Microsoft has confirmed when its anticipated New York City event is going to take place—on October 26 at 10am Eastern, the company is going to deliver some kind of announcement.

It appears this may not be the event we were expecting or hoping for. The invitation puts the focus on Windows 10—it shows a very literal picture of a window—and we're hearing from sources familiar with the company's plans that the focus will be Windows 10 and the next evolutions of the operating system. We'll likely learn what Microsoft is bringing to both OEM hardware and to the HoloLens and Xbox One, but we do not anticipate a wide array of new hardware.

As such, anyone hoping to see the next iteration of the Surface Pro, Surface Book, or Band later this month is probably going to be disappointed. We expect it's still too early to see more of Project Scorpio, the next generation Xbox that will be released next year. Anyone hoping to see a Surface Phone is also going to be disappointed (not just at this event, but in general).

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The embattled CEO of Backpage.com, Carl Ferrer, was arrested Thursday and accused of running an online ad portal that facilitated prostitution and the pimping of young children into sexual servitude.

Carl Ferrer (credit: Carl Ferrer)

"Raking in millions of dollars from the trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable victims is outrageous, despicable, and illegal, California Attorney General Kamala Harris said. "Backpage and its executives purposefully and unlawfully designed Backpage to be the world’s top online brothel."

Charged with a variety of felonies, (PDF) including pimping a minor, pimping and conspiracy to commit pimping, is Carl Ferrer. The 55-year-old Ferrer has been in a year-long battle with the US Senate, which voted to hold him in contempt for his refusal to comply with an investigation into online sex trafficking. He had claimed the Web portal enjoyed a First Amendment right not to supply documents to the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations about how it reviews third-party ads posted to the site. After his legal challenge ping-ponged through the courts, the US Supreme Court last month approved the subpoena, forcing Ferrer to comply.

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Enlarge / A Comcast data cap notification. (credit: Comcast)

Comcast is bringing data caps to a bunch of new cities beginning November 1, roughly doubling the number of markets where it imposes data limits and overage fees. As before, customers will be allowed to use 1TB of data per month before being hit with overage charges of $10 for each additional 50GB. For an extra $50 per month, customers can purchase unlimited data.

Prior to the expansion, Comcast said it was enforcing data caps in 14 percent of the markets in its 39-state territory. Instead of immediately imposing caps nationwide, Comcast has been steadily rolling them out to new markets since 2012, usually adding a few at a time and gauging customer feedback before expanding to more. The caps were originally 300GB a month, but as more customers started exceeding them, they were boosted to 1TB (downloads and uploads combined) this year. Comcast says more than 99 percent of its customers use less than a terabyte of data.

Markets in 18 states will face data caps and overage fees for the first time, though other markets in some of these states were already capped.

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Enlarge / Does this really look like good drone flying weather? (credit: NASA)

The Federal Aviation Administration and the Academy of Model Aeronautics have issued a joint statement warning drone operators to not fly in the vicinity of Hurricane Matthew rescue and recovery operations by first responders.

"Any unauthorized drone or model aircraft operations that interfere with disaster relief efforts are subject to civil penalties of up to $32,140 per violation and possible criminal prosecution," the AMA noted in a release published today. While the FAA has not yet issued any temporary flight restrictions in Florida or other areas affected thus far by Hurricane Matthew, nearly all of the population centers on Florida's east coast (and much of the coasts of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina) are already covered by "notification required" restrictions for drones because of nearby airports, helipads, and national parks.

The FAA has also issued a notice classifying the location of any "special sporting event"—including Major League Baseball playoff games, NFL and NCAA football games, or any other sporting event at a location with a seating capacity of over 30,000 people as "National Defense Airspace," banning all flights (and other airborne activity) within three nautical miles. These areas are much smaller than the flight restrictions posted for this year's Super Bowl in San Jose, which was given a 32 nautical mile radius no-fly zone—covering practically all of the San Francisco Bay area.

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An artist's depiction of the canoes used by the Polynesians of the Hawaiian islands. (credit: Herb Kawainui Kāne | University of Hawaii)

The Polynesian exploration of sparse islands of the Pacific will remain humanity's greatest migration until we head for other planets. And it clearly wasn't just a one-way trip; evidence indicates that trade networks covering thousands of kilometers were maintained for centuries. Now, a new study of ancient Polynesian DNA has indicated that it wasn't just trade goods that were exchanged. DNA from at least two different sources ended up spreading through the population of Polynesia before European contact.

