EnlargeArizona Cardinals In 2013, Megan Welter had a really bad night. Welter, at that time a cheerleader for the Arizona Cardinals, got into a drunken fight with her boyfriend. It ended with her calling 911 and reporting him for domestic violence. Welter's boyfriend was a professional fighter, who "smashed [her] head into the tile" and put her in a "choke hold with his legs," she told the 911 dispatcher. When the police showed up, they found out that wasn't true. Welter's boyfriend, Ryan McMahon, showed video on his cell phone verifying that it was Welter who had attacked him. She was arrested and charged with assault. The arrest came just days after Welter and her team, the Cardinals, kicked off a PR blitz pushing a positive story about her to various television and print news outlets. Welter wasn't just a pretty face—she was an Iraq war veteran who led troops in a signal unit of the US Army. Local Arizona TV stations, Sports Illustrated, and … [Read more...]

Enlarge / The FCC was asked to decide whether this ringless voicemail technology should be subject to anti-robocall rules.Stratics Networks A petition to exempt ringless voicemails from anti-robocall rules has been withdrawn after heavy opposition. In March, a marketing company called All About the Message petitioned the Federal Communications Commission for a ruling that would prevent anti-robocall rules from applying to ringless voicemails. But the company withdrew its petition without explanation in a letter to the FCC last week, even though the commission hadn't yet ruled on the matter. As the name suggests, a ringless voicemail is the delivery of a voice message to a voicemail box without ringing the recipient's phone. The now-withdrawn petition asked the FCC to declare that this type of message does not count as a "call" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which prohibits non-emergency calls made with auto-dialers, artificial voices, or … [Read more...]

Enlarge / Australia's Attorney General George Brandis (L) speaks at a press conference Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull looks on in Sydney on December 30, 2015.Saeed Khan / Getty Images News The move indicates that Canberra is now running ahead with what the FBI has dubbed "going dark" for several years now. This is the notion that with the advent of widespread, easy-to-use strong encryption on smartphones and other devices, law enforcement has been hindered. Many experts say, however, that any method that would allow the government access even during certain situations would weaken overall security for everyone. According to a statement released by Attorney General George Brandis, and Peter Dutton, the country’s top immigration official, Australia will press for new laws, pressure private companies, and urge for a new international data sharing agreement amongst the quintet of countries. "As Australia’s priority issue, I will raise the need to … [Read more...]

Enlarge / A Comcast service vehicle.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images An electric utility in Tennessee has accused Comcast of not paying its bills for three years. The utility says it will start removing Comcast wires from utility poles next week unless the cable company pays up. In a notice on its website, the electric co-op said: If Comcast does not pay the amounts owed to STEMC [Southwest Tennessee Electric Membership Corporation] by June 28, 2017, we will begin removing their attachments from our poles. We regret that some customers may lose their Comcast service. However, the full cost and maintenance of these utility poles are borne by all members of STEMC, and we cannot allow STEMC members to subsidize Comcast's services. We are hopeful that Comcast will make payment prior to the deadline and avoid the need to remove their cable attachments. Comcast promised to pay the "correct amount," but the industry giant says that STEMC tried to double its bill in 2015 and did not … [Read more...]

Enlarge / Rowland, Evan, and Kelly in the Wired and Ars Technica office. In this week's episode of UpVote, we're joined by Newsnight and Dragons' Den presenter Evan Davis, who talks to us about his new book on the hot topic of post-truth in politics and beyond. It's been a few days since the shock general election result ended in a hung parliament, and we're still waiting for prime minister Theresa May to form a minority government propped up by Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party. Naturally, we're still dissecting the outcome and, in conversation with Evan, we look at so-called fake news and why it was nowhere in the election campaign. Since "bullshit" is referenced heavily in Evan's book, entitled Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It, the word gets a fair amount of attention on UpVote. And anyway, even Pope Francis has recently expressed concerns about fake news, by comparing the phenomenon of spreading scandalous and false stories … [Read more...]

