Month: August 2019

Enlarge / Your local police might like to interest you in this product. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon's Ring line of consumer home surveillance products enjoys an extensive partnership with local police departments all over the country. Cops receive free product, extensive coaching, and pre-approved marketing lines, and Amazon gets access to your 911 data and gets to spread its network of security cameras all over the nation. According to a trio of new reports, though, the benefits to police go even further than was previously known—as long as they don't use the word "surveillance," that is.

Gizmodo on Monday published an email exchange between the chief of police in one New Jersey town and Ring showing that Ring edited out certain key terms of a draft press release before the town published it, as the company frequently does.

The town of Ewing, New Jersey, in March said it would be using Ring's Neighbors app. Neighbors does not require a Ring device to use; consumers who don't have footage to share can still view certain categories of crime reports in their area and contribute reports of their own, sort of like a Nextdoor on steroids.

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  An example of a Half-Truth card. There are three right answers, but you can make progress even if you pick only one.

"I think most people's experience playing trivia is just feeling dumb, and that's no way to spend an evening."

That sentence probably doesn't describe Ken Jennings, who holds the record for the longest winning streak on TV quiz show Jeopardy after a 74-game winning streak (though he still lost to IBM's Watson in 2011). But Jennings, who actually shared the quote above in a recent interview with Ars, is smart enough to recognize that most people don't find the same joy in "pure" trivia tests that he does.

"If trivia is just knowledge retrieval, it's only fun if you get it right," Jennings told Ars. "It shouldn't just be middle-aged dads trading baseball statistics... It can involve deduction and lateral thinking, different kinds of cognition other than, 'Do I remember this thing my 9th grade teacher taught me.' One is fun, the other is fun only to a very, very small group of people."

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with new deals to share today. Topping our list this afternoon are discounted Amazon Fire TV streaming sticks: now you can get the regular Fire TV Stick for $29.99 or the Fire TV Stick 4K for $39.99. Both devices come with an Alexa remote as well.

Fire TV sticks are solid streaming devices for those who want something small and portable, and for those who don't want to spend a ton on a set-top box or a smart TV. We particularly like the Fire TV Stick 4K for its faster, quad-core processor and its support for 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Dolby Vision HDR, HDR10, HDR10+, and Dolby Atmos audio.

Fire TV has had its challenges—starting with a software UI that may take some getting used to if you're not familiar with it already. And perhaps most notably, Amazon's ongoing feud with Google meant that YouTube wasn't available on Fire TV devices for a long time. However, those two companies finally settled their feud earlier this year, and now all Fire TV device owners can watch YouTube via the official YouTube app.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Many of you will know that I mostly write about physics. My knowledge of human biology is limited to being reasonably certain that I have a body. At one point, some of my research could have had a medical application, but it involved diseases, which was knowledge I didn’t have. A recent paper on using quantum effects to improve medical diagnosis has given me flashbacks to those halcyon days, even though I still don't understand diseases.

One thing I am aware of is that it is usually preferable to be diagnosed for a disease early. It might be the difference between taking a pill and having your liver decorate a surgeon’s instruments. That means your doctor needs a cheap and effective way to see whether you have the disease. This is where, hopefully, physicists—and maybe even some physics—can come into play.

Most diseases release proteins or other molecules that signal the problem. If you have sensitive enough detectors, then you can pick up these signals and identify potential problems early. The challenge is that almost all tests of this sort are concentration sensitive: that is, if there aren’t many molecules, the signal will be weak and the test will return a false negative.

Enlarge / The unadorned "human" badge from DEFCON 27: hackable jewelry. (credit: Joe Grand/ DEFCON)

LAS VEGAS—There are many things that make the DEFCON conference stand above all other hacking conferences. It's the largest, of course, with over 30,000 attendees, sprawling over four hotels in Las Vegas this year. And there are the Villages, each of them conferences unto themselves appealing to specific security and hacking communities. But the most visible, unifying part of DEFCON is its badges.

The DEFCON electronic badges—which for a time were used every other year because of the effort and budget that went into them—are typically the delivery vehicle for a unifying game. Last year's badge was a sophisticated puzzle challenge that included a social element and even a built-in text-based adventure. This year's badges, however, were both deceptively simple and cunningly complex, designed to get DEFCON attendees to interact with each other and explore the whole of the conference rather than falling too deeply into a badge rabbit hole.

Joe Grand, (AKA "Kingpin"), the designer of DEFCON's very first electronic, hackable badges (used for DEFCONs 14 through 18) returned to the task for this year's 27^th edition of the event at the request of DEFCON founder Jeff Moss ("Dark Tangent"). Just before DEFCON kicked off, Grand spoke with Ars about this year's badge design and the effort required to put together a real-world electronic quest for about 30,000 friends.