Month: May 2016

Starting June 1, Comcast customers who face data caps will not be able to rack up more than $200 worth of overage charges in a month.

Comcast will continue to charge an extra $10 for each 50GB allotted to customers beyond the standard data plan. But prior to this change, there was apparently no limit on how many times per month a customer could be charged the extra $10.

Comcast confirmed the change in one of its data cap FAQs. On a DSLReports forum, a customer in Georgia posted a copy of a letter in which Comcast describes the change.

[Update (3:49pm): The "European Phenotypes" mod has been reposted by Progeny of Europe, along with a somewhat mocking description calling it "an experiment to test how far Paradox will lie about banning my other mod" after "a wild ride of lies and slander."

Progeny says the current description shouldn't run afoul of Paradox rules that he says he was forced to glean from "conflicting reports to gaming media about why [Paradox] removed my mod." To keep the mod in Paradox's good graces, "any comments that will trigger Paradox and send them into an irrational fit of lies will be removed... If you are going to leave a comment, talk as though you are talking to the Stasi."]

Original Story (11:14am)

The cure for type 2 diabetes may be all in your head, a new study in rats and mice suggests.

With a single shot to the brain, researchers can rid rodents of all symptoms of the disease for months. The injection, a relatively low dose of a tissue growth factor protein called fibroblast growth factor 1 (FGF1), appears to reset powerful neural networks that can control the amount of sugar in the blood.

So far, it’s not completely clear how exactly FGF1 does that, researchers report in Nature Medicine. Early experiments found that FGF1 didn’t appear to lower blood sugar levels in some of the most obvious ways, such as curbing the rodents’ appetite and spurring sustained weight loss. Nevertheless, because FGF1 is naturally present in human brains, as well as those of rodents, researchers are hopeful that the lucky shot may translate into a useful treatment.

General Motors has been on a bona fide roll lately. Releasing good products like the latest Corvette, Camaro, the revitalized Volt. Waking up the dormant mid-size truck segment. Genuine leaders like Cadillac's ATS have shown the world that there's life aboard the S.S. GM and that the once-beleaguered giant has learned and refocused after staring death in the face. Which brings us to the Buick Cascada convertible.

"Good enough" is not enough in today's marketplace. "Good enough" means you're quickly exposed to predators. The Cascada looks raffish and daring, but it also sits on the old GM of Europe's Delta front-wheel-drive family. And GM's European division often shows a flair for the more sophisticated in chassis engineering. But like weather patterns, fashion, and certainly technology, goalposts move. GM's Alpha architecture (as used in the Cadillac ATS) is more capable, rigid and space-efficient than the Delta platform. Planting the new Cascada—looker though it may be—on an aging platform is an Old GM decision when New GM decisions have brought about highly sophisticated and worthy products. The Cadillac ATS, the new Camaro, Corvette, the revised Volt, and a healthy list of others have injected a sense of an actual renaissance within the company headquartered at a place called The Renaissance Center in Detroit.

What’s worse is that GM also skimped where it's most visible to owners: inside. The interior design crew coughed up dozens of buttons and dials (we stopped counting at 40) for the center stack's ventilation, audio, and ancillary adjustments you deal with everyday. To choose between satellite and terrestrial radio, you must dive into several sub-menus in the touchscreen display, in a forced carousel of sorts past AM, FM, plugged-in media devices, and then SiriusXM. The screen itself is glare-prone and hard to read, while buttons on the lower portion of the screen are often blocked or hard to select. The central instrument panel's LCD display is not able to give turn-by-turn directions when Navigation is active, either. The rest of the world and especially in this entry-premium segment has moved to multitasking digital buttons and high-res graphics. All the forward collision and lane departure technology in the business—of which the Cascada has both—can't make up for a 20^th Century interface. It's like having to use a VT-100 terminal for e-mail and word processing.

Unknown attackers have been directing an ever-changing army of bots in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against NS1, a major DNS and traffic management provider, for over a week. While the company has essentially shunted off much of the attack traffic, NS1 experienced some interruptions in service early last week. And the attackers have also gone after partners of NS1, interrupting service to the company's website and other services not tied to the DNS and traffic-management platform. While it's clear that the attack is targeting NS1 in particular and not one of the company's customers, there's no indication of who is behind the attacks or why they are being carried out.

NS1 CEO Kris Beevers told Ars that the attacks were yet another escalation of a trend that has been plaguing DNS and content delivery network providers since February of this year. "This varies from the painful-but-boring DDoS attacks we've seen," he said in a phone interview. "We'd seen reflection attacks [also known as DNS amplification attacks] increasing in volumes, as had a few content delivery networks we've talked to, some of whom are our customers."

In February and March, Beevers said, "we saw an alarming rise in the scale and frequency of these attacks—the norm was to get them in the sub-10 gigabit-per-second range, but we started to see five to six per week in the 20 gigabit range. We also started to see in our network—and other friends in the CDN space saw as well—a lot of probing activity," attacks testing for weak spots in NS1's infrastructure in different regions.