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A hacker the US authorities have labeled as the leader of an overseas Internet hacking group—the Kosova Hacker's Security—pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to charges of providing material support to the US enemy. It was the first known prosecution of a hacker joining forces with a terror group in a bid to carry out terrorism, the government said.

The defendant, a Kosovo citizen named Ardit Ferizi, was arrested in Malaysia last year and was accused of stealing data on US military personnel by hacking US corporate computers and then providing that data to the Islamic State terror group.

"Ferizi admitted to stealing the personally identifiable information of over 1,000 U.S. servicemembers and federal employees, and providing it to ISIL with the understanding that they would incite terrorist attacks against those individuals," said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin. "The case against Ferizi is the first of its kind, representing the nexus of the terror and cyber threats."

The latest version of the Android N Developer Preview is out, and the Developer Preview Program is really starting to wrap things up. Version 4 brings finalized APIs and the final SDK for developers, so the time for serious bug fixing is right now. After this preview, there's just one more version to go until the final release in "Q3 2016."

With the final SDK, the Play Store is also ready to accept apps that are targeting API 24 (the API level of Android N). Devs are encouraged to test backward compatibility on their Alpha or Beta channels and then push full N-ready apps to the Play Store. (Developers, you're totally going to do this, right?)

On the consumer side of things, Google has added a silly joke to the hidden Android N version screen. If you go to the "About Phone" screen and mash on the Android version number section, you'll get the usual "N" logo to pop up. Long press on the "N" logo and instead of an Android version of Flappy Bird, you'll now get an "N" logo with "Namey McNameface" written across it. We're guessing that's not going to be the final "N" name.

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Despite brimming data showing that drinking coffee can be good for your health, there has been a lingering black stain on the popular drink’s reputation—the 1991 assessment by the World Health Organization that classified coffee as a possible carcinogen. Today, that stain got scrubbed away.

In a Wednesday announcement and an accompanying article in the journal The Lancet Oncology, the WHO reversed that 1991 classification, striking coffee from the Group 2b list of foods and beverages that are “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” That initial classification was based on “limited evidence of an association with cancer of the urinary bladder from case-control studies, and inadequate evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals.” According to 23 health experts who met in May to review more than 1,000 new and old human and animal studies on coffee, that limited evidence didn’t stand up. The experts concluded that coffee is a Group 3 agent, which is “not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans.”

Moreover, amid their review, the experts also noted that several studies provided evidence that coffee drinking may reduce the risk of cancers of the liver and uterine endometrium. For more than 20 other types of cancers, the effect of coffee drinking was inconclusive, the experts found.

Exploring the female themes in Game of Thrones season 6. Edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

There was something gnawing at me after so many critics panned the first episode of Game of Thrones season 6. Many considered it "boring" or "tedious" since there was so much exposition, and some felt the season was headed nowhere. I realized a few episodes in what that pestering feeling was—EACH STORYLINE IS ABOUT A STRONG WOMAN. If that’s "tedious," I’m all for the bland.

This is a logical story progression, not a plot to pander to a sense of diversity. If you consider what Joseph Campbell has written about the structure of epic stories, you'll start to see what’s going on here. Emerging from the bloody battles and men on the many thrones of power, each storyline has seen a strong heroine prevail or at least scheme to dominate her opposition. What we're seeing here is the classic Campbellian emergence of the mother—the ethos of nature, life, and resurrection—rising to fight the darkness, the winter, and the ruin in this hero cycle. In this video, we explore each storyline and track the journey of this female ethos.

(credit: Chris Blakeley)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has successfully convinced a federal judge to block the disclosure of where the bureau has attached surveillance cams on Seattle utility poles. The decision Monday stopping Seattle City Light from divulging the information was expected, as claims of national security tend to trump the public's right to know.

However, this privacy dispute highlights a powerful and clandestine tool the authorities are employing across the country to snoop on the public—sometimes with warrants, sometimes without. Just last month, for example, this powerful surveillance measure—which sometimes allows the authorities to control the camera's focus point remotely—helped crack a sex trafficking ring in suburban Chicago.

Meanwhile, in stopping the release of the Seattle surveillance cam location information—in a public records act case request brought by activist Phil Mocek—US District Judge Richard Jones agreed (PDF) with the FBI's contention that releasing the data would harm national security.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a ton of new deals today. Of note is this steal of a deal on a redesigned Dell desktop: you can now get the Dell Inspiron 3650 desktop—complete with a Core i7 Skylake processor, 16GB of RAM, and an AMD R9 360 discrete graphics card—for just $579. Dell has revamped this PC with modern design cues from its XPS line, and it's built to take up 45 percent less space than the original. This is one of the best prices on a Skylake-equipped desktop we've seen, so grab it while you can.

Check out the rest of the deals we have, including discounts on new E3 releases and more.

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Underscoring the flourishing world of for-profit hacking, researchers have uncovered a thriving marketplace that sells access to more than 70,000 previously compromised servers, in some cases for as little as $6 apiece.

As of last month, the xDedic trading platform catalogued 70,624 servers, many belonging to government agencies or corporations from 173 countries, according to a report published Wednesday by researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. That number was up from 55,000 servers in March, a sign that the marketplace operators carefully maintain and update the listed inventory.

"From government networks to corporations, from Web servers to databases, xDedic provides a marketplace for buyers to find anything," Kaspersky researchers wrote in a separate blog post. "And the best thing about it—it's cheap! Purchasing access to a server located in a European Union country government network can cost as little as $6." The post continued:

Matthew Keys talks to reporters after he was sentenced to two years in prison. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Reporter Matthew Keys will not be going to federal prison today as he was scheduled to. His attorney, Jay Leiderman, tweeted the news today after he and the other lawyers on Keys’ legal team filed an emergency motion with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last night.

An automatic stay has issued in the @MatthewKeysLive case. He will not be reporting to prison today.

— Jay Leiderman (@JayLeidermanLaw) June 15, 2016

The Tuesday filing automatically triggers a temporary stay, according to the 9th Circuit’s Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. So the California journalist convicted in 2015 of hacking-related crimes will remain out of custody for now.

Keys was convicted at trial under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the notorious anti-hacking federal law that dates back to the 1980s. An effort to reform that law has languished in Congress. The 29-year-old was scheduled to begin serving his two-year sentence beginning Wednesday at 2pm Pacific Time at a federal prison camp in Atwater, California, about 120 miles east of San Francisco.