In an indictment unsealed today, the Justice Department revealed that it had charged four men with stealing information from the US Army, Microsoft, and a host of other game developers. Two of the charged men pleaded guilty on Tuesday.

The unsealed indictment—which was returned by a federal grand jury in April—alleges that starting in 2011, the four men targeted Microsoft and stole “Log-In Credentials, Trade Secrets, and Intellectual Property pertaining to its Xbox gaming system,” specifically the still-in-development Xbox One.

The four men also allegedly turned to Epic Games and used SQL injection attacks “and other incidents of unauthorized access” like stolen passwords to pilfer “unreleased software, source code, and middleware” from the upcoming Gears of War 3 title.

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"Revenge porn" is a term that has developed over the last few years to refer to the posting of nude images without the consent of those in the pictures. After a spate of publicity surrounding some of the bad actors in this business, several states have passed laws outlawing "revenge porn" and applying penalties.

Now, a coalition of businesses and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed a lawsuit (PDF) challenging the anti-revenge-porn laws. They've picked Arizona as their battleground. One of the lead lawyers on the case, Michael Bamberger, told the National Law Journal that Arizona's law is "probably the most egregious," because it has no requirement that the images even be malicious, and an exemption for images taken in a "commercial or public setting" is vague.

"This is a supposed revenge-porn statute that does not require revenge," said Bamberger.

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One of the things shown off in the Continuum video: A modified Start screen, that incorporates elements of the Start menu.

The most important thing that Microsoft showed at its Windows 10 unveiling in San Francisco today won't actually be in the Technical Preview that's shipping tomorrow.

Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of the operating systems group, showed a video of what he called a "design motion study" of a feature he called Continuum.

The Continuum design study.

With Windows 8 and 8.1, a wealth of hybrid machines that in one way or another act like tablets and laptops—machines such as the Lenovo Yoga and Surface Pro—hit the market, and Microsoft says that they've been very popular among their buyers. However, those buyers somewhat fell between the cracks.

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Tourists have become unlikely foot soldiers of China in its dispute with Vietnam over the Paracel islands in the South China sea.

It is 25 years since Denmark became the first country to celebrate same-sex civil unions.

The Start menu is back where it used to be, but now includes traditional desktop elements alongside the live tiles designed for tablets.

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As announced earlier today, the next version of Windows is Windows 10. Skipping right over Windows 9, Microsoft is trying to blend the best bits of the desktop-centric Windows 7 with the best parts of the tablet-centric Windows 8. Microsoft isn't quite going up to eleven yet, but it's close.

Instead of the full-screen Start screen of Windows 8, there's a Start menu that will look familiar to Windows 7 users while adding the live tiles created for Windows 8. Windows 10 features new options for re-sizing windows, multiple desktops, and a convenient "task view" to switch between them. The Windows command prompt is also being dragged into the 21st century.

Microsoft focused a lot today on how it's improving the desktop, but that doesn't mean Windows isn't for tablets anymore. A touch-screen device that docks with a keyboard, for example, will switch from desktop mode to tablet mode depending on whether it's attached to the keyboard or disconnected.

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The Dallas Morning News is reporting that we've now seen the first case of Ebola infection diagnosed within the US. Although patients were previously brought back to the US for treatment following infection in West Africa, this is the first case we know of where the infected individual traveled back on their own, possibly unaware that they were infected.

According to the article, the patient is currently being kept in isolation at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas after doctors found that he had symptoms consistent with Ebola and had recently been to West Africa. Blood samples were shipped to the CDC for testing yesterday, which led to today's results.

Details are scarce at the moment, but it's safe to assume that health officials are trying to track back to the individuals that were in contact with the patient since his return from overseas. This will allow them to be monitored and treated quickly if symptoms should emerge. Depending on the exact details of when the patient traveled, it could be possible to keep the virus from spreading to other patients within the US.

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In late September, advertisements appearing on a host of popular news and entertainment sites began serving up malicious code, infecting some visitors' computers with a backdoor program designed to gather information on their systems and install additional malicious code.

