This week at Ars Technica we saw the rise of Bitcoin in the popular consciousness and the unraveling of Prenda Law, the infamous porn-trolling firm that is battling possible sanctions against its lawyers. We looked at modeling tectonic plates in sugar water and we reviewed the HTC First—the phone that will carry Facebook's latest foray into the mobile world. Think you missed something important? Take a look at the list below and see if you need to catch up on anything before the next week.
- A beginner’s guide to building botnets—with little assembly required
For a few hundred dollars, you can get tools and 24/7 support for Internet crime. - “Taming the bubble”: investors bet on Bitcoin via derivatives markets
Professor: "I really have no way of figuring out what a bitcoin is worth." - Hide your kids, hide your BTC: Bitcoin-stealing malware emerges
Click-bait to an exchange lookalike site drops malware to steal from accounts. - Modeling the Yellowstone magma plume with a vat of sugar water
Model mimics the complex volcanism of the Pacific Northwest. - The PC inside your phone: A guide to the system-on-a-chip
Can't tell a Snapdragon apart from an Exynos? We're here to help. - Does WebKit face a troubled future now that Google is gone?
Aggressive streamlining of Blink, WebKit causes headaches for all. - HTC First review: Don’t call it the Facebook phone
Instead, Facebook Home is here. So how does the app integrate into this handset? - AirPlaying music and video from iPad to Raspberry Pi—it’s as easy as…
19-year-old develops Raspbmc, makes streaming to a Raspberry Pi nearly idiot-proof. - Is Microsoft integrating Windows Phone and Windows? You’d hope so
Much of the work has already been done, shipped as Windows Phone 8. - Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links
New rack design disaggregates and shares CPU, storage, and network components. - Will the Metallica table help pinball “ride the lightning” to relevance?
Stern's new offering hopes to extend pinball past the "End of the Line." - Want 12TB of flash memory for your server rack? $331,000, please
IBM is investing $1 billion in R&D for new flash memory systems. - Ten classic games you can actually beat, but probably won’t
From Snake to Pac-Man to Tetris, these games don't actually go on forever. - Prenda lawyer to court: Don’t judge me for not talking
Paul Hansmeier says he wasn't in charge of Prenda suits. Who was? Who knows. - Meet the nice-guy lawyers who want $1,000 per worker for using scanners
"It's not some kind of bull. We're not trying to harass people."
Plant Technica bonus round: How to create near-infinite clones of your favorite tomato (or any) plant
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