Month: November 2017

Enlarge / A man casts his ballot during a special election in Georgia's 6th Congressional District special election at North Fulton Government Service Center on June 20, 2017 in Sandy Springs, Georgia. (credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Georgia state officials said Monday that the recent reports of server deletion "were not undertaken to delete evidence." The conclusion came as part of a two-page "investigation report" authored by Ryan Germany of the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.

As Ars reported last week, a university server and its backups, believed to be key to a pending federal lawsuit filed against Georgia election officials, were deleted, according to e-mails recently released under a public records request.

Also this week, the state’s Office of the Attorney General (OAG) told plaintiffs that it would no longer be representing state election officials. The lawsuit will now be taken over by Barnes Law Group, headed by former Georgia Governor Ray Barnes.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Nearly a year after Razer bought Nextbit, we now know what the startup smartphone company has been working on while under the gaming company's leadership. Razer debuted its first smartphone today, the Razer Phone, and it's clearly born from the ashes of the Nextbit Robin. Mobile gaming continues to be important to all types of smartphone users, and gaming companies are now focusing on making mobile games or translating big titles for mobile. While it's not being billed as a "gaming phone," the Razer Phone is the company's attempt to give gaming enthusiasts the hardware they need to play any kind of title on the go.

Unlike the Nextbit Robin's blue-and-white plastic construction, the Razer Phone is made of aluminum and has an industrial, all-matte black aesthetic like other Razer products. It has two large speaker grilles on the top and bottom of the front side like the Robin had, but Razer worked with Dolby to make these speakers Atmos-certified, and each has its own amplifier. In the short demo Ars received, the speakers filled the room with loud, booming sound, but the details did get a bit distorted at max volume.

The 2560×1440, 5.7-inch display takes up the rest of the space on the front of the device. Razer sourced the display from Sharp, which provides the panels for its gaming peripherals. Mobile gamers will appreciate the adjustable refresh rate, which can go as high as 120Hz. We haven't seen this technology on a handset, but Apple did bring it to its newest iPad Pro models. This makes for smoother transitions between on-screen graphics, which should make the visual and performance experience better for both mobile gamers and regular users alike. The display also supports Razer's "Ultramotion" technology, which is similar to Nvidia's GSync and allows the screen's refresh rate to sync up with the smartphone's graphics system.

Today is Day 2 of top officials from Facebook, Google, and Twitter being grilled by congressional committees about how their platforms played host to a disinformation campaign perpetrated by Russian state actors.

Facebook, which has conceded that Kremlin-backed ads might have been seen by as many as 126 million people, has been taking the biggest beatings in these hearings.

Today, the House Intelligence Committee finally, and officially, released some of the Facebook ads and the handles of several thousand fake Twitter accounts—all of which were designed to foment discord in the United States.

Enlarge / Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt. (credit: Getty Images)

US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt took another step to reshape the independent boards that advise the agency on science Tuesday. The newly announced directive bars scientists who receive EPA research grants from serving as science advisers to the agency. The move follows previous decisions to dismiss a number of academic researchers in favor of greater representation from industry representatives.

In a news release, the EPA described the move as ensuring that advisers are “independent and free from any real, apparent, or potential interference with their ability to objectively serve as a committee member.” Pruitt and some other conservative critics of environmental regulations have recently argued that scientists who have performed EPA-funded research have a conflict of interest—that they are biased toward approving new regulatory efforts. “Whatever science comes out of EPA, shouldn’t be political science,” Pruitt said in the agency’s release.

Traditionally, the EPA has viewed researchers who won grants for their work as experts—you'd hope an agency only gave money to scientists it thought were among the best. As such, they were also viewed as valuable contributors who could review the quality of the agency’s scientific analyses.

Enlarge / Osama Bin Laden gets ready to play some Final Fantasy VII, apparently. (credit: US Department of Defense via Getty Images)

Today, the Central Intelligence Agency posted a cache of files obtained from Osama Bin Laden's personal computer and other devices recovered from his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan by Navy SEALs during the raid in which he was killed on May 2, 2011. The 470,000 files, 321 gigabytes in all, include documents, images, videos, and audio recordings, including Al Qaeda propaganda and planning documents, home videos of Bin Laden's son Hazma, and "drafts" of propaganda videos. There is also a lot of digital junk among the files.

The CIA site presents a raft of warnings about the content of the downloads:

The material in this file collection may contain content that is offensive and/or emotionally disturbing. This material may not be suitable for all ages. Please view it with discretion. Prior to accessing this file collection, please understand that this material was seized from a terrorist organization. While the files underwent interagency review, there is no absolute guarantee that all malware has been removed.

Some of the files contain personal correspondence between Bin Laden and members of his family and other Al Qaeda leaders, and some are related to Al Qaeda's terrorist operation. But there's a great deal of the flotsam and jetsam of cached webpages and other Internet content that Bin Laden had to view offline, such as Web advertisements (including one for a Chrysler-Dodge dealership in Calgary) and page design elements. Others include scans of newspapers, magazines, and textbooks, as well as images that were apparently downloaded from Wikipedia—such as a map of "The fragmentation of Latin Greece, c. 1350," showing the areas of influence of Italian and Catalan crusaders.

Enlarge

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's most recent "Stupid Patent of the Month" highlights the importance of IPRs—patent reviews that can knock out bad patents quickly and relatively cheaply.

US Patent No. 6,738,155 was originally filed in 1999 and assigned to the Banta Corporation, a provider of printing and supply chain management services. Banta was acquired by R.R. Donnelly in 2006, and R.R. Donnelly handed off the '155 patent to a patent-holding company called CTP Innovations in 2013. More correctly, Donnelly tried to hand off the patent—more on that in a bit.

The patent claims to cover a "printing and publishing system" that uses "a communication network." Amazing, right? But in 1999, it was very easy to get software patents.