The attack affected visitors to The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, The Hindustan Times, Internet music service Last.fm, and India-focused movie portal Bollywood Hungama, among other popular sites. At the center of the malware campaign: the compromise of San Francisco-based Internet advertising network Zedo, an advertising provider for the sites, whose network was then used to distribute malicious ads.

For ten days, the company investigated multiple malware reports, retracing the attacker's digital footsteps to identify the malicious files and shut the backdoor to its systems.

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It was only two years ago that Windows 8 was unleashed on the world. Microsoft tried to usher in an era of “Touch First” applications with a new look and feel for Windows. To say that Windows 8 was unsuccessful would be an understatement, and from both Microsoft’s and user’s perspectives, it was certainly a failure. Two years in, Windows 8 and its 8.1 derivative have struggled to gain market share over Windows 7 and XP, which still command the lion’s share of the desktop OS pie. A new interface, unfamiliar to users, did little to sway their wallets, and other market factors have come in to play as well.

 

Looking back at Windows 8, it was a big change from a company that traditionally has been called too conservative. Gone was the familiar start menu, replaced with a full screen version. Gone was the ability to move and resize applications into “windows” and instead it was replaced with full screen apps that take command of your desktop. Gone was a lot of what made Windows, well Windows. Add in the fact that Windows 8 at its launch was only half complete, and it is not surprising that the market did not buy into the new world. There were two disjointed interfaces, but one person had to interact with both no matter what form factor they were on. If you are on a touch based tablet, much of the settings and controls were still found in the old Control Panel applets. The file explorer was on the desktop, which was difficult to use with touch. On the other side of the coin, traditional desktop PC users also had to learn the new Start Screen, charms, and other controls which were clearly made for “touch first” and not the mouse and keyboard. Within weeks of the Windows 8 launch, major players in its creation were let go, or given new duties.

Since the day one release of Windows 8, Microsoft has been trying to fix many of the issues people have with the new version of their operating system, and Windows 8.1 was a step in the right direction, fixing interfaces for both the touch interface and the desktop. Windows 8.1 Update, announced at BUILD earlier this year, was a truly desktop-centric update with new keyboard and mouse controls for use in the touch environment, and the ability to control Windows Store apps with a title bar. It was a big help, but also showed off at BUILD were features coming in a later version of Windows, and that version has now come.

Windows 10 is as dramatic a shift from Windows 8 as Windows 8 was to Windows 7. Gone is the start screen for the desktop, with the familiar start menu back. Gone is the full screen applications taking over your computer, with those applications now being relegated to windows as before. Gone is the touch first interface on top of an operating system primarily used with a keyboard and mouse. However this is not Windows 7.1, and nor should it be. Windows 8 certainly had its faults, but not everything about Windows 8 needed to be thrown out.

Windows 10 starts its journey as the Windows Technical Preview for Enterprises. Microsoft’s core customer base is the enterprise, and this is important that they are starting the discussion with this market group this time around. Beginning tomorrow, people can join the Windows Insider Program and download and install the latest version of Windows for themselves. Microsoft has made it clear though that this preview is actually a preview, and not meant for general availability. Expect some rough edges, and some bugs, which should be worked out by the time the OS ships. As for the consumer side of the story, Microsoft is planning to announce more on that front in early 2015, and for developers, BUILD will be coming sometime after that. The actual Windows 10 launch is listed as “later in the year” with the year being 2015.

There is a lot to go over, and once we get our hands on the preview build we can dig into the new OS and give a full breakdown on what is new. One of the biggest complaints about Windows 8 and 8.1, is that real people do not want a single interface on every device they own. They want a User Interface which is tailored to the usage model. With Windows 10, Microsoft promises to address this.

