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Enlarge / Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates (pictured here in 2015) announced the change in the photo array guidelines in January 2017. (credit: Washington Post / Getty Images News)

The Department of Justice has instituted new guidelines regarding identification in photo arrays of suspects, making the procedure more scientifically rigorous. Notably, these changes include a “blind” administration—where the person giving the exam doesn’t actually know who the actual suspect is—and recording the identification session.

The new guidelines, which were released last Friday, state:

There are times when such "blind" administration may be impracticable, for example, when all of the officers in an investigating office already know who the suspect is, or when a victim-witness refuses to participate in a photo array unless it is administered by the investigating officer. In such cases, the administrator should adopt "blinded" procedures, so that he or she cannot see the order or arrangement of the photographs viewed by the witness or which photograph( s) the witness is viewing at any particular moment.

These guidelines apply specifically to federal agencies including the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency, and not to local law enforcement.

The cost of an entry-level VR system like this has come down quite a bit.

Back when Oculus first launched the Rift VR headset almost a year ago, buying the headset and a minimum-specced computer that could actually power it would run you at least $1,500. Now, the "entry-level" price for PC-tethered virtual reality is already down to $1,100 as part of a new bundle deal.

As Radeon recently announced, CyberPowerPC's "Gamer Ultra VR" tower is now available in a Best Buy bundle with an Oculus Rift headset for just under $1,100 (or $500 for the PC and $600 for the Rift itself). Even without the bundle deal, the tower itself is selling for only $650, the cheapest price we've seen for a pre-built PC that's officially marked as "Oculus Ready."

Part of that price reduction since early 2016 is the normal march of technology making CPUs and GPUs cheaper as they get older. But a bigger part of the change is Oculus' "asynchronous spacewarp" technology, which the company announced in October as a way to calculate a spatial transformation that can fill in missing frames on lower-end hardware.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Guido De Bortoli )

Your workout schedule may have just gotten a lot more flexible: that is, whether you try to fit in a brisk exercise routine every day before dinner or just go big on the weekends after sitting at your 9-to-5 all week—it may not actually matter to your overall health.

Looking at the health data of about 64,000 adults over 18 years, British researchers found that any exercise—however little or infrequent—was still linked to reduced risks of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer. The findings, which appear this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, beef up the idea that there is no “right” way to dole out exercise in your weekly schedule and that there’s no threshold of activity at which health benefits kick in.

“Some leisure time physical activity is better than none,” the authors, led by exercise and health expert Gary O’Donovan of Loughborough University, concluded. More exercise is better, of course. But for those who hit overall weekly goals for activity, “frequency and duration [of workouts] did not matter,” in terms of achieving those health benefits.

Enlarge / A computer infected by Shamoon System is unable to find its operating system. (credit: Palo Alto Networks)

There's a new variant of the Shamoon disk-wiping malware that was originally unleashed on Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company in 2012, and it has a newly added ability to destroy virtual desktops, researchers said.

The new strain is at least the second Shamoon variant to be discovered since late November, when researchers detected the return of disk-wiping malware after taking a more than four-year hiatus. The variant was almost identical to the original one except for the image that was left behind on sabotaged computers. Whereas the old one showed a burning American flag, the new one displayed the iconic photo of the body of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee boy who drowned as his family tried to cross from Turkey to Greece. Like the original Shamoon, which permanently destroyed data on more than 30,000 work stations belonging to Saudi Aramco, the updates also hit one or more Saudi targets that researchers have yet to name.

According to a blog post published Monday night by researchers from Palo Alto networks, the latest variant has been updated to attack virtual desktops, which have emerged as one of the key protections against Shamoon and other types of disk-wiping malware. The update included usernames and passwords related to the virtual desktop infrastructure products from Huawei, which can protect against a destructive malware through its ability to load snapshots of wiped systems.

Enlarge / NEW YORK, NY - JANUARY 10: Robert Kennedy Jr., heads up to a meeting at Trump Tower on January 10, 2017 in New York City. President-elect Donald Trump continues to hold meetings at his New York residence to fill the remaining positions in his administration. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

Today, President-elect Donald Trump met with a backer of the false idea that vaccines may be behind the rise in autism diagnoses. The result seems to be a worst-case scenario: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has accepted a position within the Trump administration, where he will chair a group evaluating vaccine safety and scientific integrity.

Trump has a history, on Twitter and in debates, of questioning the well-established science behind the US' vaccination program. He has insinuated that vaccines cause autism and has suggested that the current vaccination schedule is overly aggressive. There is absolutely no evidence for either of those positions. Numerous studies have debunked any connection between either vaccination or any specific components of vaccines and diagnoses of autism. And the vaccine schedule is based on a combination of medical risks and exposure probabilities; changing it would alter infants' risks.

It wasn't clear whether Trump's positions would lead to any policy decisions. But a worrying sign came when Trump met with Andrew Wakefield this fall. Wakefield helped establish fears of a vaccine-autism connection by publishing a paper, now retracted, that suggested a connection between the two. He has since had his medical license pulled due to misconduct during the preparation of that paper.

Enlarge / The new settings page is likely to look something like this, though Microsoft says it may change before the final release. (credit: Microsoft)

The Windows 10 Creators Update is going to introduce new settings and controls for Windows 10's privacy and data collection capabilities.

These changes have two parts. Available immediately is a Web-based "privacy dashboard" that gives access to, and the ability to delete, information collected by Cortana (if you choose to enable Microsoft's digital assistant and share the information with her in the first place): browsing history, search terms, location history, interests, contacts, and more.

Coming later this year in the Windows 10 Creators Update is a reworking of the operating system-level privacy controls. The main thing these will do is to make the choice more explicit; instead of being able to pick "Express settings," which sets a bunch of privacy-related options but does not enumerate them or fully describe them, the Windows 10 out-of-box experience will show a bunch of privacy-related options. To complete the process, particular settings must be chosen explicitly. The settings page will be more descriptive about what each setting controls and what features will be disabled when a given option is disabled.

Enlarge / The new MacBook Pro. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Update: Consumer Reports has given the new MacBook Pros a "Recommended" rating after re-testing them. The publication does note that the 13-inch MacBook Pro without a Touch Bar does significantly outperform the Touch Bar model despite Apple's claims that the two have the same battery life, which is in line with the findings in our reviews.

Original story: In late December, review publication Consumer Reports made headlines by failing to provide a "Recommended" rating to Apple's latest MacBook Pros. It was the first time any of Apple's MacBooks had failed to earn the rating. In the publication's testing, the laptops' battery life varied wildly, sometimes lasting as long as 19.5 hours and sometimes as little as 3.75 hours. The publication didn't have these problems with older MacBook Pros or with any of the 140 other laptops it has rated.

After working with Apple over the holidays, Consumer Reports now says that the problem was caused by an "obscure" Safari bug specific to page caching, which the publication disables when it runs its battery tests. To test battery life, Consumer Reports sets laptop screens to a specific brightness level and then loads a series of webpages in the laptop's default browser (Safari in this case) in a loop until the battery dies. Apple suggests that disabling browser caching for a test like this doesn't reflect real-world use, but it does make sense for a synthetic test—users will continually read new pages rather than visiting the same static pages over and over again, so Consumer Reports wants to make sure that its test is actually downloading data over the network rather than simply reading cached data from the disk.