Office supply retailer Staples is investigating a possible breach of its systems following reports from the banking industry of fraudulent credit and debit card transactions at stores in the northeastern United States.

On Tuesday, the company acknowledged that a breach may have occurred and that it had contacted the appropriate law enforcement agencies. The retailer declined to provide further details.

“Staples is in the process of investigating a potential issue involving credit card data and has contacted law enforcement,” a spokesperson said in a statement sent to Ars. “If Staples discovers an issue, it is important to note that customers are not responsible for any fraudulent activity on their credit cards that is reported on a timely basis.”

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Monica Lewinsky addressing the Forbes Under 30 Summit in Philadelphia, PA. Forbes Under 30 Summit

In a speech given at the Forbes Under 30 Summit Monday entitled "Monica Lewinsky and the Internet's Reputation Shredder," Monica Lewinsky announced her intent to draw attention to the "compassion deficit" and "empathy crisis" that have arisen from the way people are treated on the Internet. Over the course of her 25-minute address, Lewinsky recapped her own treatment online following her affair with President Clinton and how it is linked to modern online abuse.

News of her affair was first posted to the Drudge Report in 1998, and Lewinsky called herself "Patient Zero" for having her reputation "destroyed on the Internet." Lewinsky recounted how, among the news articles, comments, and e-mails traded at the time of the scandal, "there was a rotation of worsening name calling… people referring to me as tramp, slut, whore, tart, bimbo, floozy." She said repeatedly that at the time of the scandal, she wished she could die, and she namechecked a number of musical artists who now use her name as shorthand for sexual indiscretion.

But worse than the damaging language was its limitless potential for circulation, Lewinsky said. "The experience of shame and humiliation online is different than offline. There is no way to wrap your mind around where the humiliation ends. There are no borders. It honestly feels like the whole world is laughing at you." She tied the inner workings of online abuse to Tyler Clementi, an 18-year old student who committed suicide after his roommate covertly filmed and posted video of Clementi kissing another man.

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The Invizbox Tor router hardware—the same as Anonabox, but with truth in advertising. Invizbox

Last week, Ars reported on the story of Anonabox, an effort by a California developer to create an affordable privacy-protecting device based on the open source OpenWRT wireless router software and the Tor Project’s eponymous Internet traffic encryption and anonymization software. Anonabox was pulled from Kickstarter after accusations that the project misrepresented its product and failed to meet some basic security concerns—though its developers still plan to release their project for sale through their own website.

But Anonabox’s brief campaign on Kickstarter has demonstrated demand for a simple, inexpensive way to hide Internet traffic from prying eyes. And there are a number of other projects attempting to do what Anonabox promised. On Kickstarter competitor Indiegogo there’s a project called Invizbox that looks almost identical to Anonabox—except for the approach its team is taking to building and marketing the device.

Based on the Chinese-built WT 3020A—a small wireless router that appears identical to the box that was the basis for the Anonabox—the Invizbox will have similar specs to the cancelled Kickstarter: 64 megabytes of RAM, 16 megabytes of Flash storage, and the Linux-based OpenWRT embedded OS. The main difference, according to the Dublin, Ireland-based team behind Invizbox (Elizabeth Canavan, Paul Canavan, and Chris Monks) is that their Tor router will be locked down better—and they won’t pretend that they’re using custom-built hardware.

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Broadcom today unveiled DSL chips that use the new G.fast standard to deliver up to 1Gbps broadband over copper phone lines.

That doesn't mean everyone who has DSL will suddenly get a huge speed upgrade. G.fast, a standard from the International Telecommunication Union, is intended for fiber-and-copper networks in which fiber delivers data close to homes and copper takes it the rest of the way. These networks are cheaper to build than fiber-to-the-home because they reuse existing copper, but thus far they haven't been able to match the gigabit speeds of fiber-only service.

Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs and the British telecom company BT are both testing G.fast, with the latter using Huawei technology. Broadcom is now joining the party with technology it plans to sell to Internet service providers, who would then roll it out to their customers. The chips will power both the back-end technology needed to deliver high speeds as well as home gateway systems for Internet users.