Before we can talk about Windows though, we need to briefly discuss the Windows Store. Windows Store apps are executed in WinRT, which is the Windows RunTime, replacing the old Win32 runtime. WinRT has some advantages as a new framework, with the ability to be resolution independent natively, and support the Windows contracts such as Share. At BUILD in 2014, Microsoft announced Universal Apps, which are a key feature of the Windows store that is not available on any other platform. There is a lot of confusion as to what a Universal App is, and what it is not is a single application that runs on a phone, PC, tablet, and console. A Universal App leverages the common WinRT framework available in Windows, Xbox One, and Windows Phone, to allow a developer to share a common code base, but use a suitable UI for each system, and have all of it available on all platforms seamlessly through the Windows Store. It is certainly a lofty idea, and one that has gained a bit of traction in the store. With Windows 10 though, the concept of a Universal App allows a developer to target a phone, Xbox, tablet, and desktop. If anything is the killer feature of Windows 10, this could be it. Time will tell of course and developers need to buy into WinRT for this to be a reality. Today’s announcement is not developer focused, so we will expect more news on the WinRT API updates later on, at the BUILD conference.

The first place to start, is going to be Start. On Windows 7, clicking the Start button brought up the Start Menu. Windows 8 dropped the start button altogether, but 8.1 brought it back even though it opened the Start Screen. On tablets, the start screen was fine, but on a desktop, it could be unwieldy. It interrupted your workflow to bring you into a new environment, where you can find the application you want and launch it. Windows 10 brings back the Start Menu, but with a twist. Rather than just the traditional start menu of Windows 7, a familiar start menu can now also be populated with Live Tiles from the Windows Store apps. But this is only on the desktop. Tablets will get a different interface, as will the phone. To quote Microsoft: “We’re not talking about one UI to rule them all – we’re talking about one product family, with a tailored experience for each device.”

If Windows 10 is going to be successful, the tailored experience for each device is the key. The new start menu is just the first step towards that, and is especially important for the enterprise and desktop user.

The next interface change, was also announced at BUILD, and that is the ability to run Windows Store apps within a window on the desktop. This is a big change for two reasons. First, on a desktop, full screen Windows Store apps are less useful. Generally you have multiple things going on at once, and to have a single app take over the screen is generally not ideal. The usefulness of Windows Store apps has instantly been increased. The other reason it is important is for developer buy-in. Even though Windows 8 did not light the world on fire as far as unit sales, it is still on hundreds of millions of devices. However the majority of those devices are going to be traditional desktops. Writing an application for the Windows Store practically precluded use by the majority of the user base. By putting these apps on the desktop, it opens up a much larger potential audience. Microsoft needs the Windows Store to be kick-started, and this is one way they can advance that goal.

Windows Snap was also debuted in Windows 8, and it allowed two Windows Store apps to be snapped open, with one taking about 70% of the screen and the other using 30%. For multitasking, it was certainly better than other mobile operating systems from 2012, but it was a long way from Windows 7. Windows 8.1 improved Snap, and allows more than two apps to be snapped open on the screen at any one time, and for the snap percentage to be changed. Windows 10 is now offering another update on Snap. Apps can now be snapped to all four corners, giving more real estate to each app than before. Snap was a good feature, and this is a further improvement on it.

Another long requested feature is now coming to Windows 10 – multiple desktops. Desktops can be designated for different purposes, and users will be able to easily switch among them. There is a small but vocal group who have been asking for this for a long time, and they have finally been rewarded.

Sticking with the enterprise features, data security is always a big concern. Multifactor authentication based on smart cards or tokens is now built right into the OS. Bitlocker is still around, offering full device encryption, but Windows 10 now offers application and file level data separation, which can enable data protection even if that data leaves the device. Though they have not gone into a lot of detail as to how that is done, it likely leverages some of Microsoft’s other technologies such as Active Directory Rights Management Services.

Future updates to Windows should be easier for IT workers as well due to a new in-place upgrade option. And to go along with that, businesses will be able to choose whether to jump on the fast update consumer track, or lock down the updates to only deliver critical security patches, or somewhere in the middle. And this approach does not need to be at the enterprise level – different groups of machines can follow different update patterns depending on how critical the infrastructure is.

Windows 10 also supports Mobile Device Management (MDM) tools, as well as the traditional Active Directory and System Center approach to device management. This should be a boon to any small to mid-sized business who does not want to invest in a comprehensive solution.

Finally, the new Windows Store will allow volume license purchasing from within the store. Companies can re-claim licenses, and re-issue them to new devices. They can also create a custom store for their own computers which can include Windows Store and company-owned apps in the same interface.

