Aurich Lawson

You can only use another man's e-mail address for so long before he starts canceling your car appointments and insulting your gym buddies. Or so I came to learn as I sank into a joyfully vindictive mood that overwhelmed me for more than a week. This is the story of how one man’s laziness became my justification for being a total jerk.

This is my E-mail War.

Breaking just a little bit bad

If I do say so myself, I have extremely good e-mail etiquette. My personal correspondence is professional when required, touching when appropriate, and never superfluous. But where I truly earn my angel’s wings is with misaddressed e-mail. Just as when I see a child scared and lost in a store, misaddressed e-mail sends anxiety beams straight into my brain, and I am compelled to provide succor and assistance. Thanks to a bizarre username fetish, this happens quite a lot to me.

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Bill Gracey

Officials at Yellowstone National Park told reporters on Wednesday that a tourist had crashed a small drone into the iconic Grand Prismatic Spring last Saturday.

The incident marks the latest in a string of drone-related episodes in this region of Wyoming. A drone went down into Yellowstone Lake near the Grant Village Marina. Officials in nearby Grand Teton National Park have already issued one citation to a visitor for flying a drone within the park—it later got trapped in a tree and was then stolen, according to the Associated Press.

Yellowstone National Park did not immediately respond to Ars’ evening request for comment by phone or e-mail.

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LAS VEGAS—During his keynote and a press conference that followed here at the Black Hat information security conference, In-Q-Tel Chief Information Security Officer Dan Geer expressed concern about the growing threat of botnets powered by home and small office routers. The inexpensive Wi-Fi routers commonly used for home Internet access—which are rarely patched by their owners—are an easy target for hackers, Geer said, and could be used to construct a botnet that "could probably take down the Internet." Asked by Ars if he considered home routers to be the equivalent of critical infrastructure as a security priority, he answered in the affirmative.

Geer spoke about the threat posed by home routers in advance of "SOHOpelessly Broken," a router hacking contest scheduled for the DEF CON security conference later this week sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Because they are so cheap, you can get a low-end router for less than 20 bucks that hasn't been updated in a while," Geer explained.

Attackers could identify vulnerabilities in particular models and then scan the Internet for targets based on the routers' signatures. "They can then build botnets on the exterior of the network—the routing that it does is only on side facing ISPs," he said. "If I can build a botnet on the outside of the routers, I could probably take down the Internet."

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Game streaming site Twitch has started muting the audio of any video that is detected to include unauthorized audio—which is to say, any video that includes any reasonably mainstream background music.

While Twitch's main purpose is to be a platform for live game streams, which are, for the time being, unaffected, it also has a substantial library of archived broadcasts and highlight clips. These archives and highlights will have their audio muted if they're detected to contain any music owned or controlled by clients of Audible Magic, a music matching and recognition service already used by Vimeo, Facebook, and others. Twitch archives are stored in 30-minute chunks, and if any infringing audio is found in a chunk, the entirety of that section will be muted.

Earlier today, the company announced that full stream archival is being removed, but highlight clips will remain.

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Dan Geer, speaking at Black Hat, outlined a series of policies he believes will help make the Internet more secure. Sean Gallagher

LAS VEGAS—In a wide-ranging keynote speech at the Black Hat information security conference today, computer security icon Dan Geer gave attendees a sort of personal top 10 list of things that could be done to make the Internet more secure, more resilient, and less of a threat to personal privacy. Among his top policy picks: the US government should move to “corner the market” on security vulnerabilities by paying top dollar for them and then publish them to the world.

Geer is the chief information security officer for In-Q-Tel, the not-for-profit venture capital firm funded by the Central Intelligence Agency to incubate technologies that aid intelligence operations. However, he noted that he was speaking in a private capacity at the event and not as a public official.

“We could pay 10 times the market price" for zero-day vulnerabilities, Geer said. “If we make them public, we zero the inventory of cyber weapons where it stands.”

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The latest generation of game consoles has led to a fair share of pixel-counting debates and complaints from gamers and developers. But they all pale in comparison to the proposed class action lawsuit just filed against Killzone: Shadow Fall maker Sony Computer Entertainment, which accuses the game of falsely advertising 1080p graphics it did not deliver.

