The new Leap Motion VR Developer Mount lets you attach a Leap Motion Controller to the front of an Oculus Rift DK1 or DK2 and turn your hands into gloveless VR gloves. Leap Motion

It’s been about a year since we first put our hands on the Leap Motion Controller, the infrared input device that sits on your desk and tracks the movements and gestures your hands make. At the time, we were simultaneously impressed and frustrated—the device seemed to have so much potential, but everything about its software and early app integration felt designed to annoy rather than enable. It came so close to being amazing without actually crossing that threshold.

Over the past year, though, I’ve come to rely on the Leap pretty heavily—not as a game controller but as a way to execute scripts with gestures, using BetterTouchTool. Wave my hand one way, and all the Hue lights in the house turn off. Wave my hand another, and my computer display locks and turns off. I even have a gesture that just sends a "spacebar" command to the active application, enabling me to scroll webpages and pause or unpause video by flicking a couple of fingers at the screen in a crowd-pleasing gesture that never fails to draw a "Whoa!" from observers. It’s cool, and it works reliably well.

And Leap has not spent the last year idle. Work continues on API and software updates for the existing Leap Motion Controller (as well as on the company's follow-up device, codenamed "Dragonfly"). In a blog post this morning, Leap cofounder David Holz talked through the latest improvement that the company has bolted onto its existing product: a small mounting device that, coupled with a software update, enables the Leap to function as a full-fledged virtual reality controller.

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This story was written and published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, DC, and is exclusively republished here.

Janice Bowling, a 67-year-old grandmother and Republican state senator from rural Tennessee, thought it only made sense that the city of Tullahoma be able to offer its local high-speed Internet service to areas beyond the city limits.

After all, many of her rural constituents had slow service or did not have access to commercial providers, like AT&T Inc. and Charter Communications Inc.

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});As part of its investigation of municipal broadband, the Center for Public Integrity put together some audio and visual imagery to show just how the fight plays out at the local level.

Large telecommunications companies have bankrolled campaigns to try to defeat referendums that would allow cities to build or expand their own high-speed broadband networks.

First up, two examples of anti-muni broadband robocalls and push polls—one from Longmont, Colorado, and the second from Lafayette, Louisiana.

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JPMorgan Chase was one of at least five US banks hit by a sophisticated attack against its networks that netted the attacker large volumes of bank account data—for an unknown purpose. Joe Mabel

The FBI is reportedly investigating whether a sophisticated attack on JPMorgan Chase and at least four other banks was the work of state-sponsored hackers from Russia. The attacks, which were detected earlier this month, netted gigabytes of checking and savings account data, according to a report by The New York Times.

Update: According to one source Ars contacted who claims to be familiar with the investigation at JPMorgan Chase, the attack on the bank stemmed from malware that infected an employee's desktop computer. It was not clear whether the malware was delivered by a web attack or by an email "phishing" attack. That is contradicted by information shared with Bloomberg, which indicates the attack started with a zero-day exploit of one of JPMorgan's web servers.

In a statement sent to Ars, John Prisco, CEO of the security firm Triumfant said, "The nature of the JPMorgan breach was a persistent threat with a backdoor that enabled the attacker to enter whenever they wanted." He expressed surprise that the breach went undetected for so long, claiming that it was "fairly easy breach to detect."

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Making a good product is hard, and if you don't have a solid vision, there's nothing like iteration to help get you there. Samsung has taken this strategy to heart in the smartwatch category, where, in less than a year, it has released the Galaxy Gear, Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo, Gear Fit, and Gear Live. Late last night, the company took the wraps off of smartwatch #6: The Samsung Gear S.

So what's new this time around? Well, as was rumored, the Gear S has a 3G modem and Wi-Fi—it's a standalone smartwatch. Until now, just about any mainstream smartwatch has been tethered to a smartphone to get internet access. The other big addition to the Gear S is a curved AMOLED display. The 2-inch 360×480 display is one of the biggest ever on a smartwatch; just look at the last two pictures in the gallery below for an idea of the size. It's almost a bracelet instead of a watch.

Other specs include a 1GHz dual-core processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, heart rate monitor, Bluetooth 4.1, 802.11a/b/n, GPS, and IP67 water resistance.

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T-Mobile

Grooveshark, Rdio, Google Play Music, and four other music services will no longer count against data caps on certain T-Mobile US plans. In all, 14 streaming services will be exempt from LTE data caps by the end of the year as part of T-Mobile's "Music Freedom" program.

