Month: November 2017

(credit: Comcast)

Comcast met with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's staff this week in an attempt to prevent states from issuing net neutrality rules.

As the FCC prepares to gut its net neutrality rules, broadband providers are worried that states might enact their own laws to prevent ISPs from blocking, throttling, or discriminating against online content.

Comcast Senior VP Frank Buono and a Comcast attorney met with Pai Chief of Staff Matthew Berry and Senior Counsel Nicholas Degani on Monday, the company said in an ex parte filing that describes the meeting.

Enlarge / The Magic Kingdom enjoys millions of dollars in tax breaks from the city of Anaheim. (credit: Sean MacEntee)

Studios commonly offer movie reviewers advance screenings of their movies so they have time to write their reviews (Ars included) before the movies become available to the general public. The Los Angeles Times is the paper of record for the Los Angeles metro area, so you'd expect its writers to have easy access to these movie screenings.

But in a Friday tweetstorm, LA Times writer Glenn Whipp said that Disney had banned the paper from screenings of movies like Thor: Ragnarok in retaliation for its critical coverage of Disney's relationship with the city of Anaheim, home of Disneyland.

"The Los Angeles Times has been 'put on pause' by Disney, barring its reporters and critics from seeing its movies," Whipp wrote. "Disney didn't like the Times' recent two-part story detailing Disneyland's business ties with the city of Anaheim."

Enlarge (credit: Earth Microbiome)

Generally when cleaning out one’s freezer, it is advisable to get rid of any unidentifiable objects. Not so if one is a microbiologist. In that case, it is advisable to carefully label the specimen with as much information as possible about the environment from which it was collected.

It’s a good thing that the world's amateur microbiologists had freezers full of such specimens, because in 2010 the Earth Microbiome Project sent out a call (I think they shined a micrograph of a Staphylococcus aureus on the clouds or something). The call was for everyone to send in said specimens for a global analysis. And microbiologists from all seven continents, spanning forty-three countries and seventeen different environments, did just that.

The composition of microbial communities from environments ranging from the Sargasso Sea to our guts has already been studied. Trouble is, each sample type and region has been studied in isolation, making it difficult to extrapolate general rules or patterns as to what may dictate the composition of each community. Findings have been reported on the effects of temperature, pH, salinity, oxygen levels, and even day length on microbial community composition, but they cannot be globally applied because the samples were analyzed by different people at different times in different places in different ways.

Enlarge / The end credits from Twilight Zone episode "Eye of the Beholder," written by the pride of Binghamton, New York—Rod Serling. (credit: CBS via Getty Images)

The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) remains the rare bit of classic TV that can hold up today. SyFy proves this annually with its traditional Twilight Zone New Years' marathon. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that CBS, which recently produced new series from established franchises like Star Trek and The Big Bang Theory, decided the time for a reboot has finally come.

Even the most reboot cautious among us have reason to be slightly optimistic about the Thursday announcement, however. According to The Hollywood Reporter, CBS has bestowed the iconic franchise to Monkeypaw Productions, the company founded by Get Out writer/director Jordan Peele. Like Star Trek: Discovery, the project has reportedly been tapped for the CBS All-Access streaming platform.

Fans know Peele from his excellent Comedy Central series Key & Peele, but the unabashed genre fan took Hollywood by storm with Get Out this spring. Done in the style of classics like the original Night of the Living Dead, the film artfully blended legitimately terrifying horror with smart social satire. It generated such buzz and adoration that Peele has become a go-to horror creator, and the Academy-watchers at Vulture currently predict the film will score a Best Picture nomination.

Microsoft's initial announcement of the upgrade offer, way back in January 2015. (credit: Microsoft)

For the first year of its availability, Microsoft offered a free upgrade to Windows 10 for users of non-enterprise versions of Windows 7 and 8. For most people, that scheme ended last July, but one group of Windows users continued to be eligible for a free upgrade even after that cut-off point: those using assistive technology such as screen readers, Braille screens, or other usability aids.

At the time, there was no end-date for when those users would have to upgrade. But now, as spotted by Ed Bott, there is: December 31, 2017. After then, even users of assistive technology won't be eligible for a free upgrade.

What that means in practice, however, is less than clear. The limitations of the upgrade offer have never been meaningfully enforced. Paul Thurrott has been testing the ability to perform clean installations of Windows 10 (using the media creation tools from Microsoft) with Windows 7 or Windows 8 license keys, and this continues to work even with the latest Fall Creators Update. There's no verification that you're actually using assistive technology or anything like that; you can just enter the key, and the software installs and activates normally.

Enlarge (credit: Chesnot/Getty Images)

Here's one way to get your hands on the world's hottest smartphone without the need to wait in long Apple Store lines. No pre-ordering required, either. The only annoyance here is that you risk going to prison—but hey, at least you scored the latest iPhone model.

That's the gamble a group of hooded thieves took this week. They broke into a UPS delivery van and stole more than 300 iPhone X units that were headed to an Apple Store in San Francisco. No one was injured in the heist, as the van was locked and parked unattended in a loading dock at the Stonestown Mall in San Francisco.

"It appears the suspects knew what they were looking for," San Francisco police Captain Rick Yick told a local CBS news affiliate. "It appears that it was planned."

Enlarge / The two legitimate signing certificates Stuxnet used to bypass Windows protections.

One of the breakthroughs of the Stuxnet worm that targeted Iran's nuclear program was its use of legitimate digital certificates, which cryptographically vouched for the trustworthiness of the software's publisher. Following its discovery in 2010, researchers went on to find the technique was used in a handful of other malware samples both with ties to nation-sponsored hackers and, later on, with ties to for-profit criminal enterprises.

Now, researchers have presented proof that digitally signed malware is much more common than previously believed. What's more, it predated Stuxnet, with the first known instance occurring in 2003. The researchers said they found 189 malware samples bearing valid digital signatures that were created using compromised certificates issued by recognized certificate authorities and used to sign legitimate software. In total, 109 of those abused certificates remain valid. The researchers, who presented their findings Wednesday at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, found another 136 malware samples signed by legitimate CA-issued certificates, although the signatures were malformed.

The results are significant because digitally signed software is often able to bypass User Account Control and other Windows measures designed to prevent malicious code from being installed. Forged signatures also represent a significant breach of trust because certificates provide what's supposed to be an unassailable assurance to end users that the software was developed by the company named in the certificate and hasn't been modified by anyone else. The forgeries also allow malware to evade antivirus protections. Surprisingly, weaknesses in the majority of available AV programs prevented them from detecting known malware that was digitally signed even though the signatures weren't valid.

Enlarge (credit: flickr user: Caro Wallis)

Linguists know a huge amount about the historical changes that have shaped the English we speak today, but there are still plenty of questions to be answered. In some cases, new tools that linguists stole from biologists are letting us ask questions that we haven't been able to address before.

A paper in Nature this week shows that randomness has an important influence on how language changes over time—in much the same way as random genetic mutation plays a central role in biological evolution. And by borrowing tools from biology, the researchers point to some examples of historical change in English that are best explained by random processes.

Random drift or biased brains?

The parallels between biological evolution and cultural evolution are not always exact, but there are some pretty robust similarities. Like genetic mutations, new forms appear in language. As with genes, some of those new forms become more prevalent over time. If a mutated gene is beneficial, natural selection ensures that it becomes more popular; if a new linguistic form is preferred for some reason, cultural selection makes it more popular.