Month: March 2018

Enlarge (credit: Mike Mozart / Flickr)

AT&T today raised the price of one unlimited smartphone data plan by $5 a month and lowered the price of another by $10, for single-line users. Instead of the entry-level unlimited plan costing $60 and the better plan costing $90, the single-line prices are now $65 and $80 a month (plus monthly taxes and fees and a one-time $30 activation fee for each line).

AT&T raised the family plan prices by $5 a month for both of these unlimited plans. For example, four-line plans that used to cost $155 or $185 a month now cost $160 or $190. (These prices are after a discount that may not apply on your first bill.)

Each of these postpaid plans is getting some enhancements, but they're not free of limitations. "Unlimited" means that you'll never get hit with an overage fee or have your data cut off entirely, but speeds can be throttled in some situations, and mobile hotspot usage isn't allowed on the cheaper tier.

Enlarge (credit: MyHeritage)

Using crowdsourced data from a social genealogy site, a team of geneticists put together a family tree that includes 13 million people. Researchers used this behemoth of a family tree to investigate how much heredity influences longevity and to track shifts in migration habits and marriage taboos in Europe and North America over the last 300 years.

Tree building

Putting together an extended family tree on such a large scale is normally a daunting and tedious task for researchers. They typically have to ferret out records from churches and county courthouses, and most of the time those records are the old-fashioned paper kind. Tracing long-distance connections using these records can be a nightmare.

But the payoff is big, because tracking that many people’s relationships can yield insights into cultural trends, economics, genetics, and population movements. That’s especially true if researchers can combine the family tree with genetic or health data for the people listed.

GMC

DETROIT—Here in 2018, the luxury car is dead. It's not that people don't want vehicles packed with gadgets and leather, it's just that they want them to come in the shape of a truck or SUV. In 2017, the top three selling vehicles were all light trucks, plenty of which are used for commuting rather than hauling heavy loads to work sites. GMC has been selling loaded pickups for almost two decades now, and the company has high hopes for its new 2019 Sierra, which it revealed to the world on Wednesday afternoon in Detroit.

"The heritage of the GMC brand is rooted in full-size trucks, of which the Sierra is our cornerstone, with our SLT and Denali models contributing 87 percent of our total crew cab sales," said Duncan Aldred, vice president of Global GMC. "The next-generation Sierra caters to these unique customers who demand a premium, innovative truck that supports their professional and personal passions."

Enlarge (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Only three mammalian species are sanguivorous—that’s blood feeding—and they are all bats. Blood, apparently, is not that nutritious. It has almost no carbs, fats, or vitamins; its high iron levels can disrupt heart, liver, and pancreas function; its obscenely high protein and salt levels can cause renal disease if nitrogenous waste products build up. It contains pathogens. It clots.

Vampire bats have some obvious adaptations to allow them to survive on their limited and macabre diet. They have sharp incisors and canines, clawed thumbs on their wings, and use infrared sensing to find blood vessels in their prey. Their kidneys are hyperactive so that they can effectively excrete the urea that comes from all the protein in blood, and they have enhanced immunity to deal with blood-borne pathogens.

How they manage all that, however, remains largely unknown.

Enlarge (credit: flickr user: Kelley Minars)

In the run-up to the 2016 US presidential elections, a scuffle broke out about the election forecasts. While FiveThirtyEight predicted a one in three chance of a Trump win, other forecasts suggested a near-certain Clinton victory. “[T]he most popular and widely quoted website out there, fivethirtyeight.com, has something tragically wrong with its presidential prediction model,” wrote Evan Cohen at Huffington Post. “If you want to put your faith in the numbers, you can relax. She’s got this,” wrote Ryan Grim, on November 5, in a screed about FiveThirtyEight’s methods.

The widespread failure at predicting the outcome of the election has prompted a lot of analysis. Among the explanations is a simple one: polls are hard. The only way to know for sure how a bunch of people will vote is to hold the actual election. Everything else will involve extrapolating from a sample of people to the whole population, and that’s an imperfect process. A paper in Nature Human Behaviour this week finds some evidence for a method that might improve accuracy: instead of asking people how they plan to vote, ask them how their friends and family will.

You don't have to lie for your friends

The standard version of election polls involves asking a simple question: which candidate do you plan to vote for? But there are a range of other questions that can be asked. One of these is asking people to express their voting intention as a probability: what is the percent chance that you would vote for a particular candidate?

Enlarge / A screenshot demonstrating a critical vulnerability on the Trustico website before it became unavailable. (credit: @Manawyrm)

The website for Trustico went offline on Thursday morning, about 24 hours after it was revealed the CEO of the UK-based HTTPS certificate reseller emailed 23,000 private keys to a partner.

The website closure came shortly after a website security expert disclosed a critical vulnerability on Twitter that appeared to make it possible for outsiders to run malicious code on Trustico servers. The vulnerability, in a trustico.com website feature that allowed customers to confirm certificates were properly installed on their sites, appeared to run as root. By inserting commands into the validation form, attackers could call code of their choice and get it to run on Trustico servers with unfettered "root" privileges, the tweet indicated.

"If this is the case it's about as bad as it gets," security researcher Scott Helme told Ars.

Intel Skylake die shot. (credit: Intel)

Windows users running the latest version of Windows 10 on recent Intel processors will soon be receiving Intel's microcode updates to address the Spectre variant 2 attack.

Earlier this year, attacks that exploit the processor's speculative execution were published with the names Meltdown and Spectre, prompting a reaction from hardware and software companies. Intel released microcode updates for its processors to provide operating systems with greater control over certain aspects of this speculative execution; however, the company's initial releases were found to cause problems.

Intel has since fixed the microcode bugs, but until this point Microsoft has said that Windows users should turn to their system vendors to actually get the new microcode.