AccuRadio, Black Planet, Grooveshark, Radio Paradise, Rdio, and Songza should immediately become exempt. Google will be added "later this year," T-Mobile announced today.

"The new services join iHeartRadio, iTunesRadio, Pandora, Rhapsody, Samsung Milk, Slacker and Spotify already included in Music Freedom," the announcement said. "T-Mobile has a vision to add every possible music streaming service to Music Freedom, and any music streaming provider can be part of Music Freedom by applying through T-Mobile’s open submission process."

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When it comes to the game and e-sports streaming scene, Twitch is the 800-pound gorilla. But when it comes to online video as a whole, YouTube is the dominant force, which is why the early reports that Google was going to buy Twitch were a little strange. Google has all the infrastructure and technology to deliver video—including live game streaming—and in fact, Google does the job better than Twitch.

What Twitch has is a very strong brand, as the site people go to for livestreams of people playing games. It wasn't crazy for Google to consider a buyout of that brand and its loyal users, but in the end, it probably wasn't the easiest way for Google to make a play in the space.

It's all a bit moot, since Google backed down its reported plans for a Twitch buyout (reportedly amid antitrust concerns), and Twitch is now a part of Amazon instead. But if Google wants to be a part of the game streaming market—and there are good reasons why it would—it's extremely well positioned, even without Twitch.

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Alan Light

The Obama administration is fighting a federal judge's order requiring it to explain why the government places US citizens who haven't been convicted of any violent crimes on its no-fly database.

The administration is challenging the demand from US District Judge Anthony Trenga, who is presiding over the Virginia federal court case. In asking Trenga to reconsider his August 6 order, the government responded last week: "Defendants request clarification of the purpose of the requested submission so that defendants may respond appropriately."

Trenga's decision is among a series of setbacks to the government's insistence that any serious discussion about the no-fly list—about how people get on or off it—would amount to a national security breach.

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The Oval Office as it looked at the end of President Reagan's second term, as seen in the replica at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Dhrupad Bezboruah

One thing sits at the heart of what many consider a surveillance state within the US today.

The problem does not begin with political systems that discourage transparency or technologies that can intercept everyday communications without notice. Like everything else in Washington, there’s a legal basis for what many believe is extreme government overreach—in this case, it's Executive Order 12333, issued in 1981.

“12333 is used to target foreigners abroad, and collection happens outside the US," whistleblower John Tye, a former State Department official, told Ars recently. "My complaint is not that they’re using it to target Americans, my complaint is that the volume of incidental collection on US persons is unconstitutional.”

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Back in May of this year, a jury awarded Apple $120 million in damages in its second major patent trial against Samsung. Apple also asked the court to ban the sale of those Samsung phones that infringed on its three patents in question. But today, Northern California District Court Judge Lucy Koh ruled that Apple had not proven to the court that it deserves an injunction against infringing Samsung products.

In a court ruling on Wednesday, Koh wrote:

First and most importantly, Apple has not satisfied its burden of demonstrating irreparable harm and linking that harm to Samsung’s exploitation of any of Apple’s three infringed patents. Apple has not established that it suffered significant harm in the form of either lost sales or reputational injury. Moreover, Apple has not shown that it suffered any of these alleged harms because Samsung infringed Apple’s patents. The Federal Circuit has cautioned that the plaintiff must demonstrate a causal nexus between its supposed harm (including reputational harm) and the specific infringement at issue. Apple has not demonstrated that the patented inventions drive consumer demand for the infringing products.

This is the second time that Koh has ruled against an injunction for Apple after the jury ruled that Samsung's products infringed the iPhone maker's patents. Back in 2012, Apple won a whopping $1.05 billion in damages from Samsung, but months later, Judge Koh denied an injunction against Samsung. Then, as now, the judge ruled that Apple hadn't shown the court that its design patents had caused irreparable harm to the company.

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A simulated map of the WiFi signal in Jason Cole's two-bedroom apartment. Jason Cole

A home's Wi-Fi dead zones are, to most of us, a problem solved with guesswork. Your laptop streams just fine in this corner of the bedroom, but not the adjacent one; this arm of the couch is great for uploading photos, but not the other one. You avoid these places, and where the Wi-Fi works becomes a factor in the wear patterns of your home. In an effort to better understand, and possibly eradicate, his Wi-Fi dead zones, one man took the hard way: he solved the Helmholtz equation.