Microsoft is trying hard to win back the Enterprise customers who have been turned off by Windows 8. Obviously we will have to wait and see if they are successful, but there is a lot to like in this new release. The “one UI to rule them all” model of Windows 8 has been put out to pasture, and instead replaced with a single platform, with a UI to suit the device it is running on.

Not all was bad about Windows 8, and it is good to see that some of the good ideas have been taken and molded into the new OS, but also tweaked at the same time to make them work better for the device they are on. The Universal App is a powerful idea, and one that has yet to make a big splash so far, but if the WinRT framework can be updated to make it more powerful, then it would certainly add a lot of power to Windows 10. Unlike Win32, WinRT apps support high DPI by default, which is more and more important as we move to higher resolution displays on all sizes of devices. The ability to log in to any Windows PC and get your own custom look and feel, including all of your applications, and data, is a powerful feeling. They have all of the tools they need to do this across all devices now, and it is exciting to see a glimpse at what the future may hold.

Once we get the actual install files for Windows 10, we will be able to provide more coverage on this major release of Windows.

 

Flickr user: Michael Vroegop

The music-sharing service Grooveshark was sued by major record labels in 2011, and yesterday the hammer blow finally came down. A New York federal judge has ruled in favor of the music companies on just about every issue that came up in the lawsuit. Damages, and the scope of an injunction, are yet to be determined.

The 57-page opinion (PDF) penned by US District Judge Thomas Griesa certainly seems like the beginning of the end for Grooveshark. It isn't hard to rattle off names of the unauthorized music-sharing services—like Napster, Grokster, Kazaa, and Limewire—that have been dealt a death-blow by federal court rulings.

The case doesn't look like a close call. Grooveshark was hoping to be protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects online services from copyright lawsuits as long as they meet certain requirements, including responding to the takedown notices sent by copyright holders.

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Arduino

Arduino, maker of the open source hardware platform of the same name, is teaming up with a startup called Sharebot to sell a 3D printer for about $1,000.

Announced today, Materia 101 will be demonstrated at the Maker Faire in Rome this weekend. An on-sale date has not been revealed.

"The printer will be available only on the Arduino Store both as a kit and pre-assembled," the announcement said. "Official pricing of the device will be disclosed at a later date but the kit will sell for less than 600 EUR/800 USD, while the pre-assembled version will be available for less than 700 EUR/1000 USD."

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We're going to need more road again soon. Infrastructure sometimes has to chase California's vanishing water supply. USGS

In the public's mind, it's impossible to separate the climate from the weather. Each significant weather event seems to be accompanied by discussions of its implications for climate change; is it an example of what to expect, or clear indications that climate change isn't happening?

Often lost in the public discussion is that determining the role of climate change in a specific weather event is a challenging but interesting scientific problem. It's also one with immense practical implications. As regions rebuild after a damaging event, it's important that these efforts be informed by what we should expect in the future.

This month's edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society tackles this problem, termed "attribution," in a big way: 22 different studies of weather events rolled into a single report entitled "Explaining Extreme Events of 2013."

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Greetings, Arsians! Our partners from LogicBuy are back with a ton of deals for this week. The featured item is an Alienware 17 gaming laptop for $1,923 with free shipping. You save $375 off the regular price and get a $50 gift card! This beast of a laptop has a Core i7, 16GB of RAM, a 1080p screen, and a AMD Radeon R9 M290X with 4GB of video memory. It's perfect for school!

(OK, it's probably a little much for school, but it would be way more fun to bring this to class and frag things than pay attention to the lecture.)

Featured deal

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Microsoft talked briefly about the new features in its upcoming Windows 10 operating system, but it glossed over one thing that will surely be of great interest to sysadmins and developers alike: the further refinement of the Windows command line into a truly useful development and administration environment. Fortunately, engineer and blogger Rafael Rivera has spent some hands-on time with a technical preview, and he’s got a great post up explaining some of the new features—at least, as they stand right now.

The new Windows 10 command prompt options, from the current technical preview. Rafael Rivera

Rivera has a whole raft of additional screenshots demonstrating the additional command line features, but one of the simplest—and most anticipated—is proper text selection within command prompt windows. And we’re not just talking about Powershell, either—this is for every console window, including windows featuring good ol’ cmd.exe.

