This is Curiosity, but physically, Mars 2020 will look quite similar. NASA

When NASA announced its plans for future explorations of Mars, there was a sense of disappointment in some quarters, since it featured a rover much like Curiosity. But NASA made clear that it was only using the proven technology of the vehicle itself; the instruments it carried would be all new and shaped by both the advancement of technology and the experience of past missions.

Today NASA announced exactly what instruments the mission—currently called Mars 2020—will carry. They included hardware capable of making a more directed search for organic chemicals on the red planet, which could be evidence that life existed there in the past. And it will also carry an experiment designed to test our ability to produce oxygen for future manned explorations of Mars. The rover will also gather and cache samples to be picked up and returned to Earth by a future mission.

NASA had received nearly 60 proposals for instruments to fly on the Mars 2020 mission. From that list, it has selected seven, which it expects will cost a total of roughly $130 million to develop and build. Once again, the rover will be equipped with a mastcam (Mastcam-Z in this iteration) that includes panoramic and stereo imaging. The rover will also carry an instrument to track the wind, temperature, and the properties of Mars' persistent dust.

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US Computer Emergency Response Team, in cooperation with the Secret Service and researchers at Trustwave’s Spiderlabs, have issued an alert about a newly identified variant of malware installed on point-of-sale (POS) systems that was used in a series of recent attacks by cyber criminals. Called “Backoff,” the malware shares characteristics with the one used to attack Target’s point of sale systems last year: it scrapes credit card data out of the infected computer’s memory. Until now, it was undetected by antivirus software; testing by researchers found it had a "zero percent detection rate" on commercial antivirus products.

POS machines are a big target for hackers, who use malware like Backoff to collect data from credit cards and other transaction information to either create fraudulent credit cards or sell the data. In many ways, the Backoff-based attacks were similar to the attack in 2011 on Subway franchises—hackers used remote desktop software left active on the machines to gain entry, either by brute-force password attacks or by taking advantage of a default password, and then installing the malware on the hacked system.

According to US-CERT, Backoff—which is Windows-specific malware—runs in the background watching memory for the “track” data from credit card swipes, which can be used to both obtain the account number on the card and to create fraudulent cards that can be used in ATMs and other point-of-sale systems. Backoff also has a keylogger function that records the key-presses on the infected computer. The malware installs a malicious stub in Windows Explorer that can reload the in-memory component if it crashes and communicates with the criminals’ command and control network—sending home captured credit card data and checking for malware updates.

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Exporting to PDF from Excel for iPad. All four Office apps can do this now. Andrew Cunningham

Microsoft at long last released Office for the iPad in March, in keeping with CEO Satya Nadella's "cloud first, mobile first" approach to competitors' platforms. OneNote had already been available for some time, but it was the first time Word, Excel, or PowerPoint had been available as native iPad apps. Today Microsoft updated all four applications, following the hasty addition of printer support about a month after the initial release.

All four apps can now export files as PDFs, crop pictures inline, and reset changes made to pictures. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint can also use third-party fonts, presumably in addition to the Microsoft- and Apple-supplied fonts that come with iOS and the Office apps themselves. Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote pick up more features that will be appreciated by heavier users of the desktop Office apps. From the release notes:

Excel

• Flick to select: flick a cell’s selection handle in any direction to quickly and easily select all the data in a row or column.
• External keyboard support: using an external keyboard is even easier. Use the same keys to input data and move around a worksheet as you would on your PC or Mac.
• PivotTables: interact with PivotTables that have source data in the same workbook.
• Print options: more paper sizes and scaling options give you more control over the layout when printing your workbooks.

PowerPoint

• Presenter view: view and edit speaker notes, see your next slide, or jump to other slides while presenting.
• Play media: play videos, sound effects, and background music while presenting.
• Insert video: insert videos from your Camera Roll.
• Presenter tools: now you can erase highlights and drawings on your presentation.
• Hyperlinks: add links to your presentation or edit existing ones.

