Enlarge / The debate hall at Hofstra University hours before the debate is set to begin. (credit: Spencer Platt / Getty Images News)

News organizations attending Monday evening’s presidential debate must pay $200 for a “Secure Wireless Internet Connection” at Hofstra University in New York state. The debate is set to begin at 9pm Eastern.

While profiteering during a high-profile occasion such as this is not unheard of—$15 for a patch cable?—what’s worse is that event staff at Hofstra University are reportedly using a $2,000 device to actively scan for hotspots and other ad-hoc Wi-Fi networks.

Dear god. @RyanBeckler just sent me this from Hofstra. They're charging $200 for media WiFi access. pic.twitter.com/VSagT6ZerF

— (((Steph Haberman))) (@StephLauren) September 26, 2016

There was just an announcement in the debate filing center that personal wifi dongles are prohibited, instead you must buy their $200 wifi

— Jim Newell (@jim_newell) September 26, 2016

Screenshot of Ars testing the service with an Eminem track. We did not download the music. (credit: YouTube-mp3)

The Recording Industry Association of America, the British Recorded Music Industry, and other industry lobbyists have sued one of the world's leading websites. They say that Youtube-mp3.org facilitates copyright infringement by enabling so-called stream ripping for the masses.

Stream ripping on YouTube-mp3.org essentially works like this: input a YouTube music video URL into a field on the site, press "convert video," and minutes later you have a fresh download of the music on the video.

The suit comes as the music industry is hoping that paid streaming services could fuel the resurgence of an industry that has barely grown the past five years. Youtube-mp3.org works using links YouTube Red, a paid service that strips ads. The RIAA, the BPI, and other industry groups are none too happy about that. Youtube-mp3.org makes money via advertising on its landing page. Cary Sherman, chairman and CEO of the RIAA, said the following:

Enlarge / Mylan Inc. CEO Heather Breschtestifies during a hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee September 21, 2016 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Alex Wong)

The EpiPen profit figures that Heather Bresch, CEO of EpiPen maker Mylan, Inc., proudly displayed on a giant chart to the seething House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last week were misleading at best and a flat-out lie at worst, according to a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Bresch, who was called before the committee to explain steep price hikes of the life-saving devices, insisted that the company only makes $100 profit per two-pack of EpiPens. The list price for such a two pack now stands at $608. However, back in 2007, before Mylan bought the rights to the pens and raised the price 15 times, an EpiPen was priced at around just $50.

In her testimony, Bresch blamed the puzzlingly small profit on undefined costs and America’s complicated healthcare system. The committee, however, didn’t buy that—and rightly so.

Enlarge / Untrusted sites get a minimal set of Windows Platform Services and no access to the rest of the system. (credit: Microsoft)

ATLANTA—Microsoft has announced that the next major update to Windows 10 will run its Edge browser in a lightweight virtual machine. Running the update in a virtual machine will make exploiting the browser and attacking the operating system or compromising user data more challenging.

Called Windows Defender Application Guard for Microsoft Edge, the new capability builds on the virtual machine-based security that was first introduced last summer in Windows 10. Windows 10's Virtualization Based Security (VBS) uses small virtual machines and the Hyper-V hypervisor to isolate certain critical data and processes from the rest of the system. The most important of these is Credential Guard, which stores network credentials and password hashes in an isolated virtual machine. This isolation prevents the popular MimiKatz tool from harvesting those password hashes. In turn, it also prevents a hacker from breaking into one machine and then using stolen credentials to spread to other machines on the same network.

The Edge browser already creates a secure sandbox for its processes, a technique that tries to limit the damage that can be done when malicious code runs within the browser. The sandbox has limited access to the rest of the system and its data, so successful exploits need to break free from the sandbox's constraints. Often they do this by attacking the operating system itself, using operating system flaws to elevate their privileges.

It's time. After weeks of teasing us with talk of his Interplanetary Transport System and images of his new Raptor engine's test firing, SpaceX founder Elon Musk will finally deliver his much ballyhooed speech on Tuesday at 2:30pm ET (7:30pm UK), during the International Astronautical Congress.

