Flickr user Tranjilla

In 1972, long before eBay or Amazon, students from Stanford University in California and MIT in Massachusetts conducted the first ever e-commerce transaction. Using the "Arpa-net" account at their artificial intelligence lab, the Stanford students sold their counterparts a small amount of marijuana. Ever since, the 'Net has turned over a steady but small trade in illicit narcotics. But last year approximately 20 per cent of UK drug users scored online. The majority of them went to one place: the darknet markets.

You can't access darknet markets using a normal browser. They sit on an encrypted part of internet called "Tor Hidden Services," where URLs are a string of meaningless numbers and letters that end in .onion, and are accessed using a special browser called "Tor". Tor's clever traffic encryption system makes it very difficult for the police to know where these sites—and the people who use them—are located. It's a natural place for an uncensored drugs marketplace, as it is for whistleblower websites and political dissidents, which also use the same techniques to keep their visitors hidden.

The most infamous of these darknet markets was called the Silk Road. In October 2013, following a lengthy investigation, the Silk Road was closed down (the trial of 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht, who the FBI allege ran the site, is ongoing—Ulbricht denies all charges). But as soon as it was knocked offline, copycat sites were launched by anonymous operators to fill the gap. In November 2013 there were a small handful of these marketplaces: there are now around 30. Pandora, Outlaw Market, 1776 Market Place—and most of them are doing a decent trade. Between January and April 2014, "Silk Road 2.0"—set up within a month of the original being busted—processed well over 100,000 sales. But the most shocking thing about these sites is not how many there are, but how they are changing the drugs industry. They work exceptionally well.

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Entertainment Software Association

The Entertainment Software Association, best known for its video game rating system, issued its annual "sales, demographic, and usage data" report on Thursday, chock full of statistics about console, PC, and mobile gaming. The numbers are all worth poring over, but this year's report highlights a particular demographic explosion: adult women, whose gaming ranks now more than double the long-sought-after demographic of boys under the age of 18.

According to the ESA's measure of 2013 sales, women ages 18 and over now constitute 36 percent of all measured gamers, compared to boys under the age of 18, who represent 17 percent of the total population. This measure shows a further increase from last year's count of 31 percent to 19 percent (and that 2013 measure only counted boys 17 and younger, meaning the total boost may be even bigger this year).

While males still hold the total gamer-population lead at 52 percent, that is a drop from last year's count of 55 percent, and the survey's count of "frequent game purchasers" found that men and women split that category neatly in half. The report also notes a giant boost in women gamers over the age of 50, a group that grew 32 percent in 2013.

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Jacqui Cheng

If you purchased the iPhone 5 early in its life and your battery seems to need charging more often than usual, pay attention: Apple has just announced an iPhone 5 battery replacement program for phones that "may suddenly experience shorter battery life or need to be charged more frequently." The affected phones were all sold in the first few months of the iPhone 5's life, between September of 2012 and January of 2013.

Apple's program page, linked above, will tell you if your phone is eligible based on its serial number, which can be found in iOS' Settings app under the "About" subheading. Affected users will need to take their phone to an Apple service provider, an Apple Retail Store, or make arrangements with Apple's phone support technicians. Before taking your phone in for repair, Apple recommends that you back your data up using iCloud or iTunes, turn off the Find My iPhone service, and reset the phone to its factory default settings.

The program launches today in the US and China, and it will be available in other countries on August 29. It will be available for two years after your purchase date or until March 1 of 2015, "whichever provides longer coverage."

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Arturo de Albornoz

HBO could pocket up to $600 million more a year if the network figures out how to put its content online, according to a report from Barclays Capital released Thursday. The analysis lays out a couple of different ways that HBO could sell its programming online without slighting its cable-provider partners.

The report's author, Kannan Venkateshwar, lays out two options. In the first, HBO would sell subscriptions to "windowed" content that would be available six months to a year after it first aired, but at $11 per month versus the $15 cable price. The other option would be to sell digital subscriptions that give immediate access to its shows, but charge an even higher price for the privilege—about $18.

Venkateshwar estimates that the lower-priced package would cannibalize regular subscribers a bit, but between 4.4 and 6.6 million homes would be interested in the $11 per month option. He pegs the $18 per month customers as a smaller base, between 300,000 and 800,000 homes. If HBO offered both these options together, Venkateshwar estimates that the total take would be around $600 million annually. For comparison, HBO's earnings for 2013 were $1.7 billion.

