Just turning your phone on qualifies as searching it, court rules

Location data requires a warrant since 2018; lock screen may now, too.

A close-up of the PIN entry form on a smartphone's unlock screen.

Enlarge / A close-up of the PIN entry form on a smartphone's unlock screen. (credit: Nehru Sulejmanovski | EyeEm | Getty Images)

Smartphones are a rich data trove not only for marketers but also for law enforcement. Police and federal investigators love to get their hands on all that juicy personal information during an investigation. But thanks to the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution and all the case law built upon it, police generally need a warrant to search your phone—and that includes just looking at the lock screen, a judge has ruled (PDF).

Usually when the topic of a phone search comes up in court, the question has to do with unlocking. Generally, courts have held that law enforcement can compel you to use your body, such as your fingerprint (or your face), to unlock a phone but that they cannot compel you to share knowledge, such as a PIN. In this recent case, however, the FBI did not unlock the phone. Instead, they only looked at the phone's lock screen for evidence.

A man from Washington state was arrested in May 2019 and was indicted on several charges related to robbery and assault. The suspect, Joseph Sam, was using an unspecified Motorola smartphone. When he was arrested, he says, one of the officers present hit the power button to bring up the phone's lock screen. The filing does not say that any officer present attempted to unlock the phone or make the suspect do so at the time.

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The “Galaxy S20 Tactical Edition” is a shock-and-awe campaign against reality

Samsung’s “mission-ready military smartphone” is a regular S20 with lots of hype.

The most industry-leading and innovative division of Samsung—the marketing department—has conjured a new version of the Galaxy S20 out of thin air. Samsung has produced a press release and website breathlessly touting the "Samsung Galaxy S20 Tactical Edition (TE)," a "mission-ready smartphone solution tailored to the unique needs of operators in the federal government and Department of Defense (DoD)." It seems to be a regular Galaxy S20, but in a case.

Samsung's marketers are really going for it here. Let's go over some of these bullet points. The Galaxy S20 Tactical Edition "easily connects to tactical radios and mission systems, out of the box, ensuring seamless operations." How does the S20 TE accomplish such a feat? Well, with "Multi-ethernet capabilities" like "private SIM, 5G, Wi-Fi 6 and CBRS." My god, it has Wi-Fi and cellular access! What an incredible warfighting machine.

The enemy will never see you coming, thanks to "Stealth mode," which will "disable LTE and mute all RF broadcasting for complete off-grid communications." A mere civilian would need airplane mode to turn off their phone radios, but this is stealthier, presumably due to the lack of jet-engine noises? There's also a "night-vision mode," which "allows the operator to turn the display on or off when wearing night-vision eyewear." Samsung appears to be describing a power button, which hopefully works even when you aren't wearing night-vision goggles.

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Survey shows rising trust in scientists, politicization of basic facts

There’s good news for scientists, but only from one of the parties.

Image of a collection of research sample tubes.

Enlarge (credit: Marcel Kusch/Getty Images)

For the last several years, the Pew Research Center has been tracking the US public's views on scientists and science-related issues. This year's survey finds a continuation of a worrisome trend: the US public has a rising trust in scientists, but it's mostly due to an increased respect among Democrats.

The timing of the survey was such that Pew was able to add a number of questions about the COVID-19 pandemic and the policy response to it. The parties also showed differences in their view of policy responses, as you'd expect. But they also differ in how they view basic, easily confirmable facts.

Some good news, some bad news

Pew has been surveying a group of over 10,000 US residents, balanced to reflect the country's demographics, for four years now. The number is high enough to provide a very good representation of public opinion, and the length of time is now sufficient to see consistent trends rise above annual fluctuations. This makes it a fantastic resource for tracking the public's changing views of science and its role in society.

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Daily Deals (5-21-2020)

The Epic Games Store’s free game of the week is Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, a game that’s currently selling for $60 on Steam. If turn-based strategy games aren’t your thing though, you can head over to GOG to snag a free copy o…

The Epic Games Store’s free game of the week is Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, a game that’s currently selling for $60 on Steam. If turn-based strategy games aren’t your thing though, you can head over to GOG to snag a free copy of the first game in the popular The Witcher series. You have to […]

Sega’s Genesis Mini retro game console is down to $50 today

Dealmaster also has deals on Nest gadgets, Eero routers, USB-C hubs, and more.

Sega’s Genesis Mini retro game console is down to $50 today

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headed up by a nice price on the Sega Genesis Mini, which is down to $50 at a handful of retailers. While we've seen the retro game console briefly drop to $40 during a couple of sales earlier this year, today's price is tied for lowest we've seen it on Amazon specifically since the holiday season. For reference, Sega originally sold the device for $80, and it typically goes for $60 these days when it's in stock online.

We gave the Sega Genesis Mini a positive review when it launched last September. For the unfamiliar, this is a tiny retro console in the vein of Nintendo's NES Classic and SNES Classic, but with a built-in library of 42 games that were originally released for the Sega Genesis. It recreates the original machine wonderfully in a cuter, shrunken-down package, and it comes with two nicely molded controllers, both connectable via six-foot cables.

