Low-income families get cheap Internet access from Comcast. Flickr user: Karen Bryan

After complaints about a program that offers cheap Internet service to poor people, Comcast today announced it will provide "up to six months" of free Internet to new subscribers and an "amnesty" program for families with unpaid bills.

Comcast's Internet Essentials, mandated by the federal government when Comcast acquired NBCUniversal, gives $10-per-month Internet service to low-income households with schoolchildren. Critics have argued that the program is too hard to sign up for, that eligibility criteria should be less strict, and that further requirements should be implemented if Comcast is allowed to buy Time Warner Cable.

The amnesty program will make it possible for some families with unpaid bills to get the cheap service. Internet Essentials rejects applicants who have an overdue Comcast bill or unreturned equipment. Comcast isn't entirely getting rid of that policy, but the company said that "customers who have an outstanding bill that is more than one year old" are now eligible for the program. "Comcast will offer amnesty for that debt for the purpose of connecting to Internet Essentials, so long as the customer meets all the other eligibility criteria," Comcast said.

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"Time to sleep"—inside Ukraine. A few new "fans" of Sanya Sotkin have noticed his geolocation faux pas.

A Russian soldier’s bored posts to Instagram from the Russian-Ukrainian frontier apparently show that he was taking "selfies" inside Ukraine on at least two occasions. Posts from June and July, with geotags stored in Instagram’s Photo Map feature, were made just prior to the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, apparently by a Russian-built antiaircraft missile.

This isn’t the first social media faux pas by Russian soldiers on the Ukraine border. On previous occasions, Russian soldiers have posted pictures and posts to VKontakte, the Russian social media site, saying they were on their way to or actually in Ukraine. But the posts of Sanya Sotkin, a Russian Army Signal Corps sergeant (based on the insignia on his uniform in many of his self-portraits), included geolocation data that show him within a military vehicle on the Ukrainian side of the border.

For someone who works with communications systems, it’s surprising that Sotkin apparently forgot he had turned Photo Map on. By default, Instagram doesn’t give up location data; as we demonstrated in our network analysis of the application a few weeks ago, Instagram scrubs EXIF data from photos posted from the iPhone and Android Instagram apps. However, if you switch on “Add Photo to Map” while posting an image, it will automatically add all future location data to Instagram’s Photo Map by default.

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A weird place for an SSD. Apacer

PC makers do all kinds of things to save space inside their cases, but this is a new one to us: Apacer is apparently sampling sticks of DDR3 desktop RAM that include slots for M.2 SSD add-in boards and CFast CompactFlash cards, allowing you to mount storage devices directly to your RAM rather than using slots on the motherboard. The slots will still use the SATA III interface to transfer data—they're just mounted to the RAM and they draw power through the RAM slot.

These sticks will support all three lengths of M.2 SSD boards (2242, 2260, and 2280). That's especially useful because, as AnandTech points out, only one mini-ITX desktop motherboard can directly support full-length M.2 boards. Full-length M.2 boards are necessary to accommodate higher storage capacities—currently available drives top out at 512GB, but 1TB drives are on the horizon.

Connectors visible on top of the DIMMs would likely need to be connected to the SATA connectors on your motherboard; unfortunately it doesn't look like these can take advantage of the faster PCI-Express flavor of M.2.

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Shovel Knight is one of the many indie games that came to Nintendo platforms under Adelman's tenure.

Since 2005, Dan Adelman has been the man inside Nintendo most responsible for championing independent games on the company's platforms. And while he says he's leaving Nintendo for a freelance life in independent business development—and doing so on good terms—Adelman appears to have been straining against some of Nintendo's business and marketing decisions for a while.

In a departure post on his website, Adelman says his tenure at Nintendo gave him "one of the best jobs in the best industry," fighting for indie game representation on Nintendo consoles since the days when indie games were barely a thing. He says he's leaving because Nintendo has established new groups devoted to independent game developers.

"People at Nintendo don’t need to be reminded that indie games are important," he writes. "They play them every day. In fact, one of the reasons I decided to leave was that there were fewer and fewer new battles to wage. Everyone was getting on the same page and starting to work together like a well-oiled machine. What fun is getting into an argument if the other person already agrees with you?"

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Sina Weibo

Yep. That's a Samsung phone.

