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Sarah Laszlo puts an EEG headset on a research participant's head. (credit: Jonathan Cohen/Binghamton University)

While your brain on drugs may be analogous to a fried egg, your brain on Instagram may be like a super-secure form of identification, researchers report in a new study. Fingerprints are so twentieth century. The authors envision future security systems that authenticate or grant access by monitoring a user’s brain while looking at random pictures, such as snapshots of Anne Hathaway or a slice of pizza.

According to the researchers, our brains create unique patterns of neural activity in the first few milliseconds during which we process and react to certain pictures, including images of food, celebrities, and infrequently used words. When the researchers collected and analyzed such patterns from 50 adult participants, ranging in ages from 18 to 43, they were able to create unique brain-based passcodes that identified individuals with 100-percent accuracy and, so far, seem impossible to duplicate.

Study coauthor Sarah Laszlo, a neuroscientist at Binghamton University in New York, told Ars:

James Comey is the director of the FBI. (credit: Brookings Institute)

FBI Director James Comey suggested to a conference in London that his agency paid more than $1.3 million to gray-hat hackers who were able to unlock the iPhone 5C that was used by Syed Farook Rizwan, the dead terrorist who masterminded the attack in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015.

According to Reuters, Comey was asked Thursday how much the FBI paid for the technique that eventually allowed investigators to access the locked phone.

"A lot. More than I will make in the remainder of this job, which is seven years and four months for sure," Comey said. "But it was, in my view, worth it."

(credit: Sony)

Today, Google and Sony announced the Android N Developer Preview is coming to a rather surprising device: the Sony Xperia Z3. Owners of the Z3 can install Sony's "Xperia Companion" app on a Windows or Mac computer and download the developer preview.

Android developer previews are usually relegated to Google's Nexus line, so seeing a finished image for a Sony phone is definitely a surprise. The Xperia Z3 is Sony's flagship from 2014. The company's 2015 flagship, the Xperia Z5, isn't included in the developer preview.

For the Android M Developer Preview, Sony made it possible to compile your own builds of Android M from the Android source code for 17 of its devices. Things seem to be a bit easier for the Z3 this year—this seems to be a finished image.

(credit: Mike Mozart)

As expected, Comcast will officially offer a paid television service over the Internet. For now, the new service will only allow Roku and Samsung Smart TV owners to purchase access to the cable giant’s broadcast offerings. The program likely will be expanded over time.

As Ars reported two months ago, the Federal Communications Commission approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that would force pay-TV companies to provide content and programming information to makers of third-party hardware and applications. This would create a software-based replacement for CableCard, allowing other companies to build set-top boxes or mobile applications that display a pay-TV subscriber's channels without a physical CableCard. (That vote has gotten support from the White House as recently as last week.)

Comcast’s new "Xfinity TV Partner Program" appears to be in direct response to that FCC move, although the company stated earlier this year in an FAQ that such a service was coming in 2016.

(credit: Valentina Palladino)

NEW YORK—Acer has been busy, and the company showed off some of its latest work at an event in New York City today. Acer announced a slew of new laptops and PCs, many of which build upon some of its other recently released products.

The Switch Alpha 12 laptop is the juiced-up version of its Aspire Switch 12 S that was announced back at CES. Instead of the Switch 12 S's Core M processor, the Alpha 12 supports sixth-generation Core i3U, i5, and i7 processors.

But Acer is pushing this device as an efficient and cool laptop above anything else. Engineers built the Switch Alpha 12 with a liquid cooling system and a fanless design. The heat created from the device powers the cooling system, keeping temperatures down. And since it lacks a fan altogether, operating sounds are kept quiet.

Convenient timing, HBO and Microsoft. Convenient. (credit: Xbox)

Last night while asking HBO's press relations team to look the other way and slip us Obama's copy of the Game of Thrones season six premiere, we also asked whether HBO Now would ever launch on a game console.

The video-streaming app, which lets users pay to watch all of HBO's programming without a cable subscription, has appeared on a number of streaming devices, but game consoles from Sony and Microsoft have been stuck in the old HBO GO days. For now, those users must instead steal passwords from cable-subscribing aunts and uncles rather than paying for their own a la carte HBO access.

We wondered if that situation might change in light of a new Game of Thrones season starting this weekend, as HBO has a precedent there. The company launched the Xbox 360's HBO GO app the same day as GoT's second season premiere in 2012. As it turns out, our hunch was right. With no advance notice, HBO Now rolled out its first console apps on Thursday, and they're landing exclusively on Xbox systems—both the Xbox One and the Xbox 360. An Xbox Live subscription is not required for either console.