Month: July 2016

Martin Shkreli, chief executive officer of Turing Pharmaceuticals LLC, exits federal court in New York, US, on Thursday, December 17, 2015. Shkreli was arrested on alleged securities fraud related to Retrophin Inc., a biotech firm he founded in 2011. (credit: Louis Lanzano/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Today, Martin Shkreli, the reviled former pharmaceutical CEO best known for price-gouging a life-saving drug, running an alleged Ponzi-like scheme, and smirking, had the date for his trial on securities fraud charges set to June 26, 2017 in New York.

Shkreli, 33, has been indicted on eight charges in connection with the alleged Ponzi-like scheme, in which he swindled his former pharmaceutical company, Retrophin, out of $11 million in order to cover and hide losses from two hedge funds he managed. He was arrested back in December along with his former counsel, Evan Greebel. Both have pled not guilty to all charges and Shkreli was released on $5 million bail that he posted with an E-trade account worth $45 million at the time.

Since then, the pair have had their court proceedings delayed after Shkreli fired his legal team and federal prosecutors added additional charges.

(credit: Megan Geuss)

On Wednesday, lawmakers in Utah voted to approve a bill that would make it legal for firefighters or law enforcement to shoot down, spoof, or otherwise disable drones found flying over airspace that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) puts under temporary restriction due to wildfire.

The bill was passed after a small drone flying over a fire 300 miles south of Salt Lake City forced firefighters to ground aircraft. Utah’s governor, Gary Herbert, has said that the fire expanded and became more expensive to control after the drone incident. Herbert is expected to sign the bill in the coming days.

Evan Vickers, the Utah senator that co-sponsored the bill, said that firefighters and police would be allowed to shoot a drone down, but he added that they’d probably use technology to jam signals sent to a drone and bring it down that way. (You can see a video of that kind of solution here.) "The redneck in me [says] to shoot the damn thing," the Republican senator said to the Salt Lake Tribune. “But there are much more humane ways to do that,” he added.

Chex Quest HD is a real thing. Get ready to shoot lasers at booger-shaped aliens in crisp 1080p before long. (credit: Charles Jacobi)

Even if you're not an avid video gamer, you've probably noticed a significant uptick in "HD remakes" of older, popular video games. Everyone's doing them, and the remaster pool includes everything from redrawn, cartoony games like Capcom's DuckTales to gritty war simulations like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

You might argue that some of these aren't necessary, whether because they're "remasters" of games that are only a few years old or because the source material isn't a cultural cornerstone. And you may be tempted to lump Chex Quest, a 1996 CD-ROM game packed into boxes of cereal in which players must save a race of square-shaped "Chex people" from booger-shaped monsters, into the latter category.

But even that game's coming in HD—and apparently, some people really want it. Chex Quest has enjoyed quite the cult following since its unique mid-'90s launch, perhaps because it was a free, kid-friendly re-skin of Doom and was therefore many kids' first taste of the first-person shooter phenomenon. As such, gaming site Zam reached out to one of the game's co-creators, lead artist Charles Jacobi, to talk about the weird game's genesis and development in light of its 20th anniversary this year—and in the interview, the artist let slip that he's currently working on an HD remaster of the original.

(credit: Stanley Sagov)

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-San Francisco) formally introduced a new bill in Congress on Thursday that would seek to make involuntary, or “revenge” pornography, a federal crime, punishable with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

The bill, which is known as the Intimate Privacy Protection Act of 2016, states:

Whoever knowingly uses the mail, any interactive computer service or electronic communication service or electronic communication system of interstate commerce, or any other facility of interstate or foreign commerce to distribute a visual depiction of a person who is identifiable from the image itself or information displayed in connection with the image and who is engaging in sexually explicit conduct, or of the naked genitals or post-pubescent female nipple of a person, with reckless disregard for the person’s lack of consent to the distribution, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

Until now, there has been no such federal bill introduced—but 34 states, including California, have already created similar legislation.