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Photos posted on the Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo show a new Samsung device said to be the "Galaxy Alpha." The leaker says (through translation) that the device is made of metal with a 4.7-inch screen and a "flagship S5 configuration," which presumably means it has the same specs as the Galaxy S5.

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});The leaker also says that the back is still removable, and pictures show the typical fingernail slot to peel away the back panel. Presumably the removable back means only the sides are metal, with the back being plastic.

A high-powered 4.7-inch device made out of metal sounds a lot like Samsung's preemptive strike against the iPhone 6, which is rumored to have the same size screen. 4.7 inches would put the Galaxy Alpha at the smaller end of the Samsung spectrum, though the top and bottom bezels means the device itself won't be quite that compact.

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The Department of Transportation is drafting a proposal that could prevent airlines from allowing passengers to make in-flight cell phone calls, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

In-flight calls are not currently allowed, but that could change soon because of a proposal by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler. The FCC has said its action would be "purely a technical decision" to lift outdated rules that prevent in-flight calling due to concerns about interference with ground-based cellular networks. In other words, the FCC isn't taking a position on whether in-flight calls are desirable. And airlines would still need permission from the Federal Aviation Administration and the DOT to allow them.

DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx said last December that he would consider a ban on calls, and the agency is now close to proposing one. A DOT spokesperson confirmed to the Journal that the agency "is developing 'a notice of proposed rulemaking' for publication in December that would lay out its objections to passengers making and receiving calls. It would open the issue for further comments by industry and travelers until February before making a final ruling. Regulators are focused primarily on the disruptive effects of voice calls rather than... other data use, having last year loosened restrictions that now allow airline passengers to use electronic devices for these purposes from gate to gate."

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A critical vulnerability in all recent versions of Samba could put users on the receiving end of attacks that allow hackers on the same local network to run programs with nearly unfettered administrative privileges.

Samba is an open source implementation of the file-sharing components of Microsoft Windows. Most Linux releases and a wide variety of other operating systems use Samba to handle file-sharing with Windows systems.

The newly discovered bug can be exploited by sending specially manipulated traffic to a vulnerable system. The remote code execution vulnerability resides in Samba's nmbd NetBIOS name service daemon and is the result of the daemon incorrectly handling certain memory operations. The bug was found and fixed by Volker Lendecke, a Samba Team member working for SerNet.

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Drone Aviation Holding Company

Patrolling the skies these days is hard. There are so many options to choose from: traditional helicopters, new wide-angle surveillance planes, and even the more cutting-edge drones.

Each of these options has its drawbacks. Beyond the initial purchase price, well-tested helicopters typically cost at least hundreds of dollars per hour to send up. One-off surveillance planes are also not cheap, coming in at around $1,000 per hour. Drones, while very cheap, are problematic. Law enforcement needs a blanket Certificates of Authorization (COA) from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and possibly a specific Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) each time a drone is used above 400 feet.

Enter a small Florida company now attempting to make snooping from the air both cheap and administratively easy. The Drone Aviation Holding Corporation (DAHC) recently announced that it had sold its second-ever “Blimp in a Box” for local law enforcement purposes.

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Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

The tablet market is tapped out. We saw signs of this when Apple reported that its iPad sales were down year-on-year and we're seeing a similar message from retailers. Re/code's Walt Mossberg recently talked to Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly, who said that tablet sales had "crashed."

Global tablet sales are still rising—though less quickly than they once were—but in developed markets the tablet boom may be over. As Apple CFO Luca Maestri said in the company's earnings call, iPad sales were still growing in developing markets. The slowdown is all in the developed world. Samsung also reports that profits are down after tablet demand fell.

Moreover, Joly reported that PC sales—which the tablet was supposed to kill—have picked up. He attributed that resurgence partially to the end of support of Windows XP.

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Internet spaceships are and have always been serious business. Here, an Aurora puts the screws to a Hornet heavy fighter. Cloud Imperium Games

AUSTIN, TEXAS—We’ve already spent quite a bit of time talking about Elite: Dangerous, one of two crowdfunded, high-profile space combat simulators currently under development. However, as much as I would have liked to do so, I couldn’t take a quick day trip over to actually visit the Elite team in the UK while they were working. Visiting the Star Citizen team, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. Cloud Imperium Games maintains an office just outside of Austin, Texas, just a few hours away from home.

