Rajini Vaidyanathan speaks to people at a vigil in Ferguson, Missouri, for Michael Brown - the black teenager killed by police last week.

The BBC looks at what it is like to be a cyclist in Amsterdam and Delhi.

A study in Switzerland says that on average, one British person a fortnight travels to the city of Zurich for help to end their lives.

The parents of James Foley, the American journalist who was killed by Islamic State militants, have spoken to journalists about their loss.

The number of people in Japan known to have been killed in landslides, triggered by torrential rain, has risen to 39.

The BBC's Alastair Leithead reports from Los Angeles on how the police force changed after the riots there and what Missouri can learn from its experience.

Patrick Talbert

Dozens of UPS stores across 24 states, including California, Georgia, New York, and Nebraska, have been hit by malware designed to suck up credit card details. The UPS Store, Inc., is a subsidiary of UPS, but each store is independently owned and operated as a licensed franchisee.

In an announcement posted Wednesday to its website, UPS said that 51 locations, or around one percent of its 4,470 franchised stores across the country, were found to have been penetrated by a “broad-based malware intrusion.” The company recorded approximately 105,000 transactions at those locations, but does not know the precise number of cardholders affected.

UPS did not say precisely how such data was taken, but given the recent breaches at hundreds of supermarkets nationwide, point-of-sale hacks at Target, and other major retailers, such systems would be a likely attack vector. Earlier this month, a Wisconsin-based security firm also reported that 1.2 billion usernames and passwords had been captured by a Russian criminal group.

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The US box office has struggled compared to previous years during the traditional high point of the summer blockbuster season.

The history of human evolution has been completely rewritten with the discovery that modern human beings and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe for much longer than previously thought.

DonkeyHotey

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is going to have a fight on his hands if he tries to preempt state laws that limit the growth of municipal broadband networks.

Matthew Berry, chief of staff to Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai, argued today that the FCC has no authority to invalidate state laws governing local broadband networks. In a speech in front of the National Conference of State Legislatures, Berry endorsed states' rights when it comes to either banning municipal broadband networks or preventing their growth. He also argued that the current commission, with its Democratic majority, should not do something that future Republican-led commissions might disagree with.

"If the history of American politics teaches us anything, it is that one political party will not remain in power for perpetuity. At some point, to quote Sam Cooke, 'a change is gonna come,'" Berry said. "And that change could come a little more than two years from now. So those who are potential supporters of the current FCC interpreting Section 706 [of the Telecommunications Act] to give the Commission the authority to preempt state laws about municipal broadband should think long and hard about what a future FCC might do with that power."

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401(k) 2012

On Wednesday, reddit banned a recently created subreddit posted by a brazen new US dollar counterfeiting operation touting high-quality “supernotes." Such advertisements moved within the past few weeks from sketchy online forums to reddit, according to well-known security journalist Brian Krebs.

Krebs wrote Wednesday that such sites “sell everything from stolen credit cards and identities to hot merchandise, but until very recently one illicit good I had never seen for sale on the forums was counterfeit US currency.” Similar links and ads have turned up in posts on various other websites in recent months.

When contacted by Ars, Erik Martin, reddit's general manager, said that this was the first he’d heard about this subreddit, but he seemed unconcerned. “We’re not a marketplace. It’s not like we’re handling the transactions for whatever this is,” Martin said. “If we get a request to remove it, we will remove it. It’s a subreddit no one goes to.”

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In early July, a group of cyber criminals released a modified version of the Gameover ZeuS banking trojan, using a technique known as a domain generation algorithm (DGA) to make disrupting the botnet more difficult.

But the same technique has made it easier for researchers to track the botnet's activity, and they watched as it quickly grew from infecting hundreds of initial systems to 10,000 systems in two weeks. Then a funny thing happened: Gameover ZeuS stopped growing. Now, almost six weeks after researchers first detected signs of the program, the group behind the botnet keeps the infections between 3,000 and 5,000 systems, according to security services firm Seculert.