Enlargecarlosbezz / Getty Images News sentenced David Tippens to six months in prison for one remaining count of possession of child pornography that he obtained via the now-defunct, notorious Tor-hidden child porn website, Playpen. In a sentencing memorandum filed last month, prosecutors asked the judge to impose a much longer sentence. "The Government asked for 48 months in prison but the Court was impressed with Mr. Tippens' long and distinguished service in the Army, including combat duty in Iraq; his cooperation with the police at the time of his arrest and perfect compliance with pre-trial supervision; and the fact that he had a pornography addiction related to PTSD that would be addressed through continuing counseling," Tippens’ federal public defender, Colin Fieman, e-mailed Ars. Earlier this year, Tippens, a sergeant in the United States Army, was found guilty of a single count after two other counts were dropped when prosecutors acknowledged that material the … [Read more...]

Enlarge / President Barack Obama reportedly called Russian President Vladimir Putin in October 2016 on the "cyber hotline" to warn about the ongoing hacking of US election officials' systems.Presidential Press and Information Office Citing sources "with direct knowledge of the US investigation" into Russia's information operations campaign during the 2016 US presidential election campaign, Bloomberg News' Michael Riley and Jordan Robertson report that Russian hackers struck at far more states' election offices than previously known. A total of 39 states had election systems targeted by the Russians, Bloomberg's sources said—including Illinois, where attackers broke into voter rolls and tried to delete or modify voter registration data in an attempt to disrupt voting on Election Day. The scope of the attacks was so broad, Bloomberg reports, that in October of 2016, then-President Barack Obama directly called Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin on the … [Read more...]

Shiva Ayyadurai, seen here in January 2017.Boston Globe / Getty Images News History is not fixed; like memory itself, it is an act of reconstruction. Shiva Ayyadurai understands this. Ayyadurai has spent nearly six years publicly proclaiming himself the “inventor of e-mail.” But this claim about e-mail—as everyone but Ayyadurai’s supporters understand the term “e-mail”—isn’t true. Ayyadurai did write a program called “EMAIL” for use by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (now a part of Rutgers). He copyrighted the code in 1982. But Ayyadurai today makes the far more significant claim that he invented “the electronic mail system as we know it today,” even though his code had little impact beyond the university. Mainstream tech history books don’t even mention Ayyadurai—unless you count the several books Ayyadurai has written about himself. On the ARPAnet, the predecessor to … [Read more...]

Mike Cernovich denounces the Syria strike in an hours-long livestream. Image via Periscope. Shortly after “alt-right” poster-boy Steve Bannon reportedly called Jared Kushner a “cuck,” signaling an escalating battle in the White House between the “Bannonites” and the “globalists,” Donald Trump bucked his isolationist promises and launched a military strike against the Syrian government. The barf-splatter of neo-Nazi conspiracy trolls dubbed the “alt-right” were among those who weren’t happy about it, largely because they weren’t so sure the Assad regime actually murdered people. In a Periscope video chronicled by Politico, noted #PizzaGate theorist Mike Cernovich—who appears to have White House sources and tweeted about the strike hours before it happened—expressed doubt that Assad was responsible for the chemical attack and wondered whether it happened at all, declaring that the media and the … [Read more...]

Screengrab via ABC News. A girl who is estimated to be between 8 and 12 years old was found by police with a group of monkeys in a forest in Uttar Pradesh, part of the Katarniaghat wildlife sanctuary, which is situated on the Indian border to Nepal. When the police grabbed her, the monkeys attacked. The BBC reports that the girl, who has been nicknamed “Forest Durga” in reference to a Hindu goddess, had been reported by woodcutters who saw her living with the pack of monkeys. The monkeys tried to prevent her being taken when authorities arrived. Police officer Dinesh Tripathi described the scene to the Associated Press, saying, “When he [another officer] called the girl, the monkeys attacked him but he was able to rescue the girl. He sped away with her in his police car while the monkeys gave chase.” When she was brought in to the hospital in January, the girl was malnourished and had long nails and wounds on her body. Doctors could not ascertain how long … [Read more...]

