The Indonesian government has banned the jihadist group Islamic State, but support for the organisation is still evident in meetings and demonstrations across the nation.

Version:next-20140901 (linux-next) Released:2014-09-01

Residents and fighters in Amerli are celebrating the end of a two-month siege and the withdrawal of IS militants from around the town.

The parents of Ashya King are expected to appear in a court in Madrid in Spain on Monday morning. The five-year-old was taken from hospital in the UK against medical advice.

The BBC's Ian Pannell reports from Turkey's border with Syria where he met a man who helped smuggle foreign fighters cross the border.

Jenn Deering Davis

By now, you have probably heard about the digital exposure, so to speak, of nude photos of as many as 100 celebrities, allegedly taken from their Apple iCloud backups (and, it appears, based on the image analysis done by some, from other cloud services). Some of the images were posted to the “b” forum on 4Chan. Over the last day, an alleged perpetrator has been exposed by redditors, although the man has declared his innocence. The mainstream media have leapt on the story and have gotten reactions from affected celebrities including Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and model Kate Upton.

Someone claiming to be the individual responsible for the breach has used 4Chan to offer explicit videos from Lawrence’s phone, as well as more than 60 nude “selfies” of the actress. In fact, it seems multiple "b-tards" claimed they had access to the images, with one providing a Hotmail address associated with a PayPal account, and another seeking contributions to a Bitcoin wallet. Word of the images launched a cascade of Google searches and set Twitter trending. As a result, 4Chan/b—the birthplace of Anonymous—has opened its characteristically hostile arms to a wave of curious onlookers hoping to catch a glimpse of their favorite starlets’ naked bodies. Happy Labor Day!

This breach appears different from other recent celebrity "hacks" in that it used a near-zero-day vulnerability in an Apple cloud interface. Instead of using social engineering or some low-tech research to gain control of the victims' cloud accounts, the attacker basically bashed in the front door—and Apple didn't find out until the attack was over. While an unusual, long, convoluted password may have prevented the attack from being successful, the only real defense against this assault was never to put photos in Apple's cloud in the first place. Even Apple's two-factor authentication would not have helped, if the attack was the one now being investigated.

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An alien world, extraterrestrial exploration, and memory wipes on Mars sound like the makings of a Hollywood movie. Instead, it's a major IT project.

After a decade of exploring, the Opportunity rover's computer system will get a reboot to reformat its flash memory and eliminate its reliance on malfunctioning memory cells. In the last month alone, the rover has had to reset its systems a dozen times, a process that can take a day or two, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

"Worn-out cells in the flash memory are the leading suspect in causing these resets," John Callas, project manager for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project, said in a statement. "The flash reformatting is a low-risk process, as critical sequences and flight software are stored elsewhere in other non-volatile memory on the rover."

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Tavurvur erupting in 2008. Taro Taylor

Last week, the eyes of volcanologists—and presumably a few nervous pilots—were fixed on Iceland. But unexpectedly, the volcanic eruption that made headlines happened on the other side of the world, in Papua New Guinea.

Before dawn on August 29, Tavurvur—a stratovolcano on the island of New Britain, in Papua New Guinea’s eastern archipelago—awoke spectacularly after two decades of dormancy. The eruption shot lava hundreds of meters into the air, while the accompanying ash cloud reached 18km, almost double the cruising altitude of most commercial aircraft. As a precaution, several flights from Australia were rerouted around the volcano.

The explosions at Tavurvur have since died down somewhat, though as of Sunday the volcano was still ejecting material from its crater. The activity may still intensify. Regardless of how the eruption proceeds, this is a volcano worth remembering.

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The BBC's Gabriel Gatehouse reports from the besieged town of Amerli, which was liberated by Iraqi and Kurdish forces on Sunday.

Satellite view of Southern California and Nevada as of June. NASA/Earth Observatory

In a good year, the management of water resources in the American West is contentious. When a drought hits, most everyone feels it, and this year is certainly no exception. The notion of sustainability in water-strapped places isn’t much more complicated than balancing a checking account. And the budget projections aren’t exactly encouraging.

The last thing this situation needs is a decrease on the supply side. Unfortunately, precipitation in the Southwestern US is projected to decline as a result of anthropogenic climate change. Double unfortunately, the last century isn’t even a very good baseline for the region’s climate without climate change. Records from things like tree rings show drier periods in the past. A recent study led by Cornell’s Toby Ault attempts to pull this all together to improve our understanding of future drought risk in the region.