Previously, as anyone who’s dealt with a Windows command shell knows, selecting text at the prompt required a number of steps beyond simply clicking and dragging. You had to invoke a context menu, select "Mark" to tell Windows you wanted to mark text to select, and then lasso a selection box around what you wanted to pick. Text that spanned multiple lines was treated as not a single string, but rather multiple lines of text, with extraneous spacing and line breaks intact. This made for an annoying process—for more than basic selection, it was often easier to redirect whatever you were doing into a text file and do selection with a text editor.

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Thousands more people have been joining pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, ahead of what organisers hope will be the largest day of protests so far.

Kārlis Dambrāns

On Tuesday, eBay announced that in 2015 it would be splitting off its PayPal unit into a separate, publicly traded company. Investors lauded the move, sending eBay's stock price up nearly eight percent on the day, as of this writing.

PayPal has been an enormous player in the online payments and mobile payments sectors, but for years eBay's CEO John Donahoe resisted the clamor from investors to split PayPal into its own company. But after conferring with the company's board of directors, eBay has now changed its tune.

eBay acquired PayPal back in 2002, and it has been the company's fastest-growing segment, the Associated Press reported.

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OS X Yosemite as of the Public Beta. Andrew Cunningham

Not content to let some other company hog all the tens, MacRumors reports that Apple has just released the OS X Yosemite GM Candidate to developers using the new operating system. OS X 10.10 has been available to developers since it was unveiled at WWDC in June, and the release of a proposed "Golden Master" build suggests that Yosemite's fall release date will come sooner rather than later.

Note that a "GM Candidate" doesn't necessarily mean that this is the build Apple will release to the public later in the fall. It does indicate, however, that Apple has squashed the show-stopping bugs and that any future builds will contain minor patches rather than major changes. Apple has always released beta builds of work-in-progress operating systems to its registered developers, but Yosemite also brought with it the first public OS X beta program in about 14 years. Expanding its feedback pool beyond the developer community should hopefully mean that Yosemite is more stable and less buggy on day one than past OS X (and iOS) releases have sometimes been.

There's no word on when the GM build will be released to users of the OS X Yosemite Public Beta as an update, but we'd guess that Apple won't send it out before the official release date. Apple also sent out a Public Beta 4 build to users alongside the GM Candidate for developers—though it carries essentially the same build number as the developer build (14A379b, compared to 14A379a), Apple isn't labeling it as a "Golden Master" just yet.

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SAN FRANCISCO—At its Windows 10 event, Microsoft announced that the company will start a new beta program to give IT and enthusiasts early access to the next version of Windows. Beginning tomorrow, the Windows Ten Technical Preview for desktops and laptops will be available through the Windows Insider Program, with a Technical Preview of Windows 10 for servers following at a later date.

The company reinforced that this is not a version of Windows that everyone should run to download; it's an early release, not production quality, and should only be used by the technically able.

The company says that the initial version is oriented toward enterprise testers and users. Consumer-oriented features, such as the new Internet Explorer 12 interface, will emerge in early 2015, with the company planning a final release for around mid-2015.

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Don McCullough

Pennsylvania authorities suspect that two men accused of stealing mobile phones were monitoring law enforcement. Local media reported Tuesday that when they were arrested last month, one of the two suspects was carrying a camera-equipped drone that police saw flying over the Upper Saucon Township's police headquarters the day before the arrests.

The accused are Duane Holmes, 44, of North Bergen, and Chaviv Dykes, 20, of Newark. Police said they had $50,000 in mobile phones allegedly stolen from a Verizon Wireless store and other outlets that NJ.com said were lifted "during a string of smash-and-grab burglaries."

Police said footage from the drone they were reviewing did not contain images of the township's police station. However, the footage included still shots of I-495 in Union City heading toward the Lincoln Tunnel, and West 38th Street in Manhattan, CBS reported. Other footage from the drone was of shopping areas, leading CBS to suggest that the suspects were also using the drones to surveil their targets.

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Microsoft founder Bill Gates has said he is "optimistic" about increasing the treatment capacity for Ebola in West Africa.