In the complaint (PDF) filed yesterday in California's Northern District federal court, plaintiff Douglas Ladore notes that Sony promised 1080p single and multiplayer graphics in advertisements and interviews for Killzone: Shadow Fall before the game was released last November. The game's packaging also features a "1080p HD video output" logo on the back of the box.

But, as Digital Foundry pointed out in a March analysis, Killzone's multiplayer mode actually outputs natively in 960x1080 resolution, half of the 1920x1080 standard for "1080p." To output full 1080p graphics, this source image is fixed with a "temporal upscale" that fills in gaps with a horizontal interlace made up of pixels from the previous frame. The result is graphical performance that the lawsuit (and many reviews) call "blurry to the point of distraction."

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Aqua represents a one percent flood risk annually, orange a 0.2 percent. All of the icons shown are electricity generating facilities.

Today, the US Energy Information Agency announced the availability of a new mapping tool that details the flood risk faced by our existing energy infrastructure. The map has icons located on sites like distribution terminals and power plants and allows users to overlay the existing flood risk on those sites. The clear message is that a lot of our infrastructure is already at risk.

Shown above is a region in New York City with multiple power plants and most of them are in the region that's considered to be at a one percent annual risk for a flood. (La Guardia Airport isn't in great shape, either.) This is partly the result of historical accidents. Generating stations were once supplied by barge, and once the infrastructure was in place (transmission lines, etc.) and land became scarce elsewhere in the city, the facilities became locked in place, even as they transitioned to natural gas.

Now the facilities need to be hardened against flooding—the extended blackout in downtown Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy highlighted the consequences of failing to do so. The challenge is that we need to harden hundreds of moving targets given the combination of local conditions and the continual sea level rise that's expected for the coming centuries.

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Thomas Hawk

Newly published documents show that the San Jose Police Department (SJPD), which publicly acknowledged Tuesday that it should have “done a better job of communicating” its drone acquisition, does not believe that it even needs federal authorization in order to fly a drone. The Federal Aviation Administration thinks otherwise.

Late last month, a set of documents showed that the SJPD acquired a Hexacopter called the Century Neo 660, along with a GoPro video camera and live video transmitter. The nearly $7,000 January 2014 purchase was funded through a grant from the Bay Area Urban Areas Security Initiative, a regional arm of the Department of Homeland Security. San Jose, which proclaims itself the “capital of Silicon Valley,” is the third-largest city in California and the tenth-largest in the United States.

The documents, which were sent to MuckRock as part of a public records request and were published on Wednesday for the first time, make a number of statements suggesting that the SJPD has a deep misunderstanding of current drone policy.

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This month's Patch Tuesday update for Internet Explorer will include a new feature: it will block out-of-date ActiveX controls.

More specifically, it will block out-of-date versions of the Java plugin. Although Microsoft is describing the feature as an ActiveX block, the list of prohibited plugins is currently Java-centric. Stale versions of Flash and Silverlight will be able to stick around, at least for now, though Microsoft says that other out-of-date ActiveX controls will be added to the block list later.

Old, buggy versions of the Java plugin have long been used as an exploit vector, with Microsoft's own security report fingering Java in 84.6 to 98.5 percent of detected exploit kits (bundles of malware sold commercially). Blocking obsolete Java plugins should therefore go a long way toward securing end-user systems.

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Free Press

Only one portion of the FCC’s network neutrality rules survived a federal appeals court decision in January, and all four major US carriers have just been accused of violating it.

The court vacated anti-blocking and anti-discrimination rules, but it left in place a requirement to disclose accurate information about network management practices and performance.

Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge today sent letters to AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon accusing them of violating the transparency rule.

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Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe. Oculus VR

In announcing its $2 billion acquisition of Oculus back in March, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that he felt virtual reality was computing's "platform of tomorrow," which would soon supplant the handheld mobile devices dominating the tech space today. In a recent interview with Ars, though, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe suggested that Zuckerberg might not have gone far enough, saying that virtual reality "actually may be the final compute platform."

The journey that has taken computing from mainframes to PCs to laptops to mobile phones could have a few more intermediary steps in the future, such as smartwatches, Iribe allowed. But, he said, "once you replace vision with a very comfortable virtual vision that you can look around in—that you get the sense of presence, you believe is real and is comfortable—if you can have this collaborative social experience where my brain truly believes we're in a virtual place together and that you're right here in front of me even if you're not, this is the ultimate platform and this is what we've been imagining for so many years. The Holy Grail."

