A new Nexus phone is coming out soon. We've seen rumors, reports, mockups, and everything else flying around about the upcoming 5.9-inch device from Motorola. We've mostly spared you the excruciating play-by-play (someone made one out of wood!), but for the first time in a long time, there's a real news tidbit to report—there are pictures.

Android Police

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Android Police scored the above two pictures of someone using the upcoming Nexus device during their commute. The Motorola Nexus—codenamed "Shamu"—was expected to look a lot like the 2014 Moto X, just bigger. That appears to be the case based on the pictures above. And we know it's not just a Moto X, because the power and volume buttons are in a different spot. The 2014 Moto X has them toward the top of the device, and these are more toward the center.

For more evidence, the device is running a version of Android L that we haven't seen before. The navigation buttons are similar to the buttons on the preview build, but they're smaller. The status bar icons are also no longer segmented. For instance, the cell signal is normally a series of bars, but here it's just a triangle. Additionally, there's a heart icon on the left of the status bar, but the jury is still out on whether that's Google Fit in action or just some third-party app.

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Sen. John McCain threatened to take away the NFL's antitrust exemption if it doesn't stop blacking out TV broadcasts. Jim Greenhill

The National Football League must "end blackouts once and for all [or] Congress will be forced to act," two senators told the league yesterday.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) wrote a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell after the Federal Communications Commission eliminated rules that helped support the NFL's blackout policies. Commission members urged the NFL to stop blacking out games but acknowledged that the league still has the power to enforce blackouts through private contracts."[W]e write to urge the NFL to view this as an opportunity to recognize that unpopular blackouts are no longer justified in today’s environment," McCain and Blumenthal wrote to Goodell. "We ask that you capitalize on the FCC’s vote this week and voluntarily rescind your requirement that local television stations black out games that fail to sell out. The NFL has received substantial benefits from the public in the form of antitrust exemptions, a specialized tax status, and direct taxpayer dollars that subsidize football arenas and stadiums. These generous benefits were extended to leagues like the NFL in part based on recognition that sports leagues play a central role in our national culture, promote teamwork, and generate jobs and economic activity across the country. But, the provision of these substantial public benefits requires that the NFL meet basic obligations to the American public and loyal fans, and this includes abandoning rules that punish those same fans."

The NFL issued a statement after the FCC's vote on Tuesday, saying it would make no change to its policies. The NFL praised itself for being "the only sports league that televises every one of its games on free, over-the-air television." However, the NFL prevents games from being shown on local TV when tickets don't sell out. Teams are allowed to reduce the likelihood of a blackout by only requiring that 85 percent of tickets be sold, but the NFL has refused to end the blackouts entirely.

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Waleed Alzuhair

After announcing disappointing earnings earlier this year, Angry Birds maker Rovio has decided to cut 130 jobs, or approximately 16 percent of its workforce, according to a Thursday blog post by the company’s CEO.

"... We announced today that we plan to simplify our organization around our three key businesses with the highest growth potential: games, media, and consumer products," Mikael Hed wrote. "Unfortunately, we also need to consider possible employee reductions of a maximum of 130 people in Finland (approximately 16 percent of workforce). It is never easy to consider changes like this, but it is better to do them sooner rather than later, when we are in a good place to reignite growth."

In April 2014, Rovio announced 2013 annual profits of €26.9 million ($34 million), a notable drop from €55.5 million ($70.2 million) from the year before and €35.4 million ($44.7 million) in 2011.

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Steven Kreuzer

This summer, the Supreme Court made it easier for defendants to collect fees when they win patent cases. The decision is starting to have an effect—the nation's largest patent troll just got slapped with an order to pay $1.4 million in attorneys' fees to NetApp, which it sued in 2010.

The case brought by Summit Data Systems, a branch of Acacia Research Corp., hinged on an accusation that NetApp infringed when its server-based software interacted with an end user on a Microsoft operating system. The two patents-in-suit, 7,392,291 and 7,428,581, relate to "block-level storage access over a computer network."

But just two months before Summit filed its lawsuit, it sold licenses for those patents to 43 companies that were member companies of defensive patent aggregator RPX—including Microsoft.

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The new status page will let you use your device's serial number or IMEI to see its activation lock status. Andrew Cunningham

Apple introduced the Activation Lock feature in iOS 7 to help deter phone theft—if you've signed into iCloud and enabled Find My iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, you can't erase your phone without entering your account password first. Even if a thief put your phone into Recovery Mode and wiped its data manually, you need to enter the previous owner's Apple ID password as part of the first-time setup process before you can actually use it. Activation Lock renders a stolen iPhone much less useful to someone who intends to use it themselves or resell it.

