Siri won't help you hide a body today. Back in 2012, however... Casey Johnston

Update: The Gainesville police department has clarified that, while a department detective did show a screenshot of the "hide my roommate" query from the suspect's phone, the question was not necessarily asked in connection with the alleged murder. The suspect's attorney told CBS Miami that the query was found "among hundreds of pictures that were on Bravo’s phone and that the search may not have been initiated by his client." The CBS report also notes that the suspect admitted to beating the victim the night of the alleged murder, and that police found the shovel with which the victim was buried. Original story is below.

A murder suspect may have actually used a Siri Easter egg while hiding the body of his victim, according to a news report Tuesday from the Palm Beach Post and later picked up by BuzzFeed. Gainesville, Florida detective Matt Goeckel presented evidence in court Tuesday that showed the suspect, Pedro Bravo, telling Siri, "I need to hide my roommate." He received as suggestions: "Swamps. Reservoirs. Metal Foundries. Dumps."

The response from Siri was originally meant to be a macabre joke; it's one of the virtual assistant's first Easter eggs from when it launched on iOS in 2011. According to the Gainesville police, Bravo actually asked his phone for advice when looking for somewhere to hide roommate Christian Aguilar's body on September 20, 2012, after the two had a fight.

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An Arbor Networks graphic showing the sudden drop-off in network traffic from Syria on November 29, 2012 as the country was essentially erased from network routing tables.

In a Wired interview with well-known National Security Agency journalist James Bamford that was published today, Edward Snowden claimed that the US accidentally took most of Syria off the Internet while attempting to bug the country's traffic. Snowden said that back in 2013 when he was still working with the US government, he was told by a US intelligence officer that NSA hackers—not the Assad regime—had been responsible for Syria’s sudden disconnect from the Internet in November and December of 2012.

The NSA's Tailored Access Office (TAO), Snowden said, had been attempting to exploit a vulnerability in the router of a “major Internet service provider in Syria.” The exploit would have allowed the NSA to redirect traffic from the router through systems tapped by the agency’s Turmoil packet capture system and the Xkeyscore packet processing system, giving the NSA access to enclosures in e-mails that would otherwise not have been accessible to its broad Internet surveillance.

Instead, the TAO’s hackers “bricked” the router, Snowden said. He described the event as an “oh shit” moment, as the TAO operations center team tried to repair the router and cover their tracks, to no avail.

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Bravely exploring tombs... but only on Xbox, to start.

Update (August 13): In an interview with Eurogamer, Microsoft's Phil Spencer clairified that the Tomb Raider deal is a timed exclusive, though he wouldn't comment on the precise length of the deal. "Obviously the deal does have a duration. I didn't buy the IP in perpetuity," he said.

Spencer also said that the game will be coming to Xbox 360 as well as Xbox One.

Original story: Since its start in 1996, the Tomb Raider series has been proudly platform agnostic, launching on PlayStation, PC, and Sega Saturn back in the day. So it came as some surprise this morning when Microsoft announced that Rise of the Tomb Raider will be coming exclusively to Xbox One in time for the 2015 holiday season.

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The Shadow Realms teaser shown at EA's Gamescom press conference last night.

Last night's pre-Gamescom press conference from Bioware owner EA didn't bring any additional news about the still-nebulous Mass Effect 4, but it did bring the surprising announcement of a quite different kind of game from the studio best known for epic single-player RPGs. Shadow Realms is more directly inspired by tabletop RPGs, pitting a single "Shadowlord" (read: Dungeon Master) against a team of four heroes drawn from the usual set of RPG classes in a trap-filled dungeon.

In an announcement post, lead designer James Ohlen notes that while previous Bioware RPGs have been successful in their own ways, "The stories always come to an end and AI systems can’t replace the creativity of a human Dungeon Master. Shadow Realms aims to change that."

Unlike a traditional Dungeon Master, though, the Shadowlord in Shadow Realms won't be an all-seeing omnipotent force hovering over the battlefield and controlling dice rolls. Instead, as Bioware explains, he or she will invisibly roam the dungeon halls from an over-the-shoulder perspective, "setting traps, casting spells, summoning monsters, and controlling any monster in the level."

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Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell in 2012. billsorrell.com

MPHJ Technology became infamous by sending out thousands of letters demanding $1,000 per worker from small businesses using basic scan-to-e-mail functions. The company says it owns several patents that cover those basic functions and has sent out more than 10,000 letters demanding payment.

That behavior led MPHJ to be the first patent troll ever to be sued by the government. Vermont Attorney General Bill Sorrell filed a lawsuit against MPHJ in May of last year that accuses MPHJ of making misleading statements in its demand letters and doing "little, if any, due diligence to confirm that the targeted businesses were actually infringing its patents." In addition to targeting a variety of small businesses, MPHJ sent letters to two Vermont nonprofits that help disabled residents and their caregivers.

