Month: June 2017

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we're back before the holiday weekend with new deals to share. In the midst of your Fourth of July festivities, you can snag some great deals including a Dell XPS 8910 Core i5-powered desktop for $479, an XPS 13 laptop with a Core i7 CPU and 8GB of RAM for $1,099, and $10 Amazon credits for Prime members and first-time Prime Video streamers.

Check out the rest of the deals, including some pre-Prime Day savings, below.

Featured

Enlarge / Martin Shkreli outside federal court in Brooklyn, New York on Thursday, June 29, 2017. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

During Martin Shkreli’s federal trial this week for alleged securities and wire fraud, a former investor explained how she got involved with the now-infamous ex-pharmaceutical CEO and what followed. In short, she testified that she was swindled by Shkreli after he made big promises to swindle vulnerable patients.

As lawyers painted dueling pictures of Shkreli as a con-man and a “strange” yet brilliant financial mind, the investor, Sarah Hassan, laid out a story from 2010 that started with buzz in the hedge-fund world. She described a smooth-talking Shkreli, false name-dropping, and a winning business plan of sticking it to patients with rare diseases.

After investing $300,000 in one of the hedge funds Shkreli managed at the time, Hassan put in another $150,000 into Shkreli’s then-new pharmaceutical company Retrophin. According to the New York Times, she described his successful business pitch like this: “You can make a lot of money on orphan drugs because the price per patient is quite high.”

(credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ra_o/7487556500/)

Germany has passed a law that creates tight deadlines in which social media websites must remove hate speech. These platforms now face massive fines if they don't comply.

Within 24 hours, websites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube must remove postings of hate speech or other material that's "obviously illegal" under German law. If content has been flagged as offensive but isn't obviously illegal, it must be examined within 7 days, according to a BBC report on the law.

Failure to comply could lead to fines that start at 5 million euros and range up to 50 million euros, or about $57 million.

Enlarge

When you write about the game industry for a while, you can end up writing about fan game projects that have been shut down by the original publishers with depressing frequency. Everyone from Square Enix to Blizzard to Nintendo (especially Nintendo) has sent cease-and-desist letters to passionate fans over games based on their popular properties. The companies often cite the need to protect their legal copyrights to characters and related works.

So it's nice when, on occasion, we're able to write about a fan game that actually gets some level of tacit approval from the developer of the original title. That's what is happening with Installation 01, a Halo fan-game project being built in Unity in order to recapture the classic feel of Halo 2 and Halo 3 for Windows, Mac, and Linux players. Apparently, the team behind that game has worked out an arrangement to continue development without any legal trouble from the Halo-makers at 343 Industries or its corporate parent Microsoft.

The Installation 01 team wrote in a community update this week that they have been "maintaining a level of contact with 343 Industries over the past several months," eventually culminating in a meet-and-greet to talk about details of the project and its legal status. After what the team calls an "incredibly informational and very positive" phone call, they say "we have been ensured that Installation 01 is not under imminent legal threat, provided we remain non-commercial in nature and scope, and continue to follow Microsoft’s Game Content Usage Rules to the letter."

Enlarge / Monalisa Perez (left), seen here the day before the shooting of her boyfriend, Pedro Ruiz III (right). (credit: YouTube)

A Minnesota woman has been charged with manslaughter after she shot and killed her boyfriend as part of the pair’s attempt to become YouTube celebrities.

According to court documents, Monalisa Perez called 911 on June 26 at around 6:30pm local time to say that she had shot Pedro Ruiz III. The two had set up two video cameras to capture Perez firing the gun at Ruiz while he held a book in front of his chest. Ruiz apparently convinced Perez that the book would stop the bullet from a foot away. The gun, a Desert Eagle .50 caliber pistol, was not hindered by the book.

Ruiz, who was found with a single gunshot in his chest, was pronounced dead at the scene.

Enlarge / Vice President Mike Pence visited airmen and women at Peterson Air Force Base, Schriever AFB, and Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, Colorado, last week. (credit: U.S. Air Force/Christopher DeWitt)

Later today, the White House is expected to announce that President Trump has signed an executive order to reinstate the National Space Council. This should finally kick off the much-anticipated formulation of a space policy from the Trump administration, which will encompass military, civil, and commercial interests. The new council, led by Vice President Mike Pence, has the potential to do a great deal of good—or it could further muddy the waters of what already is kind of a mess.

Space policy experts are hoping for the former. "I think bringing back the National Space Council could be an improvement, but it's not guaranteed," Brian Weeden, a technical adviser to the Secure World Foundation, told Ars. "Much depends on what the Council will focus on and how it interacts with the other inter-agency processes," he said. Weeden's organization promotes sustainable and peaceful uses of outer space.

Pence

The key member of the council will be its chairman, Pence, who has shown a burgeoning interest in space matters. In early June, the vice president visited Johnson Space Center in Houston to address NASA's newest class of astronaut candidates. And last week, Pence visited two key space command facilities in Colorado, Schriever Air Force Base, and Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station. Two sources have also told Ars that he will visit NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida next week.