The feature can be misused, though. If you sell your iPhone to a legitimate reseller and forget to wipe it first, you might leave that seller with an unsellable brick that's useful for parts but not much else. For buyers and sellers who want to check a device's Activation Lock status without having it in-hand, Apple has just introduced a new Activation Lock status page that will tell you whether any device is locked if you punch in its serial number or IMEI.

The page will tell you whether Activation Lock is enabled and what kind of device you're looking at. Andrew Cunningham

This page is strictly used to check the status of Activation Lock, and it has no other features aside from some links to Apple help pages. It can't be used to override Activation Lock, nor can it give you any information about the Apple ID that's been used to lock the device. If you're buying (or selling) a secondhand iPhone and want to check its lock status before you do, this is the way to do it, and that's all it does.

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Matt Wade

After a distinguished career in the Secret Service, Joseph Clancy left for a new job at Comcast in 2011 and has since overseen protection of the cable company's employees and property. But with Secret Service Director Julia Pierson having resigned after security failures, Clancy is going back to the Secret Service as acting director of the law enforcement agency.

“Joe Clancy is an exceptional security professional who served our country as a member of the US Secret Service and in the US Department of Homeland Security and who has distinguished himself throughout his career for his integrity and strong management skills," a Comcast spokesperson said in a statement sent to Ars yesterday. "During more than three years at Comcast, he was an integral part of our security team and we are sad to see him leave. We are highly confident he will be an outstanding interim leader for the Secret Service and we wish him the very best.”

Clancy personally led Obama's security before "he retired from the agency in July 2011 as special agent in charge of the Presidential Protective Division," NBC News wrote.

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Tesla founder Elon Musk made an ambiguous post on Twitter yesterday evening, announcing that the company will unveil something on October 9:

"About time to unveil the D and something else," the tweet stated. It was accompanied by a shadowy picture of what appears to be the nose of a Tesla Model S peeking out from a half-open garage. The garage has the letter "D" emblazoned on it. Beneath the car, the date "October 9, 2014" is written.

We know that the next vehicle due out from Tesla is an SUV known as the Model X; after that, the company has previously said that it will turn its focus to releasing a lower priced entry-level vehicle it’s calling the Model 3 (speculation prior to the Model 3’s announcement was that the entry-level car would be called the "Model E," but this was changed to avoid a trademark dispute—and possibly also to avoid Tesla’s line-up spelling out S-E-X). The headlights, fog lights, and nose cone in the poster do indeed look like those on the Model S. Compare them to this still from our Model S video review:

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Not pictured: a wealth of pizza, beer, and cupcakes. We were trying to be sly about our photo-snapping! Sam Machkovech

SEATTLE—On Friday night, I showed up at the predetermined location just a few blocks from a Seattle pier. I hopped some shrubs, showed up at the keypad-locked door, and waited for my insider, Dave, to grant me access, all the while remembering our agreed-upon story: I was a paralegal, and we had recently met playing pick-up basketball. "Let's keep it simple," he'd told me over the phone earlier that day.

This all seemed like overkill, just to sneak me into an apartment pizza party, but my anonymous source was a little nervous. The party was being hosted by Comcast. Was he overdue on his bill or something?

"My building is a little weird about these residents-only events," Dave explained as he let me in. Then he added, "I don't use Comcast, anyway."

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Intel Free Press

In the early 2000s, William "Trip" Hawkins—founder of video game publisher Electronic Arts—was living the good life. He owned a private jet, two multi-million-dollar homes, sent his kids to private school, had four vehicles between himself and his wife, held San Francisco Giants season tickets, and employed a private staff.

Hawkins appeared to be flush with cash. He once had an estimated worth of $100 million while manning the video game company that has long produced best-sellers like the Madden NFL franchise, and he cashed out company stock repeatedly. He sold $24.4 million of EA stock in 1996. The following year, he sold $3.7 million more. In 1998, he sold $38.76 million.

But Hawkins had a peculiar way of keeping his cash flow up; he wasn't paying all the taxes connected to the proceeds of some of his stock sales. Instead, he participated in a tax sheltering setup designed to produce on-paper "monetary losses" to offset the gains. The scheme was all done through accounting firm KPMG, which used convoluted Swiss and Cayman Islands deals that eventually raised the eyebrows of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax auditors. The IRS and the California Franchise Tax Board eventually cried foul.

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Back in June, the United Kingdom outlined new copyright rules that would allow citizens to make backups of their music, movies, and e-books. Previously, making copies of media was illegal.

Today, those laws officially go into effect.

