401(k) 2012

Nicholas Rubin, a 16-year-old programmer from Seattle, has created a browser add-on that makes it incredibly easy to see the influence of money in US politics. Rubin calls the add-on Greenhouse, and it does something so brilliantly simple that once you use it you'll wonder why news sites didn't think of this themselves.

Greenhouse pulls in campaign contribution data for every Senator and Representative, including the total amount of money received and a breakdown by industry and size of donation. It then combines this with a parser that finds the names of Senators and Representatives in the current page and highlights them. Hover your mouse over the highlighted names and it displays their top campaign contributors.

In this sense, Greenhouse adds another layer to the news, showing you the story behind the story. In politics, as in many other things, if you want to know the why behind the what, you need to follow the money. And somewhat depressingly, in politics it seems that it's money all the way down.

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

John Schindler, the former National Security Agency analyst and an outspoken critic of Edward Snowden, resigned Monday from his position as a professor at the US Naval War College months after a picture of his alleged penis surfaced online. The professor of national security affairs announced via Twitter his resignation from the Rhode Island institution, effective August 29.

"Sorry to say I'm severing my affiliation with Naval War College. I had a great time there but it's time to move on. Thanks for your support," Schindler tweeted.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Esther Vargas

A bill to require mandatory kill switches on smartphones so that they can be disabled in the event of theft passed the California state senate today and could become law if Governor Jerry Brown signs it in the coming weeks. The bill would mandate (PDF) that all smartphones manufactured after July 1, 2015 to be sold in California come equipped with the means to “render the essential features of the smartphone inoperable when not in the possession of the authorized user.”

The bill was introduced by California Senator Mark Leno (D), and it passed on a vote of 53-20 (PDF). With the approval of Governor Brown, all smartphones sold in California would prompt the user to enable the wiping feature upon initial setup, although opting out would be possible as well. If the smartphone were stolen, the kill switch would have to prevent the phone from being re-activated on a network without the phone's owner's approval. The California bill also stipulates that smartphone designers would have to make it possible for the phone to be re-activated if it found its way back into the rightful owner's hands.

Finally, the bill asks that a civil penalty of between $500 and $2,500 be levied per smartphone if a person is found to be selling stolen phones.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

When exactly will all these fan favorites be bursting through a blue background and onto your console?

As we enter into the middle of August, the release calendar for this holiday season's AAA blockbuster games is pretty much set, running from The Sims 4 on September 2 through to Far Cry 4 on November 18 (over a week before the all-important Black Friday hits on November 28). Practically every big-name game coming out this holiday season now has a specific, publicized North American release date within that timeframe, even if some of those dates may end up slipping into the future.

And then there's the exhaustingly named Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, which seems to be 2014's only major holiday title yet to lock in a specific release date (aside from Nintendo's official, amorphous "fourth quarter" release window). That's despite the fact that the Nintendo 3DS version of the same game has been set for an October 3 release. (We should note that a leak from HMV suggests the Wii U version is coming November 28, but that is not yet confirmed.)

Even though Nintendo has stressed how important Super Smash Bros. is to the Wii U's holiday comeback plans, the lack of a specific release date and Nintendo's long history of game delays has some worried that the game may end up being pushed into 2015 after all. Every day that goes by without a release date announcement makes it more likely that Nintendo has decided to give the developers additional time to finish polishing the game. And that would mean it's less likely the company will have time to roll out the production, supply chain, marketing, and retail channel preparations it needs to get Super Smash Bros. for Wii U into consumers' hands by the end of the year.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Don McCullough

A former Amtrak employee has been giving passenger information to the Drug Enforcement Administration in exchange for money for nearly two decades, according to reports from the Whittier Daily News. A total of over $854,460 changed hands over the last 20 years, despite the fact that information relevant to the DEA's work could have been obtained from Amtrak for free.