It's the kind of grandiose vision that watchers have come to expect from Oculus, whose ambitions have certainly grown since asking for just $250,000 through Kickstarter about two years ago. It also highlights the company's expansion from its initial focus on gaming to its thoughts on virtual reality's other applications, from virtual tourism to social networking. That expansion has been worrisome to some gamers, who feel like Oculus' lack of focus will lead to a watered down vision for VR gaming.

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The starting material. A year later, and the wing was predominantly purple. Yale

For most forms of life, coloration is synonymous with the presence of a pigment that absorbs some wavelengths and reflects others. But butterflies and birds are different. Their wings and features have incredibly fine, microscopic features that can help channel light and create interference patterns that enhance some wavelengths while suppressing others.

Now, researchers have tested just how readily these complex optical systems can evolve. In just six generations of selection, they took a brown butterfly and shifted it to a rich, purple color.

Turning a "brown bush" purple

The species chosen for this work was Bicyclus anynana, an African species that also goes by the name of "squinting brown bush." As the name implies (and the image above shows), the majority of its pigmentation is brown, with a few prominent eye spots.

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The Luigi death stare will soon find its way into a line of downloadable Mercedes-Benz cars, including the Silver Arrow and the GLA.

On August 27, the US version of Mario Kart 8 will receive its first substantive patch, and just like the one announced for Japan back in May, its biggest feature will be the addition of Mercedes-Benz cars. Wednesday's news finally confirmed which models will be included, meaning that fans will soon be able to cruise through Rainbow Road behind the steering wheel of the 300 SL Roadster, the Silver Arrow, and the modern GLA wagon.

While most Nintendo game patches typically stick to bug fixes, Mario Kart 8's late-August patch will also make a few noticeable content changes. In particular, the game will begin collecting online race stats and add more viewing options to downloaded highlight videos via Mario Kart TV. Smaller tweaks include allowing players to display racetrack maps on the TV screen when the Wii U GamePad is showing the race itself. Patch notes indicate that online race stability will be addressed as well. (Sadly, the game's lousy, lousy battle mode won't receive any update in this patch.)

Once the patch goes live—which, including the Mercedes cars, will be free—players will be able to participate in a "Mercedes Cup" tournament that will run until September 23. No details for the tournament have been announced, which leads us to believe that it will simply be a Mercedes-only option for online races as opposed to a competition backed by real-world prizes.

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Wikimedia Commons

An English nature photographer is going ape over Wikipedia's refusal to remove pictures of a monkey from the online encyclopedia that he says are being displayed without his permission.

Wikimedia, the operation that runs Wikipedia, says that the public, not photojournalist David Slater, maintains the rights to the works. That's because the black macaca nigra monkey swiped the camera from Slater during a 2011 shoot in Indonesia and snapped tons of pictures, including the selfie and others at issue.

"We received a takedown request from the photographer, claiming that he owned the copyright to the photographs. We didn't agree. So we denied the request," Wikimedia said Wednesday in its transparency report.

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Earlier this week, the artist behind the Darkchylde comic book series issued a slew of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests to Tumblr, asking that posts critical of his work, specifically those appearing on the Escher Girls Tumblr, be taken down. When Escher Girls wrote about the takedowns, Queen issued a DMCA takedown request against the post discussing his DMCA takedown requests. He also wrote two e-mails to Escher Girls threatening to sue them for defamation.

The reaction from Queen drew an awful lot of criticism. But instead of escalating the matter, Queen issued an apology on his Facebook page this morning:

Hey everyone,
Just wanted to clear up a few things that happened this past week. I have been having a very hard time in my personal life with the loss of my mother and my marriage having fallen apart and found myself in a very vulnerable and fragile state of mind. There were posts on the Web criticizing my artwork that were brought to my attention and added to my stress. I reacted without thinking it through, but have now stopped, realizing my response was the wrong one to take. I am doing my best, each day, to get myself back on my feet and getting my life in a better place and realize now that I have just try to move on and get back to my art, the thing I find the most joy in these days. I want to thank those professionals, friends and family who have been giving me their support, understanding and love.
Thanks for listening.
~ R

Although Queen doesn't explicitly say that he will retract the DMCA takedown requests he sent to Tumblr, but the blogging platform responded to Ars this morning about the incident. “We removed the content in error; as soon as the mistake was realized, the content was restored.”