OneNote

• Protected sections: now you can lock or unlock password-protected sections created in OneNote for Windows.
• Organize notebooks: now you can move and reorder pages and sections and manage subpages.
• Formatted text: copy and paste formatted text between applications—whether it's an article from Safari or a document in Word, any content you paste into OneNote will look great!
• Creating notebooks: now you can create notebooks and save them to OneDrive for business. Have multiple accounts? No problem! It's easy to select exactly where you want to store your new notebook.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote are all available in the App Store for any iPad running iOS 7. A Microsoft account is required to view files in all of the applications. A current Office365 subscription is required to edit files in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

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Today, the World Health Organization announced that it will begin coordinating a $100-million effort to contain the Ebola virus outbreak that's currently killing people in West Africa. The 120 staff WHO has directed to combat the disease are turning out to be insufficient, even when combined with local health workers and a collection of NGOs. The organization has called the scale of the outbreak "unprecedented."

The launch will officially take place tomorrow in Guinea, one of the countries that has been hit the hardest by Ebola. An Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak Response Plan in West Africa has already been developed. The plan calls for several hundred additional workers, primarily "clinical doctors and nurses, epidemiologists, social mobilization experts, logisticians and data managers." Their goal will be two-fold: strengthen surveillance and response capabilities in surrounding countries to limit the spread of the virus and cut down on transmission in affected areas by scaling up existing outbreak control measures.

Ebola is part of a family of viruses that causes what are termed "hemorrhagic fevers." The results are exactly what the name implies: failure of blood vessel integrity and blood clotting, leading to widespread internal and external bleeding. Since the virus is present in these fluids, the bleeding puts anyone who comes in contact with a symptomatic individual or the body of anyone killed by Ebola at risk of infection. Health care workers can easily become infected during routine care.

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The Hoboken School District said in a statement that it is not throwing away its student laptops, despite a headline from public radio station WNYC that stated: "Why Hoboken Is Throwing Away All its Student Laptops."

That story was a reprint of The Hechinger Report's original story, under the headline: "Why a New Jersey school district decided giving laptops to students is a terrible idea." The original story noted that the school district was abandoning the essential goal of providing one laptop to each 7th and 8th grader.

In a letter “to the Hoboken Community” posted on the district website on Thursday, Interim Superintendent Richard Brockel wrote that the district’s program purchased 300 laptops “with the intent to provide technology for all students regardless of their relative personal economic situation.”

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A number of the profiles created on Reaganbook and cached by Google before the site was closed to the public, some of them NSFW.

The launch of ReaganBook, a conservative-oriented social network, was overrun by trolls Thursday despite its attempt at a soft launch meant specifically to avoid trolls. RawStory reports that the site was flooded with several fake accounts, including ones for Vladimir Putin, Sarah Palin, and Manuel Noriega. Eventually the whole site was taken offline.

ReaganBook is the work of Janet Porter, an Ohio Republican and founder of "pro-life, pro-advocacy" group Faith 2Action, according to The Daily Beast. The site, pitched as "Facebook for patriots," officially opened Tuesday and attracted such personalities as "Ben Ghazi, "Al Zheimers," "Ayn Randy," "Zombie Reagan," and "Ronald Reagan" himself. Users also created group pages for the band Slayer, "Cut Dicks for Christ," and various types of pornographic content, wrote The Daily Beast.

As of Thursday, the site is nothing but a boilerplate message thanking those who (attempted to) participate in the soft launch. "Your participation is helping us build a more secure site. Thank you!" the message reads. "Please be patient while we make the necessary changes to keep the site free from obscenity, pornography, and those intent on the destruction of life, liberty, and the family… As Reagan taught us, trust, but verify." The post is signed "Management." Ayn Randy could not be reached for comment.

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Microsoft, Sandyford, Co. Dublin. Red Agenda A federal judge ruled Thursday that Microsoft must hand over e-mails stored on an overseas server to US authorities. The case gives the Obama administration approval to reach into servers abroad.

"It is a question of control, not a question of the location of that information," US District Judge Loretta Preska ruled in a closely followed legal flap. The bench order from the New York judge was stayed pending appeal.

The judge sided with the Obama Administration claims that any company with operations in the United States must comply with valid warrants for data, even if the content is stored overseas—in this case Dublin, Ireland. It's a position Microsoft and companies like Apple contended was wrong, arguing that the enforcement of US law stops at the border.