The employee, described as a "secretary to a train and engine crew" in a summary obtained by the AP, was selling the customer data without Amtrak's approval. Amtrak and other transportation companies collect information from their customers including credit card numbers, travel itineraries, emergency contact info, passport numbers, and dates of birth. When booking tickets online in recent years, Amtrak has also collected phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

The Whittier Daily News points out that Amtrak's corporate privacy policy allows the company to share this information with "certain trustworthy business partners," however, the secretary's actions didn't happen under this sanction.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

USDA

Agriculture has an enormous footprint—by some estimates, it accounts for more than 90 percent of humanity's water use. One of the other areas where its footprint is felt is in carbon emissions. Converting land to agriculture disrupts the existing soil ecosystem, releasing carbon stored there into the atmosphere; a large fraction of humanity's collective carbon emissions fall under the category of "land use change."

In the developed world, the intensification of agriculture has actually allowed some formerly farmed areas to revert to something akin to their original state. But it's unclear whether there are limits to that intensification that will eventually force us to bring more agricultural land into use. Even if we don't run into limits, population growth means that it will have to scale quickly, as global food demand is expected to increase by at least 70 percent by the middle of the century.

A new paper in this week's PNAS examines whether there are ways to add significant new agricultural land without causing a huge boost in carbon emissions. It finds that it's possible to greatly expand farmed land while avoiding billions of metric tons of carbon emissions, but doing so would require a level of international cooperation that would be unprecedented.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Amazon is fighting hard to maintain its image as authors and customers slowly tear it apart over its fight for low e-book prices. Raul Lieberwirth

Amazon and Hachette escalated their e-books PR battle over the weekend with an impassioned message from a product team on one side, a response from a CEO on the other, and both pleading for their loyalists to help. As the fight carries on, it's clear Amazon knows it has a retail reputation to lose, but the company is unsure how to reconcile that with the business dealings coming to light over the last few months.

The dispute surfaced publicly in late spring, when it became clear Amazon was suppressing Hachette book sales and shipments in response to Hachette's refusal to agree to lower e-book prices. Since then, Amazon has tried twice to justify its actions, and Hachette has responded by saying it doesn't intend to give in, and Amazon's market influence should not be underestimated. At the end of last week, 900 authors got involved and created a $104,000 full-page ad in The New York Times condemning Amazon for putting writers in the middle of the contract dispute, handing out Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' e-mail address to encourage readers to give him what for.

On Saturday, the Amazon Books team wrote a long letter to its Kindle authors invoking George Orwell and asking the publishing industry to get on board with its product and pricing "innovations." At the end of the letter, the Books team asked readers to e-mail Hachette's CEO with a form letter that included demands like "stop working so hard to overcharge for e-books. They can and should be less expensive" and "stop using your authors as leverage and accept one of Amazon's offers to take them out of the middle."

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Flickr user: Antti Kaakinen

A one-two combination of malware programs has infiltrated the embassies and government systems of a number of former Eastern Bloc nations as well as European targets, according to a technical analysis by security researchers.

Using exploits and malicious downloads delivered through phishing attacks or on compromised websites, attackers first infect a system with a program, known as Wipbot, according to an analysis posted by security firm Symantec on Friday. The program conducts initial reconnaissance, collecting system information and only compromising systems that correspond with a specific Internet address. After the target is verified, a second program—alternatively known as Turla, Uroburos, and Snake—is downloaded to further compromise the system, steal data, and exfiltrate information camouflaged as browser requests.

The one-two combination has all the hallmarks of a nation-state intelligence gathering operation targeting the embassies of former Eastern Bloc countries in Europe, China, and Jordan, according to Symantec.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Pam

In a statement of findings and recommendations filed last week, a US Magistrate Judge for the Eastern District of California affirmed that a woman on searchable probation had the right to videotape three officers who came to her home to search it.

