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Microsoft has announced its intent to make the Windows 10 upgrade for existing Windows 7 and 8.1 users more widely available. In tandem with this, the company has also, at last, offered a good way of rejecting the upgrade and making the notifications about it go away forever.

The free upgrade is available to anyone not running an Enterprise version of Windows 7 or 8.1. Home users that update their systems through Windows Update have received a range of quite persistent advertisements in their system tray and the Windows Update app itself to encourage them to upgrade. However, domain joined systems have so far been excluded from this advertising.

Microsoft is changing this imminently. Domain-joined eligible systems that use regular Windows Update for their updates (which is to say, systems that do not have their updates managed by WSUS or SCCM) will start receiving the upgrade offer in the US later this month and worldwide thereafter.

One of Windows 10 Mobile's truly distinctive and unusual features is Continuum. If you hook a phone up to a screen and, optionally, a mouse and keyboard, you can run desktop-style apps, albeit still powered by the phone. The connection to the screen and other peripherals can be wireless, using Miracast and Bluetooth, or wired, using the USB 3 Display Dock.

While the novelty of this is appealing, I'm not altogether sure that it's ever going to be a major selling point. There are a couple of reasons: first, it requires quite specific hardware (although Miracast with Bluetooth is quite widely available); second, it requires Universal Windows Apps that specifically enable the ability to run on a large screen.

A new preview app has me feeling a little more excited about Continuum. Microsoft has released a preview of the Remote Desktop client for Windows 10 Mobile that includes Continuum support. The value of this is obvious: you can connect to a desktop PC running desktop apps, but unlike traditional smartphone remote desktop apps, you don't have to try to use those desktop apps from the small screen of a phone. Just Miracast the display to a big screen, and those desktop apps will look and work exactly the way they should.

When drones go bad, what can you do? Shooting them down could be dangerous, especially if they have explosives on board. So why not pit drone against drone? That's the reasoning behind this drone catcher, created by a team at Michigan Tech University.

Using drones against each other isn't a new idea, and there's a whole cottage industry devoted to tech that stops drones. But Michigan Tech roboticist Mo Rastgaar and his students took on this new design as a "pet project." Rastgaar got the idea to make a drone catcher two years ago, when he learned that snipers were protecting the crowd from renegade drones during the World Cup. There had to be a better solution. So Rastgaar and his students gave the drone catcher a net gun, which allows it to capture another drone in mid-air and carry it away.

The group took only two months to develop the project, Rastgaar told Ars via e-mail. "We started this project in fall 2014, and by January 2015 we had the system," he said. "The video goes back to early 2015. So with some limited extra time we had, we developed this system as a proof of concept. Everything in the system, such as net size, net range, and hunter drone specifications, can be modified to meet the specific demands based on the different scenarios."

Four tiny, implantable rods that steadily ooze drugs could help some patients kick opioid addictions, an advisory committee for the Food and Drug Administration concluded Tuesday. With a 12 to 5 vote, the committee of medical experts recommended that the regulatory agency approve the implantable device for use—and the agency often follows such advice.

If approved, the treatment would debut amid a national epidemic of addictions and overdoses involving opioids, which includes prescription painkillers and heroin. The committee concluded that the implantable device could offer a safer way to deliver medication-based treatments for addicts, who desperately need better options. However, dissenting members of the committee expressed concern over the device’s safety and hinted that the need to address the addiction epidemic may have clouded the committee’s judgment.

"We all desperately want something to be available," the committee's acting chairwoman Judith Kramer told USA Today after the committee’s Tuesday vote. But, she said, “I’m very concerned about the precedent this sets." Kramer, a professor emerita at Duke University, was one of the five dissenting committee members.

The BBC has posted an 18-minute interview with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has offered some interesting insights into his vision of the future and his goals for his companies.

Journalist Rory Cellan-Jones asked Musk about what Telsa hopes to accomplish on a grander scale with Tesla, and the CEO suggested that he’s looking to build an ecosystem for sustainable transportation. “If we can have sustainable energy production and combine that with electric cars, we have a long term sustainable future,” Musk said, adding that he believes eventually “all transport with the exception of rockets will go fully electric.”

Indeed, Musk is on the board of SolarCity, a solar panel company, and last year he announced a new line of stationary batteries, called the Tesla Powerwall, which will be sold to people who want to store energy on their premises. “The whole point of Tesla is to accelerate the presence of sustainable transport,” Musk said.

Ross Ulbricht, convicted last February of being the mastermind behind the Silk Road darknet marketplace, has filed his appeal brief. It’s a 170-page whopper that revisits several of the evidentiary arguments that Ulbricht's lawyer made at trial. It also focuses on allegations of government corruption that didn’t come out until afterward.

The brief reprises the central elements of Ulbricht’s defense: namely, that he didn't do it. Ulbricht still says he wasn’t “Dread Pirate Roberts,” or DPR, and that “there were multiple DPRs over the course of Silk Road’s existence.”

As to the digital mountain of evidence that the feds found on his computer—including Silk Road logs and thousands of pages of chats with Silk Road admins—Ulbricht answers with a kind of vague “the Internet is scary” story. His attorney, Joshua Dratel, writes that “vulnerabilities inherent to the Internet and digital data,” like hacking and fabrication of files, made “much of the evidence against Ulbricht inauthentic, unattributable to him, and/or untimely unreliable.”

North Carolina's so-called ag-gag law is in the legal crosshairs. Activists with groups backing government accountability, food safety, and animal rights lodged a federal lawsuit Wednesday in a bid to block enforcement of the measure that became law January 1.

The lawsuit follows challenges to similar anti-speech laws in Idaho and Wyoming.