For the past year, MPHJ has pushed back, demanding that its case be heard in federal court and even suggesting that the Vermont AG should be sanctioned for going after it.

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A GIF-ified version of the key part of the P.T. reveal of Silent Hills SunhiLegend / NeoGAF

Amid all the announcements at Sony's pre-Gamescom press conference today, one stood out as particularly baffling: the brief mention of an immediately downloadable PS4 "playable teaser" for a horror game simply being called P.T, from unknown studio 7780s. The mystery has now been solved, with P.T. revealed as a stealth announcement for a new Silent Hill game from Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima.

After wandering through a dark, creepy house lit primarily by a flashlight, the P.T. demo culminates with a cut scene showing a rain-soaked street. The name Hideo Kojima pops up alongside noted film director Guillermo Del Toro as the camera pans up to show a character modeled after The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus.

The game name Silent Hills then appears against a white background, followed by a disclaimer warning "This game is a teaser. It has no direct relation to the main title."

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That nice orange disk? Get rid of it, and the black hole can eat much faster. NASA

As far as we can tell, nearly every galaxy out there has a supermassive black hole at its core. And when these black holes are actively ingesting matter, they create quasars, the brightest objects we've ever detected. Quasars appear to be present in some of the earliest galaxies we can detect, from when the Universe was only six percent of its current age.

That's a bit of a problem. The radiation a black hole emits while swallowing matter places a speed limit on the amount of matter it can ingest. Currently, we simply don't know how black holes got big enough to power a quasar less than a billion years after the birth of the Universe. But a paper from last week's edition of Science suggests that the stars present at the galaxy's core might cause gravitational instabilities that let the black hole overcome the speed limit on its growth.

Black holes are famous for having a point of no return, a distance where even photons cannot escape their gravitational draw. But beyond that point, the infalling matter can form what's called an accretion disk, where its interactions with the intense magnetic and gravitational fields send copious amounts of matter and energy flowing away from the black hole.

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Language and math have always been part of the core public school experience in the US; science, by contrast, has often been considered an optional topic. But the combination of a push for greater standards and a recognition of science's increasing role in our high-tech economy has resulted in the adoption of science requirements by many states. Now, an analysis of US census data suggests that the increased push for science may have a negative effect: an increase in the dropout rate in states that have adopted science requirements.

This isn't to say that science is bad for students. "That there is positive impact of rigorous coursework when chosen by students is not controversial," researchers based at the Washington University School of Medicine wrote in a recent study, "but there has been ongoing debate over the effects of requiring a more difficult high school curriculum for everyone."

The authors relied on data obtained by the US Census Bureau, through the actual census and annual surveys the Bureau performs. (For data junkies, it's worth noting that all of the data is publicly available from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series website.)

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The 15 states in which the ACLU knows that police use cell phone tracking devices. ACLU

The Federal Communications Commission said it will investigate the “illicit and unauthorized use” of cell phone tracking and interception devices, commonly known as IMSI catchers or stingrays.

A newly published letter from FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) states that Wheeler has created a task force that recently took “immediate steps to combat the illicit and unauthorized use of IMSI catchers. The mission of this task force is to develop concrete solutions to protect the cellular networks systemically from similar unlawful intrusions and interceptions.”

Relatively little is known about how stingrays are used by law enforcement agencies nationwide, although documents have surfaced showing how they have been purchased and used in some limited instances. Worse still, cops have lied to courts about the use of such technology. Not only can stingrays be used to determine location, but they can also intercept calls and text messages. Grayson seems primarily concerned with stingray use by criminals, terrorists, and foreign government agents.

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Flickr user: Intel Free Press

Lean operations and a lack of technical staff make non-governmental organizations a prime, and relatively soft, target for well-funded adversaries, according to an academic study of a four-year campaign targeting one such group.

In a paper to be delivered at the USENIX Security Conference next week, six academic researchers analyzed nearly 1,500 suspicious e-mail messages targeting the World Uyghur Congress (WUC). The team found that, while the malware managed to reliably evade detection by many antivirus programs, the attacks were relatively unsophisticated, using known vulnerabilities that had already been patched. The social engineering tactics, however, were very targeted and convincing, with the majority written in the native language, referring to events of interest to the NGO and appearing to come from known contacts, said Engin Kirda, a professor of computer science at Northeastern University and a co-author of the paper.

"You read about sophisticated attacks, but the malware that we analyzed was pretty standard," Kirda said. "It was not some ground breaking obfuscation or malware."