In February 2011, plaintiff Mary Crago was visited by three police officers, including defendant Officer Kenneth Leonard. Leonard was working on the Sacramento Police Department's Metal Theft Task Force, and he was tipped off that Crago may have been involved in a theft involving a vehicle battery. Since Crago was on searchable probation, the officers entered her home—the door was open—and they found Crago “sitting on a mattress, digging furiously through a purse.”

According to court documents, “Inside the purse, defendant found a four-inch glass pipe and a small baggie with white residue. The white residue subsequently tested positive for methamphetamine.” Crago did not resist the officers' search, but she allegedly told Leonard that she was recording the search on her laptop. Leonard then took her laptop and deleted her recording, telling her that recording was forbidden.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Michael Patrick

On Monday, the San Jose Police Department responded to Ars’ request for comment concerning its drone use, saying that it will “follow all regulations the [Federal Aviation Administration] requires regarding its drone use."

Last week, newly published documents showed that the San Jose Police Department (SJPD) did not believe it needed federal authorization in order to fly the drone it acquired in January 2014. The FAA said otherwise, and now the SJPD will oblige.

“The SJPD will seek a [Certificate of Waiver or Authorization (COA)] if that is required,” SJPD spokesman Albert Morales told Ars. “The SJPD obtained FAA literature regarding requirements for an [unmanned aerial system, or UAS], prior to procuring the UAS.”

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Yosemite National Park

About six weeks ago in June, two days after the National Park Service (NPS) banned drones in all 401 national parks, a 68-year-old California man reported that his drone was stuck in a tree at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

“He called for help, and one of our rangers responded,” Jackie Skaggs, a Grand Teton spokeswoman, told Ars. “He was flying it in the Gros Ventre campground and got it stuck in a cottonwood tree. There was no damage as far as I know to the cottonwood tree. He wanted it out, the rangers came to help, and he was in violation of a public use closure.”

The man's drone was never rescued. When rangers returned to help the man retrieve it, it was gone. The rangers presumed it had been stolen.

Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Zach Copley

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has issued a new warning to the general public, alerting everyone to the potential dangers of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and other cryptocurrencies.

In the Monday document, the CFPB warns that such currencies have four notable risks:

Hackers. Virtual currencies are targets for highly sophisticated hackers, who have been able to breach advanced security systems.

Fewer protections. If you trust someone else to hold your virtual currencies and something goes wrong, that company may not offer you the kind of help you expect from a bank or debit or credit card provider.

Cost. Virtual currencies can cost consumers much more to use than credit cards or even regular cash.

Scams. Fraudsters are taking advantage of the hype surrounding virtual currencies to cheat people with fake opportunities.

The warning comes just two days after Dell CEO Michael Dell announced that his firm recently accepted a large order (around $50,000 worth) paid for in bitcoins. Dell became one of the largest corporations ever to begin accepting the virtual currency.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Acer

Acer's contributions to the Chromebook ecosystem have so far been mostly inexpensive Intel-based systems, things like the Acer C720 from late last year. These systems are the archetypal Chromebooks—11.6-inch screens with 1366×768 resolutions, 2GB or 4GB of RAM, cheap Intel Celeron CPUs (though a Core i3 model surfaced more recently), and relatively light price tags.

Today Acer announced a different kind of entry to the field: its fanless Chromebook 13 is a larger model with a 13.3-inch screen that comes in 1366×768 and 1080p flavors that starts at $279.99 and uses Nvidia's Tegra K1 SoC instead of an Intel chip. The Nvidia Tegra K1 Acer is using the 32-bit version, which uses four 2.3GHz ARM Cortex A15 CPU cores and an Nvidia GPU that uses the same Kepler architecture as many GeForce GT 600- and 700-series GPUs. The new Chromebook's closest competition is probably Samsung's Chromebook 2, which uses an Exynos 5 Octa processor in the same general performance bracket.

