Month: February 2017

Enlarge / Not very popular, apparently. Clearly Merriam-Webster doesn't do A/B tests. (credit: Merriam-Webster)

The dictionary makers at Merriam-Webster continue sticking to their once-a-year schedule of dumping a load of new English words into its database. The 2017 slew landed on Tuesday, a little earlier than recent years' March and April announcements. It seems the editors had a particular emphasis on technology words.

The full list, apparently counting 1,000-plus words, was not published, but Merriam-Webster's announcement page highlights quite a few terms that have become commonplace over the years at Ars. Obnoxious Web mainstays like "clickbait" and "listicle" now have their own official entries—not to be confused with "click fraud," a decades-old practice that Merriam-Webster finally recognizes as of today. Other ancient tech terms that finally received dictionary recognition in 2017 include "open source," "peer-to-peer," "ping," "rootkit," "keylogger," and "backward compatible." (Perhaps you'd call it ironic that the dictionary's entry for "NSFW" is absolutely safe to click on at work.)

The most topical tech term on this year's list is arguably "net neutrality," which Merriam-Webster defines as follows: "the idea, principle, or requirement that Internet service providers should or must treat all Internet data as the same regardless of its kind, source, or destination." Like most words and phrases in Merriam-Webster's database, it includes a context quote, which, weirdly, describes the term as hard-to-define: "...a philosophical contest that's being fought under the banner of 'net neutrality,' a slogan that inspires rhetorical devotion but eludes precise definition. Broadly, it means everything on the Internet should be equally accessible—that the Internet should be a place where great ideas compete on equal terms with big money."

Enlarge / The burning of the Reichstag in 1933. Google searches for information about the Reichstag fire have shot up in the past two weeks. (credit: National Archives and Records Administration)

World War II is having a moment, at least in the minds of people doing Google searches. Google Trends, a tool that measures the popularity of search terms over time, shows that there have been dramatic spikes in searches for topics related to the war, including: Reichstag fire, Pearl Harbor, fascism, Kristallnacht, and Nazi Germany.

Searches for “Reichstag fire,” the event that precipitated Adolph Hitler’s declaration of martial law in 1933, peaked worldwide the month after the Brexit vote in England and again in October 2016 before the US election. Those searches eventually reached an exceptional five-year high in the first week of February 2017. In the United States, searches related to the event when Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe lit the German parliament building on fire were most popular in Arizona and New Hampshire.

Enlarge / A proof-of-concept profile that exploited a serious cross-site scripting bug in the Steam community website.

Steam, an online game platform with more than 125 million active accounts, is in the process of fixing a serious security hole that opens users to hacks that could redirect them to attack sites, spend their market funds, or possibly make malicious changes to their user profiles.

As this post was going live, employees with Valve, the company that develops Steam, were reportedly in the process of fixing the bug. Unconfirmed posts such as this one reported that the cross-site scripting hole had been patched on the initial activity feed pages but not on subsequent pages. Valve representatives didn't respond to e-mails seeking comment for this post.

The vulnerability is the result of a failure to filter malicious commands out of user-created profile pages. Attackers can exploit the failure by inserting JavaScript and other types of code into their profiles. The malicious commands are then executed without warning on the computers of anyone who visits the booby-trapped page. The flaw first came to light in a Reddit thread that went live on Tuesday morning. Within hours, people were creating profiles that exploited the bug.

Pro-net neutrality rally at the White House in years past. (credit: Joseph Gruber)

US Senate Democrats today vowed that they won't let net neutrality rules be eliminated without a fight, and they urged citizens to make their voices heard by lawmakers and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai.

"Remember that two years ago, nearly 4 million Americans offered comments on the Open Internet Order," Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said at a press conference this morning (video). "That’s by far, by a factor of at least two, more than any comments on any rule before the FCC in history."

But if Congress and the FCC try to eliminate net neutrality rules, there will be a "political firestorm that will make the 4 million who communicated several years ago look like a minuscule number," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a bunch of new deals to share with you today. First, you can get a Dell Inspiron 15 5000 laptop featuring a Core i7 CPU, a Radeon R5 GPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive for just $549. We also have the first discount offered on the newest Dell XPS 15—this model features the newest Kaby Lake processor from Intel, a GTX 1050 GPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD, and you can get it now for $1,259.

Check out the rest of the deals below.

Featured