news.buyenne.com

You fight for me now.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a settlement on Monday with Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Inc. over the studio’s alleged failure to properly disclose that it had paid top YouTube “influencers” to promote the 2014 game Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. While the FTC’s complaint against Warner Bros. (PDF) does not mention any specific influencer, the commission’s press release calls out PewDiePie, the world's top-earning YouTube video creator, as one of the so-called influencers that took the studio’s money.

The FTC’s complaint says that a third-party marketing team hired by Warner Bros. gave the YouTube game reviewers “cash payments often ranging from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars,” as long as the videos they made about Shadow of Mordor met certain criteria. Among those criteria were stipulations that the video had to be positive about the game; could not show any bugs or glitches that the reviewer may have found in the early release copy they were given to play; could not contain any negative sentiments about the game, Warner Bros., or its affiliates; and had to include “a strong verbal call-to-action to click the link in the description box for the viewer to go to the [game’s] website to learn more about the [game], to learn how they can register, and to learn how to play the game.”

In addition, the YouTube creators also had to make at least one Facebook post or one Tweet to promote the video they made about Shadow of Mordor.

(credit: CDC)

Cigarette smoking causes emphysema, a disease characterized by serious structural damage to lung tissues. Smoke introduces oxidizing agents into the lung that activate inflammation and induce over-production of nitric oxide in lung tissues, leading to emphysema. A new paper published in PNAS shows that tobacco smoke exposure can be partly counteracted by doses of vitamin C and another drug, a selective nitric oxide synthase inhibitor. In other words, vitamin C could provide some protection against smoking-related lung damage.

The authors of this study have previously shown that cigarette smoke damages lung proteins via oxidation, but they hadn’t fully characterized the mechanisms involved. To further explore tobacco-induced lung damage, the researchers worked with a guinea pig model, exposing some animals to cigarette smoke and comparing them to controls. They found that exposed guinea pigs showed extensive breakdown of major lung structural proteins and that this damage helped foster emphysema.

The experiments also showed that smoke-exposed lungs had altered expression of nitric oxide synthase proteins, which resulted in increased production of nitric oxide in these tissues. Cigarette smoke exposure was directly linked to the presence of nitric oxide in exposed tissues and those tissues’ oxidative damage.

If you sign into Pokémon Go on iOS, you may be giving it more access than it needs. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Update: Niantic has confirmed in a statement that the Pokémon Go app requests more permissions than it needs, but that it has not accessed any user information. Google will automatically push a fix on its end to reduce the app's permissions, and Niantic will release an update to the app to make it request fewer permissions in the first place. The full statement:

"We recently discovered that the Pokémon Go account creation process on iOS erroneously requests full access permission for the user's Google account. However, Pokémon Go only accesses basic Google profile information (specifically, your user ID and e-mail address) and no other Google account information is or has been accessed or collected. Once we became aware of this error, we began working on a client-side fix to request permission for only basic Google account information, in line with the data we actually access. Google has verified that no other information has been received or accessed by Pokémon Go or Niantic. Google will soon reduce Pokémon Go's permission to only the basic profile data that Pokémon Go needs, and users do not need to take any actions themselves.

Original story: A word of warning if you're playing Pokémon Go on iOS: signing into the app through Google currently gives the game full access to your Google account (hat tip to Adam Reeve for discovering the issue). External apps that you sign into with Google often ask for a small subset of permissions based on what they need to do—view your contacts, view and send e-mail, view and delete Google Drive documents, and so on. But Niantic's Pokémon Go iOS app doesn't ask, and with full account access, it can theoretically do all of those things and more. You can check on and revoke permissions for Pokémon Go and any other external app on this page.

We've independently verified that the game requests full account access on iOS, but the Android version doesn't appear to have the same problem; you can sign in with Google but the app doesn't show up on the permissions page. And, of course, you don't need to use a Google account to play Pokémon Go—an account created through the Pokémon site will also work. However, that site is currently having server problems and you may not be able to create an account right now if you don't already have one.

I've wanted Mr. Robot to return so badly that my work notebooks are filled with schoolboy doodles. Unfortunately, my Elliot looks too much like Doug Funnie. (credit: Nathan Mattise)

If there are two things the Ars staff has been itching for over the past year, it's a return to podcasting and the return of Mr. Robot. If you feel similar, we have some good news.

Welcome to Decrypted, Ars Technica's weekly podcast for season 2 of Mr. Robot.

For our debut episode, we look back to season one exclusively through the eyes (err, words) of main character Elliot Alderson (played by Rami Malek). Despite the Internet's (justified) obsession with the show's realistic depiction of tech, Ars reviewer Jonathan Gitlin said the characters and especially how "they break down and experience their delusions" is what makes Mr. Robot compelling. So if breakdowns and delusions are what you're after, there's no better way to relive season 1 than through Elliot's words.

Hamas and its supporters have published images like this on Facebook. (credit: Force v. Facebook)

On Sunday, the families of several terrorist victims sued Facebook under an American anti-terrorism law. The victims died in multiple terrorist attacks in Israel in 2015 and 2016, and the families are seeking at least $1 billion in damages.

The plaintiffs allege that the social networking giant is liable as it provides “material support” to Hamas—which the United States government considers a terrorist group—by allowing its leaders and followers to openly use the service.

The case, known as Force v. Facebook, is the latest example of families attempting to use terrorism statutes as a way to shut down objectionable speech online and gain a monetary benefit for their deceased loved ones from social networks. None of the other efforts so far have been successful.

The cell's powerhouse, which looks a bit like a heavily compartmentalized kidney bean. (credit: NIH)

Mitochondria are “the powerhouse of the cell” (or so every fifth grade biology book will tell you) because they use aerobic respiration to generate ATP, the molecular form of energy that enables cellular processes to occur.

Structurally, mitochondria are unusual in that they have their own DNA. This is because they were initially bacterial cells that long ago got subsumed by other cells, relinquishing their independence for a safe harbor and giving their hosts an energy boost in exchange.

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) encodes many of the proteins required for aerobic respiration—but not all of them. Respiration still requires many proteins that are encoded by the cell's regular chromosomes. A new study suggests that the right match between mtDNA genes and chromosomal genes could be key to an organism's health and that some mtDNA may actually be beneficial.