The Helmholtz equation models "the propagation of electronic waves" that involves using a sparse matrix to help minimize the amount of calculation a computer has to do in order to figure out the paths and interferences of waves, in this case from a Wi-Fi router. The whole process is similar to how scattered granular material, like rice or salt, will form complex patterns on top of a speaker depending on where the sound waves are hitting the surfaces.

The author of the post in question, Jason Cole, first solved the equation in two dimensions, and then applied it to his apartment's long and narrow two-bedroom layout. He wrote that he took his walls to have a very high refractive index, while empty space had a refractive index of 1.

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Partial patent image from US Patent No. 7,496,943. US Patent Office

In January, Google won a jury trial against a so-called "patent troll" called Beneficial Innovations, which sued dozens of media companies over online ad patents.

But it wasn't a defensive win in which Google lawyers were laying out arguments about why they didn't infringe a patent. Instead, Google had gone on the offensive and said that Beneficial's 2011 patent lawsuit against a dozen major media companies was a breach of contract.

Google had already paid for a license, and then Beneficial went ahead and sued lots of companies that were simply users of Google's Doubleclick ad tech. (Beneficial's targets included Advance Publications, which owns Conde Nast and is the parent company of Ars Technica.)

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The Luigi Death Stare will be back for more, DLC-fueled fun in November and May. But why hasn't Nintendo gone to the DLC well more before now? Nintendo

Our official review of Mario Kart 8 is mixed, but my feelings about the game are not. I can't make as much time for games as I once did, but I devoted a substantial amount of time to getting gold cups in every Grand Prix in every speed class in the game. I also beat all of Nintendo's built-in Time Trial records and explored every track to uncover their secrets. It's probably my favorite Mario Kart game since Mario Kart DS, maybe even since Double Dash (liking Double Dash so much is apparently controversial in some circles, but that's another article).

This being 2014, I harbored hopes that the game's now-standard 32 tracks would be bolstered by more, released later on as DLC. Given Nintendo and its mostly deserved reputation for being behind the times on all things downloadable, however, I couldn't treat it as a given. Mario Kart Wii and Mario Kart 7 are both the same games they were the day they were released, give or take a patch. Why should the Wii U version be any different?

Yesterday Nintendo laid my fears to rest with the announcement of two separate pieces of DLC, both of which will add additional characters and tracks to the game. I can't imagine why it took Nintendo so long to start doing this with its games. 

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The former acting cybersecurity director for the US Department of Health and Human Services, Tim DeFoggi, was convicted yesterday on three child porn charges.

As reported by Wired, DeFoggi is the sixth suspect to be caught by the FBI's Operation Torpedo, which used controversial methods of defeating the Tor anonymizing software in order to find child porn suspects.

One site frequented by DeFoggi was PedoBook, hosted by Aaron McGrath—a Nebraska man who was convicted earlier for his role in the operations. The websites were only accessible to users who installed Tor on their browsers. DeFoggi used names such as "fuckchrist" and "PTasseater" to register on the sites, where he could view more than 100 videos and more than 17,000 child porn images.

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HTC

When Apple launched the iPhone 5S with a 64-bit processor, it sent the rest of the spec-obsessed SoC world on a race to catch up. After about a year of lag time, the Android ecosystem has finally started to catch up, with HTC announcing the Desire 510, the first 64-bit Android phone.

The Desire's 64-bit badge comes courtesy of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 410. The first 64-bit Qualcomm chip isn't a high-end monster that rivals the Snapdragon 805; it's instead a low-end chip—Qualcomm's lineup is being upgraded from the bottom up, it seems. The SoC has four Cortex A53 CPU cores running at 1.2GHz, 1GB of RAM, and LTE. The rest of the phone is packing a 4.7-inch 854x480 display, 5MP camera, 8GB of storage (plus a microSD slot), and a 2100 mAh battery.

While the chip is 64-bit, the Desire 510 doesn't actually run any 64-bit software—it runs Android 4.4, a 32-bit OS. The hardware is ready, but the rest of the Android ecosystem still needs to catch up. The first version of Android to support 64-bit apps will be Android L, which is due out sometime this year. Hopefully HTC takes advantage of its forward-looking hardware and updates the OS.

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You may already be dorking.

In a restricted intelligence document distributed to police, public safety, and security organizations in July, the Department of Homeland Security warned of a “malicious activity” that could expose secrets and security vulnerabilities in organizations’ information systems. The name of that activity: “Google dorking.”