Image credit: Gene J. Puskar/AP Images Good morning! Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you crave, all in one place every weekday morning. Here are the important stories you need to read or we’ll get really passive aggressive at you. 1st Gear: Sorry To Burst Your Bubble As a consumer-driven economy, we’ve been programmed to be attracted to the latest, new shiny thing. We’ve gotta have it! And sometimes we don’t have enough money for it! So we take out a loan! Everyone takes out a loan! And then bad shit happens! Sound familiar? This time, it’s cars. And it’s not all on the consumers, by the way. Automakers have been relying on “cheap and easy credit” from financial institutions to help them along, reports Bloomberg. Rising interest rates and bad loans are causing financial institutions to be pickier with who they throw money out to. The reasons for this? From the story: For one thing, subprime borrowers have been … [Read more...]

President Donald Trump leaves the podium after speaking at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, April 6, 2017 (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) The US military launched a missile attack on a Syrian airbase last night, and the President of the United States announced it by uncharacteristically invoking God three times in his three-minute speech. The baby known as Cold War II was conceived long ago. But last night, President Trump helped give birth. Congratulations! It’s a war! There are a lot of things I don’t know. I don’t know how Trump personally feels about Russia; I don’t know what the US will do now that it launched 59 Tomahawk missiles against the Assad regime in Syria; I don’t know if a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton would’ve done things any differently. But I feel pretty confident that I know one thing: The history books will mark 2017 as the official start of the Second Cold War. Now, this isn’t altogether fair to the concept of the Cold War. As … [Read more...]

Photo: Wikimedia commons Events are taking place across the U.S. today to mark the centennial of the nation’s entry into World War I. There’s plenty of interesting bits to read about the war in our archive, but there’s one story we haven’t delved into before: the rumor of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria’s vehicle being haunted. If you’re up on basic facts about the global conflict, you know it began when Ferdinand was assassinated—on a day when he had already survived an attempted bombing of his motorcade. As the Smithsonianrecounts the episode, Ferdinand decided to head to the hospital to visit the victims of the bombing attempt. It was Franz Ferdinand’s impulsive decision, later in the day, to visit them there—a decision none of his assassins could have predicted—that took him directly past the spot where his assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was standing. It was chauffeur Leopold Lojka’s unfamiliarity with the new … [Read more...]

One of eight Tomahawk cruise missiles launches from the stern of the USS Laboon (DDG 58) to attack selected air defense targets in Iraq, September 3, 1996. (Photo by U.S. Navy/Getty Images) The United States military has launched over 50 Tomahawk cruise missiles into Syria, according to multiple reports. The attack is a direct response to a Syrian sarin gas attack on its own civilian population. Turkish officials said that a fixed-wing aircraft dropped munitions carrying sarin onto an underground hospital, killing at least 86, according to ABC News. Sarin, a nerve agent, is known to be extremely deadly, causing a breakdown of a person’s entire nervous system in as little as a minute. President Donald Trump has criticized attacking Syria in the past without Congressional approval, and it does not appear such approval was sought in this instance: More as we have it. … [Read more...]

Popular App Shazam Trying to Cash in on the Trendiness of AR with Hiring of New CTO While it remains unknown how exactly augmented reality will make its way into the mainstream (the Microsoft HoloLens sitting at $3,000 isn't exactly accessible), many brands have been trying to integrate the tech into their mobile apps, mimicking the success of Snapchat and its popular AR filters. One of those brands going all in on augmented reality is Shazam. Shazam, the extremely popular app with over a billion combined downloads on iOS and Android, can help identify what song is currently playing in the background. Over the past year, they began pivoting their business towards AR. They launched AR-powered Shazam Codes and partnered with Snapchat so that Shazam was available in-app to identify songs from Snap stories. Now they've hired Richard Sharp as Chief Technology Officer to help take these AR ambitions to the next level. Shazam Codes in action. Image via ShazamWhile researching for his PhD at … [Read more...]

