Happy Anniversary.

Microsoft started running ads making fun of Siri last year to promote Windows 8 tablets. However, the Windows devices in those commercials were always mute—until now, Microsoft didn't have a virtual personal assistant of its own to answer back to Apple's service.

With this Windows Phone 8.1 ad, all that changes. The commercial pitches an iPhone 5S against a Lumia 635, and it shows off Microsoft's virtual assistant Cortana. The ad highlights something that Siri can't presently do: give clever reminders that are triggered by events (talking to a particular person, being near a particular store) rather than presenting mere dates and times.

The comparison is a little strange, however. The Lumia 635 and iPhone 5s are at opposite ends of the price spectrum, and it's a little unlikely that any putative buyers are actually directly comparing the two.

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GameStop has always been barely a single step up from a pawn shop with its practice of buying used games at low prices and selling them at ridiculous markups. Now, reports suggest that the massive brick-and-mortar game retailer is planning to enter another shady financial area by offering store-linked credit cards to customers at its thousands of locations.

Destructoid reports that it has "obtained photographs" of a purported brochure advertising a credit card tied to the retailer's existing PowerUp Rewards program. Signing up for the card nets customers anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 PowerUp Rewards Points (worth roughly $5 to $15 in value), according to the images, as well as benefits like "special financing offers." We'd expect that having a GameStop credit card would also provide Rewards Points for everyday purchases, but there's no mention of such a benefit in the report.

Destructoid's images show a healthy 26.99 percent APR for the card. That's well above the nationwide average of 13 to 16 percent, and it's also above the higher-than-normal rates charged by many other store-linked credit cards, which hover around the 22 percent range. And while Destructoid's sources say that "all PowerUp Rewards members are already pre-approved for the card," the materials themselves say that the card issuance is "subject to credit approval." Not that we suspect many people will be turned down for a card with such exorbitant interest charges.

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Mozilla in Europe

On Monday, the Mozilla Corporation announced that its last-minute April hire for interim CEO, Chris Beard, has been permanently appointed to the position. Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker confirmed the news in a blog post, stating that "the board has reviewed many internal and external candidates—and no one we met was a better fit."

Beard's Mozilla tenure began in 2004 and saw him eventually rise to chief innovation and chief marketing officer. He left the company in 2013 to become an "executive in residence" at Greylock Partners, an investment firm with a heavy focus on tech companies. His return to Mozilla in April came on the heels of Brendan Eich's controversial hire to the CEO position, which ended with Eich's resignation that month.

While both recent CEO hires came in the form of company veterans as opposed to outside hires, Beard's work included a wider spectrum of marketing and leadership roles, along with prior work with companies like Hewlett-Packard and Linuxcare. That's in contrast to Eich's engineer-first resume (lengthy and impressive as it is). Beard already has his hands full thanks to the company's increasing focus on Firefox OS as a viable smartphone alternative.

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The Brooklyn Bridge caper is nearly a week old, yet it's still a whodunit despite the New York Police Department invoking every digital age investigative technique in the book to crack what appears to be a low-tech prank that included kitchen cookware to pull off.

The hunt continued Monday.

Vandals performed a monster switcheroo of sorts last Tuesday and removed two giant American flags from atop the bridge's two locked 276-foot towers, replacing them with white flags. The bridge is one of the Big Apple's most heavily guarded landmarks. The culprits, who scaled cables in the wee hours of the night, did it all under the cover of darkness by employing tin cooking pans to blot out the lights while sparking terror fears in the process.

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DooFi

Attackers have figured out a new way to get Amazon's cloud service to wage potent denial-of-service attacks on third-party websites—by exploiting security vulnerabilities in an open source search and analytics application known as Elasticsearch.

The power of Backdoor.Linux.Ganiw.a was documented earlier this month by researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. Among other things, the trojan employs DNS amplification, a technique that vastly increases the volume of junk traffic being directed at a victim by abusing poorly secured domain name system servers. By sending DNS queries that are malformed to appear as if they came from the victim domain, DNS amplification can boost attack volume by 10-fold or more. The technique can be especially hard to block when distributed among thousands or hundreds of thousands of compromised computers.