So during the last week of June, I loaded up my car for the quick road trip across the blazing Texas summer prairie to poke my nose into things, learning how the game is coming along and meeting with some of the folks who are busy spending the more than $48 million dollars raised so far in Star Citizen’s mammoth crowdfunding effort. Ars last caught up with Cloud Imperium at PAX East in April 2014 at the unveiling of the game’s Arena Commander dogfighting module. Though Arena Commander took a bit longer than anticipated to actually release, I’d finally gotten some stick time and was eager to talk to the developers about the progress being made on the title.

This enormous logo adorns the wall on one of the office's hallways, bearing the surname of game designer legend Chris Roberts. (There's no logo for "Hutchinson Transgalactic Amalgamated Megacorp" yet, but I've got Aurich working with some sketches.) Lee Hutchinson

There was another reason for wanting to visit Cloud Imperium, though: it's sort of a pilgrimage for any '80s-era gamer, because the man behind Star Citizen is none other than the legendary Chris Roberts. Sadly, while we tried to arrange the visit so that Roberts’ and my paths would cross, we couldn’t quite line up schedules. Nonetheless, for someone like me who spent his childhood playing Chris Roberts' games, just visiting his design studio was like taking a field trip to Mecca.

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BagoGames

Few people know what to make of the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood mobile game. By reputation it’s boring, vapid, materialistic, and shallow—according to many serious gamers—and is deplorable not least because players can spend money to get ahead. The wails only grew louder when reports indicated that the game earned $1.6 million in its first five days and is on track to make $200 million in annual revenue, according to one analyst.

While many gamers and gaming journalists struggled to figure out why anyone would spend money on a game made by and featuring a reality TV star, we aren’t totally in the dark. For one, casting shade on the subject matter is a value judgment of a certain set of interests and lifestyle. And on a meta level, how people use their leisure time. Let he who has lived every moment deliberately immersed in deep consideration of the universe cast the first Angry Bird. Materialism in games probably does not cause materialism in the streets.

For another, Kim K is actually pretty self-aware of its own materialism and glorification of social climbing and has a sense of irony about the world it gives players to try and thrive in. To wit, one of the things you can spend in-game money on is new body parts.

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Glass Lantern, Istanbul by Eckersley O’Callaghan Institute of Structural Engineers

The shortlist for The Structural Awards 2014 has been released by the Institution of Structural Engineers.

"We hold the Structural Awards each year to recognise outstanding work by structural engineers, and to raise awareness about the vital global role they play creating innovative design solutions," said Martin Powell, chief executive of the Institution of Structural Engineers.

Among the shortlisted structures are several bridges, including one modeled on a Maori fish hook, Richard Wilson's abstract, floating Slipstream sculpture in Heathrow Airport Terminal 2 and the new Apple Store in Istanbul.

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A proposal from FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler would block an attempt by Sprint and T-Mobile US to buy spectrum together in the incentive auction that will transfer airwaves from broadcast TV stations to cellular carriers next year.

Announced on Friday, Wheeler's proposal seeks to help the smallest wireless companies develop business partnerships with larger ones. But it would not allow partnerships between the biggest carriers, since more than 95 percent of US customers are served by either AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, or Verizon Wireless.

"Our goal is to promote the participation of as many parties as possible in the auction," FCC Wireless Telecommunications Bureau Chief Roger Sherman wrote Friday. "If two of the largest companies are able to bid as one combined entity in the auction, their combined resources may have the effect of suppressing meaningful competition. Therefore, the item tentatively concludes that joint bidding arrangements between nationwide providers should not be allowed."

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WHO WANTS KISSES 20th Century Fox

Welcome to The Multiverse, a column where'll you'll find Ars' explorations and meditations on the world of science fiction. The Multiverse covers things we love, the things we hate, and the things we do not yet understand from source materials new and old. Send questions, tips, or just say hi to The Multiverse's writers at [email protected].

Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley stands in front of the squad of ten cocky, poised space marines. They laugh and joke, oozing bravado and testosterone—even the women. As the shavetail lieutenant lays out the situation, Bill Paxton’s mouthy PFC Hudson interrupts: "Is this going to be a stand-up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?"

"All we know is that there’s still no contact with the colony," replies the lieutenant, Gorman, "and that a xenomorph may be involved."