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Levi's Stadium crowd on August 17, 2014. Jim Bahn

The San Francisco 49ers' heralded Wi-Fi network served its first NFL crowd in a preseason game on Sunday, and the team has now released statistics showing that it was able to serve lots of data to lots of fans, just as intended.

"We offloaded 2.13 terabytes during the event," 49ers VP of Technology Dan Williams told Mobile Sports Report. The newly built Levi's Stadium has 68,500 seats and more than a third of attendees used the Wi-Fi network simultaneously.

"We peaked at 24,775 (roughly 38 percent of attendance) concurrent connections with an average of 16,862 (roughly 25 percent of attendance)," Williams said.

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Proposed launch facility site. Federal Aviation Administration

More details emerged this week about the deal that lured California-based SpaceX into choosing southern Texas as the site of its commercial space launch facility. According to a short write-up by the Brownsville Herald, SpaceX representatives have an agreement in hand that would exempt the facility, located in Cameron County, from paying county taxes for ten years.

Additionally, the Herald says that SpaceX will also accept $13 million in state funds from Texas’ Spaceport Development Trust Fund (along with $2.3 million in additional monies from the Texas Enterprise Fund), which will help offset the $85 million that SpaceX expects to spend developing the site.

The final details of the agreement won’t be released to the public until SpaceX formally signs off, which Cameron County officials expect will be some time next week.

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PNAS

Materials scientists may have many clever tricks up their sleeves, but with a several-billion-year head start, evolution has already beaten them to the creation of some amazing materials. One of the most astonishing natural systems is the skin of cephalopods such as squid, octopus, and cuttlefish. These animals can sense their background and control tiny structures that can radically change their skin color in a matter of seconds, allowing amazing feats of camouflage.

Now, an international consortium of researchers has decided that if you can't beat nature, you can at least copy it. The researchers have developed a flexible structure that can sense ambient conditions and adjust its color to match them. At the moment, it only works in black and white, but it's a start.

The color-shifting structures in the skin of cephalopods, termed chromatophores, rely on three layers to rapidly alter coloration. The top is a pigmented structure with muscles that allow it to expand and contract, altering the amount of light of different wavelengths that get absorbed. Below that is a reflective layer, which can also be actively altered by the nervous system. Below that is a passive white pigment that reflects incidental light. By varying the behavior of the two overlying layers, the animals are able to radically alter their visual appearance.

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final gather / flickr

In June, the US Supreme Court decided the Alice v. CLS Bank case, tweaking patent law in a way that suggests a lot more patents should be thrown out as overly abstract.

Samsung hoped that case would allow it to knock out two patents that Apple had successfully used against it in the long-running patent war between the two smartphone leaders. Last month, Samsung lawyers filed papers arguing that Apple's patents on universal search and "swipe-to-unlock" are exactly the type of basic ideas that the US Supreme Court wants to see rejected.

US District Judge Lucy Koh has now ruled that Samsung won't get a last-minute Alice reprieve. In a short five-page order (PDF), Koh found that Samsung didn't raise any defenses from the area of patent law that Alice relates to, Section 101, and it can't do so now.

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401(k) 2012

Comcast’s proposed $45.2-billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable has been criticized by angry customers, consumer advocacy groups, and even some members of Congress.

But Comcast has plenty of support, too, much of it from politicians and organizations that benefit from its political and charitable donations. With the deadline to submit initial comments on the merger to the Federal Communications Commission set to expire Monday, a number of elected officials and charities have urged the FCC to think favorably of Comcast during its merger review.

Charities supporting the acquisition include the Greater Washington Urban League, the Urban League of Broward County in Florida, the Boys and Girls Club of Rockford, Illinois, and the United Way of Tucson in Arizona. "Comcast has dedicated itself to advancing organizations like ours through financial support and partnerships," the Greater Washington Urban League wrote.

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Almost two weeks ago in Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. The incident kicked off protests in the racially divided town, and Wilson has been in hiding since the shooting.

Four days ago, a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to support Wilson was launched, and as of Friday afternoon it had brought 5,901 donations totaling $234,990. However, money wasn’t the only thing people were giving to the crowdfunding campaign: the campaign page quickly found itself drowning in hateful, racist commentary.

"We are NOT gonna let that racist bastard Sharpton and his kind railroad you into prison," said a $50 donor under the name Mark Milazzo. "Wake up White America!"

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On Thursday, 25-year-old Philip Danks was sentenced to 33 months in jail by a Wolverhampton judge for pirating a copy of Fast and Furious 6. Danks bragged that he was the first person in the world to seed the illicit recording, which he recorded from the back of a local cinema in May 2013. His upload was downloaded around 700,000 times.

