Month: March 2016

Mugello Valley Project

The ancient Etruscan stele was recycled 2500 years ago for use inside the foundation of a temple, which suggests that it is quite old. The stone is about 4 feet tall, and would once have stood as part of a sacred display.

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The ancient Etruscan civilization, whose great cities dotted the west coast of Italy between 2800 and 2400 years ago, was in many ways the model for ancient Greece and Rome. Etruscans lived in city states with sumptuous palaces, beautiful art, and a complicated social structure. But we know almost nothing about their daily lives, in part because most of their writing was recorded on perishable objects like cloth or wax tablets.

For that reason, a new discovery made by the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project could be revolutionary. At a dig outside Florence, a group of researchers have unearthed a massive stone tablet, known as a stele, covered in Etruscan writing. The 500-pound stone is 4 feet high and was once part of a sacred temple display. But 2500 years ago it was torn down and used as a foundation stone in a much larger temple. Hidden away for thousands of years, the sandstone stab has been preserved remarkably well. Though it's chipped, and possibly burned on one side, the stele contains 70 legible letters and punctuation marks. That makes it one of the longest examples of Etruscan writing known in the modern world.

Scientists believe it will be full of words and concepts they've never encountered before. Almost all the writing we have from Etruscan civilization is from necropolises, massive tombs that the wealthy elites used to bury their dynastic families for generations. So a lot of the vocabulary we've gleaned comes from what are essentially gravestones, covered in rote phrases and praise for the dead. This new stele could reveal a lot about Etruscan religion, and possibly the names of the god or goddesses worshipped at the city.

Baltimore's Union Memorial Hospital is one of the latest victims of ransomware disruptions. (credit: MedStar Health)

Hospitals and healthcare providers are increasingly falling victim to crypto-ransomware attacks. While attacks over the past few months have not been highly targeted thus far, they have caused a great deal of disruption. And disruptions at hospitals can have a much more dire impact than at most other organizations vulnerable to malware-based extortion.

This past week, that point was brought home again when multiple US hospitals acknowledged that they had been forced to take systems offline in response to crypto-ransomware infestations. And on Wednesday, security researchers at Cisco Talos Research revealed a new strain of crypto-ransomware designed to attack vulnerable servers that appeared to be primarily focused on targets in the healthcare industry.

The latest disruption came on Monday, when Columbia, Maryland based MedStar Health reported malware had caused a shutdown of some systems at its hospitals in Baltimore.

(credit: Tomaž Štolfa)

While figuring out whether the leftovers in your fridge have gone bad or not, the sniff-test just doesn’t cut it. But unfortunately, there are virtually no consumer-based tests to assure you that your food hasn’t turned, which is a huge public health problem. Each year, around 50 million Americans get food poisoning, and around 3,000 die.

Now, a research group in South Korea has come up with a possible solution, which can be briefly summarized with: pew, pew, nom, nom.

That’s right, researchers at the Korea Advanced Institutes of Science and Technology have developed a fridge-mountable laser that detects the squirming movements of microbes on the surface of your chow. The method is cheap, easy to use, and requires no contact with the contaminated food, making it an ideal solution to a common health problem, the authors suggest.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. (credit: AT&T)

AT&T today announced that it will increase its data caps on home Internet service, and expand enforcement. As a result, more customers will have to pay $10 overage charges for each 50GB they use beyond their monthly limit, similar to Comcast's data cap system.

AT&T will also let customers upgrade to unlimited data for an extra $30 a month. This is only necessary for Internet-only customers. People who purchase both AT&T Internet and TV in a bundle will get unlimited home Internet data at no extra charge. That applies to bundles with either DirecTV satellite or AT&T's wireline U-verse TV system.

Previously, AT&T enforced a 150GB monthly cap on its DSL network. On May 23, AT&T will expand enforcement of caps to U-verse Internet service, which brings fiber closer to the home to boost speeds, and to "Gigapower," its all-fiber service.

FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly speaking at the ITU World Radiocommunication Conference in 2015. (credit: United States Mission Geneva)

A Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission wants multiple investigations into Netflix because of the online video provider's admission that it throttles its video streams on mobile networks.

The FCC, the Federal Trade Commission, and Congress should all investigate, FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly said in a speech today in front of the American Action Forum, a policy research institute. O'Rielly is not impressed by Netflix's argument that it only reduces video quality to help its customers stay under mobile data caps.

"Netflix has attempted to paint a picture of altruism whereby it virtuously sought to save these consumers from bumping up against or exceeding their data caps," O'Rielly said. "There is no way to sugarcoat it: the news is deeply disturbing and justly generates calls for government—and maybe even Congressional—investigation."

Come along with us as we explore this year's New York International Auto Show—and don't miss Audi's spectacular trolling of its German rivals. (video link)

This year's New York International Auto Show (NYIAS) is currently underway at the Jacob H. Javits Center in Manhattan, and in recent years New York has become an increasingly important event for the auto industry. NYIAS is almost at the point of rivaling Detroit as the premiere US show. We spent a couple of days pounding the floors to find out what's new and interesting, and we've already reported on some of the more significant debuts—like Mazda's MX-5 RF and Porsche's 718 Boxster. There are simply too many noteworthy vehicles and technologies on display these days to give the fuller review treatment to all, so what follows is our "best of the rest," in alphabetical order, because we don't want to play favorites.

A is for Acura, and that means the Acura NSX GT3. This is a racing version of the company's new hybrid supercar, built on the same production line in Marysville, Ohio. It's shorn of the road car's hybrid system, however. We hope to see some of these competing in the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship next year.

Google Fiber Phone. Phone handset not included.

Google Fiber's phone service is official. Secret invitations to the phone service leaked back in January, but today Google announced the addition of optional phone service for Google Fiber residential customers. The addition of phone service allows Google Fiber to finally compete with "Triple Play" home offerings, which bundle Internet, TV, and phone service from a single company.

In addition to the regular Google Fiber bill, "Fiber Phone" costs $10 per month for unlimited local and nationwide calling. For international calls, the service uses Google Voice's international rates. The actual hardware you receive from Google won't be a phone, it's a VOIP phone box that will bridge your new-school fiber connection with an old-school landline phone.

The service is clearly an offshoot of Google Voice/Project Fi and carries over most of that feature set. You get a "cloud based" phone number that you can forward to any phone with spam filtering, call screening, and do-not-disturb features. There's a voicemail system with speech-to-text transcription, which we'd imagine requires an app or website of some kind. There's also call waiting, caller ID, and, critically, 911 access.