The group undoubtedly wants to grow the botnet again because cyber crime is typically a game of large numbers. When a coalition of law enforcement officials and industry players took down the botnet in late May, it comprised some 500,000 to 1 million machines. Now they're laying low, Seculert CTO Aviv Raff told Ars.

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Some of Kinshasa's residents have big aspirations for DR Congo - so much so that they have started renaming districts with the names of faraway capital cities whose style they admire.

Intel is facing an uphill battle in the mobile space from a marketshare perspective, but there's an additional challenge: the bulk of mobile apps are compiled targeting ARM based CPU cores, not x86. With the launch of Medfield on Android, Intel introduced a binary translation software layer to enable running existing ARM based Android apps on x86. Binary translation is a useful fix for enabling compatibility but it does come with a performance and power penalty. Enabling native x86 applications is ultimately the goal here, BT is just used as a transitional tool. 

As far as I can tell, none of the big game engines (Unity, Unreal Engine) were ported to x86 on Android. As a result, any game that leveraged these engines would be ARM code translated to run on x86. This morning Intel and Unity Technologies announced a native x86 version of the Unity game engine for Android. Selected developers have access to the x86 version today, and it'll be made available to everyone else by the end of the year. There's no charge for the update. Note that this only applies to the Android Unity port, the engine under Windows and all Windows tools are already obviously compiled for x86.

Intel's press release mentions support for both Core and Atom families. I clarified with Intel that the Core reference mainly applies to any Core M (Broadwell Y or Skylake Y) Android tablets, and not a push into Core based smartphones. 

Intel is also working on enabling other game engines, but we'll have to wait to see those announcements. 

One problem with Linux has been its implementation of system calls. As Andy Lutomirski pointed out recently, it's very messy. more>>

Author Euny Hong talks to the BBC about how South Korea is conquering the world through pop culture.

Spam be gone!

To work at Ars is to interact constantly with Twitter, both as a source for developing news and also as a way to goof off with coworkers and other tech journalists (folks who follow the Ars staff on Twitter should be more than familiar with our long-winded late night multi-Tweet antics). But as with any electronic medium, spam on Twitter is a nagging problem—Twitter’s real-time messaging means crafty spammers can blast their messages out to large numbers of people before getting hammered by spam reports.

However, several months back, Twitter went on the offensive against spammers, rolling out a set of anti-spam features collectively referred to as "BotMaker." In a blog post today, Twitter explained that the various components of BotMaker have been operational for about six months, and in that time Twitter has recorded a significant drop in tweetspam—up to 40 percent by its internal metrics.

Twitter’s real-time nature poses trouble for a traditional monolithic spam-checking system that might add many seconds onto the delivery of a tweet to followers. Rather than maintaining such a monolithic system (something akin to SpamAssassin, a widely deployed e-mail anti-spam application), Twitter’s BotMaker lets Twitter engineers quickly establish simple sets of conditional rule-based actions (which they call "bots"—hence "BotMaker") and apply them to tweets both during and after the posting process.

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Modern humans and Neanderthals co-existed in Europe 10 times longer than previously thought, a study suggests.

Don McCullough

This week, a Vancouver man called the police about a drone flying near his 36th-story window, marking the latest incident in a string of such reports in recent months, police say.

On Sunday evening, Conner Galway tweeted:

There was just a neon drone, only a couple of feet away from my patio, camera pointed right at me. The future is creepy.

—Conner Galway (@Conner_G) August 18, 2014

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Police clash with protesters in Ferguson.

The City of Ferguson, Missouri, in turmoil following last week's shooting death of an unarmed African-American teen by a white police officer, is "exploring" whether to outfit its police force with pager-sized surveillance cams in patrol cars and on officers' vests that record everything the officer is seeing.

The city announced the idea Tuesday, days after rioting, looting, and mass protests commenced following the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was killed on August 9. There are various accounts of what led to the teen's death. Surveillance cameras could have helped the authorities figure out what prompted a police officer to fire on Brown as many as six times.

"We are exploring a range of actions that are intended for the community to feel more connected to and demonstrate the transparency of our city departments," the city said the day before Attorney General Eric Holder arrived Wednesday to flesh out the situation for himself.

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