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(credit: Brittany Hogan)

The Supreme Court on Monday made it easier for patent holders to win extra damages in infringement lawsuits. The justices upended a lower court's standard that made it difficult for prevailing patent holders to win so-called treble damages—which amount to actual monetary damages multiplied by three.

The unanimous opinion (PDF) by Chief Justice John Roberts said the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears all patent appeals, had set too rigid of a test under the Patent Act to determine whether a losing company's infringement was willful. Prevailing parties can get punitive damages if infringement is deemed willful.

The court noted that the law in question simply says that a judge "may increase the damages up to three times the amount found or assessed." The Supreme Court on Monday noted that, after nearly two centuries, the bar has been raised—making it more difficult to win treble damages. Those special damages have wrongly become "reserved for egregious cases of culpable behavior." The chief justice said that the "principal problem" with the test the courts have glommed onto is that "it requires a finding of objective recklessness in every case."

Enlarge / See you all in hell. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Do you have a folder full of first-party, preinstalled iOS apps that you don’t use? Sure, we all do. We’ve all learned to live with this folder over the years, even as more and more of these icons have slowly crept onto our phones.

Well, no longer—in iOS 10, many (though not quite all) of the built-in system apps can be deleted just like any other app. The complete list of apps that can be removed, per the Apple Support document:

• Calculator
• Calendar
• Compass
• Contacts
• FaceTime
• Find My Friends
• Home
• iBooks
• iCloud Drive
• iTunes Store
• Mail
• Maps
• Music
• News
• Notes
• Podcasts
• Reminders
• Stocks
• Tips
• Videos
• Voice Memos
• Watch app
• Weather

Apple warns that deleting apps may affect “related system functions” and “data on your Apple Watch,” and it says that all of the apps together consume around 150MB of space.

Twitch

Bulhead and Square Enix presented a new title, Turing Test. It's a first-person puzzler set on the moon of Europa, and the team apparently consulted with scientists to figure out what the life would be like. (It's fiction, but "it could be true," they boasted.)

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After last year's inaugural PC Gaming Show at E3—a slow, sometimes painful rollout of games followed by lengthy interview segments—we weren't sure what to expect in the 2016 sequel. But today, a slew of developers offered PC gamers much quicker teases and blurbs about some titles to watch for within the next year.

In total, roughly titles were shown off. There was also expansion pack and video card news plus a lengthy appreciation of the mouse and keyboard from Warren Spector. While light on hard details like release dates, overall the show presented a diverse array of games that spanned gameplay genre and developer pedigree. Above is information on everything we took in, and below are some select notes on titles that looked particularly promising.

Ark Survival Evolved showed off a Primitive Plus mod, coming late July to players. The mod will apparently be good for roleplaying, playing on a high technology tier, creating your own storefronts. The team presenting mentioned that the goal is to create a pack of creatures, play with them, raise babies, and level them up. Players will be able to go through lifecycles from babies to adults, and the team snuck in some cheeky additions like a mate button and a poop button. (Our Sam Machkovech likened it to "Ultima Online but with DINOSAURS!")

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Though the feature wasn’t mentioned in Apple’s WWDC 2016 keynote, I’m most excited about the introduction of the Apple File System, or APFS. The preliminary version of the developer documentation is online now, and it looks like the new file system introduces a whole boat-load of solid features—including a few out of the ZFS playbook.

APFS looks to be a major update over Apple’s old and creaky HFS+ file system, which has been around in one form or another for decades. It's been the subject of expansions and additions over the years, but HFS+ never approached the extensibility and flexibility of current next-generation file systems. Rather than continuing to bolt stuff onto the old code, we now (finally!) get a new file system that has some truly compelling features.

First, the caveats

But before we get into the good stuff, let’s real quick talk about the bad stuff—or, at least, the "this is still in development so here’s what doesn’t quite work" stuff. Apple’s documentation notes that because APFS is still a developer preview, you cannot use an APFS volume as a startup disk. You also can’t use it as a Time Machine volume or part of a Fusion Drive configuration, nor can you use File Vault encryption on it.

The apparently fraudulent Twitter account associated with a scam site trying to turn the Orlando mass shooting into a Bitcoin factory.

The vultures have already begun to descend on the tragedy in Orlando, Florida. A fake Twitter account claiming to represent the nightclub where the largest mass shooting in modern US history took place in the early hours of June 12 was calling for donations to assist victims—by sending bitcoins to buy bottled water and Oreo cookies. The account was suspended on Monday afternoon.

The scammers used a common tactic—they hijacked the name of the Pulse nightclub, attached the account to the various "hashtags" associated with the shooting, and built the account's apparent profile by attaching an army of fake followers so they could draw the attention of people following conversations about the shooting. The Twitter account directed followers to a shortened Web address to make donations. That Web address linked to the six-month-old domain desifreemovies.net—a domain with a fake registration address in California and a contact e-mail account associated with the Hushmail anonymous e-mail service.

A screenshot of the highly sophisticated scam site linked to by the Twitter account.

The site itself was a fairly transparent scam—a grammatically incorrect plain HTML page with fake Amazon Prime links and a note that if the links "don't work in your area" to instead send Bitcoin to a specific anonymous address. Based on data from Blockonomics, the wallet pulled in 0.04293381 bitcoins (about $30 US)—so it wasn't exactly successful in cashing in on the tragedy. The site was shut down after Ars contacted the hosting company.