EnerVest’s computer systems and reset the company’s network servers to factory settings, essentially eliminating access to all the company’s data and applications for its eastern United States operations,” a Department of Justice spokesperson wrote in a release on his conviction. “Before his access to EnerVest’s offices could be terminated, Mitchell entered the office after business hours, disconnected critical pieces of…network equipment, and disabled the equipment’s cooling system.” As a result of his actions, the company permanently lost some of its data and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars repairing equipment and recovering historical data. It took a month to bring the company’s office back online, costing the company as much as $1 million in lost business.

And that wasn’t the first time he used technology for revenge. Mitchell’s previous legal troubles resulting from malicious use of his technical skills dates back to when he was a high school junior. In 1996, at the age of 17, Mitchell—who then went by the handle “RickDogg” in online forums—planted viruses in his high school’s computer system. He was suspended for three days from Capital High School for planting 108 computer viruses “to disk space… assigned to another student on the Capital High School computer system,” according to a school district memo obtained by the Charleston Gazette. He then posted threats to students whom he blamed for reporting him. Mitchell was expelled from the school and sued to be re-instated. The case eventually went to the West Virginia Supreme Court.

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Oh, sorry, I didn't see you there. I was standing on an alien world, staring at a wrinkly grey being...

Regular readers are probably tired of hearing us say that the latest hardware demonstration from Oculus is a new high-water mark in virtual reality that finally does away with a lot of the problems holding the technology back. To those readers, I apologize in advance: the new Crescent Bay prototype Oculus announced and showed off at its first-ever developer conference in Hollywood this weekend is a new high-water mark in virtual reality that finally does away with a lot of the problems holding the technology back.

I tried on the new device for two 10-minute demo sessions at the conference, each time going through the same set of 10 pre-made demo experiences. As soon as I put it on (or rather had it put on me; we were barely allowed to touch the fragile prototypes for fear of breaking them), I noticed a significant jump in comfort from previous Rift development kits and prototypes. Those old devices have all been akin to ski goggles, with thick elastic bands in the rear pressing the display box tightly around the eyes. It was a design decision that put a lot of pressure on some sensitive facial areas, and it left this user a sweaty, red-faced mess after every use.

The new design replaces tight elastic with a much more comfortable rigid plastic.

The Crescent Bay prototype does away with this issue. Instead of an elastic band, there's now a rigid plastic support that goes over the ears and dips down to join at a thick, triangular rear support, which tucks around the nape of the neck and back of the skull. (The single threaded wire connecting the Rift to the computer now slides down the right side of this plastic support, which is much more comfortable than the over-the-middle-of-the-skull solution on previous dev kits.) This plastic band slides in and out of the main unit quite easily to adjust for differently sized heads, while a small velcro strip comes over the top of the skull for additional support.

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Robert Couse-Baker

According to a new report in the Sacramento Bee, Sacramento County sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers accepted "at least 250 meals worth $3,800 over a five-year period" paid for by the embattled red light camera (RLC) vendor Redflex.

Then, those law enforcement agencies recommended that the Northern California county renew Redflex’s contract for the county’s RLC system late last year. Five out of the eight members of the law enforcement evaluation team received those free meals, the newspaper reported.

Once informed of the meals, the Sheriff's Office top brass was not happy.

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AT&T

An atypically metallic Samsung phone, the Galaxy Alpha, will be headed to US shores in just a few days. The Alpha is due out September 26, but the bad news is that it will be an AT&T exclusive. It's priced at $199.99 on a two-year contract or $612.99 with no contract.

The Alpha is noteworthy for being the first Samsung phone we've seen in a long time that uses a metal casing. While the back is still plastic, the frame around the device isn't. Samsung has started to experiment with metal more often of late, hoping to ditch the "cheap" feeling that many people get from their smartphones. Besides the Galaxy Alpha, the Note 4 also has a metal frame.

The spec sheet is also out of character for Samsung, which usually makes big phones with a top-tier spec sheet. For the Galaxy Alpha, though, it seems like the company read up on iPhone 6 rumors and built a phone to those specs—the Alpha only has a 4.7-inch 1280x720 AMOLED display.

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