The most important piece of the Genesis Mini is that it gets the library right—mostly, at least when you consider the licensing nightmares that would come with getting classic sports and media tie-in games onto the machine. You still get a deep roster of RPGs, platformers, action games, and shoot-em-ups, ranging from expected mascot fare like the first two Sonic the Hedgehog games, Earthworm Jim, and Ecco the Dolphin, to classics like Shining ForceContra: Hard Corps, and Gunstar Heroes, to others like Alisia Dragoon and Dynamite Headdy that are well worth playing even if their names don't ring a bell today. All of them are emulated well; our review's only nitpick was with some very slight audio delay.

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X-rays reveal the key to preserving Edvard Munch’s The Scream

Moisture from museum visitors breathing on the painting makes the paint degrade.

Edvard Munch's 1910 version of <em>The Scream</em> shows signs of degradation. New synchrotron radiation analysis provides a key to its preservation.

Enlarge / Edvard Munch's 1910 version of The Scream shows signs of degradation. New synchrotron radiation analysis provides a key to its preservation. (credit: Edvard Munch / Aurich Lawson)

Edvard Munch's The Scream is one of the most iconic paintings of the modern era, inspiring silkscreen prints by Andy Warhol, the killer's mask in the 1996 film Scream, and the appearance of an alien race known as The Silence in Doctor Who, among other pop culture tributes. But the canvas is showing alarming signs of degradation. That damage is not the result of exposure to light, but humidity—specifically, from the breath of museum visitors, perhaps as they lean in to take a closer look at the master's brushstrokes. That's the conclusion of a new study in the journal Science Advances by an international team of scientists hailing from Belgium, Italy, the US, and Brazil.

There are actually several versions of The Scream, each unique: two paintings—one painted in 1893, and another version painted around 1910—plus two pastels, a number of lithographic prints, and a handful of drawings and sketches. The inspiration for the painting was a particularly spectacular sunset that the artist witnessed while out for a walk. Munch noted the incident in a January 22, 1892 diary entry:

One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream.

Some astronomers believe this sunset was likely an after-effect of the 1883 eruption of Mount Krakatoa in Indonesia; reports of similarly intense sunsets were made in several parts of the Western hemisphere during several months in 1883 and 1884. Other scholars dismiss this notion, arguing that Munch was not known for painting literal renderings of things he had seen. An alternative explanation is that the red skies were the result of nacreous clouds common to that particular latitude. But the spot where Munch most likely witnessed the sunset has been identified: a road overlooking Oslo from the hill of Ekeberg.

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Powkiddy X2 handheld game console looks like a Nintendo Switch (but doesn’t do Switch things)

There’s something kind of familiar looking about the Powkiddy X2, a handheld game console with red and blue game controllers on either side of a 7 inch display. But while the Powkiddy X2 looks like a Nintendo Switch, it lacks much of the function…

There’s something kind of familiar looking about the Powkiddy X2, a handheld game console with red and blue game controllers on either side of a 7 inch display. But while the Powkiddy X2 looks like a Nintendo Switch, it lacks much of the functionality that makes Nintendo’s little game console special. The controllers aren’t detachable. The […]

G2A confirms stolen game key sales, pays $40,000 to Factorio devs

Developer is “satisfied” after long internal audit found 198 illicit sales.

Floating in a sea of question marks is actually a good look for G2A, given the circumstances.

Enlarge / Floating in a sea of question marks is actually a good look for G2A, given the circumstances. (credit: G2A)

After years of controversy, gray-market game key marketplace G2A has admitted to what it has long been accused of by angry game developers: profiting from the sale of illegitimate download keys—at least in one specific instance.

In a blog post yesterday, G2A confirmed that 198 copies of Factorio sold on G2A in early 2016 were indeed obtained illegitimately. G2A says it will pay Factorio developer Wube 10 times the "bank-initiated refund costs" it incurred for those fraudulent purchases, or roughly $40,000.

But the discovery and confirmation of the fraudulent keys in this one specific case come only after years of controversy and argument over the role of the marketplace.

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AT&T still refuses to kill misleading 5GE network icon for 4G service

AT&T drops ads after losing appeal but keeps using “5GE” network indicator.

Logo for 5Ge is superimposed over lush forest landscape.

Enlarge / Screenshot from an AT&T commercial. (credit: AT&T)

AT&T has reluctantly agreed to stop using the phrase "5G Evolution" to describe its 4G service in advertising but will apparently continue to use the misleading "5GE" icon as the network indicator on phone screens even when there's no 5G service.

AT&T's so-called 5G Evolution service is in reality just 4G with advanced LTE features like 256 QAM, 4x4 MIMO, and three-way carrier aggregation. AT&T has faced widespread ridicule since putting the 5GE network icon on 4G phones more than a year ago, but the icons have likely convinced many AT&T customers that they have 5G service when they really don't. The other major carriers also deployed LTE-Advanced features but continued to accurately describe the service as 4G.

T-Mobile last year challenged AT&T's 5GE campaign with the National Advertising Division (NAD), which serves as the advertising industry's self-regulatory body, and the NAD subsequently ruled that AT&T should discontinue the 5G Evolution claims. AT&T appealed that decision, claiming that its ads "served to educate customers about the billions of dollars AT&T has invested to give customers an outstanding experience," but the National Advertising Review Board (NARB) rejected the carrier's appeal.

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