Opportunity passes Lunokhod Crater on its trip to Marathon Valley. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.

Before the big publicity splash made by the Mars Science Laboratory and Curiosity, the big stars on Mars were the two Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. The pair of 400 lb (185 kg) semi-autonomous machines were dropped onto Mars in January 2004 and were initially designed with an operational lifespan of 90 sols (a sol is a Martian day, equivalent to about 24 hours and 39.5 minutes), but they managed to drastically exceed that lifespan through careful piloting and resource management. In fact, although Spirit fell silent in March 2010, Opportunity continues to be responsive—and as of yesterday, it has traveled 25.01 miles (40.25 km) across the Martian surface, setting a new record for off-world travel.

Distances driven by other off-world vehicles. NASA/JPL-Caltech

The previous record dates back to 1974 when the Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover zipped across about 24.2 miles (39 km) of dusty lunar terrain in about four months. Opportunity’s progress has been much slower, due to a combination of a low travel speed (usually about 10 mm per second, with a top speed of 50 mm per second, about 600 feet per hour) and regular stops to perform observations.

In the ten years that Opportunity has cruised the Martian craters and valleys, the faithful robot has contributed tremendously to our understanding of the composition and history of Mars, including transmitting back data that provides significant support to the idea that Mars once had oceans of liquid water.

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The British Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has started to replace advertising on copyright-infringing websites with official warnings telling users that the site is under criminal investigation.

The sites in question are those that have been identified as hosting copyright-infringing content and reported to PIPCU by rights holders. Officers from the unit evaluate the sites to verify that they are infringing copyright. They then contact the site owner to give them the opportunity to "correct their behavior" and operate legitimately. If that fails, PIPCU can get the site taken down by contacting the domain registrar, replacing the site's ads with the scary warnings, or adding the sites to the infringing website list. When a site is added to that list, the information is fed back to a group of 60 marketing agencies, advertising technology companies, and brands responsible for placing ads, and they are then asked to stop placing ads on those sites.

In order to get PIPCU's banners onto the copyright infringing sites, the police have partnered with content verification company Project Sunblock. Project Sunblock maintains the list of infringing websites and then makes sure that when clients' advertisements are going to be delivered to one of those sites, the police banners are served as a replacement. Neither Project Sunblock nor the police pay for this ad placement; they simply serve an alternative ad. Project Sunblock then reports back to the client which ads have been blocked and on how many occasions.

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The 2013 Retina MacBook Pro is getting a minor refresh. Andrew Cunningham

2014 has been a lackluster year for new Mac hardware refreshes—the year is half gone, and all we've gotten is a MacBook Air that's a little cheaper and a tiny bit faster and an iMac that's a little cheaper and a lot slower. Now the Retina MacBook Pro line is getting in on the kind-of-refreshed fun with some mild spec bumps that don't radically change the models released back in 2013.

Let's begin with the 15-inch models. The base prices remain the same across the board for these, but you now get the maximum 16GB of RAM standard with the 15-inch MBP instead of as a $200 add-on. The CPU in the $1,999 model also gets a small bump, from a 2.0GHz (3.2GHz Turbo) quad-core Core i7-4750HQ to a 2.2GHz (3.4GHz Turbo) i7-4770HQ. These CPUs are identical save for their clock speeds—the latter chip is part of Intel's mid-cycle "Haswell refresh" line, which gives OEMs an extra 100 or 200MHz without raising the price.

The higher-tier model doesn't get as substantial a boost as the entry-level model, but you do get a small price cut from $2,599 to $2,499. You get the same computer as before, except with a 2.5GHz (3.7GHz Turbo) i7-4870HQ instead of a 2.3GHz (3.5GHz Turbo) i7-4850HQ. For another $200 on top of that, you'll get a 2.8GHz (4.0GHz Turbo) i7-4980HQ instead of a 2.4GHz (3.6GHz Turbo) i7-4950HQ. These are decent clock speed bumps, though if you were on the fence about upgrading to the previous 2013 models, they don't really alter the equation.

