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John Biggs writes at TechCrunch that Comcast is quietly turning on public hotspots in its customers' routers, essentially turning private homes into public hotspots. Comcast customers get free Wi-Fi wherever there is a Comcast box and the company gets to build out a private network to compete with telecoms. Fifty thousand users with Arris Touchstone Telephony Wireless Gateway Modems - essentially basic modems that cable providers drop off at your home - have already been turned into public hotspots in Houston, and there are plans to enable 150,000 more.

Bu concerns are being raised about this service. In addition to using customers' electricity for their service, some say that in areas that have lots of apartment buildings and multi-tenant dwellings within close proximity of one another, performance will slow down. Those routers are transmitting on the same channels for their 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals, leading to RF competition. "Comcast's FAQ about Xfinity's hotspots doesn't go into any details about channels and bands," writes Samara Lynn, "but the company should be clear about how adding these hotspot networks affects the performance of existing WLANs-especially in business use."

The Guardian reports that Drafthouse Cinemas, which has 20 sites across the United States, says that users of Google Glass will not be allowed to use them while watching films because the wearable glasses can be used to surreptitiously record video. "We've been talking about this potential ban for over a year," says Drafthouse CEO Tim League. "Google Glass did some early demos here in Austin and I tried them out personally. At that time, I recognised the potential piracy problem that they present for cinemas. I decided to put off a decision until we started seeing them in the theatre, and that started happening this month."

Attitudes towards Google Glass appear to be hardening in the US. In January, cinema chain AMC said the eyewear was "not appropriate" for use in cinemas, following an incident in which homeland security officers interrogated a Glass wearer during a screening of Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit in Columbus, Ohio.

CNN reports that House majority leader Eric Cantor's loss to a college professor and political novice in the Richmond-area campaign energized tea party supporters in a midterm year and obliterated Cantor's ambition to lead the House. Critics and analysts say Cantor neglected his base at home in Virginia and paid the price. Cantor called the stunning loss a "personal setback" at a news conference and appealed for party unity before announcing his decision to vacate the No. 2 job in the GOP hierarchy on July 31.

The ouster of the No. 2 House Republican, who was seen by many as the next speaker, overturns the chamber's leadership hierarchy, and effectively kills any chance of immigration reform. "It's just sending shivers throughout the Republican conference," says veteran GOP Rep. Lee Terry. The come-from-behind victory of Dave Brat over Cantor has emboldened conservative activists nationwide, lifting their hopes of scoring more primary wins this year - and gaining renewed sway heading into a wide-open contest for the party's 2016 presidential nomination. "It creates a wave of energy that's just infectious," says Matt Kibbe, president of the Washington-based tea party group FreedomWorks for America, who sent an e-mail Wednesday to the group's activists with the subject line, "You're Winning."

Jeremy Bender reports that eight different law enforcement agencies in Indiana have purchased massive Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPS) that were formerly used in Iraq and Afghanistan. The MRAP - a bulletproof, 60,000-pound, six-wheeled behemoth with heavy armor, a gunner's turret and the word "SHERIFF" emblazoned on its flank - a vehicle whose acronym stands for "mine resistant, ambush protected." Pulaski County, home to 13,124 people, is one of the counties that have purchased an 55,000 pound, six-wheeled patrol vehicles, from military surplus. When asked to justify the purchase of a former military vehicle, Pulaski County Sheriff Michael Gayer told the Indy Star: "The United States of America has become a war zone. There's violence in the workplace, there's violence in schools and there's violence in the streets. You are seeing police departments going to a semi-military format because of the threats we have to counteract. If driving a military vehicle is going to protect officers, then that's what I'm going to do."

Tim Hornyak reports that National Science Foundation (NSF) has banned a researcher for using supercomputer resources to generate bitcoin. According to the semiannual report to Congress by the NSF Office of Inspector General, the computationally intensive mining used about $150,000 worth of NSF-supported computer use at the two universities to generate bitcoins worth about $8,000 to $10,000 (PDF). The universities told the NSF that the work was unauthorized, reporting that the researcher accessed the computers remotely, even using a mirror site in Europe, possibly to conceal his identity. "The researcher's access to all NSF-funded supercomputer resources was terminated," the office wrote. "In response to our recommendation, NSF suspended the researcher government-wide."

The incident follows a similar case in February in which a researcher at Harvard University was caught using supercomputer resources to mine dogecoin. The researcher was barred from accessing the computer resources.

Russell Brandom reports that a new feature in iOS 8 is set to cause havoc for location trackers, and score a major win for privacy - when iOS 8 devices look for a connection, iOS 8 will randomize their MAC address, effectively disguising any trace of the real device until it decides to connect to a network. Why are iPhones checking out Wi-Fi networks in disguise? Because there's an entire industry devoted to tracking customers through that signal. Shops from Nordstrom's to JC Penney have tried out a system that automatically logs any phone within Wi-Fi range, giving stores a complete record of who walked into the shop and when. But any phone using iOS 8 will be invisible to the process, potentially calling the whole system into question. "Now that Apple has embraced MAC spoofing, the practice of Wi-Fi sniffing may stop working entirely," says Brandom. "The result is a privacy win for Apple users and a major blow against data marketing - and all it took was an automatic update."

