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Enlarge / A late 2008 MacBook Pro with El Capitan, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD upgrade feels a whole lot more modern than it should. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

I took a vacation last month. I traveled some. I read a lot. And I refurbished an old late 2008 MacBook Pro, one of the original aluminum unibody models. I completely took it apart, dusted it out, put it back together, and stuck in a memory and SSD upgrade. This is the kind of thing I do to unwind.

There are lots of differences between this thing and a new MacBook of any stripe. They’re smaller and they’re thinner and they’re faster and they have better screens, better performance, better batteries. But once you’ve put in a few more modern parts and plunked a fresh install of El Capitan onto the SSD, it feels a whole lot like a modern Mac. Using a Windows laptop from 2008 to run Windows 10 is totally possible, but the screens, trackpads, and general build quality of a laptop from the last year or two will feel way better.

Upgrading and using an old-ish Mac for a bit drives home a point I’ve been trying to articulate for a while—Apple’s Mac lineup simply doesn’t feel ahead of the curve in the ways that it used to. Starting especially with those late 2008 Macs, Apple started some trends (big, multitouch trackpads; chiclet keyboards; aluminum unibody designs) and properly identified others before the rest of the industry could jump on them (SSDs, the death of the optical drive, high-resolution “Retina” displays). Apple led with the MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pros, and the PC industry largely followed.

The Yongbyon nuclear facility in North Korea—back in business and making plutonium, based on IAEA analysis. (credit: Keith Luse, Senior Professional Staff Member, U.S. Senate)

Although North Korea has had a string of bad luck with its only suspected nuclear-capable ballistic missile—which had four failed test launches in the last two months—the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is clearly intent on shifting its nuclear capabilities into overdrive. On Monday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced that North Korea's government had apparently re-activated the nuclear fuel production reactor at Yongbyon—the plant responsible for the creation of plutonium used in the DPRK's nuclear weapons program.

The analysis by the IAEA, as IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said during a news conference on Monday, pointed to “resumption of the activities of the five megawatt reactor, the expansion of centrifuge-related facility, [and] reprocessing—these are some of the examples of the areas [of activity indicated at Yongbyon]." In this instance, "reprocessing" refers to the extraction of plutonium from irradiated uranium fuel.

These conclusions were reached based on satellite imagery, as North Korea has denied IAEA inspectors access to the plant. But if the IAEA is correct, the expansion of the centrifuge facility would indicate that North Korea is preparing to produce more fuel for nuclear warheads.

(credit: EHang)

A Chinese drone company has just been granted permission to test its on-demand, passenger-carrying autonomous aerial vehicle in Nevada, making it the first such drone to be tested anywhere in the United States.

According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, state authorities from the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems granted permission Monday for EHang to fly its EHang 184 in the Silver State. EHang already makes a consumer model, the "Ghost Drone."

EHang debuted its drone at CES in Las Vegas earlier this year.

(credit: Lucas Foglia)

Generally, spidey senses hint at brewing trouble. But if those spidey senses come from a certain African species of tarantula, they may hint at a whole new way of brewing pain.

Two venom toxins from the tarantula species Heteroscodra maculate cause piercing pain sensations by targeting an ion channel in neurons not previously linked to pain, researchers report in Nature. In further experiments in mice, researchers found that these specific ion channels may underlie chronic abdominal pain in patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome.

The finding—if validated in human studies—may help scientists unravel the complexity of pain perceptions and point to new ways to block the debilitating sensation. More specifically, the data suggests that finding a drug that could block this ion channel “represents a novel therapeutic strategy for diminishing the chronic pain in IBS and perhaps other pain conditions associated with mechanical sensitization, including migraine headache,” the authors conclude.

A federal judge on Monday unsealed disturbing dashcam footage of a suburban Kansas City, Missouri police officer tasering a 17-year-old motorist who became brain damaged after what was billed as a routine traffic stop. That stop subsequently turned into an event of excessive force—resulting in a four-year prison sentence for Officer Timothy Runnels of the Independence Police Department.

The video shows Runnels tase and yank Bryce Masters out of the car and down on the street as Masters howls. The boy was filming the officer with his mobile phone, which the officer flings to the street. "Am I under arrest? Am I under arrest?" the teen is overheard saying before he is stunned and grabbed from the vehicle.

The officer drags the boy on the street like a sack of potatoes then drops him face first to the ground. During the brief 2014 incident, the boy, who was going to play Xbox with a friend, went into cardiac arrest and now suffers from brain damage. The traffic stop was based on a warrant from Kansas City, which turned out to be a mistake connected to the license plate on the vehicle the boy was driving. The officer claimed he also smelled marijuana and that the teen was being uncooperative.