Ars has already previewed the speech, which likely will lay out Musk's preferred architecture for Mars settlement, including spacecraft and a large rocket which will be powered by Raptor engines. For the speech to be a success, Musk must go beyond dazzling space hardware. He must prove to us that his plan is not science fiction, but something achievable. Humans have dreamt of going to Mars for decades—one of Wernher von Braun's first public appearances in the United States involved a presentation on Mars exploration to an El Paso Rotary Club. But we have heretofore lacked both the technology and the will to do so.

Musk undoubtedly has the technology, both in reality (such as the Raptor rocket engine or SuperDraco thrusters to land on Mars) and in concept (such as how to transport hundreds of people safely from Earth to Mars). But whether he can build a coalition of support in the government and private industry without undermining NASA's own Journey to Mars is a big question. Tuesday's speech is the start of that effort, and Ars will liveblog the proceedings with a feature-length analysis afterward.

Enlarge (credit: NSIDC/Ted Scambos)

When it comes to understanding the Earth's past climates, we have to understand what the global temperatures were. Instrument readings only go back to the 1800s, so researchers have had to rely on proxies—things we can measure, like tree ring width or oxygen isotopes, that reflect the weather conditions at the time. This has been used to track as far back as the end of the last glacial period.

Beyond that, records are sparse and local. Ice cores, for example, go back over 800,000 years, but these only capture polar conditions. Now, Stanford's Carolyn Snyder has put together the longest global climate record we have for recent times, extending back two million years from the present. The record captures a key transition in the glacial cycles that dominate recent climates.

Snyder also used this record to calculate the sensitivity of the climate to carbon dioxide, coming up with an eye-popping number that bodes very poorly for our future. Several other climate experts, however, suggest that the number Snyder calculated isn't especially relevant.

(credit: Eric Erbe, Christopher Pooley, USDA)

Bacteria are wizzes at developing resistance to our most powerful antibiotics. This unfortunate skill leads to millions of difficult-to-treat infections worldwide and growing fears that bacteria may one day become unstoppable. But these microbes’ evolutionary prowess can just as easily be their downfall, scientists reported last week in Nature Chemical Biology.

By gaming the evolutionary system, researchers have fooled drug-resistant Escherichia coli into tossing their resistance. Then, with a shot of the drug that the bacteria could previously withstand, the E. coli met their end. Though the study was just done in lab dishes, the authors, led by researchers at Harvard, are hopeful that the one-two punch could be useful in reversing drug resistance and restoring the effectiveness of life-saving antibiotics.

This strategy could “add valuable tools to our antimicrobial arsenal,” they conclude.

Want to make Snapchat great again? Donald Trump has given American users of the social media app that chance thanks to the service's first-ever nationwide "geofilter" ad campaign for a politician.

The ad rolled out to American Snapchat users today, just ahead of the 2016 presidential election's first major debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton (the debate starts tonight at 9pm EDT). The ad joins the usual geofilter available to Snapchat users, which usually list the name of a city or a nearby event as determined by GPS and time information.

As shown to the right (featuring me as its puzzled selfie star), the ad stamps a user's photo and video Snaps with a banner phrase reading "Donald J. Trump vs. Crooked Hillary," along with Trump's famed slogan and a note confirming that the candidate paid for the geofilter campaign.

Fall TV season is in full swing, but there's still time to figure out what's worth watching from the new crop of shows just underway. At Ars, we've painstakingly evaluated the new fall titles for possible geek-related awesomeness and found a baker's dozen for you to check out. Remember—we've only included new shows, not returning ones that are coming back for a second or twelfth season. But feel free to wax poetic about your love for everything from Homeland to The Walking Dead in the comments.

Drama

StartUp

This intriguing series combines Miami gangster action with the tale of a startup that has created GenCoin, a crypto currency that could save the developing world (or... just allow drug dealers to launder their money faster). Either way, this is probably the season's most unexpected tech thriller, streaming on Crackle with a fantastic cast that includes Martin Freeman, Otmara Marrero, and Adam Brody.

StartUp is a tech series in the vein of Mr. Robot, where hacking isn't just a get-rich-quick scheme for VCs in Silicon Valley—it's also about global politics. In StartUp, building a tech company is a chance for its founders to escape from poverty and to help millions of other people in the world have access to bank accounts via mobile. Unfortunately, their angel investors are drug dealers, and their roadblocks involve eluding FBI investigators. The series started streaming on Crackle on September 6.