Late last week, Kaspersky Lab expert Kurt Baumgartner reported that the DDoS bot is actively compromising Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) hosts and very possibly those of competing cloud services. The foothold that allows the nodes to be hijacked is a vulnerability in 1.1.x versions of Elastisearch, he said. The attackers are modifying proof-of-concept attack code for the vulnerability, indexed as CVE-2014-3120 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database, that gives them the ability to remotely execute powerful Linux commands through a bash shell Window. The Gani backdoor, in turn, installs several other malicious scripts on compromised computers, including Backdoor.Perl.RShell.c and Backdoor.Linux.Mayday.g. The Mayday backdoor then floods sites with data packets based on the user datagram protocol.

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Verizon Wireless

One of the most common reactions to Verizon's announcement that it will throttle the heaviest users of its "unlimited" 4G plans went something like this: "That's the last straw—I'm switching to T-Mobile!"

Unfortunately, switching to T-Mobile, AT&T, or Sprint won't protect you from getting throttled, even if the carrier is claiming to sell you "unlimited" data.

Let's take a look at the relevant passages in each carrier's terms and conditions. We'll start with the Verizon Wireless announcement last week:

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A lull in violence in Gaza is shattered as deadly explosions hit the Palestinian territory's main city and southern Israel.

An entrepreneur in Kyrgyzstan has converted a rusty old van into a mobile steam room.

The Lumia 1520 is currently the biggest Windows Phone, but at a mere 6 inches it could be dwarfed by future devices.

Before it has even delivered Windows Phone 8.1 to most users, Microsoft is readying its growing number of Windows Phone OEMs for the next release: Windows Phone 8.1 GDR 1.

Documents intended for the OEMs were accidentally made available on Microsoft's developer site for a short time, revealing details of what the patch will include. Though Microsoft has rectified the error, Paul Thurrott has posted a summary of what we should expect.

As with past platform updates, the release includes a mix of end-user features and behind-the-scenes improvements. The notable user-visible change is that the Start screen will support folders; drop one tile on top of another and it will form a folder, in much the same way as iOS and Android do. The Windows Store tile will also become live.

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Millions of Syrian children are caught up in the conflict

So far, Amazon's contribution to the great wide world of 3D printing, where you are limited only by your imagination and stash of printing filament, is bobbleheads.

Amazon has opened a 3D-printing marketplace, offering customers the ability to buy customized products and trinkets like earrings or figurines. To enable customization, Amazon has built a new interface on top of its normal product pages that allows buyers to tweak the look of different 3D products.

There are plenty of 3D print-to-order businesses already in existence, including Sculpteo, Shapeways, and iMakr. While some work just as an on-demand service for individual customers, others are marketplaces for artists' and designers' 3D-printed products that users can browse and buy, like an iPhone phonograph amplifier.

Looking more closely at Amazon's implementation, it's more like the marketplace model, with partnerships from 3D printing services like Mixee Labs, which specializes in bobblehead figurines. 3DLT, a 3D printing design company, is also participating in the new venture, though it has sold its products through Amazon since March.

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Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has scored three goals in an exhibition match to open a new stadium in Istanbul.

Meet GUSS, the little jeep that will follow you anywhere—if you happen to be a beacon-wearing Marine, that is. TORC Robotics

The Marine Corps is testing a robotic version of its micro-truck, the Internally Transportable Vehicle (ITV), that can autonomously drive itself across rough terrain to carry supplies and ammunition for Marines in the field and evacuate the wounded. Called the Ground Unmanned Support Surrogate, or GUSS, the vehicle was developed in a collaboration between the US Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, Virginia Tech University, and TORC Robotics.

As part of the ongoing Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) international naval exercise, the Marine Corps tested GUSS on Oahu at the US Army’s Kahuku Training Area. The vehicle can follow someone wearing a beacon at a predetermined distance or be dispatched to a waypoint by remote control. If it gets stuck, a human can either use a robotic controller to take direct control of the vehicle or jump into its driver’s seat and throw a switch to take control. According to a report from Fox, the Naval Surface Warfare Center and Marine Corps both rated the vehicle’s performance as good, particularly in simulations of casualty evacuations, as demonstrated in the following video:

The GUSS autonomous vehicle in action.

This isn’t the GUSS system’s first RIMPAC appearance. A different version of the system, based on a six-wheeled off-road vehicle, was tested during the 2010 RIMPAC exercise. GUSS and the ITV it is based on are small enough to be carried on a Marine Corps Chinook helicopter or Osprey tilt-rotor. More development work is required on the GUSS robotics system, which could be used on other vehicle “platforms,” but the Navy and Marine Corps believe that a version of it could be deployed within the next five years.