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Android minus the Google Apps. We've got some work to do. Ron Amadeo

Android is a Google product—it's designed and built from the ground up to integrate with Google services and be a cloud-powered OS. A lot of Android is open source, though, and there's nothing that says you have to use it the way that Google would prefer. With some work, it’s possible to turn a modern Android smartphone into a Google-less, completely open device—so we wanted to try just that. After dusting off the Nexus 4 and grabbing a copy of the open source parts of Android, we jumped off the grid and dumped all the proprietary Google and cloud-based services you'd normally use on Android. Instead, this experiment runs entirely on open source alternatives. FOSS or bust!

Before we begin, we have a few slight notes. FOSS stands for "free and open source software," and when we say "free" we don't mean free of cost, but free of restrictions. It's software that we can do whatever we want to, including copy, modify, and redistribute.

But, wait... did we say we'd dump "all" services? Not going to happen. Almost instantly, we had to compromise our open source ideals due to hardware. The SoC in the Nexus 4 is made by Qualcomm, and many of the drivers for it are closed source (this is the case with nearly all smartphones, not just our sacrificial Nexus 4). The firmware and drivers for the cellular modem, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, NFC, and camera are closed source, too. The CyanogenMod repository has a list of closed source drivers in each device branch called "proprietary-blobs.txt." You can see the list for our Nexus 4 here, which is 184 items long.

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A slide from next week's Black Hat talk titled Android Fake ID vulnerability. Bluebox Security

The majority of devices running Google's Android operating system are susceptible to hacks that allow malicious apps to bypass a key security sandbox so they can steal user credentials, read e-mail, and access payment histories and other sensitive data, researchers have warned.

The high-impact vulnerability has existed in Android since the release of version 2.1 in early 2010, researchers from Bluebox Security said. They dubbed the bug Fake ID, because, like a fraudulent driver's license an underage person might use to sneak into a bar, it grants malicious apps special access to Android resources that are typically off-limits. Google developers have introduced changes that limit some of the damage that malicious apps can do in Android 4.4, but the underlying bug remains unpatched, even in the Android L preview.

The Fake ID vulnerability stems from the failure of Android to verify the validity of cryptographic certificates that accompany each app installed on a device. The OS relies on the credentials when allocating special privileges that allow a handful of apps to bypass Android sandboxing. Under normal conditions, the sandbox prevents programs from accessing data belonging to other apps or to sensitive parts of the OS. Select apps, however, are permitted to break out of the sandbox. Adobe Flash in all but version 4.4, for instance, is permitted to act as a plugin for any other app installed on the phone, presumably to allow it to add animation and graphics support. Similarly, Google Wallet is permitted to access Near Field Communication hardware that processes payment information.

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Atari: Game Over trailer.

On Friday, Xbox Entertainment Studios (XES) released a trailer for Atari: Game Over, a feature-length documentary about Atari's downfall after the 1983 North American video game crash. In April, Xbox dug up a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where video game lore suggested that hundreds of thousands of video games—specifically E.T. The Extra Terrestrial cartridges—were buried after E.T.'s fatal flop.

As you may have remembered from Ars' on-the-scene coverage, the rumor was proven to be more than just urban legend. Although the documentary's producer Jonathan Chinn admitted that Game Over would have gone forward whether the excavators found the cartridges or not, the companies behind the film had researched the area copiously and were confident the Atari refuse would be down there. They were right, and a few hours into the dig, a team of archaeologists and filmmakers pulled up a handful of barely tarnished E.T. and Centipede games among other Atari paraphernalia.

Although it seems like the documentary makers may have shown their hand too early (yep, everyone knows the games were down there by now), the excavators pulled up buckets and buckets of artifacts that press was not allowed to peruse. We'd be curious to hear more from people like archaeologist Andrew Reinhard, who was on the team that examined the contents of the landfill in-depth.

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The Nexus line is definitely not dead. Over the weekend, a report from Android Police claimed Google and the soon-to-be Lenovo-owned Motorola are working together on a 5.9-inch Nexus phone. Today, a separate report from The Information (subscription required) corroborates the earlier report and provides additional details.

