Month: October 2019

Enlarge / A Facebook logo in front of an EU flag in this photo illustration on November 20, 2017. (credit: Jaap Arriens | NurPhoto | Getty)

Europe's highest court issued a controversial ruling Thursday with the potential to have staggeringly large implications worldwide. The Court of Justice of the European Union held that Facebook and other social platforms are not only obligated to proactively identify unlawful content but also to block it worldwide if a single country's authorities demand it.

The ruling (PDF) stems from a case that began in Austria three years ago. A Facebook user posted comments about an Austrian politician, Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, that Austrian courts found to be illegally defamatory. Glawischnig-Piesczek in 2016 wrote to Facebook Ireland, the company's EU headquarters, asking the company to delete the comments and limit access to them globally. Facebook refused, Glawischnig-Piesczek sued, and the results of the years of legal wrangling are out today.

A service is not liable for information it's hosting "if it has no knowledge of its illegal nature or if it acts expeditiously to remove or disable access" to the illegal content as soon as it becomes aware of it, the court said; the United States operates under a similar standard. The EU's directive on electronic commerce also "prohibits any requirement for the host provider," meaning a company such as Facebook, "to monitor generally information which it stores or to seek actively facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity," the court said.

Enlarge / Plastic water bottles washed up on a beach. (credit: Water Alternatives / Flickr)

Roughly halfway between Argentina and South Africa, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, is the most remote settlement on earth. The island of Tristan da Cunha, home to 251 descendants of a handful of 19th-century settlers, is the only inhabited island in its tiny archipelago.

Nearby is an inhospitable rock called Inaccessible Island, named for its forbidding cliffs and difficult landings. But something does land on the island: plastic. A paper in PNAS this week pieces together where a lot of that plastic comes from and points to a disconcerting potential source of plastic pollution—international shipping.

The Great Atlantic Garbage Dump

A colossal amount of garbage is brought together by vast oceanic currents. Islands near these currents tend to feel the effects, with loads of trash stranding on their shores.

• 

  The new Android Auto. The big change is the system bar at the bottom, which can now show tiny app controls. Here are music controls. [credit: Google ]

The glacial rollout of anything Android Auto related continues at the usual pace. Android Auto Wireless, which was announced about 20 months ago at CES 2018, is finally coming to Samsung phones. The feature allows Android phones to send a driving-focused UI to a car's in-dash display (like Apple's Carplay); normally Auto needs a USB cable to work. But this newer scheme can work over Wi-Fi, assuming the phone and the car support it.

Android Police first spotted the update to Google's Android Auto support page, which lists the compatible Samsung models. Samsung flagships from the Galaxy S8 and newer are supported, so that's the S8, Note8, S9, Note9, S10, and Note10. Along with those Samsung phones and every Google phone going back to the Nexus 5X, that's it for the list of wireless-compatible Android Auto phones. For a feature that launched 20 months ago, that's not very good.

Your car needs to be compatible with Wireless Android Auto for this to work, too, and the car compatibility list is even sadder than the phone list. Zero cars support Android Auto Wireless right now. To quote Google's FAQ page on the subject, "Android Auto wireless is only available with select models of JVC, Kenwood, and Pioneer aftermarket stereos, at this time."

Enlarge / Blood drop. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

The red liquid that an anti-vaccine protester flung onto California state lawmakers during a legislative session September 13 was, in fact, human blood, lab tests confirmed.

The woman—identified as Rebecca Dalelio, 43—tossed the blood from the visitor’s gallery of the Senate chamber in protest of two bills tightening regulations of medical vaccine exemptions, according to reports by the Los Angeles Times. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bills into law September 10.

Dalelio was one of dozens of anti-vaccine protesters in the chamber on the 13th. Others had been seated quietly with their fists raised for more than an hour before the incident. A Facebook profile matching Dalelio contained multiple anti-vaccine postings, the Times noted.

Enlarge / Graphic from Consumer Reports' report on hidden cable fees. (credit: Consumer Reports)

A Consumer Reports analysis of cable bills found that companies add $37.11 per month in fees to the average bill, raising consumers' actual costs way above the advertised prices. The $37.11 "in fees created by the cable industry" add 24% to the average base price of $156.71 a month, Consumer Reports said. That doesn't include another $13.28 in government-related taxes and fees, which raise prices even higher.

"With the proliferation of add-on fees, it's nearly impossible for consumers to find out the full cost of a cable package before they get locked into a contract—and cable companies count on this," Consumer Reports Senior Policy Counsel Jonathan Schwantes said.

Consumer Reports analyzed 787 cable bills from 13 companies for a report released today. Nearly all 787 bills included TV service, while at least 426 of them included Internet service, and at least 282 included phone service, Consumer Reports told Ars. Some of the bills listed the services only as "double-play" or "triple-play," so it wasn't always clear which services were included. The bills were collected from 787 volunteers between June and August 2018.

Enlarge / SandCat is a "Pez dispenser" of zero-days, a Kaspersky researcher said, handing over new exploits for free. (credit: William Thomas Cain / Getty Images)

A new "threat actor" tied to Uzbekistan's State Security Service has been unmasked by threat researchers at Kaspersky Lab. And the unmasking wasn't very hard to do, since, as Kim Zetter reports for Vice, the government group used Kaspersky antivirus software—which sent binaries of the malware it was developing back to Kaspersky for analysis.

Uzbekistan has not been known for having a cyber-espionage capability. But the Uzbek SSS clearly had a big budget, and according to Kaspersky, the group went to two Israeli companies—NSO Group and Candiru—to buy those capabilities. Unfortunately for the group, it didn't also buy any sort of operational security know-how along with the exploits it used.

The group, labeled SandCat by Kaspersky, was discovered by researchers in October of 2018. The discovery was triggered when a previously identified malware downloader called Chainshot—a tool used by groups attributed to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the past—had been discovered on an infected computer somewhere in the Middle East. But this Chainshot trojan was connected to a different command-and-control network than previous versions and was using a different exploit to initially install.

Enlarge / Think you can tell if one slot machine has a larger house advantage than another? Think again. (credit: Arterra/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

It's a well-worn mantra that when it comes to casinos, the house always wins, at least in the long term. That's because casinos maintain a small house "edge"—not enough to scare gamblers away, but sufficient to ensure that the house ultimately comes out ahead. Some gamblers think they can get around this by jumping from slot machine to slot machine, for instance, in hopes of hitting one at just the right time to win a big payout.

There's a corresponding long-held belief among casino operators that experienced players can actually sense shifts in how much and how often a particular machine pays out—that is, they can detect subtle differences in the house edge between machines. But the math says otherwise, according to a recent paper in the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.

Slot machines are the source of most of a casino's revenue. It's all about manipulating the payback percentage: the percentage of the "coin in" that a player gets back when they're done with the game. "When slot machines are made, the manufacturer will license multiple pay tables (usually around five)," said co-author Anthony Lucas, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "After a casino operator decides to buy the game, they must then decide which of the five licensed pars (aka pay tables) to install. This is where our work becomes helpful, as most operators do not know which par will optimize revenues."