Month: May 2016

NCTA CEO Michael Powell at the cable lobby's annual INTX (Internet & Television Expo) conference. (credit: NCTA )

The cable industry's chief lobbyist today criticized what he called the Federal Communications Commission's "relentless regulatory assault" on the industry, claiming it has been unprovoked by the cable companies themselves.

"What has been so distressing is that much of this regulatory ordinance has been launched without provocation," said Michael Powell, CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA). "We increasingly are saddled with heavy rules without any compelling evidence of harm to consumers or competitors." The FCC's recent actions have not been "modest regulatory corrections," he said. Instead, "they have been thundering, tectonic shifts that have crumbled decades of settled law and policy."

Powell, who was FCC chairman himself from 2001 to 2005, made his comments today in a keynote speech at the NCTA's annual conference in Boston. Four FCC commissioners are scheduled to speak at the conference tomorrow, and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will do so on Wednesday. Wheeler—who was CEO of the NCTA from 1979 to 1984—has been critical of the industry in speeches at the conference in each of the last two years, and he would likely disagree with Powell's assertion that cable companies haven't harmed consumers or competitors.

(credit: squirrel83)

Several years ago, nobody would have believed you if you said that a secret US court was ordering the nation's telecoms to forward the metadata for all telephone calls coming to and from the United States to the National Security Agency. It would have sounded like fiction from some deranged person wearing a tinfoil hat. But it was true. Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the NSA, turned over internal government documents in 2013 that illustrated just that reality. Future document releases would underscore that the United States had been spying on its populace and the world at large to a breathtaking extent.

Snowden, now living in Russia, handed over the documents to reporter Glenn Greenwald, who published many of the juiciest disclosures at the Guardian. Greenwald left the Guardian and took the documents with him to The Intercept, which announced Monday that it is beginning a public document dump of the goods provided by Snowden. Today, The Intercept is releasing its first batch of many classified documents—166 articles of the NSA's internal newsletter called SIDtoday. The site explained:

The Intercept’s first SIDtoday release comprises 166 articles, including all articles published between March 31, 2003, when SIDtoday began, and June 30, 2003, plus installments of all article series begun during this period through the end of the year. Major topics include the National Security Agency’s role in interrogations, the Iraq War, the war on terror, new leadership in the Signals Intelligence Directorate, and new, popular uses of the internet and of mobile computing devices.

Greenwald encouraged "journalists, researchers, and interested parties" to sift through these and forthcoming document dumps "to find additional material of interest. Others may well find stories, or clues that lead to stories, that we did not. (To contact us about such finds, see the instructions here.) A primary objective of these batch releases is to make that kind of exploration possible."

Enlarge (credit: Merge Healthcare)

A heart patient undergoing a medical procedure earlier this year was put at risk when misconfigured antivirus software caused a crucial lab device to hang and require a reboot before doctors could continue.

The incident, described in an alert issued by the Food and Drug Administration, highlights the darker side of using computers and computer networks in mission-critical environments. While a computer crash is little more than an annoyance for most people at home or in offices, it can have far more serious consequences in hospitals, power generation facilities, or other industrial settings.

The computer system at issue in the FDA alert is known under the brand name Merge Hemo and is sold by Hartland, Wisconsin-based Merge Healthcare. It comprises a patient data module and a monitor PC that are connected by a serial cable. It's used to provide doctors with real-time diagnostic information from a patient undergoing a procedure known as a cardiac catheterization, in which doctors insert a tube into a blood vessel to see how well the patient's heart is working.

(credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple has just released iOS 9.3.2, a minor update to iOS 9 that fixes a handful of minor bugs. The most significant fix is related to the iPhone SE, which "could experience audio quality issues" when paired to Bluetooth headsets. The full release notes are below:

• Fixes an issue where some Bluetooth accessories could experience audio quality issues when paired to the iPhone SE
• Fixes an issue where looking up dictionary definitions could fail
• Addresses an issue that prevented typing email addresses when using the Japanese Kana keyboard in Mail and Messages
• Fixes an issue for VoiceOver users using the Alex voice, where the device switches to a different voice to announce punctuation or spaces
• Fixes an issue that prevented MDM servers from installing Custom B2B apps

All of these fixes are for minor edge cases that affect only small fractions of the iOS userbase—major development on iOS 9 stopped with iOS 9.3, at which point Apple presumably shifted its focus to the new version of iOS that we'll see at WWDC next month. The update is available for all devices that support iOS 9, including the iPhone 4S and newer; iPad 2 and newer; all iPad Minis and iPad Pros; and the fifth- and sixth-generation iPod Touches.

Apple also released minor updates for its other iOS-derived platforms, the Apple Watch and the fourth-generation Apple TV. The release notes for watchOS 2.2.1 and tvOS 9.2.1 don't name any specific fixes, but if you want the latest "bug fixes and security updates" you can download both of them now.

