Shawn Campbell/CC BY 2.0

Twitter has pledged to update its policies regarding abuse and user safety, following a series of distressing incidents that caused Zelda Williams, daughter of the late comedian and actor Robin Williams, to leave the social network.

Two accounts have been removed by Twitter after Zelda Williams received abusive messages and doctored pictures and subsequently announced she would be leaving the social network. In a statement, Twitter's Vice President of Trust and Safety Del Harvey said the company would be addressing a variety of different issues that the event had raised and would update its policies accordingly.

"We will not tolerate abuse of this nature on Twitter. We have suspended a number of accounts related to this issue for violating our rules, and we are in the process of evaluating how we can further improve our policies to better handle tragic situations like this one. This includes expanding our policies regarding self-harm and private information, and improving support for family members of deceased users."

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Rendered image showing the electric motor between the rear wheels, and the battery compartment stretching forward. Tesla Motors

In a Friday blog post, Elon Musk wrote that Tesla will remove mileage limits on its warranty policy for all Tesla Model S drive units. The warranty, which will still span eight years, won't have a cap on the number of owners for each vehicle.

People who purchased Teslas before today were told that the warranty period for the drive unit expired after eight years or once the car logged over 125,000 miles.

The revised warranty applies to new vehicles and Model S cars that are already on the road.

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One of the slides Vringo lawyers showed the jury to win their case. Vringo

Vringo's win over Google was one of the biggest and most public jury wins for a "patent troll" in recent years. It won $30 million from a jury verdict in 2012, far less than the half-billion-dollar verdict it was seeking.

But last year, the judge overseeing the case revived Vringo's hopes, ordering Google to pay a running royalty amounting to 1.36 percent of US AdWords sales. Those additional payments could have been more than $200 million annually, pushing Vringo investors toward the billion-dollar payday they were pining for.

Today, the dream of getting rich by trading Vringo's lawsuit-driven stock is dead. A three-judge panel on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has eviscerated (PDF) Vringo's patents, ruling 2-1 that they are obvious.

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Images Money

Two major supermarket chains announced that their customers' credit card information may have been stolen during a network intrusion.

SuperValu, the Minnesota parent company of Cub Foods, Farm Fresh, Hornbacher’s, Shop ’n Save, and Shoppers Food and Pharmacy, announced that 180 stores in North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Illinois, Missouri, North Dakota, and Minnesota were affected.

"The Company has not determined that any such cardholder data was in fact stolen by the intruder, and it has no evidence of any misuse of any such data, but is making this announcement out of an abundance of caution," SuperValu said in a statement Friday.

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The English Premier League is planning to "clamp down on fans posting unofficial videos of goals online" and is developing technologies and working with Twitter to aid its quest, the BBC reported today.

"You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law," the league's director of communications, Dan Johnson, told the news organization. "It's a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it. We're developing technologies like gif crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity... I know it sounds as if we're killjoys, but we have to protect our intellectual property."

Football—also known as "soccer," a word coined by English people to describe their favorite sport—involves the kicking of a ball into a goal, feet-first slides into opponents' legs, and a variety of acrobatic dives. While players other than the goalie are not allowed to use their hands to touch the ball, they may use their heads, and—though generally frowned upon—occasionally attempt to influence the course of play by biting each other.

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Not all links on Facebook will get slapped with a "satire" tag, but if users click through an Onion article and return to their feeds, they'll probably find some stuff that's been tagged.

Facebook is already an unbearable enough place as of late, at least in my case. Awful national and international news stories continue to appear in my personal feed alongside friends' amateur political commentary and personal quibbles, and that mix makes the occasional ray of satirical, hilarious sunshine from off-kilter sites like The Onion welcome. Sadly, Facebook has begun trying to ruin even these fun articles by appending their titles with a "satire" tag.

The major catch to this auto-tagging is that it only appears in a "related articles" box. Here's how it works: If a friend posts an Onion link to his or her Facebook feed, click on it for a laugh. Once you're done at The Onion and come back to your desktop or laptop browser, Facebook will have generated three related articles in a box directly below whatever you'd clicked on. In the case of an Onion link, that box will usually contain at least one article from the same site, only that article's headline will begin with the word "satire" in brackets. As of press time, we were able to duplicate this result on three different computers from different accounts, one of which is shown above.

