The Supreme Court will finally rule on controversial US hacking law

Enlarge / Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch, back, and Stephen Breyer, right, seemed skeptical of the government's broad reading of the CFAA. Justice Thomas, center, seemed more sympathetic to the government's view. Chief Justice Roberts, left, kept his cards close to his chest. (credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Supreme Court on Monday considered how broadly to interpret the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, America's main anti-hacking statute.

Here's how I described the case back in September:

The case arose after a Georgia police officer named Nathan Van Buren was caught taking a bribe to look up confidential information in a police database. The man paying the bribe had met a woman at a strip club and wanted to confirm that she was not an undercover cop before pursuing a sexual—and presumably commercial—relationship with her.

Unfortunately for Van Buren, the other man was working with the FBI, which arrested Van Buren and charged him with a violation of the CFAA. The CFAA prohibits gaining unauthorized access to a computer system—in other words, hacking—but also prohibits "exceeding authorized access" to obtain data. Prosecutors argued that Van Buren "exceeded authorized access" when he looked up information about the woman from the strip club.

But lawyers for Van Buren disputed that. They argued that his police login credentials authorized him to access any data in the database. Offering confidential information in exchange for a bribe may have been contrary to department policy and state law, they argued, but it didn't "exceed authorized access" as far as the CFAA goes.

Obviously, no one is going to defend a cop allegedly accepting bribes to reveal confidential government information. But the case matters because the CFAA has been invoked in prosecutions of more sympathetic defendants. For example, prosecutors used the CFAA to prosecute Aaron Swartz for scraping academic papers from the JSTOR database. They also prosecutied a small company that used automated scraping software to purchase and resell blocks of tickets from the TicketMaster website.

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The best Cyber Monday 2020 deals for working from home

Enlarge / Your home office can always use some sprucing up, especially when it's your main place of work. (credit: Corey Gaskin)

By Cyber Monday, most of us have been through the home-office setup phase of working from home but, with lengthening timelines to return to the office, Cyber Monday might be a good time to grab some of the essentials or upgrades you've been eyeing. Maybe the time has come to finally get the office chair that makes you feel like you're floating or the desk that floats, er, stands up with you. Or perhaps you're starting to run out of desk space or disk space and need something to organize or offload the clutter.

Whatever the case, we've found deals on some of our top picks for work-from-home gear, as well as a few high-value deals on Macs, Surface devices, iPads, noise-canceling headphones, and much more.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

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Does Tor provide more benefit or harm? New paper says it depends

Enlarge (credit: Westend61 / Getty Images)

The Tor anonymity network has generated controversy almost constantly since its inception almost two decades ago. Supporters say it’s a vital service for protecting online privacy and circumventing censorship, particularly in countries with poor human rights records. Critics, meanwhile, argue that Tor shields criminals distributing child-abuse images, trafficking in illegal drugs, and engaging in other illicit activities.

Researchers on Monday unveiled new estimates that attempt to measure the potential harms and benefits of Tor. They found that, worldwide, almost 7 percent of Tor users connect to hidden services, which the researchers contend are disproportionately more likely to offer illicit services or content compared with normal Internet sites. Connections to hidden services were significantly higher in countries rated as more politically “free” relative to those that are “partially free” or “not free.”

Licit versus illicit

Specifically, the fraction of Tor users globally accessing hidden sites is 6.7, a relatively small proportion. Those users, however, aren’t evenly distributed geographically. In countries with regimes rated “not free” by this scoring from an organization called Freedom House, access to hidden services was just 4.8 percent. In “free” countries, the proportion jumped to 7.8 percent.

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AR Mario Kart anchors Universal’s Super Nintendo World in February

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  Some real Tower of Terror vibes here. [credit: Universal Studios Japan ]

It's been over five years now since Nintendo first announced plans to collaborate with Universal Studios on a real-world theme park. Now, Universal has announced a February 4, 2021, opening for the Japanese edition of Super Nintendo World in Osaka and is showing off some of the attractions in detail for the first time.

Mario Kart: Koopa's Challenge is one of the highlights of the new Nintendo-themed area of Universal Studios Japan. Housed inside an intricate model of Bowser's castle, the ride puts four attendees in a replica kart, complete with augmented reality glasses to help them be "fully immersed in the game." While the kart is on rails that prevent free driving around the track, augmented reality glasses should let players actually see shells being thrown to take out opponents.

Universal also announced a Yoshi's Adventure ride, featuring Captain Toad and a quest for hidden colored eggs. Both attractions last about five minutes.

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DeepMind AI handles protein folding, which humbled previous software

Enlarge / Proteins rapidly form complicated structures which had proven difficult to predict. (credit: Argonne National Lab / Flickr)

Today, DeepMind announced that it had seemingly solved one of biology's outstanding problems: how the string of amino acids in a protein folds up into a three-dimensional shape that enables their complex functions. It's a computational challenge that has resisted the efforts of many very smart biologists for decades, despite the application of supercomputer-level hardware for these calculations. DeepMind instead trained its system using 128 specialized processors for a couple of weeks; it now returns potential structures within a couple of days.