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We've written before about Windows 10's new updating policy, and today we're seeing the real-world result for the first time. The Windows 10 Technical Preview, build 9849, is being updated to build 9860. That update will roll out automatically to members of the Windows Insider program, and it will be delivered through Windows Update.

The operating system upgrade is a little more heavyweight than a regular hotfix; systems will need to reboot to finish installation, and Microsoft says that the reboot will take longer than normal.

The major feature of the new build is that it contains the first iteration of Windows 10's notification center. At the moment, it's a simple collection of historic notifications. Microsoft says that future builds will add more capabilities to the notification center, such as the ability to take actions in response to notifications.

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Neil R

The Supreme Court is weighing in on another Fourth Amendment privacy case, this one concerning a Los Angeles ordinance requiring hotels to surrender guest registries to the police upon request without a warrant.

The justices agreed (PDF) Monday to hear Los Angeles' appeal of a lower court that ruled 7-4 that the law—meant to combat prostitution, gambling, and even terrorism—was unconstitutional. The law (PDF) requires hotels to provide the information—including guests' credit card number, home address, driver's license information, and vehicle license number—at a moment's notice. Several dozen cities, from Atlanta to Seattle, have similar ordinances.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) welcomed the high court's intervention in Los Angeles v. Patel. 

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A class action lawsuit against Google, Apple, and other tech companies that struck deals to not "cold call" each other's employees may be on the verge of wrapping up. Similar cases against Oracle and Microsoft have just been filed.

The suit against Microsoft (PDF) says that in 2007, the company struck a deal with several other tech companies not to pursue employees who were at "manager level or above," even if the candidate reached out.

Such behavior is considered illegal by the Department of Justice. In 2010, the DOJ reached settlements with Google, Apple, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar, under which they had to stop abiding by such agreements. Later, a class-action civil suit was filed, claiming that more than 60,000 engineers working for those companies had their wages suppressed by the agreements. The defendant companies agreed to pay $324 million to settle that case, but the judge rejected the settlement as insufficient. Rather than make a larger offer, the defendant companies have appealed her decision.

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Naval vessels searching Swedish waters for a suspected foreign submarine are focusing on a bay near the capital, Stockholm.

Maik Meid

The Irish Ministry of Finance has announced that it will begin studying a type of new, lower tax rate on intellectual property-earned profits as a way to incentivize tech companies to do business on the Emerald Isle.

The new scheme, whose details have yet to be fully realized, would be called a “Knowledge Development Box.” This setup would allow tech companies—like Google—to pay a small percentage in taxes when they license intellectual property to Irish subsidiaries.

A week ago, the ministry announced that it will phase out its controversial (but legal) tax scheme known as the "Double Irish,” one tactic in the broader phenomenon known as “transfer pricing.” At present, such transfers effectively and legally reduce a company’s tax burden, often to near-zero.

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Today, a team of Polish researchers is reporting that it has re-established sensation and limited movements in a previously paralyzed patient. The technique involved both the transplantation of nerve fibers from the leg and a suspension of support cells obtained from the olfactory area of the brain. The results, while striking, only apply to a single patient; more work will need to be done to determine if the approach can work generally.

Spinal cord injuries are notoriously difficult to heal. Although there are nerve cells throughout the spinal cord, the majority of its function is performed by the long axons that extend up and down the length of the body. The axons transmit sensory signals to the brain and receive muscle commands back.

Injuries to the spinal cord sever these connections. The injured region generally forms a thick scar that inhibits the regrowth of axons, leaving regions below that point permanently severed from the brain. The result is paralysis and a lack of sensation. Attempts at therapies have focused on overcoming the effect of this scar. While we've learned a lot about the inhibition of nerve growth, what we've learned has not resulted in any significant successes.

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Cyrus Farivar

SAN FRANCISCO—“My… name… is… Ryan…”

In a world where most electric devices can talk and an increasing amount can listen and answer, a seemingly unassuming tablet speaking these words isn't at all impressive.

But this particular tablet wasn't replaying a recording or broadcasting some typed message. Instead, Ryan Hait-Campbell, the CEO for an Alameda-based company called MotionSavvy—signed just inches above the device as it sat flat on a table. Instantly, it interpreted American Sign Language (ASL) into written and spoken English. The tablet is also able to listen to speech and convert it into text. As Stemper looked up and smiled, the "Uni" had impressed again.