The study also suggests that our understanding of how history produced the genetics of modern Polynesians was completely off-base.

That understanding was built by looking at the DNA of modern Polynesians and comparing it with the genetics of other peoples around the Pacific. The data indicated that modern Polynesians have a mixed ancestry, with the majority of their genomes coming from an East Asian population. An additional contribution, however, came from the Papuans that inhabit the islands north of Australia.

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With just six weeks to go before its debut on Amazon Prime, we've gotten our first proper look at the new car-centric TV series The Grand Tour. Last night, a trailer featuring Messers Clarkson, May, and Hammond hit YouTube, giving us a preview of what to expect when the first episode arrives on November 18th.

The trio decamped to Amazon following Clarkson's sacking by the BBC after the Top Gear star's bad behavior became too much to excuse. But the Beeb's loss is Amazon's gain if the trailer is anything to go by. Or, as my colleague Lee Hutchinson put it, "Just like how Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were the main magic of Star Trek, the main magic of Top Gear was its three hosts."

The show's name should give you a clue to the format—it's a series of around-the-world adventures in some very cool cars, with plenty of banter and ribaldry along the way.

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Enlarge (credit: Alcon Entertainment and Warner Bros.)

Remember that Blade Runner sequel announced earlier this year? It finally has a name—and no, it's not Blade Runner 2. The sequel to one of the greatest science-fiction films of all time is now known as Blade Runner 2049, and it's coming out one year from now on October 6, 2017, not January 2018 as previously announced.

If that wasn't to wet your sci-fi whistle, Oculus has also confirmed that Blade Runner 2049 will be released in virtual reality on the Oculus Rift and other Oculus platforms (read: Samsung Gear VR), as well as in cinemas. Whether that means there will be a simultaneous release is unclear, but Oculus has promised to reveal more details at a later date.

Oh, and a series of experiences about classic Disney characters are also coming to Oculus.

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Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo/Google)

There were big changes announced at Google this week as the company's "Google Hardware" team came out of hiding and announced a slew of products. The star of the show was definitely the Google Pixel, Google's new pair of smartphones that the company is saying it designed while using HTC as a manufacturer. The advent of Pixel phones means Google is an Android OEM again, harkening back to the days when it owned Motorola. This time, though, the company is serious about hardware and software integration.

Android, however, is the world's most popular operating system because of OEM partners like Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, and LG. And if Google wants Android to continue to deliver Google services to billions of people, it will still need all those partners. Google once again has a delicate balancing act to pull off. The company must do its best to deliver a Google-y Android phone while not stealing the thunder from other OEMs or putting them at a serious competitive disadvantage.

To get to the bottom of how this new Google setup works, we sat down with Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP of Android, Chrome OS, and Google Play. Lockheimer is basically the king of "platforms" (software-side of things) at Google, while former Motorola CEO Rick Osterloh now runs the hardware team. Like the old setup when Google owned Motorola, the two groups will be kept somewhat separate.

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Enlarge (credit: Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images News)

Hundreds of people in Mumbai, India have been detained in relation to a massive telephone scam where fake callers "from the IRS" targeted Americans. In said calls, scammers tried to convince recipients that they were from the IRS in order to con victims into forking over thousands of dollars payable via prepaid credit cards.

According to The Guardian, 200 Indian police officers raided nine locations across one of India’s largest cities.

"Seventy workers have been formally arrested and around 630 others are being investigated," Paramvir Singh, the police commissioner of Thane, told the British newspaper. "We expect that many more people will be arrested."

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Enlarge (credit: Google)

The Google Pixel phones are coming, and they're even being sold through a carrier: Verizon. I've speculated a few times now that it would be a terrible idea to purchase the Pixel through Verizon, however, and now Google has offered official confirmation that it is indeed a terrible idea to purchase the Pixel through Verizon.

Google gave the following statement to 9to5Google: "Monthly security updates will come from Google (for all models), and system updates will be managed by Verizon for Verizon models, and Google for unlocked models bought from Google Store."

This is better than I expected. Security updates will come from Google, so they will actually arrive on time. Verizon, however, is still free to stand in the way of your major updates, so don't expect to get them in a timely manner.

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Update: 2K has added additional information to its post, saying that it expects a framerate-uncapping patch to go live this weekend: "We currently have a patch running here at the studio that includes 30, 60, and unlimited frames-per-second options in the video menu, among other improvements for the PC version of Mafia III. We’re verifying the patch now to ensure everything is working as expected. If everything goes well, we expect the update to go live this weekend. We will be keeping the PC community up-to-date on the status of the patch throughout the weekend and thank you for all the feedback!"