Android Police pointed out the existence of a new Nexus device in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code base, code-named "Shamu." As we went over before I/O, Nexus devices are always named after fish. The Nexus 5 is called "Hammerhead," and the 2013 Nexus 7 is called "Razor." The devices discovered before I/O were "Molly," which ended up being the Android TV developer kit, and "Flounder," which hasn't surfaced yet but is believed to be a 4:3 Nexus tablet made by HTC. (In the Material Design documents and promotional materials, Google frequently shows a 4:3 Android tablet next to other Nexus devices.)

Being in AOSP and having a fish codename means the device is definitely a Google-made Android device. The report, which was labeled a "rumor," says Shamu is a 5.9-inch device that will be manufactured by Motorola. It also mentioned the possibility of a fingerprint sensor and a November release. The name "Shamu" would certainly fit the theme of a large device.

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The Federal Communications Commission just started taking public comments on whether it should preempt state laws that limit the growth of municipal broadband in Tennessee and North Carolina.

Twenty states have passed such limits, which protect private Internet service providers from having to compete against cities and towns that seek to provide Internet, TV, and phone service to residents. After FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said he intends to use the commission's authority to preempt the state laws, the commission received petitions from two public entities that want to expand broadband offerings.

"On July 24, 2014, the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the City of Wilson, North Carolina filed separate petitions asking that the Commission act pursuant to section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to preempt portions of Tennessee and North Carolina state statutes that restrict their ability to provide broadband services," the FCC said today. "The Electric Power Board is an independent board of the City of Chattanooga that provides electric and broadband service in the Chattanooga area. The City of Wilson provides electric service in six counties in eastern North Carolina and broadband service in Wilson County. Both Petitioners allege that state laws restrict their ability to expand their broadband service offerings to surrounding areas where customers have expressed interest in these services, and they request that the Commission preempt such laws."

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Officials from China's State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) made surprise visits to four Microsoft offices today as part of what is described by the Financial Times as an antitrust probe. Offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu were inspected by SAIC officials.

The nature of the investigation is currently unclear, with neither Microsoft nor SAIC offering any details. So far, the regulator has made no formal complaint against the company.

Microsoft is already in the Chinese government's crosshairs, with the government issuing a ban on the use of Windows 8 on government PCs due to security concerns. In June, the state-run broadcaster called into question the security of the operating system and cited experts claiming that the company was working with the US government to spy online.

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Sharks Cove. Microsoft

Even Microsoft wants a piece of the development board market made famous by Arduino and Raspberry Pi.

Microsoft has teamed up with Intel and hardware maker CircuitCo to design the $300 "Sharks Cove," now available for pre-order. Described as a "development board that you can use to develop hardware and drivers for Windows and Android," it contains an Intel Atom Z3735G, a quad-core chip with speeds of 1.33GHz to 1.83GHz. It has 1GB of RAM, 16GB of flash storage, and a MicroSD slot.

Microsoft made its pitch in a blog post this past weekend:

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If you want to use a safe-for-work photo in an article about Hustler, a word to the wise: Stick to its casino offshoots. Laurie Avocado

Hustler Magazine founder Larry Flynt has begun making the interview rounds to promote the pornography magazine's 40th anniversary, but in a Monday interview with Bloomberg TV, the incendiary publisher spoiled the birthday party by predicting a short lifespan for his print edition.

"I don't think Hustler's going to be around very much longer," Flynt said. "Most people are getting their information from the Internet. It's a technology evolution that brings a lot with it and takes a lot away." When asked if he knew when the magazine would cease publication, Flynt said that it will remain so long as it continues to make money, adding "but we can see the handwriting on the wall."

While other major publishers have gone to great lengths to bemoan the modern media landscape, Flynt proved level-headed in the interview. In fact, he pointed out that his company's print portfolio only makes up ten percent of its revenue. "Our company has diversified so much," he said, noting bustling Internet success along with cable and satellite TV revenue throughout Europe, Latin America, and Asia (with the notable exception of censorship-heavy China, which Flynt mentioned before reminding viewers of his Supreme Court victory in 1988).