We can only assume this was implemented as a reaction to users believing that Onion links are nonfiction reports (you can lose hours flipping through Literally Unbelievable, a site that catalogs such boneheaded moments), but we're not sure what compelled Facebook to go so far as to assert editorial control. Maybe the company still feels bad about how users reacted to its intentional News Feed manipulation from 2012.

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Microsoft could be shipping a preview release of the next major version of Windows—codenamed "Threshold" and expected to be named "Windows 9"—in either late September or early October, according to sources speaking to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley. The preview will be widely available to anyone who wants to install it.

The final version of the operating system is currently believed to be scheduled for spring 2015.

Microsoft has all but confirmed some of the features that Threshold will ship with, including a new hybrid Start menu that includes bits of the old Windows 7 Start menu alongside new live tiles and the ability to run modern Metro applications in windows.

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FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn (right) with former FCC Chairman and current NCTA CEO Michael Powell. National Cable & Telecommunications Association

Comcast and Time Warner Cable were planning to spend $132,000 to sponsor a dinner honoring FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn but are now redirecting the donations after accusations that the companies are trying to curry favor with Clyburn during the FCC's review of Comcast's proposed $45.2 billion acquisition of TWC.

Comcast was going to be a "presenting sponsor" with a $110,000 donation for next month's annual dinner of the Walter Kaitz Foundation, which seeks to "advance the contributions of women and multi-ethnic professionals in cable." TWC paid $22,000 for the event.

The dinner's previous honorees include Comcast itself, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, and Roberts' father, Comcast founder Ralph Roberts. Time Warner Cable and three of its employees have also been honored at previous fêtes. The annual dinners have raised $35 million, including $1.75 million last year. Kaitz uses that money to make grants to other organizations that promote diversity.

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Following the announcement of 10 million PS4 sales worldwide earlier this week, Sony has confirmed that the PlayStation 4 continues to outsell its console competition in the US. July was the seventh straight month that Sony's system has been the best-selling console in the country, according to Sony and NPD data.

Neither Sony nor Microsoft offered concrete sales numbers for the month of July, following NPD's monthly report on US retail video game sales, but Microsoft did say the console "continues to sell at a strong and steady pace following the release of the $399 console in June." Microsoft previously announced that US sales for the Xbox One had doubled in June following the unbundling of the Kinect sensor, and it said this month that "we continued to see this momentum in July.”

Combined, US sales for the Xbox One and PS4 are up 80 percent compared to the first nine months of sales of last generation's Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, NPD said. Those consoles sold a combined 3.82 million units in their first nine months in 2005 and 2006, putting current combined US sales of Sony and Microsoft's new consoles at around 6.87 million.

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USGS

The world's glaciers are melting, driven to retreat by a warming trend that has persisted for well over a century. But glaciers are slow-moving bodies in more ways than one, as their huge mass of ice melts slowly, even when the temperatures rise rapidly. Since the onset of the current retreat traces back to the middle of the 19th century and the end of the Little Ice Age, it can be difficult to tell how much of recent ice dynamics is driven by recent warming.

Now, a new study has taken a close look how the world's glaciers have responded to natural and human-driven climate change. The results show that the majority of melting in the last century was still a hangover from the Little Ice Age, but a clear signal of human influence has emerged over the last few decades.

The authors of the new paper, who hail from Austria and Canada, recognize the challenge of discerning climate influences by following the behavior of glaciers. But they also suggest that there's a great opportunity in doing so. "Because glacier extent responds to changes in the glacier mass balance with a lag of decades to centuries," they write, "glaciers provide an opportunity to directly perceive long-term climate change, unobscured by interannual variability." In other words, the erratic behavior of short-term climate trends gets smoothed out by the slow adjustment of the glaciers.

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Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan says that PrivateCore is a "perfect fit" for the social media company. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

On August 7, as Def Con was kicking off far below in the bowels of the Rio Hotel’s convention center in Las Vegas, I was ushered into a suite on the 19th floor to see a man who has one of the most high-profile security gigs in the industry: Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s chief security officer. An acquisition of a security startup company announced that same day and a huge internal investment in security technology development have created a software security giant that has but one paying customer—Facebook itself. Sullivan explained the PrivateCore deal as an investment in Facebook’s future—especially when viewed within the context of the company’s Internet.org effort to bring affordable Internet access (and Facebook) to the still-unwired parts of the planet. “PrivateCore is a perfect fit for the future of Facebook,” Sullivan told Ars.