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When the Blackphone team arrived at Def Con last week, they knew they were stepping into a lion’s den. In fact, that's exactly why they were there. The first generation Blackphone from SGP Technologies has been shipping for just over a month, and the company’s delegation to DefCon—including Silent Circle Chief Technology Officer Jon Callas and newly hired SGP Technologies Chief Security Officer Dan Ford—was looking to both reach a natural customer base and get help with further locking down the device.

Ask and you shall receive. Jon “Justin Case” Sawyer, the CTO of Applied Cybersecurity LLC, walked up to the Blackphone table at Def Con and told them he rooted the phone. And those who followed him on Twitter received an abbreviated play-by-play.

What followed, however, was not what Sawyer or the Blackphone team counted on: a BlackBerry blogger at N4BB leapt on one of Sawyer’s tweets and wrote a story with the erroneous headline, “Blackphone Rooted Within 5 Minutes.” By the time Sawyer was presenting on Sunday at Def Con with Tim Strazzere, the story had been picked up by a number of blogs and websites—and nearly all of them didn’t bother getting further details from Sawyer or Blackphone.

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Since the announcement and revocation of Microsoft's "Family Sharing" features on Xbox One, we've been waiting for someone to come up with a fair and logical way of sharing generalized gameplay experiences with friends over the Internet. Steam's library-wide Family Sharing features were a step in the right direction, but Sony's newly announced Share Play feature sounds like the Internet game sharing we've been waiting for.

Announced at Sony's pre-Gamescom press conference today, Share Play is being sold as a "virtual couch" that lets you in effect "pass the controller" to friends online even if they don't own a copy of the game. That means you'll be able to play simultaneous cooperative and competitive games with your PSN friends, even if the game is only designed for local multiplayer. Alternatively, an online friend can take over for you in single-player games to help with a particularly difficult section.

It all happens without the need for the second online player to buy or download anything, Sony said, although both players will need to have a PlayStation Plus account. While Sony didn't get technical at the press event, it seems the feature works through the same kind of Gaikai-fueled game-streaming/screen-sharing technology that powers PlayStation Now and PS4 Remote Play on the Vita.

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Apple's ethnicity numbers in the US may be more diverse than other giant tech companies, but today's charts don't explain how Apple Store employees fit into sub-categories like "tech" and "leadership." Apple

On Tuesday, Apple joined a growing list of tech companies issuing diversity reports about hiring practices, and like its peers, Apple's report broke down ethnicity and gender percentages in the categories of "tech," "non-tech," and "leadership." Taken at face value, the report paints Apple as a company with a higher percentage of underrepresented groups among its tech and leadership ranks.

However, unlike companies like Facebook, Google, and Yahoo, Apple counts a massive number of retail employees among its ranks—today's report listed a total of 98,000, and retail included more than 32,000 employees in 2012 (a number that has assumedly expanded since). Tuesday's report failed to clarify exactly how Apple Store employees fit into the new statistics. A Re/code report alleged that the "leadership" category included Apple Store management, but Apple's own report didn't indicate either way.

According to the report compiled internally by Apple human resources, Apple's worldwide tech hiring includes 20 percent women, as opposed to Google's 17 percent. In the US, Apple's tech category includes seven percent Hispanic and six percent black employees; those ethnicity numbers are each at least four percent higher than all other companies who've reported thus far. Apple's leadership percentages also outpace the others in diversity, including 28 percent women worldwide (topping Facebook and Yahoo at 23 percent), along with an American count of six percent Hispanic and three percent black.

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Our contribution to the bad jokes. Sorry. Aurich Lawson

Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, is officially the new owner of the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers, according to a league announcement.

The newly unemployed Ballmer has paid $2 billion for the team (which, as I understand it, plays a variant of the popular game netball). The price is a record sale for an NBA team.

Ballmer's efforts to buy the team have been delayed by a court case between the team's former owners, Donald Sterling and his estranged wife, Shelly. Donald Sterling attempted to block the sale negotiated by Shelly Sterling, but a California probate court allowed the sale to go through.

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US Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia. Alan Kotok

Recently, the US Patent and Trademark Office concluded an internal investigation that it began about two years ago. The investigation resulted in a bruising 32-page report, finding that a significant fraction of the roughly 7,900 patent examiners at the US Patent and Trademark Office routinely lie about their hours worked. About half of those examiners work from home, but even the half in the office have proven hard to supervise.

But that strongly worded report didn't end up on the desk of the inspector general. Instead, Commerce Department Inspector General Todd Zinser was given a 16-page scrubbed-up version of the report with inconclusive findings. The potentially incendiary quotes and cases in the original report were all gone.

