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(credit: Bryton Mellott via Facebook)

A 22-year-old Illinois man named Bryton Mellott decided to celebrate July Fourth by burning the US flag and posting pictures of his actions on Facebook. The actions led to his arrest by local police, national press attention, and threats against his life.

“I am not proud to be an American," wrote Mellott, in a Facebook post that he later deleted. "In this moment, being proud of my country is to ignore the atrocities committed against people of color, people living in poverty, people who identify as women, and against my own queer community on a daily basis."

The photo remains up, with the accompanying hashtag "#betterburnthatflag."

(credit: Clever Cupcakes)

According to a contract seen by Recode, Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer struck a deal with Mozilla in 2014 specifying annual payments of $375 million to the browser creator in exchange for Yahoo's search engine appearing in the default position on Firefox. That $375 million price tag will be paid out every year until 2019 one way or another—even if Mozilla doesn’t like the company that buys Yahoo and decides to walk away.

Of course, if Mozilla decides it likes whichever company buys the embattled search giant, then payments continue as before and the new owner of Yahoo’s search engine retains the default position on the browser.

The trick is, then, finding a buyer who is committed to keeping Yahoo’s search product robust, Recode says, at least for the next three years. If a potential buyer was thinking of abandoning search, however, that could come at a very steep price, as it would send Mozilla searching for a better search engine to serve up to its users.

With its August 2 release date growing closer, the Windows 10 Anniversary Update is nearing completion.

A steady stream of new builds for Windows Insiders on the fast track has been released over the past few weeks. The latest build, 14383, came out today and includes a wide range of fixes. As with many of its predecessors, this build has been made available simultaneously for Windows 10 on the desktop and Windows 10 Mobile; Microsoft is intending to ship the Anniversary Update simultaneously for PC, phone, and Xbox One when that release date arrives.

Windows Central is reporting that according to its sources, the build one newer than today's release, 14384, is the first candidate for what would formerly be known as Release To Manufacturing (RTM). With Windows now being delivered "as a service," the old RTM terminology isn't favored by Redmond any more—not least because many people will download the update rather than have it preinstalled by a PC manufacturer—but the concept that RTM represents endures. The "RTM" build will be the one released on August 2 to people in the stable channel, and then after several months of regular Patch Tuesday updates, it will be released as the Current Branch for Business.

Enlarge / World of Warcraft it ain't.

Probably only the oldest of old-school online gamers can remember playing Habitat, an MMO that ran on the Commodore 64's Quantum Link online service starting way back in 1986. The early LucasArts classic (dating back to the days when the company was still called LucasFilm Games) went offline in 1988, living on briefly as the revamped Club Caribe and in a short-lived Japan-exclusive version under electronics maker Fujitsu.

Now, after years of work by the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment and some partners, the source code for that early experiment in online game design has been fully preserved and posted on Github.

The effort to revive Habitat began back in 2013, when MADE was researching a "History of LucasArts" exhibit for the 2014 Game Developers Conference. As part of that effort, MADE recruited original designers Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer to help decipher old bits of PL/1 code and 6502 Assembly.

Security experts have documented a disturbing spike in a particularly virulent family of Android malware, with more than 10 million handsets infected and more than 286,000 of them in the US.

Researchers from security firm Check Point Software said the malware installs more than 50,000 fraudulent apps each day, displays 20 million malicious advertisements, and generates more than $300 million per month in revenue. The success is largely the result of the malware's ability to silently root a large percentage of the phones it infects by exploiting vulnerabilities that remain unfixed in older versions of Android. The Check Point researchers have dubbed the malware family "HummingBad," but researchers from mobile security company Lookout say HummingBad is in fact Shedun, a family of auto-rooting malware that came to light last November and had already infected a large number of devices.

For the past five months, Check Point researchers have quietly observed the China-based advertising company behind HummingBad in several ways, including by infiltrating the command and control servers it uses. The researchers say the malware uses the unusually tight control it gains over infected devices to create windfall profits and steadily increase its numbers. HummingBad does this by silently installing promoted apps on infected phones, defrauding legitimate mobile advertisers, and creating fraudulent statistics inside the official Google Play Store.

(credit: HBO)

In the final episode of Silicon Valley’s third season, Pied Piper’s master BS artist Erlich Bachman is broke. But Bachman—who failed at running an incubator and then failed utterly to show up his enemies with his Bachmanity project—has a gift for spin. Somehow he turns a modest “uptick” in the number of daily active users into an incredible windfall for the company as well as the season’s most elaborate dick joke.

Problem is, the uptick is fake. Business manager Jared couldn’t face the possibility that Pied Piper—and his idol, founder Richard Hendricks—will soon collapse. In the series’ biggest twist, we discovered where the “uptick” came from—a crowded, smoky click farm in Bangladesh. The masterful sequence at the end of episode nine shows a Bangladeshi worker’s morning commute, biking his way through the crowded streets of one of the world’s poorest countries. There’s no hip music as the episode ends, just the quiet clacking of hundreds of keyboards. Is this how a bunch of coddled California techies define success?

Farming for fun and profit

The thing is, Jared isn’t the only one who knows about the scam. Pied Piper founder Richard (Thomas Middlebrook) knows, too. Actually, it turns out a lot of people know. In a hilarious sequence from the final episode, Dinesh and Gilfoyle congratulate Richard while Dinesh "accidentally” drops a flash drive with a "zombie script" that would "randomize user actions," making “fake users in click farms absolutely indistinguishable from real users." Richard is on the verge of being corrupted, and they love him for it. Finally, they have a boss ready to swim with the sharks. The click farm scam is some "serial killer level shit," Dinesh tells him. "I think I finally respect you as a CEO," Gilfoyle says.