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FTC

It's no secret that mobile cramming has cost cell phone users lots of money. A Senate Commerce Committee report released yesterday says the unauthorized charges crammed into customer bills have "likely cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars."

The report further says that industry self-regulation has "left gaps in consumer protection." The carriers promised last November to stop these charges, given that previous attempts at self-regulation failed, but much damage was already done and Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) says the risks to consumers are not entirely gone.

The committee staff report, requested by Rockefeller, says, "For several decades, phone companies have allowed third-party vendors to charge consumers on their phone bills for goods and services unrelated to phone service, such as photo storage, voicemail, and faxes. This practice began with landline phone bills and continued on wireless phone bills as consumer use of mobile phones increased. Throughout this period, the industry has assured the public that its self-regulatory system is effective at protecting consumers from fraudulent third-party billing on their phone bills."

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Greetings, Arsians! Our partners at LogicBuy are back with a ton of deals for this week. We've got a back to school special today only: a Dell Inspiron 15 laptop with a Core i7 Haswell processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive for just $749.99. There's also a lower-specced Inspiron 15 for $499.99. Either one will save you a ton of cash and get you ready for school.

Featured deal

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Laptops, desktops, and tablets

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Davide Bonnadonna

We tend to think of feathers as one of the defining features of birds. But in recent years, it's become apparent that the lineage of dinosaurs that gave rise to birds (the Theropods) had feathers millions of years before anything remotely bird-like existed. Just last week, feathers were also found on a dinosaur outside the theropod lineage, raising questions about what made the theropods special (aside from, well, all sorts of cool dinosaur species).

Previous attempts to detect any global trends in bird-like traits among the theropods haven't come up with anything definitive. But today, scientists are releasing a new computer analysis of thousands of traits from theropod dinosaur fossils. The results show that the lineage that gave rise to birds has been getting smaller for 50 million years, and it underwent a huge burst of adding novel anatomical features. Both of these revelations are in sharp contrast to the rest of the theropod lineage.

The first theropods appear in the fossil record after the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction event. During the early part of their history, they were notable for being rather large and static. Some groups appeared in the fossil record 180 million years ago, persisting right up to the mass extinction event that ended the non-avian dinosaurs. And one of the earliest groups to split off the lineage that led to birds were the Megalosaurids—which, as their name implies, were rather large.

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The head of the Central Intelligence Agency has apologized to leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee after determining that his officers improperly accessed computers that were supposed to be available only to committee investigators, according to multiple reports on Thursday.

The mea culpa from CIA Director John O. Brennan was in sharp contrast to a defiant statement he made in March. After US Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the agency of breaching long-recognized separations between employees of the legislative and executive branches, Brennan maintained that there had been no inappropriate monitoring of Senate staffers' computer activity.

"When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong," he said at the time.

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The F-35 program and the F-22 before it, coupled with budget sequestration, have put the Air Force into a strategic tailspin. US Navy

Yesterday, US Air Force leadership released a document called “America’s Air Force: A Call to the Future,” a 30-year plan focused on “strategic agility” according to its authors. Created by the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force and advisors to the Air Force Chief of Staff, the strategy document calls for the Air Force to focus on the ability to quickly adapt to the changing world by using incremental, agile weapons system development instead of budget-busting major programs that aim for giant leaps in capability.

That doesn’t mean that the Air Force is abandoning its present path right away. The more than $1 trillion acquisition of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—the most expensive fighter aircraft development program in history—continues unabated. But the Air Force, which slashed the size of its force and much of its capability to fund the F-35 and the F-22 Raptor, is now realizing that it has run hard up against a fundamental law of defense procurement: Augustine’s sixteenth law.

The Ferengi rules of defense acquisition

In 1983, Norman Augustine, former CEO and president of Lockheed Martin, published a book through the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics entitled Augustine’s Laws. The “laws” in the book were a collection of observations and aphorisms about business in general with insights on aerospace and the defense industry in particular. Many were tongue-in-cheek jabs (Law XI states, “If the Earth could be made to rotate twice as fast, managers would get twice as much done…If the Earth could be made to rotate 20 times as fast, everyone else would get twice as much done since all the managers would fly off”).

