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Guccifer 2.0, the online persona behind a high-profile hack of the Democratic National Committee, on Friday took credit for a separate breach of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and published a massive amount of personal information belonging to hundreds of Democratic representatives to prove it.

One Excel spreadsheet contains a dizzying amount of personal information—including work and cell phone numbers, home addresses, official and personal e-mail addresses, and names of staffers—for the entire roster of Democratic representatives. Several other documents contain passwords for various DCCC accounts. Other documents purport to be memos detailing fund raisers and campaign overviews.

"As you see the US presidential elections are becoming a farce, a big political performance where the voters are far from playing the leading role," Guccifer 2.0 wrote in a blog post accompanying the document dump. "Everything is being settled behind the scenes as it was with Bernie Sanders."

(credit: Kim Dotcom)

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday in favor of the American government’s seizure of a large number of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s overseas assets.

In the US civil forfeiture case, which was brought 18 months after the initial criminal charges brought against Dotcom and Megaupload, prosecutors outlined why the New Zealand seizure of Dotcom’s assets on behalf of the American government was valid. Seized items include millions of dollars in various seized bank accounts in Hong Kong and New Zealand, multiple cars, four jet skis, the Dotcom mansion, several luxury cars, two 108-inch TVs, three 82-inch TVs, a $10,000 watch, and a photograph by Olaf Mueller worth over $100,000.

After years of delay, in December 2015, Dotcom was finally ordered to be extradited to the United States to face criminal charges. But his appeal is set to be heard before the High Court in Auckland on August 29. Dotcom could conceivably appeal to the New Zealand Court of Appeals and to the Supreme Court of New Zealand (if it agrees to hear the case), a process that could take many more years.

(credit: Dave Crosby)

Visiting Italy and passing on the country’s world-class cheeses, meats, and seafood may seem like a ghastly travel crime. But if you live in the country and do the same with your kids, it could soon be a real crime.

Conservative lawmaker Elvira Savino recently proposed a law that would prohibit parents from keeping their kids on a strict vegan diet—that is, one that abstains from meat, fish, dairy products, and sometimes other animal products such as honey and gelatin. The text of the law describes such a diet as “devoid of elements essential for healthy and balanced growth.”

If the law is passed, parents found in violation would face up to a year in prison. But if a child becomes ill or dies on the diet, the parents would face boosted jail time of up to four or six years, respectively. The law applies to parents of kids 16 and under, with the harshest penalties going to parents of kids three and under.

Three days after its PlayStation 4 launch, the space-exploration game No Man's Sky is now live for Windows PC gamers (via either Steam or GoG). But if you've been anywhere near PC gaming for the past few years, you won't be surprised to find out that combining "small development team," "video game that promises 18 quintillion planets," and "worldwide simultaneous launch on all kinds of PCs" is a dangerous mix.

The game's Steam reviews, which have surpassed 5,700 as of press time, are sampling out as "mostly negative," with frequent complaints about framerate hitches and total system crashes. Though Steam's reports must be considered anecdotal, more than a few trustworthy voices are piping up online to report issues with No Man's Sky, despite using systems that far exceed the game's minimum spec, which calls for older cards like the GTX 480 and Radeon 7870. Even users with high-end solutions like the GTX 1080 or two GTX 980Ti cards in SLI mode are reporting major stutters—on a game that runs on a comparatively so-so PS4 console with a mostly consistent 30 FPS refresh.

Ars Technica is running two NMS test sessions on high-end PCs at the moment, and both of them are running GTX 980Ti cards with SSD drives, 16GB of RAM, and either a Skylake i5 or a Haswell i7 Intel chip. We're seeing inconsistent framerates, in spite of both computers in question having fully updated drivers on Windows 10. The game's PC version defaults to a 30 FPS cap, which can be disabled in the normal options menus. But with this setting turned on, the game can't help but hitch down to an apparent 20 FPS on a regular basis, not to mention throw up frequent display hitches of half a second at a time. Removing that framerate cap can get play up to a smooth 60 frames per second, and we enjoyed more consistent framerates without the cap. But even those framerates can bounce down to 30 or less at random intervals. The game also suffers from freezing hitches, even without apparent spikes in visible geometry like creatures or spaceships.

(credit: US Health and Human Services)

Physics researchers have a long history of sharing work they're preparing for publication in order to solicit suggestions and comments from their peers. Like so many things, this behavior migrated to the Internet: Cornell University's arXiv server hosts over 1.1 million documents, many of which later appeared in formal peer-reviewed literature.

The physics and astronomy communities see arXiv as beneficial, and biologists put together their own database called The BioRxiv. Now it appears that chemists are going to get their own equivalent. The American Chemical Society is asking for input from the research and publishing communities about what they'd like to see in a ChemRxiv.

The structure of the service will probably be the same as it is for other fields: manuscripts can be posted and shared prior to submission for peer review. The American Chemical Society's stated goal is to have information get circulated faster, which should accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. For individual researchers, the benefits may include having any errors or misinterpretations caught and fixed before hitting the peer review process.