LAS VEGAS, NEV.—In what’s becoming a yearly tradition for Ars, we met up with Austin-based TrackingPoint at CES to see what was new in the world of “Precision Guided Firearms”—the term the company uses to refer to its Linux-powered rifles. Last year, TrackingPoint had just taken the wraps off of its AR-15 PGF (which we got to shoot a few months later ), and this year we got to take a peek at a new prototype weapon that can accurately put rounds on targets up to a mile away—targets that can be moving up to 30 miles per hour. Dubbed the “Mile Maker,” the prototype was described by TrackingPoint representative Anson Gordon as “mostly” representative of the final product. The weapon at least for now is built around an enormous, enormously heavy, custom-milled steel barrel, which fires what TrackingPoint is calling “338TP”—a round somewhat similar to .338 Lapua Magnum but with some customized attributes. The company decided to continue on with their own cartridges for the longer-range rifle instead of moving up to a bigger round (like .50 BMG) because of the superior ballistics of the .338 bullet over the bigger .50 round. Lee Hutchinson TrackingPoint’s “Mile Maker” prototype. 7 more images in gallery Previously the longest range TrackingPoint’s weapons could accurately hit was about 1,200 yards with the company’s XM1 bolt-action rifle; the “Mile Maker” adds 600 effective yards onto the range of the XM1 by using different rounds, a longer barrel, and most importantly, updated software in the computerized tracking scope. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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TrackingPoint shows off the “Mile Maker,” a rifle with 1,800-yard range
Amanda Parker writes In-flight internet service Gogo has defended its use of a fake Google SSL certificates as a means of throttling video streaming, adding that it was not invading its customer’s privacy in doing so. The rebuttal comes after Google security researcher Adrienne Porter Felt posted a screenshot of the phoney certificate to Twitter. From the article: “The image clearly shows that Gogo signed the certificate, not Google, thus misleading customers and opening the door to malware on users’ devices. It also serves as a way to throttle data and limit traffic on its networks. ‘Gogo takes our customer’s privacy very seriously and we are committed to bringing the best Internet experience to the sky, ‘ CTO Anand Chari said in a Monday statement.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Other than ingesting alcohol and narcotics in sufficient doses to induce a state of analgesia, for most of its history, people in the West got through surgery with the aid of little more than forcible restraint and grit. Read more… 
The Goal Zero Sherpa 100 Solar Kit is a portable solar charging kit capable of recharging tablets, SLR camera batteries, or even your laptop using only power from the sun. We’ve put it to the test everywhere from Iceland to Nepal. Read more… 
An anonymous reader writes: Over at Medium, Jon Peterson (author of Playing at the World) has put up a new in-depth article covering the internal process at TSR that created Dungeons & Dragons modules in the 1980s. The adventures created at that time (by the likes of Tracy Hickman, then a staff designer) paved the way for many later computer role-playing games, and this piece shows how TSR work was pitched, storyboarded, proofed, edited and organized. With the positive reception of the new 5th edition of D&D and the attention paid to the fortieth anniversary of the game, the historical record behind modern gaming gets ever more important. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