“Malicious cyber actors are using advanced search techniques, referred to as ‘Google dorking,’ to locate information that organizations may not have intended to be discoverable by the public or to find website vulnerabilities for use in subsequent cyber attacks,” the for-official-use-only Roll Call Release warned. “By searching for specific file types and keywords, malicious cyber actors can locate information such as usernames and passwords, e-mail lists, sensitive documents, bank account details, and website vulnerabilities.”

That’s right, if you’re using advanced operators for search on Google, such as “site:arstechnica.com” or “filetype:xls,” you’re behaving like a “malicious cyber actor.” Some organizations will react to you accessing information they thought was hidden as if you were a cybercriminal, as reporters at Scripps found out last year. Those individuals were accused of “hacking” the website of free cellphone provider TerraCom after discovering sensitive customer data openly accessible from the Internet via a Google search and an “automated “ hacking tool: GNU’s Wget.

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Accessory Outlet

A Wisconsin woman has filed a lawsuit in New York state court against a shady online retailer, Accessory Outlet, which had threatened her by saying, “You are playing games with the wrong people” after she attempted to cancel an order for a $40 iPhone case that did not arrive on time.

The woman, Cindy Cox, is being represented by the advocacy group Public Citizen, which recently won summary judgment and damages of over $300,000 earlier this year in a related case in Utah involving the French parent company of KlearGear, a similarly unscrupulous vendor. She is seeking declaratory judgment that the company’s self-imposed “debt” of $250 is invalid and that the company engaged in deceptive practices.

“Accessory Outlet is using unfair terms hidden in fine print, along with threatening emails, to bully a customer into keeping quiet about her bad experience with the company,” Scott Michelman, the Public Citizen attorney handling the case, said in a statement. “But terms that prevent a customer from speaking publicly about her transaction and from contacting her credit card company are unreasonable and unenforceable.”

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A sixth-generation iPod Nano embedded in a watch band. Aaron Muszalski

Re/code is reporting that Apple will introduce a wearable device on September 9 alongside two next-generation iPhones. Such a device from Apple has been highly anticipated since the wearable market received newcomers from Samsung, LG, and Motorola.

Apple's entry into this market was originally expected sometime in October based on an earlier report from Re/code. The site has had a good track record of correctly predicting the timing of Apple product releases since the AllThingsD days.

John Paczkowski, who reported the news, says that the coming device will certainly be equipped to make use of Apple’s HealthKit platform for its Health app, as well as HomeKit, which is a platform to connect devices to smart appliances and light bulbs.

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Constructive and destructive interference make this cat out of photons that never actually went through a cat-shaped transparency. Gabriela Barreto Lemos

One item on the long list of strange facts about quantum mechanics is that the mere possibility of something happening is often just as good as it actually happening. For example, the fact that a photon could potentially travel down a given path can be enough to create an interference pattern that requires the photon to take that path.

Something similar is true regarding a phenomenon called quantum interference. A team of researchers from the University of Vienna has now taken advantage of this idea to create a bizarre imaging technique where the photons that actually strike the object being imaged are discarded. The image itself is then built other with photons that were entangled with the discarded ones.

Interference is the ability of two waves, such as photons, to interact either additively or destructively. In the quantum world, whether or not interference occurs depends on the ability to distinguish the two things that are interfering. If they are distinguishable, interference cannot occur. But you don't have to actually distinguish between them in order to block interference. As the authors of the new paper write, "The mere possibility of obtaining information that could distinguish between overlapping states inhibits quantum interference."

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Kyle Orland

For months now, if you bought the $400, Kinect-free version of the Xbox One, the only way to add the 3D camera/microphone setup to your system later was to buy a Kinect secondhand. Today, Microsoft announced that it will begin selling an official standalone version of the Xbox One Kinect with a bundled download of Harmonix's Dance Central Spotlight on October 7 for $150 in the US.

The new Dance Central game comes out next week at a price of $10, with ten packaged songs and additional songs offered as $2 DLC. Subtract that, and Microsoft is valuing the standalone Kinect itself at roughly $140. That's significantly larger than the $100 difference between the Kinect-bundled Xbox One ($500) and the Kinect-free version of the system ($400).

True, there are extra costs associated with selling the Kinect separately (packaging, shipping, inventory, retail space). Still, it seems unlikely that Xbox One purchasers who already refused to essentially add on a $100 Kinect when they bought the system will decide after the fact that they want to spend more money for the benefits of the device.

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