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US Bureau of Land Management

A Utah man was sentenced to a year probation, half of which must be served under house arrest, and fined $15,000 Monday after pleading guilty to stealing a fossilized dinosaur footprint believed to be 190 million years old.

Grand County Sheriff's Office The defendant, Jared Ehlers, 35, said he was "sorry" for unhinging the 150-pound sandstone slab in the Sand Flats Recreation Area of Southeastern Utah and dumping the three-toed print into the Colorado River.

"I don't have a lot to say," Ehlers said during sentencing before US District Judge Dale Kimball. "I'm just extremely sorry for a horrible decision that I made."

While on the Hell's Revenge trail, Ehlers saw that the footprint was loose. He pried it up and took it to his nearby Moab home. Federal authorities said he dumped the print after being questioned about the print. He pleaded guilty in July to a felony count of theft of a paleontological resource. [PDF]

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The 2014 Mac Mini has fewer internal components than before, which is good for Apple's manufacturing but bad for upgraders. iFixit

A few months back, we weighed the pros and cons of shrinking Apple's Mac Mini. Shrinking the computer has the obvious benefits of making it smaller and thus easier to fit in more places, but we feared it would come at the cost of upgradeability and reparability. A smaller Mini would need to solder more parts to the motherboard to save space, and it could give up niceties like the second 2.5-inch drive bay that make it a nice mini-server.

When Apple updated the Mini for the first time in two years at its product event last week, it looked like it stayed pretty much the same. The product dimensions on Apple's product pages are the same, and the outside certainly looks the same as it has since 2010 or so. Unfortunately, according to iFixit's teardown, the new Mini makes several changes that we were worried about, even though the dimensions are unchanged.

The bottom of the Mini no longer twists off to reveal easily accessible RAM slots. iFixit

In the 2010, 2011, and 2012 models, the bottom of the unit was relatively easy to twist and remove, giving users easy access to two RAM slots. In the 2014 model, the same panel must be pried off with a plastic tool, and an additional metal cover held in place with Torx Security screws must also be removed (iFixit notes that the Security screws are unusually small).

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Leo Reynolds

Geology rewards an active imagination. It gives us a lot of tantalizing clues about very different times and places in Earth’s history, leaving us to try to answer “Man, what would that be like?” One of the things that's tough to imagine involves changing something that most of us never give a second thought—the fact that compasses point north. That’s plainly true today, but it hasn’t always been.

What we call the “north” magnetic pole—the object of your compass’ affection—doesn’t need to be located in the Arctic (it noticeably wanders there, by the way). It feels equally at home in the Antarctic. The geologic record tells us that the north and south magnetic poles frequently trade places. In fact, the signal of this magnetic flip-flopping recorded in the seafloor was the final key to the discovery of plate tectonics, as it let us see how ocean crust forms and moves over time.

That the poles flip is interesting in itself, but “Man, what would that be like?” Does the magnetic pole slowly walk along the curve of the Earth over thousands of years, meaning your compass might have pointed to some part of the equator for long stretches of time? Do the poles weaken to nothing, disappearing for a while before re-emerging in the new configuration? Do they somehow flip in the blink of an eye? Given the number of species that use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate—especially for seasonal migrations—this is more than an academic curiosity.

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Player Attack

Update: In a post on the Code Avarice blog, Mike Maulbeck announced that he is stepping down from the company, and has sold his interest in it to fellow developer Travis Pfenning. The move is an effort to convince Valve that it "has no reason to harbor any more ill will towards the company, and maybe even if we can’t see Paranautical Activity restored [to Steam], at least future Code Avarice games may be allowed onto the platform."

After apologizing again for his intemperate tweet, Maulbeck noted that "my temper and tendency to use twitter to vent has been a consistent problem since I entered the games industry, and I just can’t do it. I don’t have the willpower necessary to be the 'face' of a company. If I do continue to work in games it’ll be as an anonymous 1 of 1000 at some shitty corporation, not the most public figure of a single digit sized team."

Original Story

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Fabian Picardo says the people of Gibraltar see their future with the UK, and being part of Spain is "not realistic".

A New Zealand appeals court has ruled that Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom must reveal his financial assets to the Hollywood studios that are suing him for pirating their movies.

