Month: July 2016

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton checks her Blackberry phone alongside Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan (R) as she attends the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, Korea, November 30, 2011. Clinton used the uncleared, personal device throughout her four years at the State Department in conjunction with a private mail server in her home. (credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

Hillary Clinton, former secretary of state and presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency, is facing a massive backlash after an FBI investigation found her to have been "extremely careless" in the handling of classified information. The scandal surrounding her use of a private e-mail server has only grown since the Justice Department's decision not to pursue criminal charges. Polls show that a majority of Americans believe she should have been indicted, and more recent polls place Clinton in a dead heat with the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. Clinton led by a significant margin just weeks ago.

Regardless of the political games being played, the facts of Clinton's use of a private e-mail server and the related potential exposure of Top Secret information—including the names of covert intelligence personnel overseas and at home—are worth knowing and nailing down. At the core, these details raise a much broader question surrounding how national secrets are kept and shared and how broken the information infrastructure of the United States government really is.

In order to have an intelligent conversation about Clinton’s e-mails, here is a technical analysis of the evidence as it has been presented (think of it like a print version of Congressional hearings, minus screaming, finger-pointing, and grandstanding). A clearer picture has started emerging based on the testimony given by FBI Director James Comey and the Inspectors General of the State Department and the Intelligence Community (OIG), plus a portion of the 30,000-plus e-mails released thus far through FOIA requests by the State Department and other agencies. That picture, based on our assessment, is not a very pretty one.

The second half of Magic: The Gathering’s return to Innistrad, Eldritch Moon (EMN), will be released on July 22—but we've been lucky enough to play with the set already. Read on for our review of the newest addition to the Magic line, as the mystery of the madness infecting Innistrad is revealed...

Surprise! It was Emrakul who had been hiding out in Innistrad and was causing some, er, issues.

Emrakul, the Promised End.

Moving on from the brooding sense of horror in Shadows over Innistrad (SOI), EMN is the big reveal, with the last Eldrazi titan—Emrakul—arriving on the plane to wreak havoc. For people who missed our other Magic reviews, Emrakul is one of three giant reality-warping creatures with clear Lovecraftian influences, and her tentacled touch is what’s behind the events in SOI.

From a game mechanics sense, this means the end of Investigate from the first set, as the mystery is solved, and the addition of several new mechanics—Emerge, Meld, and Escalate—to represent things going from bad to worse. In general, follow-up sets in Magic can be a little more experimental, as players now have had some time to get the grasp with the foundations, and EMN really delivers on the “new and weird” front.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we've got a bunch of deals from Dell's Black Friday in July sale. One of the best of them is a bundle deal: you can get a Vizio P-Series 50-inch 4K LED home theater display with a $250 Dell gift card and a 6-inch tablet remote for $999. The display alone is worth $999, so you're essentially getting the remote and the $250 gift card for free. There are also great savings on Skylake-powered desktops, powerful laptops, monitors, and much more, so grab those hot-ticket items before they're sold out.

Check out the full list of Dell's Black Friday in July deals below.

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