Original Story: It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Mafia 3, the new open-world crime game being released tomorrow on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, will be locked to 30 frames per second on its console incarnations. What may come as a surprise, though—as users with early copies of the game started suspecting this morning—is that the game is capped to the same 30fps on PC. Publisher 2K confirmed that the cap is indeed in place in a post on the game’s website this afternoon, though it didn't explain what issues led to the limitation.

The good news is that developer Hangar 13 is “currently working on an update for PC that will give players the option to play Mafia III at higher framerates.” The bad news is that it looks like that patch won't be ready for the game’s midnight release. “We’ll share more details about the update, and when you can expect it to arrive, very soon,” the post says.

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Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a number of deals to share ahead of Columbus Day next week. Now you can get a Dell XPS tower desktop, featuring a Core i7 processor and support for a full size video card up to 225W, for just $705. There's also a great deal on an Alienware laptop: you can get the Alienware 15 R2 laptop with 4K support and GTX 980 graphics for $1,399, which is the lowest price we've seen on a laptop of this kind.

Check out the full list of deals below, which includes 4K TVs, laptops, games, smart home devices, and more.

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Fake bear dump. (credit: Stewart Butterfield)

A pattern of mischaracterization, misrepresentation, and outright alteration of breached data has emerged in two of the latest headline-grabbing batches of hacked files. Investigators discovered that recently published data from anti-doping testing at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro had been altered by parties connected to a Russia-based hacking group behind the breach, according to a report issued by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) yesterday.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) dump, released by a group calling itself "Fancy Bears," was found by WADA's incident response team to contain altered information. "WADA has determined that not all data released by Fancy Bear (in its PDF documents) accurately reflects [Anti-Doping Administration and Management System (ADAMS)] data," a spokesperson for WADA wrote in a post on the investigation. The attackers gained access by stealing ADAMS credentials through "spear phishing" e-mails sent to IOC officials who owned the accounts. The attack was similar to the e-mails sent to DNC and Clinton campaign officials earlier this year.

This fits into a pattern tied to recent hacks by "Fancy Bear" and other groups—organizations that researchers and government authorities believe are connected in some way to the Russian intelligence community—being used for misinformation. Some of the data in the initial Democratic National Committee "dump" by the entity calling themselves Guccifer 2.0 was revealed to have been altered, and that leaked metadata indicated files had been edited by someone who spoke Russian. While the latest "leak" from Guccifer 2.0 allegedly against the Clinton Foundation's network contains no such smoking guns, the metadata does exist and suggest data came from previous "Fancy Bear" breaches at the DNC and other organizations that used the DNC's network.

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SAN FRANCISCO—In a Thursday hearing, a federal judge appeared greatly skeptical that Airbnb and other short-term rental websites should be able to halt a new local law imposed by the city and county of San Francisco that would require the company to verify listings with the city first.

"How does facilitating the rental of an unregistered short-term unit constitute a lawful transaction?" US District Judge James Donato asked of Jonathan Blavin, an attorney representing Airbnb.

As Ars reported previously, the new 2016 San Francisco law expands upon a previous ordinance that Airbnb itself helped initially draft. That ordinance requires hosts to have registration numbers and pay a $50 fee for the privilege. (According to NBC Bay Area that fee will rise to $250 next month.) The ordinance is designed to provide the city with additional revenue and to help regulate housing stock in a city where the median one-bedroom apartment rent is over $3,800—one of the highest in the nation.

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Imagine a futuristic society in which robots are deployed to everybody's house, fulfilling a mission to scan the inside of each and every residence. Does that mental image look far-off and futuristic? Well, this week's Yahoo e-mail surveillance revelations perhaps prove this intrusive robot scenario has already arrived in the digital world.

Days ago, Reuters cited anonymous sources and reported that Yahoo covertly built a secret "custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming e-mails for specific information." Yahoo, the report noted, "complied with a classified US government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI."

Reuters then followed up, saying Yahoo acted at the behest of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Not to be outdone, The New York Times reported Yahoo used its system designed to scan for child pornography and spam to search for messages containing an undisclosed "signature." The Times said a FISA judge found probable cause to believe that this digital signature "was uniquely used by a foreign power." The scanning has ceased, the report noted, but neither of the news agencies said how long the search lasted and when it began.

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Enlarge / A Fujitsu Lifebook. (credit: Fujitsu)

Japanese media are reporting that Chinese PC giant Lenovo is in talks with Fujitsu to buy its ailing PC business.

