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Cisco Nexus switches. (credit: pchow98)

Cisco has finally quashed a long-running lawsuit brought by an Israeli patent-holding company called Commil USA. The case took a surprising number of detours, including a trip to the Supreme Court last year that looks almost unnecessary in hindsight.

In an opinion (PDF) published Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said that Cisco's non-infringement argument should have won the day at trial, and there was no justification for a jury's $64 million verdict against the networking giant. The opinion overturns the verdict, leaving Commil with nothing to show for a case it has pursued since 2007.

Monday's decision puts the Federal Circuit in an awkward position, because they had already considered the case before in 2013. At that time, the three-judge panel chose to punt on the non-infringement argument, simply not ruling on it—yet now the same panel views it as a decisive point in Cisco's favor.

Welcome to Ashley Madison. We're your fembot hosts.

In one of 2015's most sensational hacks, a group called Impact Team dumped the real names and credit card information associated with 39 million accounts from cheater dating site Ashley Madison. And yet, despite the public shaming of prominent men who paid to join the site and several lawsuits against the company, Ashley Madison claims that it has added 4 million members in the months since the hack.

But why would anyone join a cheater site knowing that they risk exposure? Is this a case of the Internet having a ridiculously short memory? Of horniness overcoming good sense? Or is it just another trick played by a company whose brand has become synonymous with using bots to plump up its membership numbers?

Company reps refuse to disclose how they came to the 4 million number, saying merely "we do not have any updates to share." What we know is that the Ashley Madison database and source code show that the company had created at least 70 thousand fake female profiles called "engagers" to chat up curious men who joined the site for free. Bots created by developers at Ashley Madison would use these fake profiles to send men messages and e-mails—which the men could only read if they signed up for a paid account. Apparently, the bots were so successful that they accounted for 59 percent of conversions to paid accounts (see the "engager vs. female" chart in this article).

PC gamers were dismayed on Christmas Day to find that Valve's popular (and arguably essential) Steam store had gone haywire before becoming entirely inaccessible. Logged-in users were seeing account data that didn't belong to them, with partial credit card numbers, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, billing addresses, and purchase histories all visible. This happened for a period of about an hour and a half, from 14:50 to 16:20 EST on Christmas Day, after which the service went down entirely.

Valve has published an explanation of what happened and why. Steam routinely suffers from denial of service attacks. On Christmas Day, this traffic exploded. The Steam Store was already busy, due to the Winter Sale, and the denial of service attacks pushed the load to 20 times the normal load.

To handle the load of the attack, Valve's Web caching partner rolled out an updated configuration that resulted in personal, authenticated pages being cached and subsequently served to users they didn't belong to. After about 90 minutes the error was spotted. The Steam Store was taken offline entirely, the cache configuration was repaired, and the erroneously cached data was purged. Normal operation resumed thereafter.

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On Tuesday, lawyers representing CBS and Paramount Studios sued Axanar Productions, a company formed by a group of fans attempting to make professional-quality Star Trek fan-fiction movies, for copyright infringement.

"The Axanar Works are intended to be professional quality productions that, by Defendants’ own admission, unabashedly take Paramount’s and CBS’s intellectual property and aim to 'look and feel like a true Star Trek movie,’” the complaint reads (PDF).

Axanar Productions released a short 20-minute film called Prelude to Axanar in 2014, in which retired Starfleet leaders talk about their experiences in the Four Years War, a war between the Federation and the Klingons that occurred in the Star Trek universe before The Original Series began. The feature-length Axanar is scheduled to premier in 2016 and follows the story of Captain Kirk's hero, Garth of Izar. Both productions were funded on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, raising more than $1.1 million from fans.

(credit: Wikimedia Commons)

When it comes to evolution, people tend to focus on the big driving force of natural selection, which latches on to helpful mutations while purging the harmful ones. But there are other processes that change the frequencies of mutations—everything from random drift to the founding of small isolated populations.

Looking at our own species' history, we would expect to see some of this in action. After modern humans established themselves in Africa, smaller populations branched out to establish footholds in Asia before spreading east, eventually reaching the Americas. At each step, a small group of migrants took a fraction of humanity's genetic diversity with it, creating a series of population bottlenecks.

This should be easy to see in our DNA, but so far it has turned out to be complicated. Different attempts using distinct populations and methods have come to mixed conclusions about whether a clear signal is there. Now, a large international team of researchers has gone and sequenced genomes from multiple populations along humanity's route out of Africa, and they found a signature of these bottlenecks both in terms of genetic variation and in terms of potentially harmful mutations.