Month: December 2015

Enlarge / No spoilers: this is a thing that the trailer showed happening in the movie at some point where two characters exchange a lightsaber maybe. (credit: Walt Disney Pictures)

There are no Star Wars spoilers in this piece. Read without fear, but beware of clicking any of the links presented herein.

I haven’t seen Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. I probably won’t see it until well into the new year—the idea of waiting in line to see a movie in a theater just doesn’t fly for me anymore. Ars Editor Tiffany Kelly hit up the press screening in LA, but I haven’t talked to her about the film yet, nor have I talked to our Disney PR rep or anyone else affiliated with the film.

Nonetheless, I already know everything that happens, from crawl to credits.

Though Abrams and friends planned to keep things under wraps for as long as possible for the fans, and in spite of Disney’s lunatic hair-trigger litigiousness, no plan survives contact with the enemy—and in this case, the enemy has proven to be anyone entering the theater for premiere screenings, in and outside of the United States. As I write this, it’s still a few hours until the general public in the US gets an unchaperoned crack at the films—evening screenings start tonight—but even though I made only a casual search for Star Wars spoilers, it took only moments to gobble up dozens of plot points and revelations. After maybe fifteen minutes of reading and watching, I’d seen everything. I’d seen it all.

(credit: Renee McGurk)

Redflex Holdings Limited (RHL), the embattled Australian red light camera company, has now been brought into an ongoing massive corruption-related lawsuit involving the city of Chicago.

Earlier this year, the city of Chicago had previously sued Redflex Traffic Systems Inc. (RTSI), RHL’s Arizona-based subsidiary, for $300 million. RTSI recently had the case transferred out of Illinois state court and into federal court.

Earlier this week, the city of Chicago filed an amended complaint outlining expanded allegations against both firms. The new allegations include the previous accusations of violations of the city’s False Claims Ordinance “as well as claims for breach of contract, civil conspiracy, unjust enrichment, and payment of kickbacks in connection with City contracts.”

Enlarge (credit: Nick Matzke/Science)

We're just a few days from the 10th anniversary of Kitzmiller v Dover, the case that declared teaching intelligent design in science classrooms an unconstitutional imposition of religion. The sound legal defeat at Dover, however, hasn't convinced people who dislike evolution from trying to limit its use in public education. Instead, they've simply adapted to the new legal environment by developing new tactics.

If all that adapting to the environment sounds a bit like evolution to you, you're not alone. Nick Matzke played a key role in the Dover trial, and he went on to graduate studies in evolutionary biology. In a short report that's being released by Science, Matzke describes how you can apply evolutionary analysis to the dozens of bills that have targeted science education in various states. The results look a lot like evolutionary lineages, with lots of dead ends and the rapid expansion of successful innovations.

Matzke used to work for the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), which helped support the plaintiffs at the Dover trial. He's most famous for finding another evolution analog in a key text: a search of early drafts of the intelligent design book promoted by the school board turned up a "transitional fossil."

(credit: Rightscorp)

A Virginia federal jury watching a high-profile copyright case reached a verdict (PDF) today, ordering Cox Communications to pay $25 million to BMG Rights Management for turning a blind eye to music piracy. The company's behavior amounted to a willfully infringed copyright in the eyes of the jury.

The verdict comes at the close of a two-week trial, which took place after US District Judge Liam O'Grady issued an opinion (PDF) slamming Cox's behavior, saying that the ISP isn't protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act "safe harbor" because the company did not "reasonably implement" a policy to terminate repeat infringers.

Today's verdict is a huge victory for BMG and its copyright enforcer, Rightscorp. The Rightscorp business model is based on sending massive numbers of copyright notices via email and asking for $20 or $30 per song "settlements" from users believed to have pirated songs. While Rightscorp wasn't a named plaintiff in the suit, BMG's case was based on evidence produced by Rightscorp, which says it found the IP addresses of the worst Cox infringers.

Blackberry Priv (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Blackberry chief John Chen. (credit: Sam Churchill)

"We are indeed in a dark place when companies put their reputations above the greater good. At BlackBerry, we understand, arguably more than any other large tech company, the importance of our privacy commitment to product success and brand value: privacy and security form the crux of everything we do. However, our privacy commitment does not extend to criminals," Chen wrote in a blog post titled "The encryption Debate: a Way Forward."

Chen links to a recent Ars story in which Apple is fighting the authorities on whether it should give them access to an iPhone running iOS 7. Among other things, Apple argues in the criminal case that "forcing Apple to extract data in this case, absent clear legal authority to do so, could threaten the trust between Apple and its customers and substantially tarnish the Apple brand. This reputational harm could have a longer term economic impact beyond the mere cost of performing the single extraction at issue."

(credit: Comcast)

You probably know that Comcast is hitting subscribers with overage charges of $10 when they exceed their 300GB monthly data caps. But can customers trust Comcast to measure Internet usage accurately? The nation’s largest cable company points to research it commissioned showing that its data metering is usually accurate, but one customer who contacted Ars was able to prove that he was being incorrectly accused of using excessive data.

Oleg, a programmer from Tennessee who prefers that we not publish his last name, said he got repeated warnings from Comcast that he was using too much data. But the traffic logs from his router showed that “I was not even close to Comcast’s cap,” he wrote. Oleg described his saga in a Pastebin posting, a YouTube video, and in e-mails to Ars.

Oleg received warnings in September and another in October, the latter while he was overseas for a multiple-week vacation with his wife. When they returned home on November 9^th, Comcast’s data meter was “showing I used 120 gigs of data, like, while I was gone,” he wrote. Customers can check their usage on Comcast’s website.