It upholds a July decision by Justice Patricia Courtney, who ordered Dotcom to give up the information amid fears he was "asset-dumping" by supporting his newly founded Internet Party, according to the New Zealand Herald. He donated about $3.5 million of his own money to the Internet Party, The Guardian reports.

Dotcom won't have to make the list of assets public, just reveal it to the studios. The major motion picture studios have all sued Dotcom for copyright infringement in the US. The civil suit from Hollywood isn't the biggest legal headache Dotcom is facing, though; he's also wanted on extraordinary charges of criminal copyright infringement by US authorities. In February of next year, Dotcom will face an extradition trial over whether he must go to the US to face a trial.

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The logo on the back of the OnePlus One is of the number one, NOT the letter "i" for "invite-only." That becomes even truer next week when the device finally opens up to a wider pre-order pool. Sam Machkovech

Chinese smartphone startup OnePlus caught our attention in April with its high-end, low-price "One" model, which launched the following month in the form of a strange, invite-only sales system. Even we had to scrounge to secure a unit of our own, and while we enjoyed its price-to-performance ratio and its default use of the Cyanogenmod fork of Android, we weren't hot on what a pain it was to get the phone in our hands.

On Monday, the company finally responded with a long-awaited upgrade to its sales model. Starting October 27, interested shoppers will be able to pre-order a OnePlus One phone of their own, and the company has already opened a pre-pre-order site full of instructions and the ability to create a OnePlus account to speed the ordering process come next week.

A OnePlus blog post on Monday clarified that over 20,000 invites went out to interested shoppers through October, which gave the company confidence enough to expand its ordering system. Even so, the company still reminded shoppers of statements made by OnePlus director Carl Pei last month. "We have to be conservative and only produce the amount of devices we’re 100 percent sure will be sold," he wrote on the company's blog, explaining that the devices' minuscule profit margin will keep any initial pre-order campaign thin on supply.

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Before laughing off an electric Harley, read on. BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON—On June 18, 2014, Harley-Davidson shocked the motorcycle community by announcing an electric motorcycle prototype called Project LiveWire. The Project LiveWire teaser video showed a bike screaming down route 66, emitting a sound that vaguely resembled a turbine. I could barely believe what I saw, so I immediately spent time reading comments about LiveWire—naturally, the reaction was mixed. Some gave props to Harley-Davidson for thinking outside the box; others complained “this is no Harley."

The current trend for all-electric and hybrid vehicles is to assume a “quasi-futuristic,” sci-fi-infused look that pretty much leaves convention and tradition at the curb (think Nissan Leaf). Many automotive enthusiasts don’t see a lot of “soul” or “character” in these appliance vehicles. But enter Harley-Davidson, the company known for its shaking, rumbling, chrome-clad motorcycles that go beyond machinery and extend to a lifestyle. These bikes radiate tradition, heritage, and style. A Harley-Davidson is a Harley because it has a thumping, 45-degree, v-twin, air-cooled power plant breathing through pipes that emit a signature sound. Harley power must be transmitted to the rear wheel via a rubber belt, so now the company may also offer an electric bike. Really? The motorcycle community may need a little time to adjust. And as for my own curiosity about what it would be like to ride LiveWire, I had no idea I would find out just a few weeks later.

Next-generation design

The Project LiveWire engineering team uses all of the latest design, prototyping, and manufacturing expertise that Harley-Davidson developed over the last century of building v-twin motorcycles. I learned about how the LiveWire team engineered and built their ground-breaking electric bike when I talked with lead project engineer Ben Lund. Lund studied Mechanical Engineering and—as you'd expect—loves riding. He's got multiple motorcycles spanning dirt to street.

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The majority of the Chromebooks tend to have 16GB of onboard storage with some high-end models having twice that. For the intended usage where everything is done in the web, that is sufficient, but when you need local storage for offline occasions (e.g. when traveling), 16GB or 32GB will not get you far. There is always the option of carrying external storage to expand the internal storage, but there is another alternative: upgrading the internal SSD. Read on to find out how the upgrade is done and how MyDigitalSSD's Super Boot Drive M.2 2242 SSDs does in our Chromebook tests, as well as how it fares as a standard SSD.