The worst US droughts of the 20th century were the 1930s “Dust Bowl” in the central US and the 1950s in the Southwest. In the past, the Southwest has averaged one or two of these almost-decade-long droughts per century, but there have also been droughts longer than anything in the historical record—droughts lasting several decades.

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Following on from part one, Wired.co.uk concludes our discussion of all thingsDragon Age: Inquisition  with executive producer Mark Darrah and creative director Mike Laidlaw. Here, the creators cover how players will continue their epic stories across console generations, upping the difficulty while giving gamers more control, and how the critical reception of the last game impacts the team's newest.

With Inquisition making the leap to PS4 and Xbox One, which lack backwards compatibility, how will people's past games be integrated?

Mike Laidlaw: We recognized that a core problem we were going to face is that there will be a big block of people who have jumped from Xbox 360 to Xbox One, or PS3 to PS4. We started some early explorations about how we could do that. What we realized very quickly was that an external solution was the best way to do things. So we built something called the Dragon Age Keep, which is currently in beta. It allows you to build up three-to-five world-states. You craft them to say "this is a world where Alistair is King and the Warden was a Daelish elf, etc," covering the events of Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2. You can build it up either through an interactive story, a bit like Pottermore.

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Gencon bills itself as the world's largest gaming convention. It's four days devoted to RPGs, tabletop games, card games, dice games, miniatures games, foam swords, and cosplay. (But no—well, very few—console or computer games.)

I, along with 50,000 other folks, attended this year's bash located in downtown Indianapolis. It was my first true nerd con, and I spent 4,000 words describing the wonderful weirdness of it, but words alone can't do justice to a spectacle as big as this one.

Without further ado, then, here are the images that best summed up my own Gencon experience. (If you want to see more, including the performers in a has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed nerd burlesque, click over to my feature). Click on any image to enlarge.

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The Pakistani army has stepped in to remove anti-government protesters from state TV headquarters in Islamabad, after they stormed the building, taking it off air.

The police are to be given new powers to seize the passports of terrorist suspects and stop British jihadists from returning to the UK, David Cameron has said.

As negotiators meet in Minsk to discuss the Ukraine crisis, Russia's President Vladimir Putin says the process of direct negotiations is "the beginning of a very important process".

Thomas Hawk

OAKLAND, CA—Documents released last week by the City of Oakland reveal that it is one of a handful of American jurisdictions attempting to upgrade an existing cellular surveillance system, commonly known as a stingray.

The Oakland Police Department, the nearby Fremont Police Department, and the Alameda County District Attorney jointly applied for a grant from the Department of Homeland Security to "obtain a state-of-the-art cell phone tracking system," the records show.

Stingray is a trademark of its manufacturer, publicly traded defense contractor Harris Corporation, but "stingray" has also come to be used as a generic term for similar devices.

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Horseball, a mix of rugby and basketball, was invented in France in the 1970s, and now there are attempts to get it into the Olympics, as the BBC's Ollie Williams reports.

There are already animation studios in Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, but only a very limited number of good schools teach art and animation techniques on the African continent.

Trinitite specimens. mseery

Four months ago, Ars Technica sent me out to Alamogordo, New Mexico to be present at the unearthing of a landfill that was long-rumored to hold a trove of Atari games, dumped at the site after the video game crash of 1983. As I was preparing for the trip, my coworkers and I chatted about the event in the editors' IRC channel.

”When you’re hanging out in the trash dump be sure to look out for Trinitite,” automotive editor Jonathan Gitlin told me.

”What’s Trinitite?” I asked. He explained that it was a type of radioactive glass that formed during the first test of the first nuclear bomb in 1945. I did a quick Google search and understood (somewhat incorrectly, more on that later) that collecting and selling Trinitite had been made illegal long ago. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for the murky green or red glass when I was in Alamogordo, and I finished booking my motel room.

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ASRock has been one of the few motherboard vendors to focus on mini-PCs targeting the HTPC and portable gaming markets. Starting from the ION-based nettop days, they have consistently refreshed the mini-PC lineup in sync with Intel's product cycle. We have been reviewing members of their CoreHT lineup (rechristened as VisionHT last year) since the Arrandale days, but today, we are focusing on their gamer-targeted mini-PCs. The VisionX lineup marked the departure from NVIDIA to AMD for the discrete GPU component, and their Haswell version, the VisionX 420D combines a Core i5-4200M with an AMD Radeon R9 M270X. Read on to see how the mini-PC fares under both gaming and HTPC workloads.