Author: Ars Staff

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we are bringing a number of great deals for you to check out this weekend. One of the best is for a powerful Bluetooth speaker—now you can get an Omaker M4 Portable Wireless Bluetooth & NFC speaker for just $18.99, a fraction of its $89 original price and a great deal on its $29 list price.

This speaker lets you bring your favorite tunes into any environment with its splashproof, shockproof, and dustproof design, and it fully recharges in just three hours. You'll get 12 hours of music with this gadget with just 80 percent battery, so you're covered no matter how long your jam session is.

Check out the usual list of laptop, gaming, TV, and accessories deals below as well.

Evolve is an asymmetrical multiplayer game where a team of hunters chase down a monster. It was made by the hugely talented Left 4 Dead developers over six years before being released early in 2015, and I thought it was great. But publisher 2K, so convinced of the game's quality, put in place various DLC packages and pre-order bonuses to milk what it expected to be an enormous community. The perception took hold that Evolve was ripping off players—who had to buy the "core" game first—and it failed to sell in anything like the numbers expected. Now it's dead.

Rainbow Six: Siege walks a dangerously similar path.

Launched just before Christmas in the kind of primetime slot that with hindsight so often looks like a graveyard, Ubisoft anticipated that Siege would achieve lifetime sales of over seven million copies. For many reasons, however, Siege has thus far failed to make a commercial impact. The tragedy is that Siege offers something new and unique in the stalest of genres, the mainstream FPS. At one point it even looked like it might usurp the greats of the competitive shooter world. What's stopped it? Ubisoft.

Greetings, Arsians!

Thanks to our partners at TechBargains, we have a number of deals to share that will change how you work and play for the better. One of the highlights is the Dell Latitude 15 3000 laptop that you can now get for just slightly more than $700. Originally $1,227, this laptop features an Intel Core i7 processor, a 15.6-inch HD display, 8GB of RAM, and a 2GB Nvidia GPU to help you get work done as efficiently as possible.

On the flip side, there are also deals on games for when you need a break, including a $370 PS4 bundle and $20 of games, including Fallout 4, Deadpool, and others.

Calories consumed minus calories burned—it’s the simple formula for weight loss or gain, but dieters often find that it doesn’t work. Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley of Gastropod investigate for Mosaic science, where this story first appeared. It's republished here under a Creative Commons license.

“For me, a calorie is a unit of measurement that’s a real pain in the rear.”

Bo Nash is 38. He lives in Arlington, Texas, where he’s a technology director for a textbook publisher. He has a wife and child. And he’s 5’10” and 245 lbs—which means he is classed as obese.

Eric Springer is an Australian developer who worked at Amazon as a software developer engineer. He left a few years ago to work on several Bitcoin projects, one of which he sold.

As a security conscious user who follows the best practices—using unique passwords, two-factor authentication, only using a secure computer, and being able to spot phishing attacks from a mile away—I thought my accounts and details would be pretty safe. I was wrong.

That's because when someone went after me, all those precautions were for nothing. That’s because most systems come with a backdoor called customer support. In this post I’m going to focus on the most grievous offender: Amazon.com. Amazon.com was one of the few companies I trusted with my personal information. I shop there, I am a heavy AWS user (raking up well over $600/month), and I used to work there as a software developer.

Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link)

A large assault weapon picks off an enemy in the distance, a familiar visual for any fan of first-person shooters. But the audible bang of the weapon isn't the only sound being heard. A narrator orients the audience: "I—Ismenus, Niobe's oldest son—was guiding my horse's reins when an arrow planted itself in my chest."

Huh? Perhaps a line from Greek mythology about Niobe, daughter of Tantalus, isn't the commentary or soundtrack you'd find paired to your run-of-the-mill FPS even in the most avant garde of Twitch chats. At Pierrepont School in Westport Connecticut, that's precisely the point. Members of of EK Theater (who double as students at Pierrepont) are busy preparing for their forth-coming adaptation of Osiris, a classic Egyptian story. And rather than mulling over costumes and traditional stage direction, these thespians worry about selecting a virtual gaming stage and programming the choreography.

Shodan, a search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT), recently launched a new section that lets users easily browse vulnerable webcams.

The feed includes images of marijuana plantations, back rooms of banks, children, kitchens, living rooms, garages, front gardens, back gardens, ski slopes, swimming pools, colleges and schools, laboratories, and cash register cameras in retail stores, according to Dan Tentler, a security researcher who has spent several years investigating webcam security.

"It's all over the place," he told Ars Technica UK. "Practically everything you can think of."

In the past decade, mobile computing has gone from a niche market for well-heeled enterprises with large field organisations to the fastest growing, and often most popular, way for employees of organisations of all sizes to do business computing. The near-universal adoption of mobile devices by consumers—who are also employees—has forced one of the most major shifts that corporate IT has ever seen.

In many cases, expensive company-owned laptop rollouts have been replaced by leveraging phones and tablets that are owned by employees. Business applications are quickly being rewritten, and new ones are being invented that leverage the power and ubiquitous nature of mobile devices.

Mobile computing is no longer just another way to access the corporate network: it is quickly becoming not only a new computing platform, but the dominant computing platform for many enterprises. Along the way, corporate culture has had to change to accommodate the always-present nature of the modern smartphone, and security practices have been completely rethought to deal with the challenge of alien, uncontrolled devices being brought inside the corporate firewall.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a slew of new deals for you to check out over the weekend. The highlight is a new smartphone from Huawei: you can now preorder the Huawei Honor 5X unlocked smartphone for just $200. It's a steal on a pretty robust handset, which features a 5.5-inch 1080p display, an octa-core processor with 2GB of RAM, up to 128GB of storage, and dual-sim capabilities for travel convenience. If you're in need of a cheap smartphone for daily use or an extra one for traveling, this is the perfect time to grab one at a good price. The Honor 5X officially comes out on January 31.

Also check out a number of new deals on tablets, laptops, TVs, and more below.

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You can be forgiven for not being caught up with The CW’s dystopian-future series The 100. Based on a decent but neglected young adult (YA) book series, the series took some time to find its footing. But then, last season, the story of 100 teenagers dumped from an orbital space station onto a toxic, abandoned Earth morphed into something altogether more interesting and complex. Violent and fascinating, the show is full of cultural clashes, compelling alliances, and a relentless, uncompromising worldview. This show may not have been on your radar before, but with the third season starting tonight, it deserves to become a priority.

Breathless propulsion

In the series, a small fraction of humanity has survived after a nuclear apocalypse, and the titular Hundred are one hundred (very attractive) criminal teens sent from the Ark space station to investigate whether Earth is now hospitable to human life. Led by Clarke, the show’s protagonist, and a variety of other teenage misfits, the Hundred quickly discover that the Ark residents are not the only people who survived the bombs.

Far from empty, Earth is populated by numerous tribes and factions with complicated inter-relationships and a unifying wariness of each other. Some of the show’s most surprising and compelling twists arise due to clashes between communities with distinct cultures and vastly different levels of technology. Sky People (former Ark residents) have education and tech know-how but are perpetually at a loss for resources; Grounders live in a bow-and-arrow paradigm; the residents of Mount Weather, who feature throughout season two, are both highly sophisticated and dangerously weak.