Month: November 2016

(credit: Darron Bergenheier)

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump will now become the 45th president, succeeding President Barack Obama.

"I say it is time for us to come together as one people," Trump, the president-elect, told supporters in New York, shortly after Clinton called him to concede the election.

Here is where Trump stands on the issues near and dear to Ars:

Enlarge / The Nebraska state capitol building in Lincoln. (credit: Education Images / Getty Images)

“Make me pleasure.”

That Facebook message was directed at Bill Kintner, a 55-year-old Nebraska state senator, while the politician was in Boston for a conference last July. In his hotel room, Kintner had started chatting online—using a state-supplied computer—with a woman who went by “Vinciane Diedeort.” Her English was not idiomatic, but she looked good. And she wanted Kintner to masturbate with her on Skype.

“I don't want to sneak behind my wife's back,” he wrote. “It's not about you, it is about me. You are smoking hot.”

Enlarge / Netflix company headquarters in Los Gatos, California. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A five-year-old patent brawl between Netflix and Rovi (now TiVo) has reached a turning point, with the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upholding a major lower-court victory by Netflix.

The litigation between the two companies began in 2011, when Netflix sued to invalidate a batch of patents on Rovi's digital entertainment guides, for which Rovi had demanded Netflix pay licensing fees.

The patents described ways of navigating TV and other video content online. Even after Netflix lawyers bested Rovi at the International Trade Commission and then pounded all five patents out of existence at district court last year, Rovi said it would push forward with an appeal.

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Google has shut down an operation that combined malicious AdSense advertisements with a zero-day attack exploiting Chrome for Android to force devices to download banking fraud malware.

Over a two-month span, the campaign downloaded the Banker.AndroidOS.Svpeng banking trojan on about 318,000 devices monitored by Kaspersky Lab, researchers from the Moscow-based anti-malware provider reported in a blog post published Monday. While the malicious installation files weren't automatically executed, they carried names such as last-browser-update.apk and WhatsApp.apk that were designed to trick targets into manually installing them. Kaspersky privately reported the scam to Google, and engineers from the search company put an end to the campaign, although the timing of those two events wasn't immediately clear.

"So far, those behind Svpeng have limited their attacks to smartphone users in Russia," Kaspersky Lab researchers Nikita Buchka and Anton Kivva wrote in Monday's post. "However, next time they push their 'adverts' on AdSense they may well choose to attack users in other countries; we have seen similar cases in the past. After all, what could be more convenient than exploiting the most popular advertising platform to download their malicious creations to hundreds of thousands of mobile devices?"