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The Qi-compatible Nexus 5 on the Nexus Wireless Charger. New chargers will be able to increase the space between the device and the pad. Andrew Cunningham

The Wireless Power Consortium's Qi wireless charging standard is wireless in that the phone is not physically plugged into anything, but it still requires your device and the wireless charging pad to be touching each other to work. Today, the WPC announced (PDF) that version 1.2 of the Qi standard will add support for resonant charging, making it possible for your phone to be charged when near a Qi pad rather than directly on top of it.

A small image showing Qi 1.2 in action. WPC

It's a minor enough change that current Qi 1.1 receivers will be able to take advantage of it with no extra hardware, but it opens up a few different possibilities for companies that want to build Qi support into their products. The WPC says that Qi chargers can now be embedded within tables and desks rather than placed on the surface, making them less obtrusive. "New low power transmitter designs" will make it easier to build Qi chargers into cars, and a single Qi 1.2 transmitter will be able to charge multiple Qi devices simultaneously. Qi can also now supply up to 2,000 watts of power to household appliances (the release specifically mentions "kitchen applications").

Current Qi devices will be able to draw power from these new transmitters at distances of up to 30 mm (around 1.2 inches), while devices with purpose-build Qi 1.2 receivers increase the distance to 45 mm (about 1.8 inches). Engadget reports that the resonant version of Qi is roughly 70 to 80 percent efficient, while the old inductive version is around 85 percent efficient, and Qi 1.1 and 1.2 transmitters and receivers will be able to interoperate, so inductive charging pads like the Nexus Wireless Charger will still be able to charge Qi 1.2 phones. Just know that resonant charging will require a Qi 1.2 transmitter.

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Shondo, the reality series' MMA fighter, adds a lot of excitement and energy to a medieval-obsessed show whose lore and fictional world don't always keep up. ABC

The Quest, ABC’s latest reality TV series, debuts on Thursday with a shameless plea to lovers of fantasy and other self-identifying geeks. The show asks its 12 contestants to fake like medieval knights—which they do thanks to activities like living in a castle, wielding spears, bowing to a queen, and meeting creepy witches in the woods.

But for the producers who dumped real people into a Tolkien-obsessed world, that’s not enough. These “paladins” apparently all have a greater purpose beyond a cash prize or D-list celebrity status. Contestants don’t take long to reveal the massive chips on their shoulders, many of them recalling a younger life when they didn’t fit in, when they wore headgear and giant glasses, or when they hid with books or video games.

So only now, wearing leather armor and clutching the broken shards of the ancient “Sunspear,” do they see a path to confidence and redemption. The quotes come flowing while the dozen players take their first steps toward the show’s world of Everrealm: “It was my fate to embark on this journey,” one says, while another goes a little further: “I want to show the little kid I used to be, who was so shy and so quiet, that he doesn’t always have to be that way.”

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NFL

The surveillance society, it seems, is broadening at NFL stadiums.

Facial-recognition technology already tracks fans at some venues. But now, with its upcoming season just around the corner, the NFL is installing radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in players' shoulder pads to track all of their on-field movements in real time.

The NFL announced Thursday that it is partnering with Zebra Technologies, the company that already supplies RFID chips for applications from "automotive assembly lines to dairy cows' milk production." For the football nerd, it's a bonanza of sorts, possibly changing fantasy football and morning-after box scores forever. Zebra said the technology, known as "Next Gen Stats," will track player acceleration rates, top speed, length of runs, and even how much separation a ball carrier got from a defender. It's not just a Pandora's box of stats for fans and broadcasters, as coaches can immediately employ the data to decide what plays to run or how to defend them.

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Sprint isn't the only company trying to buy T-Mobile US.

Iliad, a telecom in France, "has made an offer for T-Mobile US in a bold bid to counter an offer for the country's fourth-largest wireless carrier by Sprint," The Wall Street Journal reported today. But it may be too late. While Sprint and T-Mobile haven't announced a merger, the two companies "have agreed on the broad outlines of a deal valuing T-Mobile US at more than $30 billion," the report stated.

The CEO of Sprint owner SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, has argued that Sprint needs more scale to compete against AT&T and Verizon Wireless and has vowed a "massive price war" if regulators let Sprint and T-Mobile merge. T-Mobile US CEO John Legere has spoken favorably of "consolidation" and is reportedly likely to be CEO of a combined Sprint/T-Mobile.

