The BBC's John Simpson speaks to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on his new book and his continued refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy.

A man who was in the church hostel in Lagos which collapsed has credited a table with saving his life.

Ivan David Gomez Aarce

China's military broke into Pentagon contractors' computer networks at least 50 times—hacks that threaten "to erode US military technical superiority," according to a federal investigation.

The Senate Arms Services Committee found that nearly two dozen intrusions were of the well-orchestrated "advanced persistent threat" variety. The yearlong probe [PDF] blamed the Chinese government for hacks targeting civilian transportation companies that the US military employs for the movement of troops and equipment. According to the investigation, hackers from the People's Liberation Army started in 2012 and put malware onto an airline's computers, stealing computer codes, e-mail, documents, and user accounts from firms the government declined to name.

"These peacetime intrusions into the networks of key defense contractors are more evidence of China's aggressive actions in cyberspace," said committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.)

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CloudFlare has developed a way to separate SSL from private crypto keys, making it easier for companies to use the cloud to protect their networks.

Content delivery network and Web security company CloudFlare has made a name for itself by fending off denial-of-service attacks against its customers large and small. Today, it's launching a new service aimed at winning over the most paranoid of corporate customers. The service is a first step toward doing for network security what Amazon Web Services and other public cloud services have done for application services—replacing on-premises hardware with virtualized services spread across the Internet.

Called Keyless SSL, the new service allows organizations to use CloudFlare’s network of 28 data centers around the world to defend against distributed denial of service attacks on their websites without having to turn over private encryption keys. Keyless SSL breaks the encryption “handshake” at the beginning of a Transport Layer Security (TLS) Web session, passing part of the data back to the organization’s data center for encryption. It then negotiates the session with the returned data and acts as a gateway for authenticated sessions—while still being able to screen out malicious traffic such as denial of service attacks.

In an interview with Ars, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince said that the technology behind Keyless SSL could help security-minded organizations embrace other cloud services while keeping a tighter rein on them. “If you decide you’re going to use cloud services today, how you set policy across all of these is impossible," he said. "Now that we can do this, fast forward a year, and we can do things like data loss prevention, intrusion detection… all these things are just bytes in the stream, and we’re already looking at them.”

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Eli Kari Gjengedal has broken the world record for continuous weather presenting, with 33 hours on screen.

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam. Verizon

No company has gone to greater lengths than Verizon in trying to stop the government from enforcing network neutrality rules.

Verizon is the company that sued to overturn the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order from 2010. Verizon won a federal appeals court ruling this year, overturning anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules and setting off a months-long scramble by the FCC to get enforceable rules into place.

Verizon has also been spending money to press its case with lawmakers. "An analysis by San Francisco-based data firm Quid found that Verizon alone spent $100 million to lobby Congress on net neutrality since 2009," NPR reported yesterday.

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A shale gas well being drilled in Louisiana. Daniel Foster

The primary public concern surrounding fracking—the fracturing of shale rock layers with hydraulic pressure to release the natural gas and oil they contain—has been the perceived risk to drinking water. After all, the water used to fracture the rock is laced with chemicals that enhance the process, and some of them are hazardous. While those chemicals haven’t really shown up in water wells, natural gas has. If natural gas isn’t identified and vented, it could collect in buildings and pose an explosion hazard—videos of garden hoses turned into flame-throwers have made the rounds.

But tying that natural gas to fracking projects isn’t as straight-forward as many assume since there are natural sources of methane as well. One group of researchers has been studying this question for several years, focusing on Pennsylvania, where the Marcellus Shale has been targeted by the natural gas industry. A controversial analysis the group performed concluded that natural gas in well water was more common near active natural gas production wells, indicating that much of the contamination was related to recent human activities rather than natural conditions.

The researchers also looked for hints of natural migration of fluids from the Marcellus Shale, which is deep underground, to the well water, which is taken from sources closer to the surface. By analyzing elements like chlorine and strontium, they identified the fingerprint of briney Marcellus fluid in some of the water wells, which pull from an aquifer where concentrations of those elements are much lower. They concluded that some of those fluids were present, casting doubt on the idea that the Marcellus Shale was too tight a seal to allow fluid to escape upward into drinking water. That work also indicated that some of the methane-contaminated wells seemed to be impacted by naturally occurring methane, but typically the ones close to natural gas production wells weren't.

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Yesterday evening Apple released OS X 10.9.5 to the general public, the fifth major update for OS X Mavericks. As usual, the update comes with a handful of fixes for user-facing features as well as a small pile of security updates. Many of these security patches are also available for OS X 10.7.5 and 10.8.5 in separate updates.