Dan Borstein's Twitter selfie before testifying in Oracle v. Google. (credit: @danfuzz)

SAN FRANCISCO—Top Android programmer Dan Bornstein returned to the stand today as the Oracle v. Google trial rolled into its sixth day.

Oracle, which acquired Java when it purchased Sun Microsystems in 2010, says Google infringed its copyrights by using 37 Java APIs in Android. In 2012, a judge ruled that APIs can't be copyrighted at all, but an appeals court disagreed. Now Oracle may seek up to $9 billion in damages, while Google is arguing that its use of the 37 APIs constitutes "fair use."

Bornstein, who wore a silver tie, clear glasses, and his trademark Android lapel pin, was on the stand for less than half an hour today. He answered friendlier "re-direct" questions from Google attorney Christa Anderson, who sought to ameliorate any possible damage from Friday's cross-examination of Bornstein.

Thomas Manning, the first man in the US to receive a penis transplant. (credit: Massachusetts General Hospital)

A Boston man who lost most of his penis in a fight with cancer has become the first US patient to receive a penis transplant.

Thomas Manning, 64, a bank courier from Halifax, Massachusetts, received the new organ from a deceased donor in a 15 hour-long operation conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on May 8 and 9. The procedure involves doctors hooking up nerves, veins, and arteries between the recipient and donor organ. So far, Manning's doctors are “cautiously optimistic” that he will recover urinary and sexual function in the coming weeks and months.

“It’s uncharted waters for us,” Dr. Curtis L. Cetrulo, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, told the New York Times. Cetrulo was a leader on the team of seven surgeons, 6 fellows, and more than 30 other health care workers who contributed to Manning’s procedure.

Some of the code behind the new Mr. Robot website. (credit: NBC Universal)

The USA Network show Mr. Robot has drawn a good deal of praise for its accurate (relative to other TV shows) portrayal of hacking and computer security. So, naturally, the site for the show has drawn a slightly different sort of adoring fan—"white hat" hackers looking for security holes.

On May 10, USA Network launched a new site for Mr. Robot promoting the July debut of the series' second season—a JavaScript-powered page that uses text input and mimics a Linux shell (complete with a GRUB bootup message). On the same day, as Forbes' Thomas Fox-Brewster reported, a hacker operating under the name Zemnmez reported a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the Mr. Robot site that could have been used to trick visitors to the site into giving up their Facebook profile data. Zenmez sent an e-mail about the vulnerability to Mr. Robot writer Sam Esmail; within a few hours, according to NBC Universal (USA Network's corporate parent), the vulnerability was removed.

News of the vulnerability apparently piqued the interest of other hackers in the show's fanbase. On May 13, another "white hat" hacker who calls himself corenumb poked around the site's e-mail registration code and found that the PHP code behind it was vulnerable to a type of attack called blind SQL injection—an attack that embeds SQL commands into text sent to a website, bypassing error messages that would normally block those attacks. The vulnerability would have allowed a malicious attacker to execute SQL commands against the database used for the show's e-mail list. Corenumb was able to retrieve information about the backend database and the server it runs on using SQLmap, an open source penetration testing toolkit used specifically for checking for SQL injection vulnerabilities.

In this scatter plot, you can see the correlation between higher GINI coefficient, which measures economic inequality, and higher BPM (as determined by a free BPM analyzer called MixMeister). (credit: Eric Michael Johnson)

People who tuned in to the Eurovision finals this weekend may have noticed an odd trend. The often dance-friendly song contest was packed with ballads this year. Things felt a little subdued, despite the tear-away sparkle dress from Croatia and the Russian singer who climbed a wall that looked like it was exploding. Could it be that the year's political and economic turmoil somehow affected the tempo of Eurovision songs? We decided to find out.

The question of whether the speed of a given Eurovision song reflects internal problems in that country comes down to a simple numbers game. Beats per minute (BPM) is a measurement of tempo, and there are several available programs for analyzing BPM. For this test, we used the free Mac software called MixMeister and uploaded the 43 songs on the Eurovision 2016 double CD set in order to get a BPM value for each track. This data was then placed in a scatterplot on Excel along with the United Nations Gini Index for that country. The Gini Index is a measure of a country’s level of inequality. The higher a given Gini score, the greater the gap between rich and poor. Multiple analyses have shown that high Gini scores are correlated with increased social and political instability.

As the scatter plot above shows, there is a positive correlation between a song’s BPM (the x-axis going across) and the competing country’s Gini Index (the y-axis going up). While it isn’t the case for every country, on average the tempo of the song was faster when the level of inequality was higher in that country. Using Graph Pad’s Prism 7 statistical software, a student’s T-Test showed that this was a highly significant result with a p-value of 0.0001 and a t-value of 24.9838. (Scientific studies consider a statistical result to be “significant,” or less likely to be the result of a random error, if the p-value is below 0.05. Likewise, the further a t-value is from zero, the more likely it is that you can reject the “null” hypothesis that there is no significant difference.) In other words, this analysis shows that there is a strong positive correlation that is highly statistically significant.