The discovery occurred at a security checkpoint at Richmond International Airport in Virginia. As a male traveler from Williamsburg went through the checkpoint, he submitted a carry-on bag to be inspected via an X-ray machine. The X-ray revealed the outline of a knife. TSA officers conducted a manual search of the man’s bag, found nothing, and re-ran the bag through the X-ray machine. The second scan appeared to show the knife inside a laptop, resulting in a second manual search. This time, the officers pried the laptop open to expose its insides.

The laptop’s inner workings indeed contained a double-edged knife. Based on photos shared by the TSA, the weapon appears to have been adhered to the inside of the laptop’s bottom casing. When closed, the knife would have hugged the machine’s G-Style battery. It’s unknown whether the laptop was operable with the knife present.

According to the TSA, the laptop’s owner initially said he wasn’t aware a knife was present; after the machine was pried open, the owner admitted the knife was actually his. Information isn’t currently public about what motivated the owner to hide the knife in his laptop, and it might never be—based on the TSA’s Twitter page, travelers regularly hide weapons in their luggage (and in other strange belongings), but the context surrounding each attempted sneak is rarely given.

Regardless of the laptop owner’s intent, he’ll almost definitely face hefty fees for his foiled smuggling. Under the TSA’s “ordinary artful concealment” policy, sharp objects result in a fine of $530 to $2,250. “Extraordinary artful concealment” (like in the case of a carefully hollowed-out book) results in a $5,320 to $10,700 fine. Though it’s unlikely that the TSA will consider the laptop owner’s early lie to be false information, that could technically rack up another $1,490 to $4,480 in fines, too.

As for now, it appears the laptop owner won’t be facing jail time. He might, however, never speed through a busy security checkpoint again: Travelers caught traveling with weapons lose their ability to participate in the TSA PreCheck program for good.

Now Read:

• New Cerebras Wafer-Scale ‘Andromeda’ Supercomputer Has 13.5 Million Cores
• TSMC Reportedly Bringing 3nm Production to Arizona to Apple’s Benefit
• Mushroom Skin Could Hold the Key to Biodegradable Printed Circuit Boards

Enlarge / The original Slingbox, on display at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show. Key indicators this was a long time ago include the Toshiba Satellite laptop used for the demonstration (and the giant glossy UI buttons). (credit: Getty Images)

Slingbox, the device and service that was into streaming digital television long before the world was ready for it, will die a cloud-based server death Wednesday, November 9. The service was nearly 17 years old.

Sling Media announced two years ago that the Slingbox would be discontinued, noting that "all Slingbox devices and services will become inoperable." The reason given was decreased demand. Being able to watch the video that would normally be on your television on a non-television screen was a novel—and legally contentious—thing back when Sling started in 2005. Today, there is more content than you can possibly watch in a lifetime, available on devices that can connect from almost anywhere, willingly offered by every major media company and sports league.

Sling was born out of two rich fields: General Magic, the Apple spin-off company where founder Blake Krikorian worked in the early 1990s, and San Francisco Giants baseball in 2002. Krikorian and his brother, Jason, traveled frequently back then while building their own consulting firm. The Giants were headed to the World Series that year, and the Krikorian brothers wanted to watch, or at least listen. They found that they were either blacked out by local broadcast agreements or asked to pay additional fees to stream the games on top of the cable and Internet they already paid for at home.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Google has announced a raft of updates to its Messages app for Android. Those chatting with Google’s app will be able to reply in-line to messages, set reminders, star messages, and more. Well, as long as you’re using RCS. Even if you’re not, Messages will let you react to all messages with an emoji, but that’s probably more about annoying iPhone users than anything else.

It would be an understatement to say that Google’s approach to messaging has been disjointed. The company has, at times, had four or five different messaging platforms, one or two of which are killed off every year. After Google took the “L” on Allo, it began focusing on RCS (Rich Communication Services) as an alternative to SMS. Initially, Google hoped carriers would implement RCS, but unsurprisingly, they were well on their way to making it a mess of walled gardens. Google implemented RCS itself in Messages, which is the default messaging app on most Android phones.

Most of the new Messages features require you to use RCS, which supports numerous enhancements over SMS like longer messages, read receipts, and high-resolution media. The new threaded replies will let you reply to specific messages without disrupting the flow of conversation, and you can set a reminder for specific messages as well. The app will also recommend adding a star to messages that it thinks are important enough to refer back to later. Should someone end a YouTube video, the updated Messages app can also play those in-line.

Google has added one more feature that appears aimed at giving Apple a taste of its own medicine. The Messages app will let you react to any message with an emoji, even if it’s not an RCS chat. So, those who aren’t using RCS (like iPhone users) will get the dreaded “X reacted to Y with Z” pings. That’s a pain Android users with iPhone friends know all too well when iMessage folks react to a green bubble. Google added a feature to Messages earlier this year that automatically strips those superfluous messages and appends the emoji to the original message. Google tells The Verge that if Apple wants to change how these reactions appear in its app, that’s up to Apple. Sick burn, Google.

Google’s new emoji reactions mark an escalation of its catty messaging war with Apple. It has attempted to shame Apple into fixing the “green bubble problem” by adding support for RCS to the iPhone. Apple CEO Tim Cook has been unconvinced, saying the company has seen no indication its users want RCS support. He also unhelpfully suggested people just buy iPhones.

RCS is technically a standard — anyone with the resources can implement an RCS server as Google has. However, it’s effectively Android’s iMessage as there are only two mobile platforms of consequence. The smartphone in your pocket either uses RCS or iMessage for enhanced messaging, and it’s unlikely Apple is going to pipe Google’s preferred messaging platform into its phones when iMessage is such a major source of lock-in for users.

This is really only a battle that matters in the US market. In most of the rest of the world, people have moved on to third-party messaging services like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger. For those still hoping RCS works out, the new features will arrive over the coming weeks.

Now read:

• With AT&T Deal, Google Has Almost Won the RCS Messaging Wars
• Google Abandons Allo Chat App to Focus on RCS Messaging
• Google’s messaging options get even more convoluted with Allo and Duo