Month: October 2017

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump. (credit: Getty Images | Win McNamee )

President Donald Trump today suggested that the Federal Communications Commission should challenge an NBC license because of "fake news."

"With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!" Trump tweeted.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel offered a brief response to Trump, saying that's "not how it works" and linking to a manual that discusses the FCC's regulation of broadcast radio and TV licenses.

Enlarge (credit: Bing blog)

Bing users in search of their next Netflix binge may now have an easier time finding the perfect show. Microsoft announced a few updates to its search engine through a blog post, with one of them being entertainment search results showing content options from streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

The update makes Bing smarter and better able to give you suggestions based on entertainment-related searches. Bing will show up-to-date information about trending search topics like “fall 2017 TV premieres,” as well as service-specific topics like “trending movies on Netflix.” Results show up in a carousel at the top of the results page, separated from webpage links, much like visual results in Google’s search engine. An image in the blog post shows that you can further filter search results by year, genre, and show rating.

Bing now also has a new “My Saves” section where you can save images and videos for later reference. To save media to your Saves section, you’ll only need to hover over the image or video and press the small plus icon that appears. Saves appears to be similar to a media-specific bookmark collection, with the option to make specific folders based on the types of media you want access to quickly (one folder in an image on the Bing blog is entirely dedicated to “favorite cat videos”).

Enlarge (credit: Kaspersky Lab)

The rapidly evolving story about Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab's involvement in helping Russian government hackers steal sensitive National Security Agency materials has taken yet another turn, as The Wall Street Journal reports that the assistance could have come only with the company's knowledge.

Wednesday's report, citing unnamed current and former US officials, said the help came in the form of modifications made to the Kaspersky antivirus software that's used by more than 400 million people around the world. Normally, the programs scan computer files for malware. "But in an adjustment to its normal operations that the officials say could only have been made with the company's knowledge, the program searched for terms as broad as 'top secret,' which may be written on classified government documents, as well as the classified code names of US government programs, these people said."

The report is the latest to detail a 2015 event in which an NSA worker—described as a contractor by the WSJ and an employee in articles from The Washington Post—sneaked classified materials out of the agency and onto an Internet-connected computer that had Kaspersky AV installed on it. The WSJ, WaPo, and The New York Times have all reported that hackers working for the Russian government were able to home in on the documents with the help of the Kaspersky software.

Gary Whitta co-wrote Rogue One and has written screenplays for movies starring Will Smith and Denzel Washington. Plus he writes comics and novels! (credit: Gary Whitta)

What’s it like to work as a professional geek in Hollywood? Find out from Gary Whitta, who started as a humble gamer and became the co-writer of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Along the way, he worked on movies with Will Smith and Denzel Washington and helped create a Walking Dead game. He’ll discuss his experiences writing movies, as well as what it's like to tell new stories set in a beloved fan-favorite franchise.

Join Ars Technica editors Cyrus Farivar and Annalee Newitz in conversation with Gary Whitta at the next Ars Technica Live tonight, October 18, at Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland.

Gary is the former Editor-in-Chief of PC Gamer magazine and now an award-winning screenwriter and author, best known as the co-writer of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. He also wrote the post-apocalyptic thriller The Book of Eli starring Denzel Washington, co-wrote the Will Smith sci-fi adventure After Earth, and served as writer and story consultant on Telltale Games’ adaptation of The Walking Dead, for which he was the co-recipient of a BAFTA award for Best Story. Gary has written multiple episodes of Disney XD’s animated series Star Wars Rebels. Most recently, he wrote the feature film adaptation of the Eisner award-winning comic-book series Mouse Guard for 20th Century Fox. His first novel, Abomination, was recently published to critical acclaim.

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg shows off the "infinite screens" you can get on the Oculus Rift.

SAN JOSE—At the Oculus Connect conference today, Facebook head of VR Hugo Barra announced that the Rift and Touch controller bundle would be permanently reduced to $399, following a temporary drop to that price during the Summer of Rift promotion in July and August. Barra said that promotion was a "huge success" that saw the Rift community "grow a lot," through he did not share specific sales numbers.

The Rift/Touch combo was being sold for $799 as recently as February, before dropping to $598 in March. That cost doesn't include the PC needed to power the hardware, which has also been dropping in price throughout the year.

The permanent price drop comes on top of the announcement of Oculus Go, a standalone, $199 wireless headset being billed as a "sweet spot" between mobile and tethered PC VR, due early next year.

Enlarge (credit: The City of Toronto)

The Internet Archive is an online library known for pushing the boundaries of copyright law to promote public access to obscure works, including classic video games and historic images. Now the organization is taking advantage of a little-noticed provision of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act to publish complete copies of out-of-print books published between 1923 and 1941. The organization has cheekily named this the "Sonny Bono Memorial Collection." The group hopes that the move will inspire other libraries to follow its lead, making hundreds of thousands of books from the mid-20th Century available for download.

Congress passed the controversial law in 1998 under heavy lobbying from major content holders. The law is the reason Mickey Mouse, Batman, and Gone with the Wind haven't fallen into the public domain—all had copyrights that were due to expire between 1999 and 2017—until Congress intervened.

The 1998 law was championed by big companies and the estates of famous authors and artists. But critics pointed out that it would needlessly limit public access to more obscure works—works that were out of print and therefore not generating any income for the authors or their heirs. And Congress was passing the law just as digitization technology and the Internet were making it possible to give these works a second life as free downloads.