Month: March 2017

Enlarge / The Samsung Galaxy S8. Check out those bezels.

Preorders for Samsung's new Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones are available now, and the company is throwing in a gift if you pledge your money before the handsets launch on April 21. When you go to Samsung's website and preorder either smartphone, you can get a free Gear VR headset and the new motion controller Samsung developed with Oculus.

We mentioned this yesterday when the Samsung Galaxy S8 was announced. It's a good deal because you're getting a $170 bundle (the $130 Gear VR plus the $40 motion controller) for free. If you do choose the free gift, you'll also get a content bundle from Oculus that you can redeem as a digital download when you receive your order. Samsung's pricing for the Galaxy S8 isn't surprising: the website says the handsets start at $650, but the base models you can preorder from each major carrier (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint) place the S8 at about $750 and the S8+ at about $840. Currently you cannot preorder an unlocked Galaxy S8 or S8+ from Samsung's website.

If you want to splurge, Samsung is also offering a $99 "Gear VR Immersive Bundle," which includes a Gear VR headset, the motion controller, a pair of AKG headphones, and a 256GB microSD card. All those items separately would cost about $530 total, so getting Samsung's bundle for just $99 is a good deal as well. You'll only be able to pick one of these additional gifts if you preorder the S8 or S8+ before April 20.

Enlarge / The "flight proven" Falcon 9 rocket sits on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (credit: SES)

Update: SpaceX did it. Its flown booster launched on Thursday evening from Florida, delivered its payload into orbit, and then returned safely to Earth by landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. During a brief interview on the SpaceX webcast, company founder Elon Musk was almost at a loss for words. "It's been 15 years to get to this point," he said. "It's taken us a long time. A lot of difficult steps along the way."

Ars will have a comprehensive, new story posted later tonight.

Original story: This evening, nearly a full year after it first launched a payload into orbit, a Falcon 9 booster will attempt a second launch. Some might call this a "used" or "reused" rocket, but in a wonderful marketing euphemism, SpaceX has characterized the booster as "flight proven." One day, clearly, rocket manufacturers like SpaceX and Blue Origin hope to convince satellite operators that used rockets are, in fact, more reliable than new ones.

Enlarge / So many Switch games to play that Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been relegated to the bottom of my bin. (Insane, I know.)

We've had a lot—a lot, lot, lot—to say about the new Nintendo Switch game system this past month. But if you are keeping score, you may notice that we haven't reviewed many games for the home-portable hybrid console.

That's no small gap in coverage, because as we've reported, the portable touchscreen device currently can't do most of the things you would expect from a modern portable touchscreen device. It has no Web browser; no streaming-media apps; no messaging service; and no cute, Nintendo-styled systems like Miiverse or Streetpass. Until Nintendo issues a substantial patch, the Switch is games or bust.

Video host: Mark Walton (video link)

Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org. (credit: Kirk Walter)

If you want to read the official laws of the state of Georgia, it will cost you more than $1,000.

Open-records activist Carl Malamud bought a hard copy, and it cost him $1,207.02 after shipping and taxes. A copy on CD was $1,259.41. The "good" news for Georgia residents is that they'll only have to pay $385.94 to buy a printed set from LexisNexis.

Malamud thinks reading the law shouldn't cost anything. So a few years back, he scanned a copy of the state of Georgia's official laws, known as the Official Georgia Code Annotated, or OCGA. Malamud made USB drives with two copies on them, one scanned copy and another encoded in XML format. On May 30, 2013, Malamud sent the USB drives to the Georgia speaker of the House, David Ralson, and the state's legislative counsel, as well as other prominent Georgia lawyers and policymakers.

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A couple of years ago, when I was investigating the UK's safest ISP, a high-ranking employee at Virgin Media told me there was no NSA or GCHQ Internet traffic interception equipment hiding within Virgin's network. He also said that, in his opinion, not much traffic interception actually occurs in the UK. I asked him why. "Because they don't need to. They'll get your data when lands in the US."

While it's not true that all Internet traffic flows through the US, the addition of a few listening posts at key Internet exchanges in Europe (London, Paris) and some in Asia (Hong Kong, Tokyo) ensure that the NSA and its Five Eyes partners can analyse and ingest the majority of international Internet traffic.

To visualise the extent of the NSA's surveillance network, IXmaps has created a tool that shows you the location of suspected Internet traffic interception points. You can input your own traceroute data, or if you're in a rush you can just bring up traceroute data from people living in the same city or using the same ISP. Then click the "layers" button and turn on NSA, AT&T/Fairview, and Verizon/Stormbrew.