Acer has also added 2GB of RAM, a 16GB SSD, two USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port, and two-stream 802.11ac Wi-Fi (which should provide maximum theoretical transfer speeds of 867Mbps), and the company promises 13 hours of battery life in the 1366×768 version and 11 hours in the 1080p version. The laptop weighs 3.31 pounds, average for a 13-inch notebook, and Acer says it's 0.71 inches thick. The 1080p version of the Chromebook 13 is $299.99, and an upgraded version with 4GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD will run you $379.99. The $300 1080p model is currently available for pre-order at Best Buy while the other two models are available for pre-order from Amazon.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

NASA

Scientists have studied stars many light-years away, exoplanets, black holes, neutron stars, and even the invisible dark matter that permeates every galaxy. Given that, it hardly seems (at first) that the Moon could still surprise us. After all, the study of the Moon is as old as astronomy itself, and it's the only astronomical object a human being has ever set foot on. But a new study suggests that the Moon has a previously undiscovered low-viscosity region, residing just above the core. The region is partially molten, which fits with earlier models that suggest some melting may exist on the core-mantle boundary.

The region, referred to in the study as the “low-viscosity zone," could better explain measurements of tidal dissipation on the Moon. While scientists have previously calculated the effects of Earth's tidal forces on the Moon, none of those calculations have been able to account for certain observations. Specifically, there is a relationship between the Moon's tidal period and its ability to absorb seismic waves, which are converted to heat deep in the Moon's interior. That relationship was unexplained until now.

The authors of the study, however, were able to closely match those observations with their simulation when a low-viscosity zone was included in their models.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Warning: This footage is graphic.
Police are crowdsourcing an investigation to determine whether criminal charges should be brought in connection with a deadly sprint car race on Saturday—and are urging spectators to turn over any still or video footage that might help with the probe.

Spectator videos of the deadly crash Saturday at the Canandaigua Motorsports Park in Canandaigua, New York, already have gone viral, with millions of viewers watching the incident on YouTube. Famed NASCAR driver Tony Stewart was competing in the non-NASCAR event when he collided with Kevin Ward Jr.'s car and knocked him out of the race. Ward exited his vehicle and walked down the dirt track, apparently angry at Stewart and gesturing at him. When Stewart's car came around after another lap, it struck Ward, who later died.

"We're trying to collect the facts so we can definitively identify the cause of the crash," Ontario County Sheriff Philip Povero told a news conference late Sunday. "The world is watching. We're working on it diligently."

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Not everyone likes their friendly neighborhood cable behemoth.

Two weeks ago, in the wake of Ryan Block’s nightmare of a cancellation call, Comcast Chief Operating Officer Dave Watson issued an internal memo saying that the recording was "painful to listen to." He exhorted his employees to "do better." Unfortunately for Watson, another call surfaced on Sunday that will likely be just as painful: a fellow named Tim Davis called Comcast to contest some bogus charges on his bill and only managed to get them refunded because he had recordings of previous Comcast calls.

According to the write-up by The Consumerist, Davis had moved to a new apartment and transferred his Comcast service to his new residence, opting to perform a self-install rather than have Comcast send out a technician. After a few weeks without problems, his Internet connection started dropping out, and a technician was dispatched. Comcast determined that the problems had to do with outside wiring rather than anything under Davis’ control, and thus the company told him that the truck roll and service were gratis.

Tim Davis and the Comcastic Customer Service Call.

(Warning: the above video has some strong language, and you should probably put on headphones if you're going to listen to it at work.)

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

This is what Seattle looks like underneath its heatsink. AMD

First unveiled in January, AMD today gave a detailed look at its first ARM-based server processor, the Opteron A1100 "Seattle."

Seattle has eight 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 cores arranged into four pairs, with each pair sharing 1MB of level 2 cache. All eight cores share an 8 MB level 3 cache. There are two memory controllers, supporting both DDR3 and DDR4, enabling a total of 128GB ECC memory in total.

