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(credit: NASA)

Top Congressional leaders were briefed a year ago on the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee but were sworn to secrecy by intelligence officials.

According to Reuters, the Gang of Eight was briefed in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, last summer. This group has an even number of Republicans and Democrats, it includes Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell and House of Representatives Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), as well as Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the House and Senate intelligence committee chairs. Across the aisle, it also includes Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) of the intelligence committees.

Due to the sensitivity of the information, they were restricted from telling anyone, including the targets.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

If you wander around the streets of New York City, you'll eventually run into rectangular structures the size of small trees in areas filled with pedestrians. Aside from being gigantic billboards, these kiosks are part of the new Link NYC initiative to replace payphones in the city with high-tech information centers. Each Link NYC kiosk has a tablet on its edge that you can use to browse the web, look up local information, make free phone calls, and finddirections to your next destination. There are also a couple USB ports that you can use to charge your devices and even a headphone jack so you can make calls with a little more privacy.

If you don't like the idea of standing in front of this kiosk to do your web searching, they also have free Wi-Fi networks you can connect to with your own smartphone or tablet. However, since the program is still in beta, only certain Apple products can connect to a private Wi-Fi network with a key; Android devices are limited to the free Wi-Fi network.

Google has been fined more than £5 million (438 million rubles, $6.8 million) and told to slacken limits it places on device makers by Russian authorities who found that the search and ad giant had breached competition rules with its Android mobile operating system.

On Thursday, the country's Federation Anti-monopoly Service (FAS) said that Google forced mobile phone manufacturers to include Google search on the home screen of all Android devices and bundling other services with Google Play, while preventing manufacturers from pre-installing competing services.

The case was opened in February 2014, when one of those rivals, Yandex, filed an official complaint against Google. Last year, the authorities decided that it had broken Russian competition law. The ruling was upheld again in March, when Google lost an appeal.

About a dozen years ago, the notion of bringing a pristine asteroid sample back to Earth was one of those "wouldn't it be cool if..." things nerdy scientists kicked around over a few beers. But after one of those bar-table discussions Dante Lauretta and a few of his colleagues decided they might just be onto something. So they spent seven years writing and making proposals, and finally won enough support from their colleagues that NASA agreed to fund the concept.

The idea has since become a spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, now resting in a hangar at Kennedy Space Center. The rocket that will launch it into deep space on Sept. 8 stands nearby. If all goes well for OSIRIS-REx over the next two years, it will fall into orbit around the 500-meter asteroid Bennu, and spend the next 700 days carefully studying the asteroid to determine where best to try to grab a sample for a return to Earth.

Only then, sometime in July, 2020, will the real challenge begin. How, exactly, does one reach out and grab some pebbles off the surface of an asteroid and live to tell the tale? Ars spoke with Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and the mission's principal investigator, to get the details.