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The screen of the Oculus Rift DK2. iFixit

iFixit has gotten a hold of the Oculus Rift DK2, the second version of the virtual reality developer kit, which has slowly started shipping to customers. The site wasted no time in doing its traditional teardown, and what it found as Oculus' choice of display is a little surprising: it's the entire front half of a Samsung Galaxy Note 3.

Yes, you heard that right. The DK2 includes the Note 3's 1920×1080 AMOLED display, a (useless) Synaptics touchscreen controller, and even the glass display cover, complete with Samsung logo and cutouts for the sensors, earpiece, and the home button.

A previous report indicated that Samsung and Oculus had started up a mutually beneficial relationship, which would see Samsung providing display technology to Oculus and Oculus helping Samsung build a VR headset of its own. A leaked Samsung concept showed a head unit that was mostly an empty shell that the user's smartphone would slide into. The concept seems a lot more plausible now, since Oculus is basically taking a more-integrated approach of the same idea for its developer kit.

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dariorug

Apple's long-rumored content delivery network (CDN) has gone live in the US and Europe, delivering traffic directly to Comcast and other Internet service providers thanks to paid interconnection deals, Frost & Sullivan analyst Dan Rayburn reported today.

The CDN can deliver multiple terabits of data per second and will help Apple more efficiently distribute new releases of iOS and OS X.

Apple is still using Akamai and Level 3 CDN services for iTunes and app downloads, "but over time, much of that traffic will be brought over to Apple’s CDN," Rayburn wrote. "It’s too early to know how much traffic will come over and when, but Apple’s already started using their own CDN much faster than I expected. The pace of their build out and amount of money they are spending on infrastructure is incredible. Based on my calculations, Apple has already put in place multiple terabits per second of capacity and by the end of this year, will have invested well more than $100M in their CDN build out." Apple has been working on its CDN for about a year.

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The exact size and makeup of that "library of games" is going to be quite important to Now's success.

When pricing information for the closed beta of Sony's PlayStation Now streaming service leaked last month, many PS4 owners were up in arms over prices of up to $30 for 90-day rentals of games like Final Fantasy XIII-2, which sell new on disc for roughly half that price. While Sony hasn't significantly altered that ridiculous pricing scheme for today's public beta launch, the company wants customers to know that it has heard their complaints and is developing new pricing options.

"We’ve heard you loud and clear for an update on a PS Now subscription option and want to reassure you that we are working on it," PlayStation Now Senior Director Jack Buser wrote in an announcement of the service's public beta. "We think PS Now represents the next step toward the future of gaming and we’re excited to have the PlayStation Nation come along with us on the beginning of this journey."

Sony originally mentioned a subscription option for PS Now when announcing the service back in January. For now, though, streaming games are available for individual rental periods of four hours, seven days, 30 days, or 90 days. Buser also notes that users will soon "start seeing reduced pricing on some 4-hour rentals which will appear at $1.99."

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Just a few months ago, we were looking at Sony's end-of-fiscal-year financial reports and worrying about the consumer electronics giant's $10+ billion in losses over the past eight years. Today, things are looking a bit rosier, as Sony is riding strong sales of the PlayStation 4 and its associated games and services to an increase in profitability for the quarter ending in June.

The numbers for Sony's Game & Network services division tell the tale, flipping from a ¥16.4 billion (about $160 million) loss this time last year to a ¥4.3 billion (about $42 million) profit this year. Savvy industry watchers (or anyone with half a brain) will note that the PlayStation 4 launched in that time, and Sony confirms that the turnaround is "due to the contribution from sales of PS4 hardware which was launched in November 2013, as well as a significant increase in network services revenues accompanying the launch of the PS4."

Digging deeper into the numbers, we see that Sony sold 3.5 million game consoles (including both PS3 and PS4) worldwide for the quarter, up significantly from the 1.1 million PS3s it sold during the three-month period in 2013. Assuming PS3 sales didn't somehow increase well into the system's eighth year of life, that means Sony probably sold somewhere in the range of 2.5 to 3 million PS4s worldwide in the last three months. That's not far off from the sales pace Sony set earlier in the year, when it was selling roughly a million consoles a month in March.

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