It is, however, still illegal to share those backups with friends or family, and making copies of rented media, or media that a person pays a subscription for (like Rdio or Netflix), likewise remains illegal. Media consumers are allowed to change formats—burning MP3s on a CD, for instance—but media vendors are allowed to use all kinds of DRM to keep users from doing just that (like Amazon does with its e-books, for example). Also, consumers are not allowed to resell an original copy if they keep the duplicates of it.

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We're starting fresh with a clean install of Windows 10.

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The redesigned Start menu is one of the biggest changes in Windows 10 and probably the first most people will notice. While it looks similar to the Windows 7 Start menu, it acts a lot like the full-screen Start experience from Windows 8. You can make the menu about as big or as small as you want by adding and subtracting live tiles, or ditch it altogether and use the full-screen version introduced in Windows 8. Here's a quick look at the new, customizable, Metro-ish, desktop Start menu. If you want to use it yourself, download the Windows 10 Technical Preview that came out today.

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Defense Distributed

Eighteen months after demonstrating that he could make a 3D-printed gun, Cody Wilson announced Wednesday that his nonprofit group, Defense Distributed, has now moved on to simplifying the process of manufacturing traditional metal guns.

Defense Distributed is now selling a $1,200 computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) mill—dubbed the "Ghost Gunner"—that can complete an unfinished lower receiver for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle as part of a limited pre-order. While designed to mill an AR-15 lower, the CNC could theoretically mill anything of a similar size.

Wilson’s new Ghost Gunner makes home gunsmithing faster, cheaper, and more portable than ever before.

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Verizon Wireless was scheduled to begin throttling certain LTE users today as part of an expanded "network optimization" program, but it has decided not to follow through with the controversial plan after criticism from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler.

Since 2011, Verizon has throttled 3G users who have unlimited data plans when they connect to congested cell sites if they fall within the top five percent of data users. That's 4.7GB or more per month. In July, Verizon announced plans to extend this policy to 4G users with grandfathered unlimited data plans starting in October. But Verizon pulled the plug today, announcing its decision in a statement to Ars and other media outlets.

"Verizon is committed to providing its customers with an unparalleled mobile network experience," the company said. "At a time of ever-increasing mobile broadband data usage, we not only take pride in the way we manage our network resources, but also take seriously our responsibility to deliver exceptional mobile service to every customer. We’ve greatly valued the ongoing dialogue over the past several months concerning network optimization and have decided not to move forward with the planned implementation of network optimization for 4G LTE customers on unlimited plans. Exceptional network service will always be our priority, and we remain committed to working closely with industry stakeholders to manage broadband issues so that American consumers get the world-class mobile service they expect and value."

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Sister Roma's selfie from early Wednesday before the meeting in which Facebook issued an apology to drag queens and performers affected by the social network's real-name policy, which should see sweeping changes in the near future. Sister Roma Two weeks ago, Facebook was forced to address a firestorm over its real-name policy after "several hundred" drag queens and performers were targeted in a spree of user reports. On that day, Facebook responded by sending a message to those account holders: either switch their public Facebook names to "legal" names or convert their accounts to public "pages," which lack certain normal-profile features. The affected users had two weeks to do so, which ran out today.

However, instead of disabling those hundreds of accounts, Facebook went in a decidedly different direction. A meeting between affected performers, including original complainant Sister Roma, and company officials took place at the Facebook campus today, and according to a Valleywag report, it ended with Facebook issuing an official apology and promising "substantive changes" to the real-name policy.

"Facebook agreed that the real names policy is flawed and has unintentionally hurt members of our community," San Francisco Supervisor David Campos said to Valleywag. "Facebook apologized to the community and has committed to removing any language requiring that you use your legal name. They're working on technical solutions to make sure that nobody has their name changed unless they want it to be changed and to help better differentiate between fake profiles and authentic ones."

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What comes up might go back down. Pete Markham

As we transition away from fossil fuels, one way for us to have our cake and eat it too is to capture the CO2 before it reaches the atmosphere and stick it back down in the ground. That can be done by pumping it into the same reservoirs that once held oil and gas or into deep, saline aquifers. While that CO2 will gradually dissolve and eventually form carbonate minerals, in the meantime, you’re relying on the integrity of the rocks to provide the container that keeps the CO2 locked away.

Injecting CO2 beneath the seafloor is also an attractive option, but questions have remained about the ecological effects of a CO2 leak on the ocean floor. A newly published study created an artificial leak off Scotland’s western coast to measure its impact; the work was done by a large group of researchers led by Plymouth Marine Laboratory’s Jerry Blackford, the Scottish Association for Marine Science’s Henrik Stahl, and the University of Southampton’s Jonathan Bull.