These cores all share a set of I/O options. The system-on-a-chip has 8 lanes of PCIe 3.0 for expansion cards and 8 lanes of SATA revision 3.0 for storage. Network connectivity comes from two 10GBASE-KR controllers. (10GBASE-KR is a short-range specification designed for copper connections to backplanes in blade servers and modular routers.)

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

You were fabbed in the long summer; you've never known anything else. Aurich Lawson

Last week I flew from New Jersey to Portland, Oregon, to get briefed by Intel PR reps and engineers about the company's next-generation CPUs and the new manufacturing process behind them. It was my first-ever visit to Intel's campus.

One of its campuses, anyway. I saw several peppered throughout suburban Portland, and that's not even counting the gargantuan Intel-branded factory construction site I jogged by the next morning, or Intel's other facilities worldwide. Usually our face-to-face interactions with tech company employees take place on neutral ground—an anonymous hotel room, convention hall, or Manhattan PR office—but two-and-change days on Intel's home turf really drove home the size of its operation. Its glory may be just a little faded these days, primarily because of a drooping PC market, tablet chips that are actually losing the company money, and a continuing smartphone boom that Intel's still scrambling to get a piece of, but something like 315 million PCs were sold worldwide in 2013, and the lion's share still has Intel inside.

That's what makes Intel's progress important, and that's why we’re champing at the bit to get the Broadwell architecture and see Intel’s new 14nm manufacturing process in action. The major industry players—everyone from Microsoft to Dell to Apple—depend on Intel’s progress to refine their own products. The jump between 2012’s Ivy Bridge architecture and 2013’s Haswell architecture wasn’t huge, but for many Ultrabooks it made the difference between a mediocre product and a good one.

Read 58 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The Khronos Group today released OpenGL 4.5, the newest version of the industry standard 3D programming API. The new version contains a mix of features designed to make developers' lives easier and to improve performance and reliability of OpenGL applications.

The group also issued a call for participation in its next generation OpenGL initiative. Amid growing interest in "low-level" APIs, such as AMD's Mantle and Microsoft's forthcoming Direct3D 12 specification, Khronos is working on its own vendor-neutral, cross-platform API to give developers greater low-level control and to extract more performance from 3D hardware.

The big feature in OpenGL 4.5 is Direct State Access (DSA). OpenGL is a complex API that relies extensively on an implicit state that is maintained between function calls. For example, to specify properties of a texture, first a texture unit must be set as active. Then, the texture must be bound to the currently active texture unit. Then, the properties of the currently bound texture are specified. In each case, the link between the calls is implicit; the binding of the texture implicitly uses the active texture unit, and the property setting implicitly uses the bound texture.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

LAS VEGAS— Sin City has the greatest density of surveillance cameras per square mile anywhere outside the Pentagon, and that fact makes Vegas an appropriate host for both Black Hat and Def Con, the yin and yang of information security conferences. The two have become the anchors for a collection of security events here every summer (including BsidesLV  and PasswordsCon) that results in a week-long festival of infosec overload so scary, it's now even more frightening to use hotel Wi-Fi.

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});While Jeff Moss, aka "TheDarkTangent," is the founder of both Black Hat and Def Con, the two events have continued to diverge. This year, however, they carried a very similar message: security has reached a critical point, and the people gathered at both events have never been more relevant to society as a whole, for better or worse. "This is our moment right now," Moss said during the introduction of his Black Hat keynote. "When was the last time we were this relevant and this in demand? I would say during the dot com (boom)... but if you think about it, all you needed was green hair to get a job back then."

Moss challenged attendees at Black Hat to do something real in the coming year. "I have the sense that we don't have unlimited time," he warned. "If we're going to make some moves, we're going to have to make them soon." The message at Def Con was similar—a call to action in a world where state actors and other maleficent forces are taking advantage of an ever-growing number of vulnerabilities in systems ranging from mobile applications to "Internet of Things" devices. The looming threat of surveillance makes it increasingly difficult to live a private life.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments