Want to make Snapchat great again? Donald Trump has given American users of the social media app that chance thanks to the service's first-ever nationwide "geofilter" ad campaign for a politician.

The ad rolled out to American Snapchat users today, just ahead of the 2016 presidential election's first major debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton (the debate starts tonight at 9pm EDT). The ad joins the usual geofilter available to Snapchat users, which usually list the name of a city or a nearby event as determined by GPS and time information.

As shown to the right (featuring me as its puzzled selfie star), the ad stamps a user's photo and video Snaps with a banner phrase reading "Donald J. Trump vs. Crooked Hillary," along with Trump's famed slogan and a note confirming that the candidate paid for the geofilter campaign.

Fall TV season is in full swing, but there's still time to figure out what's worth watching from the new crop of shows just underway. At Ars, we've painstakingly evaluated the new fall titles for possible geek-related awesomeness and found a baker's dozen for you to check out. Remember—we've only included new shows, not returning ones that are coming back for a second or twelfth season. But feel free to wax poetic about your love for everything from Homeland to The Walking Dead in the comments.

Drama

StartUp

This intriguing series combines Miami gangster action with the tale of a startup that has created GenCoin, a crypto currency that could save the developing world (or... just allow drug dealers to launder their money faster). Either way, this is probably the season's most unexpected tech thriller, streaming on Crackle with a fantastic cast that includes Martin Freeman, Otmara Marrero, and Adam Brody.

StartUp is a tech series in the vein of Mr. Robot, where hacking isn't just a get-rich-quick scheme for VCs in Silicon Valley—it's also about global politics. In StartUp, building a tech company is a chance for its founders to escape from poverty and to help millions of other people in the world have access to bank accounts via mobile. Unfortunately, their angel investors are drug dealers, and their roadblocks involve eluding FBI investigators. The series started streaming on Crackle on September 6.

Enlarge / Atlanta (credit: Microsoft)

ATLANTA—At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President for Cloud and Enterprise, explained that the company wants IT professionals to feel empowered and digitally transform the organizations. Accordingly, Microsoft is focusing on three areas to do this: security, intelligence, and the cloud.

The company announced a range of new security and data analytics features designed to make Windows, Office 365, and Azure run better. More importantly, they were designed, at least in part, to specifically make Windows 10 the safest, most secure place to work. Microsoft may be offering its software on more platforms than before, but while you don't have to use Windows, the company is suggesting you probably should.

The strongest example of this was the integration of Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (WDATP), which uses big data analysis to detect suspicious behavioral patterns that indicate a hacker or other security issue, and Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), which works to trap malicious URLs and attachments.

Enlarge / Plex on Amazon Drive. (credit: Plex)

Plex, a service for streaming video and other media from a home PC or NAS device, has teamed up with Amazon to help customers stream their content from the cloud.

Plex is a great tool for making movies, music, and photos available to just about any device, whether you're at home or traveling. But the home computer that holds your Plex content must be powered on and connected to the Internet in order for it to work. A power failure or Internet outage at home could thus leave a Plex user without any streaming content when they're traveling.

Plex Cloud, announced today, could solve that problem. "Plex Cloud eliminates the need to run your own local Plex Media Server and manage an always-on computer or NAS," the announcement said. "Let Amazon worry about nasty stuff like power failure, corruption, and data loss. It turns out they’re pretty good at that stuff!"

(credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It has been almost a year since The Wall Street Journal dropped a bomb of a scoop on the Android community, saying Chrome OS would be "folded into" Android. The resulting product would reportedly bring Android to laptops and desktops. According to the paper, the internal effort to merge these two OSes had been underway for "roughly two years" (now three years) with a release planned for 2017 and an "early version" to show things off in 2016. It seems like we're still on that schedule, and now Android Police claims to have details on the new operating system—and its first launch device—coming Q3 2017.

First up, we've got a host of new code names to throw at you. The hybrid OS is apparently called "Andromeda." Besides being the name of a galaxy, it's probably meant as a geeky portmanteau of "Android" and "Chrome." Google also has a launch device cooking for Andromeda, which is officially codenamed "Bison"—Android Police says this is the unofficial codename of "Pixel 3." "Pixel 3" is a reference to the "Chromebook Pixel" (Google's flagship laptop line for Chrome OS), but since this edition isn't running Chrome OS, you can't really call it a "Chromebook" anymore.

We've seen Android and Chrome OS slowly come together in various ways recently, with Chrome OS gaining the ability to run Android apps and Android snagging Chrome OS' dual partition update system. It's easy to see the hybrid OS reports as an overhyped version of these products, but Android Police says Andromeda is a "completely distinct effort" from what is currently public. "Andromeda is a much larger, more ambitious initiative that is being pursued via merging Chrome features into Android not vice versa" the report says. "It would be more accurate to say Bison [AKA the Pixel 3 laptop] will run Android [rather] than Chrome OS."

Enlarge / The new sign, "Ophiuchus," means "Snake Bearer." And who's got two thumbs and loves snakes? THIS GUY RIGHT HERE. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

According to a post on NASASpacePlace, everything we thought we knew about the influence the heavens have over our Earthly lives has been thrown into chaos. NASA has announced that the celestial sphere above us contains not twelve canonical zodiacal constellations, but 13. The heretofore overlooked constellation, Ophiuchus, is purported to guide and command events surrounding humans born between November 29 and December 17—so, if you used to be a Sagittarius, then congratulations: you’ve got a new sign, baby!

The addition of Ophiuchus—the snake bearer, in case you were wondering—has obvious and far-reaching implications for the entire western Babylonian-derived zodiac calendar. For one thing, squeezing it in means changing the effective dates of all the other signs. According to Yahoo News, the new 13-sign calendar plays out like this:

• Capricorn: January 20-February 16
• Aquarius: February 16-March 11
• Pisces: March 11-April 18
• Aries: April 18-May 13
• Taurus: May 13-June 21
• Gemini: June 21-July 20
• Cancer: July 20-August 10
• Leo: August 10-September 16
• Virgo: September 16-October 30
• Libra: October 30-November 23
• Scorpio: November 23-November 29
• Ophiuchus: November 29-December 17
• Sagittarius: December 17-January 20

The changes are as sweeping as they are staggering. For example, I woke up this morning firmly believing that I was an outgoing, courageous, independent, generous Leo. However, now I have to come to grips with the fact that I am in fact a stupid, sulky, inconsiderate, pessimistic Cancer. I have gone from lion to crab, and it weighs heavily upon me.

A social hangout website for teenage girls has sprung a leak that's exposing plaintext passwords protecting as many as 5.5 million user accounts. As this post went live, all attempts to get the leak plugged had failed.

Operators of i-Dressup didn't respond to messages sent by Ars informing them that a hacker has already downloaded more than 2.2 million of the improperly stored account credentials. The hacker said it took him about three weeks to obtain the cache and that there's nothing stopping him or others from downloading the entire database of slightly more than 5.5 million entries. The hacker said he acquired the e-mail addresses and passwords by using a SQL injection attack that exploited vulnerabilities in the i-Dressup website.

The hacker provided the 2.2 million account credentials both to Ars and breach notification service Have I Been Pwned?. By plugging randomly selected e-mail addresses into the forgotten password section of i-Dressup, both Ars and Have I Been Pwned? principal Troy Hunt found that they all were used to register accounts on the site. Ars then used the contact us page on i-Dressup to privately notify operators of the vulnerability, but more than five days later, no one has responded and the bug remains unfixed.