Month: January 2017

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The Nintendo Switch will launch in Japan, the US, Canada, "major European countries" and Hong Kong on March 3, Nintendo announced in a Japanese presentation late Thursday night. The system will cost $299 in the Unites States, 29,980 yen in Japan, and  cost will vary by retailer and country throughout Europe.

Nintendo also announced the system will not be subject to a region lock, and that all software would work on systems released in all countries.

The Joy-Con controllers, which can be slid off the side of the capacitive touch screen tablet on the hybrid system, will sport a motion IR camera that Nintendo says can "tell the difference between rock paper and scissors" and the distance of a hand flashed in front of it. The system also makes use of what Nintendo is calling "HD rumble," which can let players differentiate "the number of ice cube in a virtual glass" and the water filling that glass.

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Shadow Brokers, the mysterious group that gained international renown when it published hundreds of advanced hacking tools belonging to the National Security Agency, says it's going dark. But before it does, it's lobbing a Molotov cocktail that's sure to further inflame the US intelligence community.

In a farewell message posted Thursday morning, group members said they were deleting their accounts and making an exit after their offers to release their entire cache of NSA hacking tools in exchange for a whopping 10,000 bitcoins (currently valued at more than $8.2 million) were rebuffed. While they said they would still make good on the offer should the sum be transferred into their electronic wallet, they said there would be no more communications.

"Despite theories, it always being about bitcoins for TheShadowBrokers," Thursday's post, which wasn't available as this article was going live, stated. "Free dumps and bullshit political talk was being for marketing attention. There being no bitcoins in free dumps and giveaways. You are being disappointed? Nobody is being more disappointed than TheShadowBrokers."

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On Thursday the New York Times reported that the Obama Administration had recently finalized rules to give the National Security Agency (NSA) more leeway in sharing its vast trove of intercepted communications with the 15 other government agencies that make up the Intelligence Community.

Previously, agencies like the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation would have to request information on a target from the NSA. The NSA, in turn, would retrieve communications pertaining to that target and scrub the documents of information that was considered irrelevant to the search, including the names of innocent Americans—a process called “minimization.” Now, that middle step has been cut out. The agencies need only get approval from the NSA to access its data, and agents from the agencies are expected to carry out minimization on their own.

As the New York Times puts it, “Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the NSA will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.” Although the agency analysts who will have access to the NSA’s surveillance powers are directed to ignore and redact information pertaining to innocent Americans, if they see evidence of criminal acts in the data they access, they are directed to hand it over to the Justice Department.

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A federal judge in North Carolina has sentenced Michael Fluckiger, a co-administrator of a notorious Tor-hidden child porn site, to 240 months, or 20 years, in prison.

Fluckiger pleaded guilty to running Playpen in December 2015, after being indicted in March 2015. His two fellow admins, David Lynn Browning, of Kentucky, and Steven Chase, of Florida, who were also prosecuted as part of the same case, and also have plead guilty, have not yet been sentenced.

According to prosecutors, the three men who ran the website are among the over 200 Playpen-related prosecutions nationwide. In order to identify many of the site’s users who were prosecuted, the FBI had to seize and operate the site for 13 days.

Enlarge / Well, it's an Acrobat. (credit: tmmmb)

Adobe rolled out a set of patches for Acrobat, Adobe Reader, and Flash on Patch Tuesday this week, and the update had an unwelcome surprise in store for Chrome users. After updating their systems, they found that Chrome was prompting them to enable an extension from Adobe.

The extension does a couple of things; it provides a quick way to convert a Web page into a PDF if you have a full, paid version of Acrobat, and it lets you choose to open PDFs in Adobe Reader rather than using Chrome's built-in PDF support. This is occasionally useful for using PDF features that the browser-based support doesn't offer. The extension has existed for some years. The new more aggressive distribution is new, however. The plugin seeks permission to do three things; "read and change all data on the websites you visit," "manage your downloads," and "communicate with cooperating native applications." The level of access required appears to be consistent with the plugin's stated purpose; as it can make a PDF of any page, it needs to have access to any page, and Chrome does not distinguish between extensions that read from pages and those that modify them.