Like OS X 10.9.4, the update focuses on smaller problems that affect a subset of Macs. The new features include Safari 7.0.6, improved "reliability for VPN connections that use USB smart cards for authentication," and better reliability for connecting to file servers that use the SMB protocol. For businesses using OS X, the update fixes a problem that could keep system admins from "performing some administrative tasks successfully" on larger groups of Macs, and it also speeds up authentication "when roaming on 802.1x networks which use EAP-TLS."

Among the security updates are fixes for Bluetooth, CoreGraphics generally and the Intel graphics driver specifically, and OS X's version of OpenSSL among many others. The latter problems were fixed by updating from OpenSSL version 0.9.8y to 0.9.8za.

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There's an old saying in the real-estate business that the three most important things in a property are location, location and location. We can assume this is still true when it comes to real estate, but it also is increasingly true when it comes to Web applications. more>>

A little over four years ago, before I joined Ars Technica (and while I was working as a freelance writer), I started a Google Group called "Game Journalism Professionals." As I stated in an introductory post at the time, the group was intended as "a semi-private way to connect and talk" with colleagues based well outside my home base of Pittsburgh and whom I saw in person only a few times a year.

Yesterday, that group came under fire for being a secret clearinghouse where "elite" journalists discuss how best to collude on covering the video game industry to "shape industry-wide attitudes to events." In reality, the group was and is simply a place for business competitors (and journalists are definitely competitive!) to discuss issues of common professional interest.

Unfortunately, in the wake of initial attacks on game developer Zoe Quinn, I wrote one message to the group in which I said several things that I soon came to regret. In private conversation, we've all had the experience of throwing out ideas, only to realize after further thought that they weren't appropriate or productive—and life moves on. The bad ideas are forgotten. Thanks to the Internet, though, such conversations can now be archived and then dredged up for display to the public weeks or months later.

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iCloud Drive is now available on Windows, but not OS X. Andrew Cunningham

Apple officially released iCloud Drive yesterday as part of the iOS 8 update, but it came with a caveat: turning it on disables the "old" way of iCloud syncing, but OS X doesn't yet support iCloud Drive and won't until OS X Yosemite is released later this fall. If you use iCloud to sync application data between your phone, tablet, and desktop, this means you'll need to keep living with the more limited version of iCloud until Yosemite is out (or roll the dice and give the Public Beta a try).

If you're a Windows user with an iPhone, though, you can go ahead and pull the trigger on that iCloud Drive update now. Apple today released an updated version of the iCloud for Windows application that adds full support for iCloud Drive. Install the program and sign in, and iCloud Drive will appear in your user profile folder and your Favorites menu in Windows Explorer, much like Microsoft's own OneDrive cloud storage service. This is the first opportunity that Windows users will have to view and directly manipulate iCloud data, not counting the more limited capabilities of the iCloud.com Web apps, and it's a nice new addition for people who like iOS but don't care to use Macs.

Otherwise, iCloud for Windows continues to be more limited than iCloud on either iOS or OS X. It can sync with your Photo Stream and sync Safari bookmarks with either Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome, and if you have Outlook 2007 or later installed it will also offer to sync your iCloud mail, calendars, contacts, and reminders. However, it can't use iCloud Keychain to sync passwords, nor does it provide any kind of "Find My Device" functionality as it does in both iOS and OS X. You can't sync Notes data directly either, though that feature is accessible via iCloud.com.

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Left: The Note 3, Right: The Note 4. Ron Amadeo

Phablets are all the rage these days, and the originator of this market segment, the Galaxy Note Series, has a fresh update coming out soon. If you're interested in picking up the Galaxy Note 4, Samsung and friends will be happy to officially take your money starting tomorrow. Pre-orders for the Galaxy Note 4 start September 19, and delivery will come about a month after when the Note 4 releases on October 17.

If you need a quick refresher on the specs, the Note 4 is packing a 5.7-inch, 2560×1440 AMOLED display, 2.7GHz Snapdragon 805 processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, a 16MP camera, and a 3220 mAh battery.

The Note 4 will be available just about everywhere in the US. Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular have all signed up to sell it, and you can find it in Best Buy, Amazon, Costco, RadioShack, Sam’s Club, Target, and Walmart. Samsung says pricing and availability will vary by store, but it can't vary that much.

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The BBC's Jeremy Bowen has travelled with the Syrian army to the front line where forces are fighting what they call religious extremists.

A BBC documentary team has filmed hundreds of refugees being held back by French police as they attempt to board trucks and other vehicles heading to Britain from Calais.