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E-mail addresses and cryptographically protected passwords for thousands of Mozilla developers were exposed through a database glitch that may have been exploited by hackers, Mozilla officials warned Friday.

About 76,000 e-mail addresses and 4,000 password hashes were left on a publicly accessible server for about 30 days beginning June 23, according to a blog post. There is no indication the data was accessed, but Mozilla officials investigating the disclosure can't rule out the possibility. Hackers who might have managed to crack the hashes wouldn't be able to use the passwords to access Mozilla Developer Network accounts, but they may be able to access other user accounts secured with the same cracked passcode. The glitch was touched off when a data "sanitization" process failed, causing the addresses and hashes to be dumped to a publicly accessible server.

"We are known for our commitment to privacy and security, and we are deeply sorry for any inconvenience or concern this incident may cause you," Stormy Peters, director of developer relations, and Joe Stevensen, operations security manager, wrote. They continued:

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Stack Exchange

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

Panzercrisis asks:

I've always liked the idea of having multiple inheritance supported in a language. Most often though it's intentionally forgone, and the supposed "replacement" is interfaces. Interfaces simply do not cover all the same ground multiple inheritance does, and this restriction can occasionally lead to more boilerplate code.

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The mobile browsing experience on Windows Phone has steadily improved, taking a big leap forward in Windows Phone 8.1 with its Internet Explorer 11 browser. However, it's still not as good as that of the iPhone. A big part of that isn't because of Internet Explorer—it's because of mobile sites either not recognizing that Internet Explorer on Windows Phone is a mobile browser or using coding that's specific to Mobile Safari.

The forthcoming Windows Phone 8.1 Update, as well as adding Cortana support for China and the UK, support for new form factors and accessories, and other minor improvements, aims to make Internet Explorer a much better mobile browser.

To do this, the Internet Explorer team has looked at the 500 most popular mobile sites to check their behavior on Windows Phone, and, if they behave poorly, figure out what the problem is. The company says that the work it has done for the Update improves the browser's behavior in more than 40 percent of these sites.

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Los Angeles authorities are weighing whether they may legally block hobbyists from flying camera-equipped drones over police stations.

The inquiry was prompted Friday after the LAPD confronted a Southern California man outside its Hollywood station. The cops told him he was trespassing for using a drone to capture footage of the station's parking lot, and ordered him to stop. The incident is posted to YouTube.

“What concerns us is that they are filming over private property and it's gated – you’re looking at the layout of the police station, how we operate, personnel license plates,” police Lt. Michael Ling said. “It’s kind of like if it was your house, if they’re flying over your backyard you’d start asking questions about it.”

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Ciaran McGuiggan

Earlier this week, mobile payments company Square announced that it had developed a credit card reader that will verify purchases from an embedded chip on the card. Currently, US consumers primarily rely on swipe-and-sign credit cards, which give card details to a merchant through the magnetic stripe on the back. But because the swipe-and-sign system became overburdened with instances of fraud, MasterCard, Visa, and other financial groups decided in 2012 that they would transition their systems to a chip-based setup called EMV (eponymous for EuroPay, MasterCard, and Visa, the three primary developers of the standard) by October 2015.

Square is hoping to capitalize on this transition by being one of the first companies out of the gate in the US to offer small and medium-sized business owners a smaller, less-expensive alternative to buying a whole new set of credit card terminals.

The EMV standard works using a chip that's embedded in a credit card, which effectively acts as a mini-computer. Instead of swiping quickly and having your card give its details to a merchant's point of sale (POS) system, an EMV card creates a unique code for each transaction and (ideally) requires the consumer to enter a PIN associated with the card instead of relying on a signature. Because of this, EMV is often called chip-and-PIN. Making a purchase with an EMV card also requires the card to be present in the card reader throughout the transaction.

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Aurich Lawson

An Austrian privacy activist has launched a wide-reaching class action suit against Facebook Ireland for breaching European data protection law.

Anyone outside of the US and Canada can join activist and law student Max Schrems' suit via the website fbclaim.com, since they will have signed up to Facebook's terms and conditions via the Dublin-based European subsidiary. That amounts to around 82 percent of all Facebook users. After being live for just one hour, the site has collected 100 participants.

The suit is seeking damages of €500 ($537) per user, and injunctions to be levied on the company for the following breaches:

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