Month: June 2019

Enlarge / Donald Trump. (credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Twitter's rules state that "you may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people." So when US President Donald Trump tweeted in January 2018 that he had a "nuclear button" that was "much bigger & more powerful" than the nuclear button of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and (a few months earlier) that North Korea "won't be around much longer" if it continued its bellicose rhetoric, critics asked Twitter to take the tweets down for violating Twitter's rules.

Twitter rejected those calls. Instead, the social media giant argued that the words of world leaders are newsworthy and that such newsworthiness can trump rules that might otherwise apply. But activists have kept up the pressure on Twitter. So now the company has rolled out a new policy to deal with this kind of situation.

"In the past, we've allowed certain tweets that violated our rules to remain on Twitter because they were in the public's interest, but it wasn't clear when and how we made those determinations," a Thursday blog post says. "To fix that, we're introducing a new notice that will provide additional clarity in these situations."

Enlarge (credit: Malwarebytes)

An ongoing operation that’s installing ransomware and other malware on the computers of unsuspecting website visitors is one of the most potent drive-by attack campaigns researchers have seen in recent memory.

The attacks install three pieces of malware using an exploit kit called GreenFlash Sundown, which researchers identified in 2015 and have continued to follow since. Attacks in recent weeks have spiked again as ShadowGate—one of the names given to the hacker group behind the campaign—has unleashed a highly revamped version of the exploit kit on hacked ad servers run by Web publishers. The most notable compromise is of an ad server belonging to onlinevideoconverter[.]com, a site with more than 200 million visitors per month that converts YouTube videos into video files that can be stored on a computer hard drive.

“They are ongoing and with a scale we haven’t seen in a couple of years when it comes to exploit kit-related attacks,” Jérôme Segura, a Malwarebytes researcher tracking the campaign, said of the attacks on onlinevideoconverter[.]com visitors. “We literally noticed a huge spike in our telemetry starting a few days ago, which is very unusual. Given what we see in our telemetry, this is the most successful drive-by campaign we have seen in quite a while, so we can infer many people were affected by it.”

Enlarge / The exterior of Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

An "especially aggressive" nonprofit hospital system in Memphis that made $86 million after expenses in 2018 and pays virtually no taxes has spent years relentlessly suing thousands of low-income patients over medical debts, according to a new investigation by ProPublica and local reporting-network member MLK50.

Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare runs six hospitals around Memphis, a city in which about 25 percent of residents live below the poverty line. The hospital system, which made $2.1 billion in revenue, charges low-income patients interest on their bills and regularly garners their meager wages when they don't pay up. The hospital system owns its own collection agency to pursue debtors.

From 2014 to 2018, Methodist filed more than 8,300 lawsuits for unpaid medical bills. Through the courts, it secured garnishment orders in 46 percent of those cases.

Enlarge / John Carmack (left) and John Romero (second from right) pose with their id Software colleagues in the early '90s. We really hope USA Network's adaptation of their origin story gets this "fashion" just right. (credit: John Romero)

We've seen our share of video games turned into films and TV series, but what about the real-life origin stories behind those games? USA Network has planted a flag as the first TV network to develop a series based on the true stories of a video game's genesis, and it's a meaty one: Masters of Doom.

The series, named after the 2003 non-fiction book, will revolve around the creation of id Software, its meteoric rise following the launch of 1993's DOOM, and its iconic pair of studio leads: idiosyncratic programming wizard John Carmack and brash, long-haired level designer John Romero. As Deadline reported on Thursday, the series currently only exists as a pilot order, meaning that the wheels have begun turning to produce and cast a single, premiere episode, as opposed to an outright guarantee of a season's worth of episodes.

Author Tom Bissell has landed the pilot's writing honors, and he comes to the gig with experience writing about video games (Extra Lives), for video games (Gears of War 4), and even testing video games (as a late-'90s QA staffer at id Software, of all places). Bissell's attachment to the project makes more sense when you see its production house: Ramona Films, run by James and David Franco (who adapted Bissell's co-authored book The Disaster Artist into an award-winning 2017 film). Bissell is among the project's many executive producers, alongside original book author David Kushner.

Debunking the flat Earth is a relatively easy task. (credit: NASA)

“Vaccines are safe and effective,” write researchers Philipp Schmid and Cornelia Betsch in a paper published in Nature Human Behavior this week. “Humans cause global warming. Evolution theory explains the diversity and change of life.” But large numbers of people do not believe that these statements are true, with devastating effects: progress toward addressing the climate crisis is stultifyingly slow, and the US is seeing its largest measles outbreak since 2000.

Getting accurate information across in the face of this science denialism is something of a minefield, as there is evidence that attempts to correct misinformation may backfire, further entrenching the beliefs of science deniers instead. In their paper, Schmid and Betsch present some good news, some bad: rebutting misinformation reduces the ensuing level of science denialism, but not enough to completely counter the effect of the original exposure to misinformation.

Denialism is not skepticism

Schmid and Betsch make a point of emphasizing that science denialism is a universe away from a healthy skepticism. In fact, skepticism of existing results is what drives research to refine and overturn existing paradigms. Denialism, they write, is “dysfunctional” skepticism “driven by how the denier would like things to be rather than what he has evidence for.”

Enlarge / Despite the exciting imagery, Steam's Grand Prix promotion may be inadvertently harming some low-cost indie games on the platform. (credit: Steam)

As part of this year's annual Steam Summer Sale, Valve is hosting a new "Grand Prix" promotion that gives participants a chance at free games if they complete certain daily "quests" on the platform. But confusion over how the promotion works seems to be leading Steam users to delete some low-cost indie games from their Steam wishlists in a misguided attempt to maximize the value of their potential winnings.

"We lost 1,500 wishlists in the first 24 hours of the sale," No More Robots Director Mike Rose told Ars regarding the four indie games the publisher sells on Twitter. "Usually you lose, like, 20 in a day."

No More Robots is far from alone. Mode 7 Games' Paul Kilduff-Taylor tweeted a graph showing wishlist deletions spiking to over 1,100 following the start of the sale on Tuesday. SixtyGig Games's Raymond Doerr showed a similar increase in deletions for his game at the same time, outpacing a smaller rise in additions and purchases from the wishlist. There are now enough anecdotal examples of this effect across multiple indie games, all starting on the first day of the sale, to suggest this marked increase is something more than random chance.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. We're kicking things off today with a couple Audible deals exclusively for Amazon Prime members that you can get right now ahead of Prime Day. Prime members who do not currently have an Audible subscription can get a one-year membership, with 12 credits upfront, for $119.50. You can even add an Echo Dot to your order for an extra $0.99. Those who don't want to spend as much and are new to Audible can get a 3-month subscription for just $4.95 per month ($14.85 total), a discount of $10 per month from the regular subscription price.

The one-year subscription deal can save you about $80 in total. A regular year subscription to Audible costs $150 and an Echo Dot cots $50. So getting both of those things for just $121 is a great deal, particularly for those who want to listen to audiobooks around the house using a smart speaker like the Echo Dot. Amazon's Alexa integrates well with Audible, so you can ask Alexa on the Echo Dot to play any audiobook in your library and it will either start from the beginning or pick up where you left off.

If you just want to try Audible for a bit, the 3-month subscription deal will save you approximately $30 over the subscription's duration. All Audible members can use their credits to redeem any of the company's thousands of audiobooks, and members have access to daily deals (some books cost just a couple dollars if they are a daily deal) as well as two free Audible Originals per month.