Johan’s awesome overview of the Haswell-EP ecosystem showed that the server processor line from Intel is firmly in the track for DDR4 memory along with the associated benefits of lower power consumption, higher absolute frequencies and higher capacity modules. At that point, we all assumed that all Haswell-EP Xeons using the LGA2011-3 socket were DDR4 only, requiring each new CPU to be used with the newer generation modules. However thanks to ASRock’s server team, ASRock Rack, it would seem that there will be some Xeons for sale from Intel with both DDR3 and DDR4 support.

Caught by Patrick at ServeTheHome, ASRock Rack had released their motherboard line without much of a fuss. There is nothing strange about that in itself; however the following four models were the subject of interest:

A quick email to our contacts at ASRock provided the solution: Intel is going to launch several SKUs with a dual DDR3/DDR4 controller. These processors are available in eight, ten and twelve core flavors, ranging from 85W to 120W:

QVL CPUs for ASRock Rack EPC612D8T   E5-2629 v3 E5-2649 v3 E5-2669 v3 Cores / Threads 8 / 16 10 / 20 12 / 24 Base Frequency (GHz) 2.4 2.3 2.3 L3 Cache (MB) 20 25 30 TDP (W) 85 105 120

At the current time there is no release date or pricing for these DDR3 Haswell-EP processors, however it would seem that ASRock Rack is shipping these motherboards to distributors already, meaning that Intel cannot be far behind. It does offer a server team the ability to reuse the expensive DDR3 memory they already have, especially given the DDR4 premium, although the processor counts are limited.

CPU-World suggested that these processors have dual memory controllers, and we recieved confirmation that this is true. This could suggest that all Xeons have dual memory controllers but with DDR3 disabled. Note that these motherboards would reject a DDR4-only CPU as a result of their layout. It does potentially pave the way for combination DDR3/DDR4 based LGA2011-3 motherboards in the future. We have also been told that the minimum order quantity for these CPUs might be higher than average, and thus server admins will have to contact their Intel distribution network for exact numbers. This might put a halt on smaller configurations keeping their DDR3.

Source: ServeTheHome, ASRock Rack

Additional (9/25): We have been asked to make clear that these CPUs will not be on general sale for end-users. Only those companies with large minimum-order-quantities will be able to obtain the CPUs, and as a result these motherboards might find their way into complete servers only, rather than be up for sale individually. These are off-roadmap processors, not intended for general release.

Version:next-20140918 (linux-next) Released:2014-09-18

The Jewish community in Egypt is on the verge of disappearing - up until the 1950s, as many as 100,000 Jews called the country home - now, just 12 remain.

Tim Cook unveils iOS 8 at WWDC 2014. Megan Geuss

Apple has updated its privacy policy as part of the rollout of iOS 8, announcing that devices with the latest version of the operating system installed can no longer be accessed by the company itself.

Previously, as we reported in May 2014, if law enforcement came to Apple with a seized device and a valid warrant, it was able to access a substantial portion of the data already on an iPad or iPhone. But under the latest version of iOS, even that will be impossible.

"On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed under the protection of your passcode," the company wrote on its website Wednesday evening. "Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data. So it's not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8."

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Andrew Cunningham

The old Apple TV setup screen. Note the glassy button and its blue glow.

27 more images in gallery

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});The Apple TV's interface is only vaguely similar to the one on your iPhone or iPad, but inside the set-top box is the same hardware and software that runs the rest of the iDevices. Alongside iOS 8, Apple today introduced "Apple TV Software version 7.0," a fancy name for "the Apple TV's version of iOS 8."

The Apple TV's software was never as skeuomorphic and texture-soaked as iOS 6 was on the iPhone and iPad, but the old interface still used thicker fonts and glassy buttons. The new update tweaks the design to bring it in line with iOS 7, iOS 8, and the upcoming OS X Yosemite. Helvetica Neue Light is everywhere, and glassy buttons and faint blue glows are replaced by flat black-and-white buttons.

The new design is what you'll notice first, but the Apple TV picks up a few other iOS 8-related features, too. The box supports Family Sharing, the feature that lets family members with different Apple IDs share purchases with one another. There's a new Beats Music channel, which ties in to the streaming service Apple picked up when it bought Beats earlier this year. And AirPlay now works with other iDevices, even if they're not on the same Wi-Fi network—now, devices can form an ad-hoc wireless network and stream that way. We recommend using the Apple TV's built-in security features to keep strange iPhones from finding and streaming to your Apple TV without your consent.

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Mayor of Toronto Rob Ford has been diagnosed with a rare type of cancerous tumour.