The extension also collects basic information and sends this to Adobe. This tracking appears to be on by default, though it can be disabled through the extension's options page. Adobe states that this information is anonymous and does not include URL data.

Enlarge / This box of 1,200 pounds of remaindered DS cartridges isn't literally what's being sold by GameStop, but it gives you the general idea of what's available in this sale.

A decade or so ago, I remember my local GameStop location had a clearance sale on the last of its dwindling NES and SNES stock, selling any loose cartridges for prices under $10. I skipped out on those deals back then, but I think about that clearance a lot today—especially every time I see some of those cartridges going for prices easily 10 or 20 times the price on eBay and the like.

I bring that up now because it looks like GameStop is doing a similar "everything must go" closeout clearance on its stock of Nintendo DS titles. Nearly 900 DS games that were previously selling used for about $5 (already not a princely sum) are now clearance priced for anywhere from $1 to $3 at GameStop's website.

Obviously, that list of clearance-priced games includes a lot of truly unsellable crap: mini-game-filled shovelware; cheap-o "Brain Training" knockoffs; simplistic "Imagine"-style simulation games; and the worst kind of quickly licensed cash-ins that the bloated DS library has to offer. But if you're willing to do some digging and consult some old reviews, there are a few true classics and interesting experiments to be found from the wide-ranging, freeform era of pre-smartphone touchscreen game design.

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In a new 400-page analysis that blows through the current state of scientific knowledge on the health risks and benefits of marijuana, one of the strongest conclusions is that it can effectively treat chronic pain in some patients.

The sweeping report, released Thursday by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, covered more than 10,000 scientific studies and came to nearly 100 other conclusions. Those mostly highlight unanswered questions and insufficient research related to health effects of marijuana, as well as several risks. However, the firm verification that marijuana does have legitimate medical uses—supported by high-quality scientific studies—is a significant takeaway in light of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s decision in August to maintain marijuana’s listing as a Schedule I drug. That is, a drug that has no medical use.

The new report also strongly concludes that the Schedule I listing creates significant administrative barriers for researchers wishing to conduct health research on marijuana and its components—an issue Ars has previously reported on.

Enlarge (credit: Babak A. Tafreshi/Wikimedia)

There are times in nature where the way things work at small scales has a remarkable impact that is only apparent when you zoom out. These emergent behaviors or patterns can produce the amazing coordination of a school of fish or the tidy geometry of patterned ground in permafrost. Such things can seem almost impossible at first glance, but it's been possible to work out the underlying processes.

In some calm, protected patches of Andean snowfields, the snow has seemingly been sculpted into evenly spaced blades, crowds of elegant spires called penitentes. The sculptor here is physics. Feedbacks take slight dimples in the snow surface and exaggerate them until a field of penitentes develops with stable spacing between spires.

Several factors drive this pattern. First, sunlight reflecting off the steep walls of the pentitentes is focused on the low spots. The tops of the thin blades or spires are better at giving up the heat from the sunlight they do absorb, accentuating the contrast. Finally, the air plays a role. Penitentes only form in calm, dry places, where sublimation of snow directly to water vapor dominates. As the thin surface layer of air between the blades or spires warms, its relative humidity falls, enabling more sublimation from the low spots. (The thickness of this air layer is actually what determines the spacing of the penitentes.) Add it all together, and snow is disappearing from the low spots faster than the tips, making the penitentes more and more jagged.

Enlarge / Leeor Ben-Peretz is the executive vice president of the Israeli firm Cellebrite. (credit: JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)

On Thursday, Vice Motherboard reported that an unnamed source provided the site with 900GB of data hacked from Cellebrite, the well-known mobile phone data extraction company.

Among other products, Cellebrite's UFED system offers "in-depth physical, file system, password, and logical extractions of evidentiary data," and is often the go-to product for law enforcement to pull data from seized phones and other devices.

In a statement, Cellebrite called this hack "illegal" and noted that "the company is not aware of any specific increased risk to customers as a result of this incident; however, my.Cellebrite account holders are advised to change their passwords as a precaution."