The limitations of the system aren't yet clear—DeepMind says it's currently planning on a peer-reviewed paper and has only made a blog post and some press releases available. But the system clearly performs better than anything that's come before it, after having more than doubled the performance of the best system in just four years. Even if it's not useful in every circumstance, the advance likely means that the structure of many proteins can now be predicted from nothing more than the DNA sequence of the gene that encodes them, which would mark a major change for biology.

Between the folds

To make proteins, our cells (and those of every other organism) chemically link amino acids to form a chain. This works because every amino acid shares a backbone that can be chemically connected to form a polymer. But each of the 20 amino acids used by life has a distinct set of atoms attached to that backbone. These can be charged or neutral, acidic or basic, etc., and these properties determine how each amino acid interacts with its neighbors and the environment.

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Verizon wiring up 500K homes with FiOS to settle years-long fight with NYC

Enlarge / A Verizon FiOS truck in Manhattan on September 15, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Smith Collection | Gado)

Verizon has agreed to bring FiOS fiber-to-the-home service to another 500,000 households in New York City by July 2023, settling a lawsuit over Verizon's failure to wire up the entire city as required in a franchise agreement.

"Today's settlement will ensure that 500,000 households that previously lacked Verizon broadband access because of a corporate failure to invest in the necessary infrastructure will have the option of fiber broadband, and create critical cost competition in areas where today only one provider exists," NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio's office said in an announcement last week. The settlement's full text is available here.

New York City sued Verizon in March 2017, saying the company failed to complete a citywide fiber rollout by 2014 as required in its cable-TV franchise agreement. At the time the lawsuit was filed, Verizon said it had brought its fiber network to 2.2 million of NYC's 3.1 million households.

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Cases against Facebook are reportedly coming… when FTC decides how

Enlarge / All Facebook, no matter which way you look. (credit: Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

After well over a year spent investigating Facebook, state and federal regulators are more than ready to start launching a slate of cases against Facebook, new reports say—that is, as soon as the agencies can agree on how they actually want to do it.

New suits against Facebook should come before the end of January, The Wall Street Journal writes. Both the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of attorneys general for 47 states and territories are expected to take some kind of action.

The state and the federal probes are basically looking into two overall buckets of potentially anticompetitive behavior. The first has to do with Facebook's effects on other businesses that could or do compete with it. That's the investigation that delves into mergers and acquisitions, both large and small, as well as Facebook's behavior toward companies that refuse a buyout.

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Growl, once a staple of the Mac desktop experience, has been retired

A Growl notification. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Growl, a key part of the Mac desktop experience for 17 years, is being retired. Christopher Forsythe, who acted as the lead developer for the project for years, announced the retirement in a blog post on Friday.

Launched in 2004, Growl provided notifications for applications on Macs (it was also offered for Windows) before Apple introduced its own Notification Center. Notification Center was added to macOS (then styled Mac OS X) in the Mountain Lion update in 2012, but it first debuted on iOS a year earlier.

Here's a snippet of Forsythe's announcement:

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How Romain Grosjean walked away from F1’s scariest crash in decades

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  The medical car and track marshals were on the scene seconds after Grosjean's car came to rest, half of it wedged into the guardrail. [credit: BRYN LENNON/POOL/AFP via Getty Images ]

The Formula 1 cars had barely made it a third of the way around the track before the red flag brought a temporary halt to this weekend's Bahrain Grand Prix. The start of an F1 race is often chaotic, especially among the back half of the grid, and so it proved on Sunday when the Haas VF-20 driven by Romain Grosjean speared off track to the right after exiting turn three.

First-lap crashes aren't that unusual in the sport, unlike what happened next. After hitting the guardrail at about 137mph (220km/h), Grosjean's car ripped in half and then burst into flames—something that hasn't happened for over 30 years. To make matters worse, the front half penetrated between the guardrails that lined this section of track. As crashes go, this one was more reminiscent of the bad-old days of F1, the kind that claimed the lives of drivers like Roger Williamson or Francois Cevert.

But Grosjean walked away—understandably gingerly—with little more injury than some burns to his hands. And that is a testament to the safety that's designed into modern F1.

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Ajit Pai announces departure from FCC after four-year deregulatory blitz

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai speaking at a press conference on October 1, 2018, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Mark Wilson )

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced today that he will leave the FCC on January 20, 2021, the day Joe Biden will be inaugurated as president. In his four years as FCC chief, Pai deregulated the broadband industry, eliminated net neutrality rules, and justified his deregulatory agenda by using faulty data and taking credit for broadband deployments that were planned before he became chairman.

Pai called being chairman "the honor of a lifetime."

"I am grateful to President Trump for giving me the opportunity to lead the agency in 2017, to President Obama for appointing me as a Commissioner in 2012, and to Senate Majority Leader McConnell and the Senate for twice confirming me. To be the first Asian-American to chair the FCC has been a particular privilege. As I often say: only in America," Pai said in his statement today.

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