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Enlarge / If only it were this easy to catch lost Bitcoin credentials. (credit: Cravetiger / Getty Images)

In a world where various mass breachers dictate the use of strong, randomized passwords more than ever, reliable and secure credentials management is paramount in 2020. One Irish drug dealer has evidently learned this lesson the hard way.

This week, the Irish Times reported the sad tale of Clifton Collins, a 49-year-old cannabis grower from Dublin. Collins quietly grew and sold his product for 12 years, and he amassed a small fortune by using some of that revenue to buy bitcoins around 2011 and 2012 before the price of the cryptocurrency soared. But in 2017, state authorities on a routine overnight patrol spotted and then arrested Collins with an estimated $2,171 of cannabis in his car. The man quickly earned himself a five-year jail sentence.

According to the Times: as part of authorities' investigation, Ireland's Criminal Assets Bureau discovered and confiscated 12 Bitcoin wallets belonging to Collins totaling nearly $59 million (reportedly the biggest financial case in CAB's 25-year-history). There was only one problem—CAB couldn't access the accounts because Collins had lost the keys.

Enlarge / Ian (left, voiced by Tom Holland) and Barley (Chris Pratt) don't always get along as brothers, but in Onward, they must join forces to figure out a magical mystery. (credit: Pixar)

Now that Pixar's latest film is officially in US theaters, we are resurfacing our review, which was originally published on February 21st.

Pixar's latest feature-length film, Onward, doesn't reach US theaters until March 6, and it's rare for us at Ars Technica to review a film so far in advance of its launch. When we do, it's usually for good reason.

In Onward's case, that's because we haven't seen a film so easy to recommend to Ars Technica readers in years. We know our average demographic: parents and older readers who are deeply fluent in decades of nerd culture and who appreciate films that offer genuine laughs, likable characters, and tightly sewn logic in family-friendly fashion without compromising the dialogue, plot, or heart—or beating an original, previously beloved franchise into the ground. Pixar has come out screaming with a film that feels focus-tested for that exact audience, and I'm already eager to attend the film again in two weeks.

Enlarge / The house is watching you watch it. (credit: Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images)

Almost 1,000 police and sheriff departments around the country have partnership agreements with Ring, Amazon's home surveillance subsidiary. These arrangements are now drawing scrutiny from a division of the House Oversight committee, which wants to know what, exactly, Ring is up to.

For starters, Congress wants a list of every police deal Ring actually has, the House Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy wrote in a letter (PDF) dated February 19.

After that, the Subcommittee wants to know... well, basically everything. The request for information asks for documentation relating to "all instances in which a law enforcement agency has requested video footage from Ring," as well as full lists of all third-party firms that get any access to Ring users' personal information or video footage. Ring is also asked to send over copies of every privacy notice, terms of service, and law enforcement guideline it has ever had, as well as materials relating to its marketing practices and any potential future use of facial recognition.

Enlarge / AT&T sponsor logo on the backdrop of the 31st Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards Gala in Palm Springs, California, on January 2, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Chris Delmas)

AT&T's mandatory-arbitration clause is unenforceable in a class-action case over AT&T's throttling of unlimited data, a panel of US appeals court judges ruled this week.

The nearly five-year-old case has gone through twists and turns, with AT&T's forced-arbitration clause initially being upheld in March 2016. If that decision had stood, the customers would have been forced to have any complaints heard individually in arbitration.

But an April 2017 decision by the California Supreme Court in a different case effectively changed the state's arbitration law, causing a US District Court judge to revive the class action in March 2018.

Enlarge / A million games are part of GeForce Now now.

Nvidia announced this week that over a million people have signed up to use GeForce Now to stream games from Nvidia's central servers. The announcement comes just a couple of weeks after Nvidia first opened the service up to the general public.

Those user numbers were no doubt helped by the presence of GeForce Now's free service tier, which limits rendering quality and restricts play sessions to a single hour. Subscribers for the paid version of the service are also currently inside a free 90-day "introductory period"—it's unclear how many of those trial users will continue to pay $5 a month once it expires.

Those caveats aside, the quick trip to a million users represents a strong start for Nvidia's entry into an increasingly crowded streaming gaming field. For context, Sony reported a million subscribers for its $60/year PlayStation Now streaming service as of last November, almost five years after it launched. Google hasn't discussed user numbers for Stadia, but there are some early signs that not many early adopters are even making use of the platform's free games (though the company did have trouble satisfying all its initial pre-orders late last year).

Enlarge (credit: DenisKot / Getty)

The nonprofit Internet Society attracted widespread condemnation late last year after announcing it was going to sell off the Public Interest Registry, a subsidiary that administers the .org domain, to a private equity firm called Ethos Capital. People were particularly alarmed because the move came shortly after ICANN removed price caps on registration and renewal fees for .org domains. That opened the prospect of big price hikes in the coming years.

In a Friday press release, Ethos Capital announced it would voluntarily commit to limit price hikes for the next eight years. But under the new rules, Ethos Capital would still be able to raise prices by 10 percent a year—which would more than double prices over the next eight years. Ethos framed this as a concession to the public, and strictly speaking, a 10 percent price hike limit is better for customers than completely uncapped fees. But 10 percent annual increases are still massive—far more than inflation or plausible increases in the cost of running the infrastructure powering the .org registry.

For comparison, ICANN recently announced that Verisign, the company that administers the .com domain, will be allowed to raise prices by 7 percent per year over the next decade, except for a two-year "pause" after four years of hikes. Those changes, adding up to a 70-percent price hike over 10 years, was enough to trigger alarm among domain registrars who must pass these fees on to their customers.