They drilled a horizontal borehole out to a point 11 meters (slightly more than 36 feet) below the seafloor, beneath twelve meters of water. They monitored and sampled that area while injecting CO2 for about five weeks. The injection started out slow, increasing over time. Without a barrier to keep it below the seafloor, some of the CO2 escaped upward.

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From left, the Moon in visible light, a terrain map, and a map of the gravity anomalies. View is centered over the Oceanus Procellarum. Note the strong linear features in the gravity image. NASA/Colorado School of Mines/MIT/JPL/Goddard Space Flight Center

The side of the Moon that faces us is dominated by a series of mares, or seas. These aren't water-filled seas teeming with moonsharks, however. Instead, they're filled with darker rock, thought to be the product of impacts that unleashed a flood of magma onto the surface of the Moon.

The largest of these features was apparently too big to be a mare, and it has picked up the name Oceanus Procellarum. It truly is massive, at about 2,500 kilometers across (for contrast, the Moon is 3,500 km in diameter). It has been interpreted as the remains of an even larger impact basin, but data from the lunar GRAIL mission has now called that theory into question. The new information suggests that Oceanus Procellarum may be the one case where the Moon's own internal heat drove massive volcanic eruptions.

GRAIL involved two satellites orbiting the Moon, with the distance between them being constantly monitored. As they zoom above denser features in the Moon's crust, the leading satellite will accelerate slightly, increasing the separation. Over multiple orbits, this builds a gravity map of the Moon, revealing details of its inner structure that could otherwise only be inferred from surface features. (The mission was based on the successful GRACE satellites that orbit Earth, coming to an end in 2012.)

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US Attorney General Eric Holder North Charleston

Attorney General Eric Holder, the US top law enforcement official, said it is "worrisome" that tech companies are providing default encryption on consumer electronics. Locking the authorities out of being able to physically access the contents of devices puts children at risk, he said.

"It is fully possible to permit law enforcement to do its job while still adequately protecting personal privacy,” Holder said during a Tuesday speech before the Global Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Online conference. “When a child is in danger, law enforcement needs to be able to take every legally available step to quickly find and protect the child and to stop those that abuse children. It is worrisome to see companies thwarting our ability to do so."

Holder's remarks, while he did not mention any particular company by name, come two weeks after Apple announced its new iPhone 6 models would be equipped with data encryption that prevents authorities from accessing the contents of the phone. At the same time, Google said its upcoming Android operating system will also have default encryption.

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A sample Sway presentation, viewed from a Web browser.

The day after giving a preview of the next version of Windows, Microsoft has revealed another part of its play to take its desktop to the cloud—an upcoming addition to the Office suite called Sway. Designed to build Web-based interactive presentations, Sway is now available as an invitation-only preview. A tool designed for a new form of Web presentations and story-telling, Sway will run as a combination of client applications and back-end cloud services to intelligently assemble and format content.

Sway creates “sways”—multimedia, animated, interactive presentations that live within a Web container—that can be created, published and viewed from any connected device with access to Microsoft’s OneDrive service. Sway will allow users to use any device to collect or input images, text, and other media through native applications or a Web interface. Users can also grab content from other Web sources, including social media. Facebook and Twitter posts can be dragged and dropped directly into presentations.

Since its interface is Web-based, Sway will be able to run across multiple platforms, including Apple and Android mobile devices. Images and other content added to a Sway document will be stored in a OneDrive account folder.

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Microsoft released a technical preview of Windows 10 this morning, and it's available for download here.

System requirements are a 1GHz or faster processor, 1GB of RAM for 32-bit systems or 2GB for 64-bit systems, 16GB of free hard disk space, and a Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with a WDDM driver. In other words, anything that's capable of running Windows 8.1 can be moved to Windows 10. You can upgrade to the Windows 10 preview from either Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1.

It's free, as long as you sign up for the Windows Insider Program with a Microsoft account. The 32-bit download is 3.16GB while the 64-bit one is 4.10GB. Although Microsoft makes a version of Windows for ARM devices, the preview is x86-only. The preview will expire on April 15, 2015, with Microsoft releasing the final version of the OS sometime after that.

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Nick Thompson

Programming costs are so high today that even Comcast complains about the expense. What of small Internet service providers who lack the negotiating power of the nation's largest TV and broadband company?

Some of them are dropping channels or exiting the pay-TV business altogether, says a new article in The Wall Street Journal.

"I think the TV model is broken," BTC Broadband President Scott Floyd told the newspaper. BTC stopped offering TV late last year while continuing to sell Internet and phone service.

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