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Argonne National Lab

The energy storage density of batteries has made remarkable strides in the last few decades, but people will always be happy with further improvements. The more charge you can stuff into a limited space, the longer cellphones will last and the farther electric cars will drive.

Right now, the anodes of lithium-ion batteries contain material that stores lithium in its structure. It would be more efficient to simply make the anode out of lithium metal itself, but early attempts to do so haven't worked out especially well, as the metal forms structures that rapidly degrade performance of the battery. Now, researchers have figured out how to put a carbon cap on top of the metal, keeping the lithium in its place and greatly enhancing the anode's stability.

The researchers behind the new paper, who are based at Stanford, nicely describe the problems with some of the previous work on lithium metal electrodes. To begin with, as charge moves in and out of the electrodes, they will necessarily grow and shrink with the changes in the amount of lithium present. This strains any electrolyte they're in contact with, frequently causing defects to appear at the electrode-electrolyte interface. Once these defects form, lithium metal will preferentially be added at these sites, causing extremely uneven growth.

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Happy Anniversary.

Microsoft started running ads making fun of Siri last year to promote Windows 8 tablets. However, the Windows devices in those commercials were always mute—until now, Microsoft didn't have a virtual personal assistant of its own to answer back to Apple's service.

With this Windows Phone 8.1 ad, all that changes. The commercial pitches an iPhone 5S against a Lumia 635, and it shows off Microsoft's virtual assistant Cortana. The ad highlights something that Siri can't presently do: give clever reminders that are triggered by events (talking to a particular person, being near a particular store) rather than presenting mere dates and times.

The comparison is a little strange, however. The Lumia 635 and iPhone 5s are at opposite ends of the price spectrum, and it's a little unlikely that any putative buyers are actually directly comparing the two.

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GameStop has always been barely a single step up from a pawn shop with its practice of buying used games at low prices and selling them at ridiculous markups. Now, reports suggest that the massive brick-and-mortar game retailer is planning to enter another shady financial area by offering store-linked credit cards to customers at its thousands of locations.

Destructoid reports that it has "obtained photographs" of a purported brochure advertising a credit card tied to the retailer's existing PowerUp Rewards program. Signing up for the card nets customers anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 PowerUp Rewards Points (worth roughly $5 to $15 in value), according to the images, as well as benefits like "special financing offers." We'd expect that having a GameStop credit card would also provide Rewards Points for everyday purchases, but there's no mention of such a benefit in the report.

Destructoid's images show a healthy 26.99 percent APR for the card. That's well above the nationwide average of 13 to 16 percent, and it's also above the higher-than-normal rates charged by many other store-linked credit cards, which hover around the 22 percent range. And while Destructoid's sources say that "all PowerUp Rewards members are already pre-approved for the card," the materials themselves say that the card issuance is "subject to credit approval." Not that we suspect many people will be turned down for a card with such exorbitant interest charges.

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Mozilla in Europe

On Monday, the Mozilla Corporation announced that its last-minute April hire for interim CEO, Chris Beard, has been permanently appointed to the position. Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker confirmed the news in a blog post, stating that "the board has reviewed many internal and external candidates—and no one we met was a better fit."

Beard's Mozilla tenure began in 2004 and saw him eventually rise to chief innovation and chief marketing officer. He left the company in 2013 to become an "executive in residence" at Greylock Partners, an investment firm with a heavy focus on tech companies. His return to Mozilla in April came on the heels of Brendan Eich's controversial hire to the CEO position, which ended with Eich's resignation that month.

While both recent CEO hires came in the form of company veterans as opposed to outside hires, Beard's work included a wider spectrum of marketing and leadership roles, along with prior work with companies like Hewlett-Packard and Linuxcare. That's in contrast to Eich's engineer-first resume (lengthy and impressive as it is). Beard already has his hands full thanks to the company's increasing focus on Firefox OS as a viable smartphone alternative.

