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Enlarge / MILWAUKEE, WI: A woman rests her head on the shoulders of a man as a group of supporters stop and pray after a verdict of not guilty came back on four of the five charges for the three former police officers who stood trial for the beating of Frank Jude Jr. (credit: Getty | Darren Hauck)

After news broke that a group of Milwaukee police officers savagely beat an unarmed black man named Frank Jude in 2004, the city saw crime-related 911 calls drop by about 20 percent for more than a year—totaling about 22,200 lost reports of crimes—according to a new study by a group of sociologists at Harvard, Yale, and Oxford universities.

The outcome wasn’t unique to Jude’s beating, the researchers found. Looking at the city's 911 call-records from 2004 to 2010, they noted similar drops after other highly publicized local and national cases of police violence against unarmed black men.

The findings square with earlier research showing that communities—specifically black communities given recent events—become more cynical of law enforcement after brutality cases. But the new study, published in the October issue of the American Sociological Review, is the first to show that people actually change their behavior based on that elevated distrust. Namely, community members become less likely to report crimes to law enforcement, likely out of fear of interacting with police or skepticism that police will take them seriously and help.

(credit: Caribb)

Late last Friday, Volkswagen Group agreed to pay 652 Volkswagen dealers a total of $1.21 billion in a settlement that was proposed earlier this summer. Each dealer would receive approximately $1.85 million.

The settlement is related to the emissions scandal that broke over a year ago—VW Group was producing diesel Jettas, Beetles, Golfs, and Passats, as well as Audis and Porsches, that were giving off significantly more nitrogen oxide (NO_x) than the company claimed to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). To goose the numbers, the cars were outfitted with illegal software that engaged the emissions control systems on the cars when they were being tested in the lab but relaxed emissions controls while the cars were on the road.

When the EPA announced that it discovered VW Group’s defeat devices, Volkswagen dealers across the US were suddenly left with cars they couldn’t sell sitting on their lots. Lawyers for the dealers also argued that they should be compensated for VW’s tarnished image, which hurt their sales.

Webpass radios on a San Francisco building. (credit: Webpass)

Google Fiber today said it has completed its acquisition of Webpass, a wireless Internet service provider that will figure prominently into its plans for deployment of high-speed Internet. But the Alphabet division is not giving up on fiber, saying it will use both wireless and fiber networks to compete against cable companies and telcos.

Google Fiber revealed its plan to buy Webpass in June, and the company said in an announcement today that Webpass "is now officially part of the Google Fiber family." The Webpass site has been updated to call the service "Webpass from Google Fiber."

"It’s been impressive to watch Webpass evolve from a boot-strapped startup to an established category leader with tens of thousands of happy customers in five major metros from San Francisco to Boston," Google Fiber President Dennis Kish wrote.

A federal appeals court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit brought by a fired Oklahoma police officer who sued his former department for damages after the agency released a video of the officer roughing up a suspect. The officer, Mike Denton, was fired and then reinstated with full back pay before being fired again years later after another video surfaced of him allegedly using excessive force on someone. Denton previously claimed the first video's release was a violation of his First Amendment right to free speech and association.

The 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals said the former officer did not prove that the release of the 2011 video by the Owasso Police Department was done in retaliation. Denton had previously e-mailed fellow union members urging them to reject a proposed collective bargaining agreement. But ultimately, the court said that Denton proffered "unsubstantiated allegations" (PDF).

The officer's suit, however, highlights that different people can come to varying conclusions about the value of police video. This idea first came to light with the Rodney King beating, but a similar split occurred with videos in Charlotte, North Carolina and El Cajon, California just last week. In this instance, Denton likely would not have found himself in hot water at all if not for the initial video.

A major battle is underway for control over hundreds of millions of network-connected digital video recorders, cameras, and other so-called Internet of Things devices. As Ars has chronicled over the past two weeks, hackers are corralling them into networks that are menacing the security news site KrebsOnSecurity and other Web destinations with some of the biggest distributed denial-of-service attacks ever recorded.

Johannes B. Ullrich, a researcher and chief technology officer for the SANS Internet Storm Center, wanted to know just how vulnerable these devices are to remote takeover, so he connected an older DVR to a cable modem Internet connection. What he saw next—a barrage of telnet connection attempts so dizzying it crashed his device—was depressing.

"The sad part is, that I didn't have to wait long," he wrote in a blog post published Monday. "The IP address is hit by telnet attempts pretty much every minute. Instead of having to wait for a long time to see an attack, my problem was that the DVR was often overwhelmed by the attacks, and the telnet server stopped responding. I had to reboot it every few minutes."

Enlarge / Server administrator kaiju hates user password reset requests. (credit: Bandai Namco Entertainment America (CC))

A couple of decades ago, Microsoft was the kaiju of network computing. First came MS-DOS, and Windows soon followed. Each simply took over business desktops. Before Novell knew what hit it, Windows was then infused with the DNA of OS/2 and became Windows NT and in turn NT Server. Novel had dominated the early PC networking market, but by the end of the 1990s the company was a shadow of its former self.

Like a special breed of kaiju, Microsoft's server platform keeps on mutating, incorporating the DNA of its competitors in sometimes strange ways. All the while, Microsoft's offering has constantly grown in its scope, creating variants of itself in the process. Godzilla often retreats, battered after battle, to regenerate, and the monster has spawned multiple variants (Roland Emmerich's 'Zilla is the Microsoft Bob of Godzillas, right?). Windows Server has done the same, coming back again and again to disrupt another server market with a snap of its 80-percent-functionality-for-20-percent-of-cost teeth.

In 2016, it's happening again. Microsoft Windows Server 2016 picks up where its predecessor (Server 2012 R2) left off three years ago. The last release of Server strove to elevate the status of Microsoft's server platform. It went from being an also-ran in the movement from on-premises servers to an increasingly virtualized, cloud-based enterprise to being integral to business cloud computing itself. With four different versions (Essentials, Hyper-V Server, Standard, and Datacenter), three different deployment schemes ("Desktop experience," Core, and Nano), and an ever-expanding collection of optional features, Server 2016 wants to be everything for everyone. It's a heavyweight virtualization hypervisor! It's a lithe cloud application container! It's a high performance storage platform! It's a hardened security platform!

Tesla Factory in Fremont, California. (credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pestoverde/8763130149/)

Tesla Motors sent out a press release late Sunday saying that it had delivered 24,500 vehicles in the company’s third quarter. According to Tesla, that number doesn’t account for 5,500 vehicles which had already come off factory lines but were still in transit to customers.

In Q2, CEO Elon Musk told investors and the press that Tesla would deliver 50,000 vehicles by the end of the year. That goal was a lofty one considering the company had only delivered 14,402 vehicles that quarter. Musk noted that his priority at the time was perfecting Tesla’s factories, or “the machine that makes the machine,” as the company’s executives have taken to calling it.

Tesla’s press release notes that Q3’s deliveries represent a 70-percent increase over last quarter’s deliveries. In total, 15,800 of the deliveries were Model S vehicles, and 8,700 were Model X vehicles.