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TechCrunch is reporting that Google has acquired "Emu," an innovative texting app that pairs a virtual assistant with your instant messages. Emu was an IM service, but it constantly mined your conversations and offered quick access to relevant tasks. For instance, a message mentioning a restaurant would come with the Yelp score attached. An incoming message asking "dinner Friday?" would show your agenda for Friday night along with a button to add the event to your calendar.

The service basically applied Google Now-style smarts to instant messaging, and it seemed like something right up Google's alley. The company must have thought so, too, resulting in today's acquisition. And Google should be able to solve the biggest downside to Emu, which is having to switch IM services. Google will likely start integrating these features into Google Hangouts, the default IM service on Android devices and Gmail.

Besides restaurant reviews and agendas, the app supported creating reminders from messages, both time and location-based. It would show movie times and even allow you to set restaurant reservations right from a message.

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Today, the European Space Agency announced that its Rosetta mission successfully arrived at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after a 10-year journey. As the probe approached over the past several weeks, it provided greater detail on the oddly shaped comet, which was venting water as its orbit drew it closer to the Sun. Now, at just 100km from the comet's surface, Rosetta is providing detailed images of a truly otherworldly landscape.

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko occupies an elliptical orbit that takes it from areas beyond Jupiter to somewhere in between Earth and Mars (currently, it's midway between Jupiter and Mars). That presents a significant challenge, since any probe intended to track the comet must roughly match its orbit before approaching—or it would need a prohibitive volume of propellant to slow down. This explains Rosetta's 10-year journey, which included four orbital flybys of Earth and Mars to put it in place for a gradual approach.

Earlier this year, Rosetta successfully woke from hibernation, and it's been imaging the comet during its approach. Early images indicated that 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has a two-lobed structure that some have compared to a rubber duck, albeit one with an unusually large head. The second lobe, corresponding to the duck's body, is broader and more oblong.

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The latest procurement list used by the Chinese government has dropped Apple's products, including the iPad, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro, reports Bloomberg. Public money can no longer be used to buy Apple hardware due to "security concerns."

The procurement list, created by the National Development and Reform Commission and Ministry of Finance, limits the purchasing of all government departments, ministries, and local governments in China. A draft created in June included the Apple products, but the final version from July omits them.

Apple is in good company. Prior drafts of the list have dropped Symantec and Kaspersky antivirus software, and Microsoft's Windows 8 has been excluded because of "energy efficiency" concerns. The removal is consistent with growing antagonism between the Chinese government and non-Chinese companies. Microsoft and Qualcomm are being investigated for antitrust issues, and the state television broadcaster has claimed that certain iPhone features could be used to leak state secrets.

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Wikipedia page of "Italian mobster," Renato Vallanzasca, removed in Europe. Wikipedia

Wikipedia unveiled a page Wednesday that describes which pages from the online encyclopedia won't be displayed in some online search results, due to Europe's recent "right to be forgotten" court ruling.

The new page from the world's sixth-most trafficked site lists dozens of Wikipedia links that Google has been required to remove from its European search results.

"We do not know who requested the removal. People should not assume that a subject of an article made the request, since others may have the opportunity to make such a demand for removal," the page reads.

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Mister Gadget

The Moto360 in its charging dock. The left side of the screen (normally the bottom) is dead space.

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Let this serve as your monthly reminder that the Moto360 is still planned as a real product that will eventually go on sale. The Italian site Mister Gadget has gotten ahold of a pre-release version of the smartwatch and sheds new light on just how the wearable works and what it can do.

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});The biggest new component is the charging dock, an upright wireless charger that displays the watch as a bedside clock. Being wireless means the Moto360 has no ports, plugs, or pogo pins, just like a normal watch. While on the dock, the charge progress is displayed as a blue ring around the screen perimeter, and the center can display either the time or the battery level.

Keen observers will note that the charge progress ring is cut off on the left side in the pictures, because, yes, the Moto 360 screen still isn't a perfect circle. The bottom of the screen is "dead space" that houses the components that normally go into the bezel of a phone. Internally, it provides space for things like the display cable; externally, it provides space for components like the auto-brightness sensor.

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