Eventually, Zinser got the original report when it was given to him by an unnamed patent office worker. Now The Washington Post has published both versions, along with an article highlighting some of the worst abuses. The original suppressed report paints a portrait of dysfunction at a large government office that's rarely in the spotlight.

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The Xbox One Digital TV Tuner. Microsoft

The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 aren't just games consoles; a succession of software updates has made them into rich media boxes, capable of playing all manner of video and audio on your TV. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4, by contrast, have thus far offered a rather sad and limited media experience. On the Xbox One, at least, that experience is about to get a whole lot better, as Microsoft revealed today at Gamescom in Germany.

A new media player app for the console is being released with support for playback from USB devices and, later in the year, DLNA streaming from other devices on the home network, including Windows PCs. This is in addition to its existing ability to have content pushed by network devices.

On its own, this would merely bring the Xbox One's media capabilities up to the same level as those found in the older Xbox 360, but Microsoft is going a step further with substantially wider format support. The company has published a full list of supported codecs, but one stands out: support for MKV containers. While MKV is a rarity in the world of explicitly authorized video, it's quite abundant in the murky world of pirated TV shows. Native MKV support will make watching this content substantially easier on the Xbox One.

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At its pre-Gamescom press conference today, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe President and CEO Jim Ryan announced that the PlayStation 4 has sold over 10 million units worldwide since its launch late last November. "Just to be clear, that's 10 million PS4s sold through to consumers," Ryan clarified.

Sony last shared official PS4 sales numbers in April, when it confirmed seven million PS4s sold through that point. Last month, Sony noted in its earnings report that strong PlayStation sales were responsible for a rise in the company's overall profits.

Microsoft last announced that it shipped five million Xbox One units to retailers worldwide back in April, though it stated that sales had more than doubled in the US following the unbundling of the included Kinect camera. Last week, Ryse developer Crytek said it was "not 100 percent happy" with sales of Microsoft's system so far when considering where to place a possible sequel to the Xbox One launch exclusive.

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The USB Type-C cable and its various connector designs. USB-IF

The USB Promoter Group announced today that it has finalized the design of the USB Type-C plug, a new type of USB plug that's designed to completely replace every size of all current USB connectors. Like Apple's Lightning cables, the new connector is reversible so that it can be used in any orientation.

According to the USB-IF's press release (PDF), the new connector is "similar in size" to current micro USB 2.0 Type-B connectors (the ones you use for most non-Apple phones and tablets). It is designed to be "robust enough for laptops and tablets" and "slim enough for mobile phones." The openings for the connector measure roughly 8.4mm by 2.6mm.

As we've reported previously, cables and adapters for connecting Type-C devices into older Type-A and Type-B ports will be readily available—the prevalence of these older ports will make any industry-wide shift to USB Type-C an arduous, years-long process.

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If you're a PC gamer of a certain age, the name Sierra On-Line (or Sierra Entertainment) revives memories of some of the most classic point-and-click adventures of the late 20th century. New corporate owner Activision is set to reactivate those memories today, reviving the brand as "Sierra Games" and promising new games in the King's Quest and Geometry Wars franchises.

The new Sierra name will apparently serve as an umbrella for a number of independent studios to reinterpret some classic gaming franchises. The newest King's Quest entry is being developed for 2015 by The Odd Gentlemen, best known for esoteric puzzle platform game The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom. Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions, meanwhile, is being worked on by mobile/portable developer Lucid Games for this holiday season. No platforms have been announced for either title.

“Sierra’s goal is to find and work with gifted up-and-coming indie developers working on their own amazing projects or who are passionate about working on great Sierra IP,” a Sierra representative told GamesBeat. “We’re in talks with a large number of other indie devs, and we can’t wait to share more details with fans in the near future.”

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The Uber smartphone app. Uber

CNN reports that people associated with car-on-demand service Uber have been attempting to sabotage an Uber competitor, Lyft, by ordering and canceling as many as 5,000 rides since October 2013. Lyft drivers have also complained that Uber employees will call them to take "short, low-profit rides largely devoted to luring them to work for Uber."

Uber reportedly used the ride request-and-cancellation tactic earlier this year on another competitor, Gett, to the tune of around 100 rides. Those ride calls were placed by employees as high in the company as Uber's New York general manager, Josh Mohrer. The calls serve a number of purposes: frustrating drivers, wasting their time and gas approaching a fare that won't come through, and occupying them to artificially limit driver availability, if only temporarily.

Lyft claims to have sussed out the fake requests using phone numbers used by "known Uber recruiters." Lyft claims that one Uber recruiter requested and canceled 300 rides from May 26 to June 10, and it said that recruiter's phone number was associated with 21 more accounts with 1,524 canceled rides between them. However, in this instance, there's no evidence that the cancellations were suggested by Uber corporate, according to CNN.

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