The court also ruled that Michael Bell, the boyfriend of Danks' sister, played a part in distributing the film. He was sentenced to 120 hours of community service.

The film's distributor, Universal Pictures, argued to the judge that Danks' upload cost the company about £2.5 million. Danks had also sold DVD copies of the movie for £1.50 each. He said his total profit from the scheme was about £1,000.

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Julien GONG Min

Censorship of the Internet in China is a heavily studied but little-understood process, driven by both private networks and government employees and having effects that are hard to measure. To better understand it, a group of researchers tested censors and filters by attempting to post over a thousand bits of content on various social networking sites. They found that there was an aggressive pre-filtering process that holds a high number of submissions for review before they're posted—and that the results are actually undermining China's censorship mission. The filters tend to hamstring pro-government content as often as they block anti-government writing.

Part of the authors' process involved setting up a social media site of their own within China to see what standards they would be subjected to and what tools they would have to use in order to comply with the country's censorship requirements. They found that sites have an option to install automated review tools with a broad range of filter criteria. Censorship technology is decentralized, they wrote, which is a technique for "[promoting] innovation" in China.

Most research that has been done on Chinese censorship is largely based on what posts exist on the Internet at one point and then do not at a later time, indicating that they were pulled by censors. While that behavior is easily observed, there is another layer to the censorship system whereby users' posts get held for review by censors before they're made public. This new study attempted to figure out what sort of posts would get held for review, what would eventually make it through, and what might escape suspicion at either the posting or review stage, only to be removed later.

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A new iPhone screen size doesn't come along every day—the last one happened in 2012, when the iPhone 4S (left) was replaced by the iPhone 5 (right). Jacqui Cheng

We're just a few weeks out from the expected launch of Apple's next iPhone, which means the ever-noisy rumor mill is spinning even more quickly than usual. Rather than bombarding you continuously every time a blurry picture of a circuit board leaks, we're going to gather up the most relevant stuff for your perusal, applying a healthy amount of skepticism along the way. This week, the scuttlebutt is about the phone's larger screen, which may be its most obvious and most widely anticipated feature.

Finding resolution This is supposedly a close-up shot of the new iPhone's display panel. Feld & Volk

First up, we have some rumors from earlier this week on the screen's resolution—Apple will want to hold on to the "Retina" moniker it's been using for its screens since the iPhone 4, and that means maintaining or beating the 326 PPI density of its current screens. One report, based on a close-up photo of what is supposedly an iPhone display panel, claims a resolution of 1704×960. Another, based on a string found in the latest Xcode 6 beta, claims a resolution of 1472×828.

The new iPhone is rumored to come in two different screen sizes, one 4.7-inch and one 5.5-inch. At 4.7 inches, those rumored resolutions would come out to 416 PPI and 359 PPI, respectively. At 5.5 inches, they would come out to 356 PPI and 307 PPI. Assuming that we do get two different iPhones in two different sizes, it's theoretically possible for both resolutions to be correct: the higher resolution might belong to the 5.5-inch model, while the lower resolution could apply to the 4.7-inch model. At this point there's not a lot of proof one way or the other.

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Photograph by Stan Weichers

Earlier this year, a weak earnings report and wave of store closures had us thinking about the long, slow decline of brick-and-mortar game retail. Today, things look a little brighter, with GameStop reporting healthy sales growth along with an incredible factoid about its centrality to the modern console software market.

"Our hardware and software market share continues to expand and is now at an all time high as we go into the critical holiday season," GameStop President Tony Bartel said during an earnings call. “We continue to sell over one half of all PS4 and Xbox One titles.”

Let that sink in for a second: a single chain of gaming stores sells more individual Xbox One and PS4 games than all the big box stores, retail websites, and direct digital downloads combined. That doesn't sound like a business that's on the verge of collapse. Total, year-over-year sales growth of 25 percent for the quarter, including a 16 percent increase in new software sales, also sounds pretty healthy for GameStop.

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Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department

The tale of an iPhone stolen from a burglarized Southern California home sits at the intersection of Web culture and the swap meet.

A woman in the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Clarita reported to authorities that her home had been ransacked July 30, and among the missing items were cash and an iPhone. But in what appeared to be another episode of Thieves Gone Stupid, the victim's iCloud account was hit with pictures, including a selfie of a cute couple posing on a pillow.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department released the selfie days ago, saying that the unidentified people in the image were persons of interest. The story, with the couple's picture, went viral. On Thursday, the whodunit got even stranger. The man in the photo told NBC Los Angeles that neither he nor his girlfriend committed the burglary.