Darren Pauli writes at the Register that researchers who scanned 900 Windows libraries have uncovered a variety of security functions that were updated in Windows 8 but not in Windows 7. Researcher Moti Joseph speculates Microsoft had not applied fixes to Win 7 to save money. "Why is it that Microsoft inserted a safe function into Windows 8 [but not] Windows 7? The answer is money - Microsoft does not want to waste development time on older operating systems ... and they want people to move to higher operating systems," Joseph said in a presentation at the Troopers14 conference.

Joseph and Marion Marschalek developed a diffing (comparison) tool dubbed DiffRay which compares Windows 8 with 7, and logs any safe functions absent in the older platform. In a demonstration of DiffRay, the researchers found four missing safe functions in Windows 7 that were present in 8. Future work will extend DiffRay's capabilities to find potential vulnerabilities in Windows 8.1 (PDF), add intelligence to trace input values for functions and incorporate more intelligent signatures used to find potential holes. "If we get one zero-day from this project, it's worth it," says Joseph.

Nigel Nelson writes in "The Mirror" that according to ex-KGB Major Boris Karpichkov, spies from Russia's SVR intelligence service posing as diplomats tricked Snowden into seeking asylum in Russia. Kapichkov revealed that the SVR had a recruitment operational dossier on Snowden since 2007 while he had diplomatic cover to maintain the CIA's computer network security in Geneva, Switzerland but they did not approach him until he went to Hong Kong, when agents posing as diplomats persuaded Snowden that President Putin's Russia was the best place for Snowden to seek asylum. "It was a trick and he fell for it . Now the Russians are extracting all the intelligence he possesses," says Karpichkov."He wasn't a Russian spy before he went to Moscow . But death threats have frightened him. These threats were a carefully planned operation by the Russian security services to make Snowden stay in Russia."

According to Karpichkov, who fled Moscow on a false passport in 1998 after spying on his native Latvia for the KGB and its successor, the FSB, Russian intelligence services are not interested in how US spy agencies harvested data on international phone calls and emails and even snooped on foreign leaders. They want to know exactly how America and Britain encrypt and decrypt secret information. "Codebreakers are the top targets of every secret service," says Karpichkov adding that the Russians plan to keep Snowden in Moscow for another three years. "He will stay in Russia until they have got everything they want from him. They need the time to extract all the classified intelligence he possesses about the operational methods and tactics of Western security agencies."

Michael Mishak writes that there are few places in the nation more vulnerable to rising sea levels than low-lying South Florida, a tourist and retirement mecca built on drained swampland. Yet as other coastal states and the Obama administration take aggressive measures to battle the effects of global warming, Florida's top Republican politicians are challenging the science and balking at government fixes. In Miami Beach, which floods even on sunny days, the concern is palpable. On a recent afternoon, local businessman Scott McKenzie pulled out his iPad and flipped through photos from a 2009 storm. In one, two women kayak through knee-high water in the center of town. "This is not a future problem. It's a current problem," says Leonard Berry, a contributing author of the National Climate Assessment, which found that sea levels have risen about 8 inches in the past century. By one regional assessment, the waters off South Florida could rise another 2 feet by 2060, a scenario that would overwhelm the region's aging drainage system and taint its sources of drinking water. "It's getting to the point where some properties being bought today will probably not be able to be sold at the end of a 30-year mortgage," says Harold Wanless. "You would think responsible leaders and responsible governments would take that as a wake-up call."

Gov. Rick Scott, who is running for re-election, has worked with the Republican-controlled Legislature to dismantle Florida's fledgling climate change initiatives that were put into place by his predecessor and current opponent, Democrat Charlie Crist. "I'm not a scientist," says Scott when asked about anthropogenic global warming during a stop in Miami. Meanwhile, Miami Beach is bracing for another season of punishing tides. "We're suffering while everyone is arguing man-made or natural," says Christine Florez, president of the West Avenue Corridor Neighborhood Association. "We should be working together to find solutions so people don't feel like they've been left on a log drifting out to sea."

Time Magazine reports that thirty years ago, a little game about dropping geometrically strange thingamajigs - originally clusters of punctuation marks - into neat, lookalike rows kicked off on a wild journey that led it out of a metamorphosing Soviet Union to the United States. That game, dubbed Tetris after the Greek word for the number four, is today one of the most popular video games of all time going from "blockbuster" sales of 2 million already by 1988 to over 425 million paid mobile downloads today. "I never imagined Tetris was going to be this successful," says creator Alexey Pajitnov. "The simple, yet addicting nature of Tetris still has me playing it a few times every week. I meet fans from around the world who are also as passionate about Tetris as me, and there is no doubt in my mind Tetris will continue to expand and bring its classic appeal to new players in new ways and on new devices, whatever they may be."

Peter Hartlaub says that the problem with writing a tribute to "Tetris" is that there are no great moments associated with it which is pretty much the point of the game. It's about taking the player out of the moment, and into a sort of high-functioning intellectual limbo. "Tetris isn't about letting your mind wander to a different world: It's about shutting it down altogether," says Hartlaub. "It creates almost a meditative state. The DNA of Tetris, still popular in its own right, is evident in some of the most popular games in 2014, including the equally escapist "Bejeweled" and "Candy Crush Saga." Tetris perfected downtime, and this was no small thing. In defending my role as pop culture critic, I often try to explain that there's honor in making someone's BART commute seem to go by more quickly. Some of us create fine art, others craft a way to pass the time."