A VM in a vCage

The technology PrivateCore is developing, vCage, is a virtual “cage” in the telecom industry’s usage of the word. It is software that is intended to continuously assure that the servers it protects have not had their software tampered with or been exploited by malware. It also prevents physical access to the data running on the server, just as a locked cage in a colocation facility would.

The software integrates with OpenStack private cloud infrastructure to continuously monitor virtual machines, encrypt what’s stored in memory, and provide additional layers of security to reduce the probability of an outside attacker gaining access to virtual servers through malware or exploits of their Web servers and operating systems. If the “attestation” system detects a change that would indicate that a server has been exploited, it shuts it down and re-provisions another server elsewhere. Sullivan explained that the technology is seen as key to Facebook’s strategy for Internet.org because it will allow the company to put servers in places outside the highly secure (and expensive) data centers it operates in developed countries.

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A strange new type of USB cable that aims to solve an age-old problem. Dianxinshouji.com.cn

If reader reaction is any indication, most of you are looking forward to the new reversible USB Type-C connector spec that was finalized earlier this week. Some pictures snapped today by dianxinshouji.com.cn (and spotted by MacRumors) claim that Apple is already working on its own solution for its next-gen Lightning cables, a type of reversible connector that will fit into a USB Type-A port in either orientation. These cables would have this reversible USB Type-A plug on one end and the current Lightning connector on the other.

Such a cable would have to use very thin parts to fit into existing USB ports, and making these parts thinner is only going to increase the chances that they'll bend or break. Still, assuming the rumor is true and that the cables work well, it could be a good stopgap measure while we wait for USB Type-C connectors. While those connectors are small, reversible, and support the fast new USB 3.1 specification, it will also take many years for them to replace the current USB Type-A and Type-B connectors on various devices.

Since all we have are blurry photos grabbed from a Chinese blog, take them with a few grains of salt. They could be faked altogether, or they could be cables from an ambitious third-party and not from Apple itself. Still, the frequency and accuracy of these part leaks usually increases as we draw nearer to a new iPhone's release date, and we have less than a month to go until the next iPhone is expected to be unveiled. We've already gathered the most credible rumors here, and we'll be revisiting them again in the days before the event.

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There are millions of these lurking in Earth’s back yard. NASA

Millions of asteroids of all shapes and sizes are littered throughout the inner Solar System. In the past three decades, scientists have spotted as many as 500,000, but plenty more remain unseen. And many of them have a “rubble pile” internal structure, which is rather unusual compared to other bodies in the Solar System.

Rubble-pile asteroids are exactly what they sound like: a grouping of different sized rocks brought together under the influence of gravity. Its constituent pieces could be anything from large boulders tens of meters in size to dust particles smaller than a thousandth of a meter in diameter.

Until now, it was assumed that the main forces that hold all these pieces together were gravity and friction. But a rubble-pile asteroid named (29075) 1950 DA, with a diameter of 1.3km, is an exceptional case, one where some other force must be involved.

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Aurich Lawson

The shift from copper landlines to fiber-based voice networks is continuing apace, and no one wants it to happen faster than Verizon.

Internet users nationwide are clamoring for fiber, as well, hoping it can free them from slower DSL service or the dreaded cable companies. But not everyone wants fiber, because, when it comes to voice calls, the newer technology doesn’t have all the benefits of the old copper phone network. In particular, fiber doesn’t conduct electricity, where copper does. That means when your power goes out, copper landlines might keep working for days or weeks by drawing electricity over the lines, while a phone that relies on fiber will only last as long as its battery. That's up to eight hours for Verizon’s most widely available backup system.

Thus, while many customers practically beg for fiber, others—particularly those who have suffered through long power outages—want Verizon to keep maintaining the old copper lines. But Verizon continues pressuring customers to switch, and it’s getting harder to say no.

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Ana Luiza Cunha

A group of five Muslims (four of whom are United States citizens) have sued top American government officials, alleging that their constitutional rights have been violated for having been put on a federal watch list.

The plaintiffs' lawsuit, which was filed on Thursday in federal court in Detroit, accuses numerous leaders—including the attorney general, the directors of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, and others—of violating their constitutional rights to due process and the right to be free from religious discrimination.

In the complaint, each person outlines a similar story: being detained at the border, often having digital devices seized, and being subject to prolonged physical searches. One was told that he was on the no-fly list and was later offered a chance to work on behalf of federal law enforcement in exchange for removal. He seems to have declined.