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When a British Ars reader went to delete his Ashley Madison account, this is what he saw.

Earlier this week, Ars got an e-mail from a reader named Rob Plant. “I think most right-thinking people have been dismayed by the tactics of charging for picture take downs—what is worrying to me is that these practices now seem to have been taken up by more legitimate websites.”

Ars has long covered the scourge of “revenge porn,” in which seedy websites post revealing photos of unwilling people and then charge those victims a fee to take the photos down. But Plant was writing about a site called Ashley Madison, which markets itself as a dating website for married people to find accomplices in extra-marital affairs. (Its slogan is blunt: “Life is short. Have an affair.”) The website has been around since 2001, and although it's taken some guff for allegations that it populates its network with fake profiles of women, it still boasts 29 million users worldwide, most of whom are presumably not fake.

The way it works is this: Ashley Madison allows people to sign up for free with "Guest" accounts, which permit users to send and receive photos and “winks.” Guest accounts can also reply to messages sent by a member. To become a "Full Member," one must buy credits, as opposed to, say, paying a monthly subscription. Full Members can initiate messages and chats with their credits, and women can send messages “collect." After first contact (and guidelines of the Prime Directive permitting) messages between the two users are free.

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Daniel Genkin et al.

Researchers from Tel Aviv University have demonstrated an attack against the GnuPG encryption software that enables them to retrieve decryption keys by touching exposed metal parts of laptop computers.

There are several ways of attacking encryption systems. At one end of the spectrum, there are flaws and weaknesses in the algorithms themselves that make it easier than it should be to figure out the key to decrypt something. At the other end, there are flaws and weaknesses in human flesh and bones that make it easier than it should be to force someone to offer up the key to decrypt something.

In the middle are a range of attacks that don't depend on flaws on the encryption algorithms but rather in the way they've been implemented. Encryption systems, both software and hardware, can leak information about the keys being used in all sorts of indirect ways, such as the performance of the system's cache, or the time taken to perform encryption and decryption operations. Attacks using these indirect information leaks are known collectively as side channel attacks.

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Yoav F On a mobile application, users typically have a single choice to protect their privacy: install the application or not.

The binary choice has left most users ignoring permission warnings and sacrificing personal data. Most applications aggressively eavesdrop on their users, from monitoring their online habits through the device identifier to tracking their movements in the real world via location information.

Now, a research group at North Carolina State University hopes to give the average user a third option. Dubbed NativeWrap, the technology allows Web pages to be wrapped in code and make them appear as a mobile application, but with user-controlled privacy. Because many applications just add a user interface around a Web application, the user should have equivalent functionality for many wrapped apps, said William Enck, assistant professor in the department of computer science at North Carolina State University.

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A parasite queen (left) and the queen of the ants it preys on. Note the two scale bars both represent one millimeter, indicating the parasites' relatively small size. University of Rochester

We tend to think of parasites as creatures that attach themselves to their hosts or worm their way inside, consuming the hosts' resources directly from their bodies. But there are other parasites that steal from their hosts simply by freeloading off them. The classic example is the cuckoo, which lays eggs in the nests of other birds, who then happily feed the cuckoo's offspring as if they were their own.

A successful strategy like that is hard for evolution to pass up. So it really wasn't a surprise to find out that there are also parasitic species of ants, ones that breed within the nests of other ants and raise their offspring using the resources provided by the hosts. Now, researchers have developed evidence that at least one of those species evolved within the nests that they now occupy.

The parasitic ant in question has the evocative name Mycocepurus castrator. It lives off the hard work of a related leaf-cutter ant named Mycocepurus goeldii. Although the host species is distributed widely within South America, M. castrator has a much narrower range—a single stand of eucalyptus trees conveniently located on the campus of Sao Paulo State University in Brazil.

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Netflix via IMDB

An IP address used by staff at the US House of Representatives has been banned from editing Wikipedia for 30 days. It's the second such punishment for would-be anonymous House Internet users in less than a month.

The first ban was imposed for 10 days after a series of "disruptive" edits, including a change to the entry about the website Mediaite to describe it as a "sexist transphobic news and opinion blog."

Now the same IP address has been condemned by editors for making several controversial edits on articles related to transgender issues. Last night, a Wikipedia administrator imposed a month-long ban, with some editors asking for harsher measures.

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