British people have been going to Italy to hook up for more than a century. (credit: A Room with a View)

Vacation flings are the stuff of bad romance movies and unhappy trips to the clinic, but now they are also the subject of two studies published in a British Medical Journal publication called Sexually Transmitted Infections. Two groups of researchers analyzed surveys of what British people do when they travel abroad and found that sex is high on the list.

One study, authored by population health researcher Clare Tanton and her colleagues, was an examination of 12,530 people who took part in the British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles between 2010 and 2012. The group was composed of people from 16-74 years old, who reported having at least one sexual partner in the past five years. Out of this group, 9.2 percent of men and 5.3 percent of women said they found one or more new sexual partners while outside England. And out of those groups, according to Tanton and her colleagues, there was a lot of "disassortative sexual mixing," meaning cross-nationality intermingling.

In total, 72 percent of men said their overseas hookups were with non-UK residents, while 58 percent of women said the same. Interestingly, the study states that "men were less likely than women to report having partners from the Middle East/North Africa (2.4 percent vs 5.7 percent)." People who had sex with non-UK residents were also less likely to identify themselves by ticking the box for "White (British)" on the survey form.

(credit: Dave Newman)

Major tech companies, advocacy groups, and at least one senator have publicly proclaimed their opposition to two bills currently working their way through Congress. The two pieces of proposed legislation would each significantly expand use of National Security Letters to include "Electronic Communication Transactional Records"—better known as metadata.

As Ars has reported previously, federal investigators issue tens of thousands of NSLs each year to banks, ISPs, car dealers, insurance companies, doctors, and others in terrorism and espionage investigations. The letters demand personal information, and they don't need a judge's signature, much less a showing of probable cause. They also come with a default gag to the recipient that forbids the disclosure of the NSL to the public or the target.

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote on one of those provisions as an amendment to a bill called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act of 2015 (S. 356). The provision would allow NSLs to target "account number, login history, length of service (including start date)…Internet Protocol address…routing, or transmission information…" and more.

(credit: GotCredit)

In a scenario that's growing increasingly common, the chief technologist of the US Federal Trade Commission recently lost control of her smartphone after someone posing as her walked into a mobile phone store and hijacked her number.

Details of the incident were provided by the FTC's Lorrie Cranor in a blog post published Tuesday morning with the headline "Your mobile phone account could be hijacked by an identity thief." In it, Cranor wrote:

A few weeks ago an unknown person walked into a mobile phone store, claimed to be me, asked to upgrade my mobile phones, and walked out with two brand new iPhones assigned to my telephone numbers. My phones immediately stopped receiving calls, and I was left with a large bill and the anxiety and fear of financial injury that spring from identity theft. This post describes my experiences as a victim of ID theft, explains the growing problem of phone account hijacking, and suggests ways consumers and mobile phone carriers can help combat these scams.

My Experiences as a Victim of ID Theft

One evening my mobile phone stopped working mid call. After discovering that another phone on my account also had no signal, I called my mobile carrier on a landline phone. The customer service representative explained that my account had been updated to include new iPhones, and in the process the SIM cards in my Android phones had been deactivated. She assumed it was a mistake, and told me to take my phones to one of my mobile carrier’s retail stores.

The store replaced my SIM cards and got my phones working again. A store employee explained that a thief claiming to be me had gone into a phone store and “upgraded” my two phones to the most expensive iPhone models available and transferred my phone numbers to the new iPhones.

I called my mobile carrier’s fraud department and reported what happened. The representative agreed to remove the charges, but blamed the theft on me. When I asked how the store authenticated the thief, he told me that employees of stores owned by the mobile carrier would have asked for the account holder’s photo ID and the last four digits of their social security number, but if the theft occurred at another retailer, that might not have happened.

I logged in to my online account, changed the password, and added an extra security PIN recommended by the fraud department. I then logged on to the Federal Trade Commission’s identitytheft.gov website to report the theft and learn how to protect myself. Identitytheft.gov is a one-stop resource for identity theft victims. It includes step-by-step instructions and sample letters to guide victims through the recovery process. Following the Identitytheft.gov checklist, I placed a fraud alert and obtained a free credit report. I also prepared an identity theft complaint affidavit, which I later printed and took with me to my local police station when I filed a police report.

The FTC chief technologist went on to invoke federal law to force the unnamed carrier to provide the paperwork filed by the identity thief who hijacked her account. Cranor discovered that the thief used a fake ID that showed Cranor's name and the thief's photo. The thief acquired the iPhones at a retail store in Ohio hundreds of miles from Cranor's home and charged them to Cranor's account on an installment plan.