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In District Court on Wednesday, Hunter Moore, the notorious operator of a now-deduct revenge porn website called “IsAnybodyUp.com,” was sentenced to 30 months in prison on charges of computer hacking and identity theft.

Moore’s site posted nude and/or embarrassing photos of people without their consent, often along with the subjects’ names and other personal information. The site became known as a “revenge porn” website, as jilted exes submitted photos out of revenge. Earlier this year, Moore also pleaded guilty to paying co-conspirator Charles Evans up to $200 per week to steal nude photos from victims by accessing victims' e-mail accounts through social engineering.

Assistant US Attorney Wendy Wu told Ars in 2014, "Basically, he [Evans] was impersonating these victims' friends and was able to get confidential information that would allow him to access their accounts.”

An artistic interpretation of Bacteriophages. (credit: Flickr user: Zappy's Technological Solutions)

Bacteriophages, or viruses that infect bacteria, were on the cusp of becoming medical therapies in the middle of the twentieth century. But before the viruses got a shot in clinics, researchers discovered the wonder drugs that we now know as antibiotics. With those drugs now failing as pathogenic bacteria grow ever more resistance to classic and modern antibiotics, researchers are once again eyeing bacteriophages (or just “phages” to their friends) as attractive tools for combating infectious diseases.

This past July, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases hosted a conference on bacteriophage therapy with the stated goal of developing phages as “a means to specifically target antimicrobial resistance while preserving the natural microbiome.” Phage-based treatments can fight infections while helping to preserve the microbiome (our normal bacterial communities) because the viruses are much more specific than the broad-spectrum antibiotics now in use.

Today, those antibiotics indiscriminately kill a large range of microbes they encounter. But at the time researchers first developed and promoted antibiotics, they were unaware of the human microbiome's existence, let alone its importance.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Sixteen cities and towns in New Jersey have asked the state to investigate Verizon, claiming that the telecommunications company “has, through neglect, abandoned and retired its copper landline infrastructure in most of South Jersey.”

In areas where Verizon hasn’t upgraded its network to fiber, it has failed to properly maintain the copper wires used to provide telephone service and DSL Internet, the towns said in a petition to the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU).

“In more affluent communities, Verizon has begun to phase out copper with more modern fiber” while “ignoring these issues in communities like ours,” Hopewell Township Committeeman Gregory Facemyer said in the towns’ announcement of their petition.

After 20 years, developers will finally be able to ape this Ridge Racer screen.

Back in 1995, Namco threw in a playable, miniature version of the arcade classic Galaxian to keep players amused during the lengthy loading times for PlayStation launch title Ridge Racer. In the decades since, other developers have largely been prevented from copying the idea of minigames on loading screens. That's because of a broad US patent Namco got for games that prevent "unnecessary wastage of time... by first loading the smaller, auxiliary game program code into the games machine, before the main-game program code is loaded, then loading the main-game program code while the auxiliary game is running."

Some games, like FIFA and Bayonetta, have managed to skirt that patent by including load-screen minigames that are simply smaller versions of the full game rather than "auxiliary" games as mentioned in the patent. Still, for the most part, developers have been forced to use those unskippable load times to display concept art or in-game statistics rather than playable diversions.

The dark era of dull loading screens may finally be coming to an end, though, because the 20-year term on Namco's 1995 patent expired last week. To celebrate, a number of indie developers are getting together for a Loading Screen Game Jam, devoted to "creating interactive loading screens... and defiling the patent that held back game design for so many years!"

(credit: David Kravets)

Apple picked up a major ally in its battle against the Justice Department's e-book price-fixing case against the gadget maker. The Authors Guild and several other writers groups told the Supreme Court on Wednesday that Apple didn't illegally conspire with major publishers to fix and raise the prices of e-books, as an appeals court ruled. Instead, Apple enhanced competition, the guild claimed in a friend-of-the-court brief.

The authors were challenging a June federal appeals court decision that found Apple liable for engaging in e-book price-fixing in an antitrust lawsuit brought by the Justice Department and 33 states. The government also sued publishers Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan.

The publishers agreed to settle the 2012 suit for $164 million. Apple fought the charges and lost, and it appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, where it is pending high court action. Apple argued that at the time of its 2010 entry into the e-book business, Amazon was its only real competitor, and Amazon was selling e-books for $9.99, which Apple said was well below a competitive price. Apple claimed it worked with publishers to hit a price point that would help Apple be profitable enough to enter the e-book market and compete with Amazon.