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Microsoft has had "passionate" discussions about renaming Internet Explorer to distance the browser from its tarnished image, according to answers from members of the developer team given in a reddit Ask Me Anything session today.

In spite of significant investment in the browser—with the result that Internet Explorer 11 is really quite good—many still regard the browser with contempt, soured on it by the lengthy period of neglect that came after the release of the once-dominant version 6. Microsoft has been working to court developers and get them to give the browser a second look, but the company still faces an uphill challenge.

Renaming the browser could be seen as a way of breaking from the past and distancing the new, actively maintained, standards-driven browser from this legacy. The team was asked if it had considered such a renaming, and the answer was yes. The browser developers didn't completely rule out the possibility for the future, either, noting that the discussion was "very recent" and asking rhetorically "Who knows what the future holds :)"

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In a high-profile civil case involving a disgraced ex-Texas sheriff, a judge has prohibited the plaintiff's attorneys from tweeting the deposition of the defendant as it happens.

Earlier this summer, former Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño was sentenced to five years in prison for a money laundering scheme that involved taking campaign contributions from drug trafficker Tomas "El Gallo" Gonzalez. Treviño, however, is still facing several civil lawsuits, including one from a former contender for the sheriff's position, Republican candidate Robert Caples.

In a deposition on August 1, Caples' attorney, Javier Peña, questioned Treviño, and members of Peña's law firm tweeted Treviño's responses. Although the session was supposed to last six hours, Treviño's defense attorney, Preston Henrichson, shut down the session after a little more than four hours, objecting to the questioning and the tweeting. On Wednesday, Judge Rudy Delgado of the Texas State District Court said that the deposition would be allowed to continue on Friday for the one hour and 48 minutes left to Peña's firm, but that tweeting details would be out of the question.

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Former Microsoft programmer Allen Murray took credit this week for pushing banner ads on the Xbox 360's dashboard, including these that he says he helped design.

The Xbox 360 may have blazed a trail in connecting console players via online gaming, but with that service came an unpopular side effect: banner ads, designed to be downloaded and updated on a regular basis by all of those online players. As the 360 tiptoes toward its tenth anniversary, Allen Murray, a former Xbox programmer, used his own 10-year mark in the games industry to get something off his chest. Banner ads are his fault, he said, and they came after he argued with coworkers who actually didn't want them on Xbox 360.

In a Gamasutra post on Monday, Murray described his start with Microsoft in 2004 as a Web services layer programmer, where he became intimately acquainted with the Xbox Live Arcade initiative—and realized how hard its games were to find for players unaware of a console-specific game-download shop. "It was several clicks down in the UI, hidden from the player," Murray complained, so he asked for a meeting with an unnamed boss to discuss adding promotional content to the in-development dashboard.

According to Murray, he was met with immediate resistance—"Banner ads? Like on websites?"—and was told that "gamers would hate ads." Murray used the post to recall why his sales pitch failed at first: "My choice of language, using terms like ‘advertising’ and 'banner ads,’ conveyed a tone of corporate soullessness. This was games! We were supposed to be cool and 'fuck the man' and all that shit."

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Sony

This week's gaming news has been dominated by Microsoft's controversial decision to buy timed Xbox exclusivity for the next Tomb Raider game. While this is not an unusual practice historically, a Sony executive is trying to make some hay by saying the PlayStation 4 doesn't need to buy exclusive games. Except when it does...

In an interview with CVG, PlayStation Europe's Jim Ryan said that Sony's stable of first- and second-party exclusives, as well as exclusive and early content in games like Destiny, is enough to make the PlayStation 4 compelling.

"So do we feel the need to go out and buy outright exclusivity? Probably not," Ryan said. "You saw last night [at Sony's press conference] that before the media briefing we showed updated videos of games that we had revealed at E3. That's because we wanted to keep the show itself full of new, fresh things. We think that gave us a good, strong, convincing portfolio of exclusive stuff, and we're happy with that."

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Greetings, Arsians! Our partners at LogicBuy are back with a ton of deals for this week. Have you backed up your files lately? The featured deal today is a 1TB portable hard drive from Toshiba for just $59.99. Nobody likes backing up files, but with USB 3.0, your backups should go just a little bit faster. The drive and a ton of other deals are below. Enjoy!

Featured deal

• Toshiba Canvio Basics 1TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive for $59.99 with free shipping (list price $119.99)

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