In the early 2000s, Fujitsu was one of the top 5 PC makers globally. Today, it's a loss-making enterprise that's seen its market eroded by smartphones and tablets. The margins have squeezed, and IT conglomerate Fujitsu has been working to offload its non-core businesses and improve profitability. The company spun off its PC division as a separate business in February, a move that's typically a precursor to a sale or other major restructuring option.

Fujitsu was initially hoping for a three-way merger with Vaio (Sony's former PC business, split off in 2014) and Toshiba's PC division. These talks collapsed after none of the companies involved wanted to hold a controlling stake, leading Fujitsu to enter discussions with Lenovo. The Beijing firm is promising to maintain existing factories and jobs, which will see around 2,000 people making the move to the Chinese company.

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Enlarge / Facebook's Free Basics app for India, which was banned by the country's net neutrality rules. (credit: Facebook)

Facebook is considering whether to launch a mobile application in the United States that would provide free access to a selection of websites, according to a Washington Post report today.

Facebook has been talking to White House officials about how to roll out the Free Basics program in the US without inviting regulatory scrutiny, the article said, attributing the information to anonymous sources. The Free Basics application provides access to a variety of websites—including Facebook and Facebook Messenger—without counting against customers' data caps, so Facebook would also need cooperation from US mobile operators.

"The US version of Free Basics would target low-income and rural Americans who cannot afford reliable, high-speed Internet at home or on smartphones," the Post reported.

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Enlarge (credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project)

In 2015, representatives from 196 countries met for the Paris Climate talks, setting greenhouse gas emissions targets for the year 2025. As part of this agreement, the US has set what are called "intended nationally determined contributions," which are planned reductions in carbon emissions. A recent paper in Nature Climate Change examined the current federal policies and determined that it is unlikely the US will meet its own targets as things now stand.

The paper attempted a comprehensive evaluation of historical and projected greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and it put a particular emphasis on the most influential policy years. These were 2005 (the year the Kyoto Protocol went into effect and the Montreal action plan was developed) and 2025 (the date for reaching the targeted goals of the Paris climate talks). Researchers built a model that included historical and projected estimates of both climate data and energy use. The team then used the model to test the potential effects of several different pieces of climate policy that have been proposed or passed in recent years.

They found that the EPA’s Clean Power Plan would be the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions reductions, producing an estimated drop of 221 to 267 million tons of CO₂ equivalent. However, the team did find that an earlier, more ambitious version of the Clean Power Plan would have had an even larger effect.

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Enlarge / Oculus diversity lead Ebony Peay Ramirez speaks about a $10 million pledge toward diversity-minded initiatives. (credit: Oculus)

Oculus' annual conference revolving around its VR products just happened to be scheduled two weeks after the company's founder, Palmer Luckey, was revealed as a major contributor to a "shit-posting" political meme organization. Coincidentally, this third edition of Oculus Connect began with a major no-show on its keynote stage: Palmer Luckey.

Luckey could have used the Oculus Connect stage to address the controversy over his donations to Nimble America, which my Ars UK colleagues so succinctly described in September as "an unofficial pro-Trump political nonprofit that is powering the tsunami of white supremacist and other racist image macros that have plagued Reddit." Instead, Oculus gave a few minutes of stage time to Ebony Peay Ramirez, the company's head of diversity, who announced that Oculus will commit $10 million to "diverse programs for virtual reality."

"VR will only succeed if it reflects a diverse ecosystem," Ramirez said to the Oculus Connect crowd. "Diversity matters, not just in the storytellers lending their voices to the medium but to the audience as well." Ramirez described a variety of Oculus-run initiatives, including VR For Good, Launch Pad, and The Diverse Filmmakers Project, to offer access and assistance for more diverse VR creators. However, she frequently stumbled over her words throughout her speech, even when asking, "Can I hear it from the women in VR, please?"

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuri_Arcurs)

The Federal Communications Commission plans to vote on rules protecting the privacy of broadband subscribers later this month despite persistent opposition from Internet service providers.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler circulated the proposal to commissioners today and scheduled a vote for October 27. The rules are likely to be approved by a 3-2 vote with the commission’s Democratic majority supporting them.

The proposed rules will put broadband providers under a stricter privacy regime than the one imposed on websites like Google and Facebook, which are regulated separately by the Federal Trade Commission. The rules will require ISPs to get opt-in consent from consumers before sharing Web browsing data and other private information with advertisers and other third parties.

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