Photo: Getty Images Iggy Azaela, a woman that I’d rather not spend that much time thinking about, recently released a music video for a song called “Mo’ Bounce.” In said video, she spends an awful lot of time twerking and apparently lost 15 lbs. as a result. It will come as no surprise to anyone with a passing knowledge of Iggy Azalea’s ouevre and her sterling reputation as a “rapper”that Iggy had to do some considerable training. In an interview with New Zealand radio hosts Fitzy and Wippa, the old Igster revealed that twerking like she does in the video is actually not as easy as it looks. “I did a lot of rehearsals actually, and man I lost 15 pounds in a week dancing to that song!” she said. Perhaps we can consider this next sound bite from Australia’s finest as progress, maybe: “I did take classes. I do have someone who is very, very good at twerking, and she helped me. I never realized how flexible you have to be to … [Read more...]

Image: M Dreibelbis/Flickr Celiac disease can be a nightmare, with the slew of gluten-triggered ails it brings. Those includes everything from gastrointestinal symptoms like bloating and diarrhea, to psychological symptoms, anemia, seizures... pretty much everything that can make the body feel bad, combined into one awful mess. At least one in 141 Americans suffer from celiac disease (that’s a few million), and many aren’t diagnosed. Scientists thought its cause was genetic, something coded in the DNA that causes the immune system to attack the body in the presence of wheat gluten. But now, a large international team of researchers has presented some convincing evidence that the story goes deeper than that—the disease’s trigger might lie in a benign viral infection. Those researchers, who published their work today in the journal Science, suspected celiac disease had some environmental component based on lots of evidence. For instance, two percent of people … [Read more...]

Photo: Jeff Gross/Getty Images Running back Montee Ball’s last brush with the NFL was a practice-squad spot on the Patriots during the 2015 season, and the team cut him in February of 2016 after he was arrested and charged with battery in Wisconsin. The 26-year-old spoke with Alex Marvez of the Sporting News and said alcohol is what ended his football career. Ball, who admitted to his therapist that he was an alcoholic, talked about waking up and going to Broncos practices while still drunk, and said he would drink excessively on Sunday, Monday, Thursday, and Friday nights during football season. He recounted one time where a coach pulled him aside and tried to help him: Ball said Broncos running backs coach Eric Studesville suspected something was wrong when he asked Ball to stay following one running backs meeting. “He talked about how he could smell the alcohol on me and that he thinks I may have a problem with drinking,” Ball said. “He said if I needed any … [Read more...]

GIF Some real-life Torettos made off with an unspecified haul of cash in South Africa this past weekend after blowing the doors off an armored truck and making a getaway in a pair of luxury sedans. The robbers shot out the tires of the armored truck on Saturday on a busy Johannesburg highway and forced its guards out before blowing the doors. A nearby motorist was treated for minor injuries from the blast, as South Africa’s News 24reports. The whole incident was caught on video, posted by the Intelligence Bureau SA. You can hear onlookers in disbelief as the robbers blow the truck, with everybody in traffic figuring out how they can get out of dodge. The robbers escaped the scene with “an undisclosed amount of money in cash boxes and one of the guard’s firearms,” according to local police. The robbers made their escape in a Mercedes-Benz and a BMW, which were later recovered by the police. As of yet, no arrests have been made. … [Read more...]

The $3.3 billion deal is "the beginning of an exciting evolution for Sunoco into a premier nationwide fuel supplier," the company's CEO says. Sunoco LP said Thursday it had agreed to sell most of its convenience stores to 7-Eleven for $3.3 billion so it can focus on its fuel supply business. The deal includes 1,110 Sunoco convenience stores, mostly on the East Coast and Texas, and a 15-year take-or-pay agreement to supply 7-Eleven with about 2.2 billion gallons of fuel annually. 7-Eleven, which is a subsidiary of Japanese retail group Seven & i Holdings, currently operates 8,700 stores in the U.S. and Canada, including those run by franchisees. Sunoco said it plans to be “a leading consolidator in the domestic wholesale fuels business, supplying fuel to a network of more than 8,900 locations of third-party dealers, distributors, and other commercial customers.” The company, a master limited partnership that is owned by Dallas-based Energy Transfer Equity, will sell … [Read more...]