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Version:3.15.7 (stable) Released:2014-07-28 Source:linux-3.15.7.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.15.7.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.15.7.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.15.7

Version:3.14.14 (longterm) Released:2014-07-28 Source:linux-3.14.14.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.14.14.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.14.14.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.14.14

Version:3.10.50 (longterm) Released:2014-07-28 Source:linux-3.10.50.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.10.50.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.10.50.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.10.50

Version:3.4.100 (longterm) Released:2014-07-28 Source:linux-3.4.100.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.4.100.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.4.100.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.4.100

Just over a month ago, AMD and their partner Raptr pushed out the first version of their video recording Game DVR utility, which ships as a part of AMD’s second-party sourced Gaming Evolved Client. Last month’s release saw the initial take on this feature in beta form, which was a generally positive experience that proved the core technology worked, though not without some rough edges that remained to be cleaned up. Since then the Raptr team has been further working the Game DVR function as part of a broader client update, culminating in today’s release of version 4.0 of the Gaming Evolved Client.

Ahead of today’s client release Raptr gave us some time to spend with the forthcoming update, and while the Game DVR function is still officially in beta as version 4.0, we can briefly report that AMD and the Ratpr team have made good progress in just the last month. In the earlier beta of the Game DVR function – now dubbed Game Video Recorder, or GVR – we encountered both compatibility and image quality issues, and in the case of the latter the problem has been fully resolved in our test suite. The one game we were having a problem with on the previous client, Thief, now records with the correct gamma. All other games that we’ve had a chance to test (our complete benchmark suite and then some) are similarly correct.

Game compatibility however is still hit & miss. GEC will only enable recording for games it can detect – this essentially serving as a whitelist of sorts – and it needs to be able to both detect the installation of a game and its launch. Of the dozen games we’ve tried, all of these games are on the compatibility list and their installations are detected, but GEC stubbornly can’t detect the launch of Bioshock Infinite and hence can’t record it. The actual recording process itself is rather generic and Bioshock is supposed to be supported, so this would seem to expose some weaknesses in GEC’s launch detection process rather than a lack of (intended) support.

Otherwise our other 11 games were detected just fine. And indeed the Raptr team is claiming that they now support 5000 games, versus what Raptr claims is 169 for NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience (a claim NVIDIA strongly disagrees with since they don't even use whitelists). In any case, at 5000 games we have no way to fully validate this claim – and meanwhile we’d note that GeForce Experience worked with all 12 of our test games out of the box – but it’s worth pointing out that for technical reasons it’s important for GEC to support so many games. Since GEC lacks a fallback measure equivalent to GeForce Experience’s desktop capture mode and doesn’t officially support adding unsupported games, a large supported games list is necessary in this case to enable recording of as many games as possible.

Along with the under the hood updates to the GVR function, Raptr has also given the feature a UI tweak from the beta. Of particular note, the always-on (Replay) and on-demand (Record) functions have been separated from each other, allowing them to be easily enabled and disabled separately from each other. GVR’s settings pane has also been tweaked for 4.0, with image quality settings being excised to their own tab for space. Finally the in-game overlay HUD icons for the GVR functionality has also been overhauled to make it clearer when the Record and Replay functions are in use and how to use them, with the HUD being hideable when not in use.

Finally, with the release of the 4.0 client the Raptr team is looking to parlay the GVR functionality into their larger social networking ambitions, with the final feature addition of the new client being a dedicated community replay showcase. The replay share feature allows for replays to be uploaded to YouTube and simultaneously listed in the Raptr community showcase, complete with comments and hashtags. The built-in video uploading is fairly clever – many, if not most of these recordings will be destined for YouTube – though I’m not sure how frequently gameplay videos are uploaded directly to YouTube without editing (something that notably Sony included as part of their replay sharing package on the PS4).

The Gaming Evolved Client 4.0 update will be released later today, and should be available both as an automatic client update and as a download from AMD's Gaming Evolved Client website.

The launch of the QNAP TS-x51 series was covered in detail last month. Its introduction has revitalized the premium NAS market for SOHO and power users by providing a powerful enough alternative to the Atom D270x-based NAS units. The 22nm Celeron J1800 in the TS-x51 is a SoC (obviates the necessity for a platform controller hub) and brings a revamped Atom microarchitecture (Silvermont) to the NAS market. Does this make the TS-x51 perform better and consume lower power compared to its predecessors in the same class? Read on for our review of the 4-bay TS-451 to find out.

At least 38 people have been killed in clashes between troops loyal to the Libyan government and Islamist fighters in the city of Benghazi, officials say.