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The Brooklyn Bridge caper is nearly a week old, yet it's still a whodunit despite the New York Police Department invoking every digital age investigative technique in the book to crack what appears to be a low-tech prank that included kitchen cookware to pull off.

The hunt continued Monday.

Vandals performed a monster switcheroo of sorts last Tuesday and removed two giant American flags from atop the bridge's two locked 276-foot towers, replacing them with white flags. The bridge is one of the Big Apple's most heavily guarded landmarks. The culprits, who scaled cables in the wee hours of the night, did it all under the cover of darkness by employing tin cooking pans to blot out the lights while sparking terror fears in the process.

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DooFi

Attackers have figured out a new way to get Amazon's cloud service to wage potent denial-of-service attacks on third-party websites—by exploiting security vulnerabilities in an open source search and analytics application known as Elasticsearch.

The power of Backdoor.Linux.Ganiw.a was documented earlier this month by researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. Among other things, the trojan employs DNS amplification, a technique that vastly increases the volume of junk traffic being directed at a victim by abusing poorly secured domain name system servers. By sending DNS queries that are malformed to appear as if they came from the victim domain, DNS amplification can boost attack volume by 10-fold or more. The technique can be especially hard to block when distributed among thousands or hundreds of thousands of compromised computers.

Late last week, Kaspersky Lab expert Kurt Baumgartner reported that the DDoS bot is actively compromising Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) hosts and very possibly those of competing cloud services. The foothold that allows the nodes to be hijacked is a vulnerability in 1.1.x versions of Elastisearch, he said. The attackers are modifying proof-of-concept attack code for the vulnerability, indexed as CVE-2014-3120 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database, that gives them the ability to remotely execute powerful Linux commands through a bash shell Window. The Gani backdoor, in turn, installs several other malicious scripts on compromised computers, including Backdoor.Perl.RShell.c and Backdoor.Linux.Mayday.g. The Mayday backdoor then floods sites with data packets based on the user datagram protocol.

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Verizon Wireless

One of the most common reactions to Verizon's announcement that it will throttle the heaviest users of its "unlimited" 4G plans went something like this: "That's the last straw—I'm switching to T-Mobile!"

Unfortunately, switching to T-Mobile, AT&T, or Sprint won't protect you from getting throttled, even if the carrier is claiming to sell you "unlimited" data.

Let's take a look at the relevant passages in each carrier's terms and conditions. We'll start with the Verizon Wireless announcement last week:

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The Lumia 1520 is currently the biggest Windows Phone, but at a mere 6 inches it could be dwarfed by future devices.

Before it has even delivered Windows Phone 8.1 to most users, Microsoft is readying its growing number of Windows Phone OEMs for the next release: Windows Phone 8.1 GDR 1.

Documents intended for the OEMs were accidentally made available on Microsoft's developer site for a short time, revealing details of what the patch will include. Though Microsoft has rectified the error, Paul Thurrott has posted a summary of what we should expect.

As with past platform updates, the release includes a mix of end-user features and behind-the-scenes improvements. The notable user-visible change is that the Start screen will support folders; drop one tile on top of another and it will form a folder, in much the same way as iOS and Android do. The Windows Store tile will also become live.

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So far, Amazon's contribution to the great wide world of 3D printing, where you are limited only by your imagination and stash of printing filament, is bobbleheads.

Amazon has opened a 3D-printing marketplace, offering customers the ability to buy customized products and trinkets like earrings or figurines. To enable customization, Amazon has built a new interface on top of its normal product pages that allows buyers to tweak the look of different 3D products.

There are plenty of 3D print-to-order businesses already in existence, including Sculpteo, Shapeways, and iMakr. While some work just as an on-demand service for individual customers, others are marketplaces for artists' and designers' 3D-printed products that users can browse and buy, like an iPhone phonograph amplifier.

Looking more closely at Amazon's implementation, it's more like the marketplace model, with partnerships from 3D printing services like Mixee Labs, which specializes in bobblehead figurines. 3DLT, a 3D printing design company, is also participating in the new venture, though it has sold its products through Amazon since March.

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