Month: March 2021

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Peter Dazeley)

Some Comcast customers received an unwelcome surprise yesterday morning when their upload speeds were suddenly lowered from 20Mbps to 16Mbps. Comcast was raising download speeds on its "Extreme Pro" tier from 600Mbps to 800Mbps—good news, to be sure—but the plan's relatively paltry 20Mbps upload speeds received a simultaneous 20 percent cut.

Customers affected by the change complained to Comcast, and two of them emailed Ars yesterday. When we passed these complaints on to Comcast public relations, a spokesperson initially told us that "there was no change to the upstream speed." But after we pointed out that customers were in fact getting reduced upload speeds, Comcast investigated further and discovered it made a mistake while rolling out download-speed upgrades for some of its plans.

"The customers who received the [download] speed increase last night should now be seeing the correct upload speeds in their usage meter," Comcast told Ars last night. "When we pushed the speed increase overnight, there was an issue with how the upload speeds were provisioned, which is why the meter and our internal tools that our care agents use were showing the upload speed of 16Mbps. Once you notified us, we quickly looked into it and everything should be correct now."

Enlarge / Would you notice if a large pink bear in a high-vis vest drove past you on the highway? (credit: IIHS)

Depending on your perspective, the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) that are appearing in more and more new cars are either a panacea for an epidemic of distracted driving or a reaction to a driving culture that doesn't take seriously enough the act of controlling thousands of pounds of high-speed machinery. It doesn't help that there's widespread public confusion, particularly when it comes to the one-two combo of adaptive cruise control and lane keeping and whether they allow a driver to nap on the freeway.

Now, a series of tests involving a large pink teddy bear, wearing a high-vis vest while strapped to the back of a moving car, has shown that using adaptive cruise and lane keeping—known in industry jargon as "SAE Level 2 automation"—can help increase a driver's situational awareness. However, the effect required some familiarity with such systems. The study was performed by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety and published earlier this month.

You’re adapting my what?

When activated, adaptive cruise control uses forward-looking radar to maintain a specific distance to a vehicle in the lane ahead, slowing down or speeding up (to a maximum of whatever speed cruise control was set to) as necessary. Lane-keeping systems use forward-looking cameras to detect the lane markings on a road to keep the vehicle between them, and when both are active together, the vehicle will do a pretty good facsimile of driving itself, albeit with extremely limited situational awareness.

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  The Asus ROG Phone 5. It looks like it's going to transform into a robot any second now. [credit: Asus ]

Welcome to the world of maximum Android overkill with the Asus ROG Phone 5 Ultimate! It has two displays, two USB ports, and two... batteries? It's the new highest-spec Android phone on the market, available in Europe for €1,299, or about $1,545. This is the follow-up to last year's Asus ROG Phone 3—a ROG Phone 4 is not happening because Asus is a bunch of tetraphobics.

Let's talk about these crazy specs. The ROG Phone 5 Ultimate is sporting a 144 Hz, 6.78-inch, 2448×1080 OLED display; a Snapdragon 888 SoC; 18GB of RAM; 512GB of UFS 3.1 storage; and a 6000 mAh battery. Eighteen gigabytes of RAM is a new high-mark for Android phones and (I'm not sure if this is good or bad for Android) is more RAM than you'd get in some laptops. The phone comes with Android 11, supports Wi-Fi 6E, and supports 65 W wired quick charging with a charger in the box. There's also an in-screen fingerprint reader, a headphone jack, two USB-C ports, and front stereo speakers. The cameras are definitely an afterthought, with a 64 MP Sony IMX686 as the main camera, a secondary 12 MP ultrawide, a 5 MP macro camera, and a 24 MP front camera.

The headline addition is the second screen on the rear, which appears to be just for fun. Embedded diagonally in the back of the phone is a tiny, low-resolution, monochrome OLED display. There are no official specs for it, but it looks to be around a 1.7-inch, 256×64 display. Last year, the ROG phone had an RGB LED logo on the back, and similarly, this seems to be mostly for decoration. There are a number of premade animations for it, like a motorcycle speeding past a city, and it's programmable with a custom message. One animation is for an incoming call, while another is for charging, but for actual data, that appears to be it. The little screen doesn't seem like it can show notification information or the time, like other secondary displays we see on foldable phones. Samsung did a lot more with a 1.1-inch display on the Galaxy Z Flip.

Enlarge / The head of the Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor), Andrei Lipov, during a meeting with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, at the Moscow Kremlin. Alexei Nikolsky/Russian Presidential Press and Information Office/TASS (Photo by Alexei NikolskyTASS via Getty Images)

Kentik Director of Internet Analysis Doug Madory observed this morning that traffic to Russian state ISP Rostelecom dropped significantly in the wake of its attempt to throttle Twitter. The outages seem to have been caused by a poorly crafted substring in a blocklist/network shaping tool maintained by Russia's Roskomnadzor bureau.

What Roskomnadzor intended was to slow down access to Twitter's link shortening service, t.co. All links embedded in tweets are automatically wrapped through this service, which enables Twitter to monitor the types and quality of links its users share.

Russian authorities have railed against Twitter for some time due to the service's failure or refusal to remove content illegal in Russia. This includes content that is illegal in most of the world and violates Twitter's own terms of service, such as self harm and child sexualization—but Roskomnadzor only claims 2,000 or so such posts over the course of a year. It seems likely that the real sticking point for the agency is posts encouraging children to join Russian opposition protests.

At least two species of sacoglossan sea slugs are capable of severing their own heads from their bodies and then growing an entirely new body, including a heart and other internal organs. The authors of a new study published in the journal Current Biology postulate that the secret to the decapitated slugs' survival might lie in the algae that makes up the majority of their diet.

It's a type of self-amputation known in biological circles as "autotomy," and many species exhibit some form of the phenomenon, most notably lizards and salamanders, which shed their tails (caudal autotomy) to evade predators (the tails usually grow back). Sea cucumbers can respond to stressful situations by ejecting their internal organs, which then regenerate. Starfish can shed their arms; sometimes those arms grow into new starfish. It's much more rare in mammals, but there are two species of African spiny mice that can shed their skin to escape a predator's clutches, regenerating all the damaged tissue (including hair follicles, sweat glands, fur, and cartilage).

Other species of sea slug, apart from those used in this latest study, will respond to being handled by dropping their "mantle skirt," (which forms much of the slug's dorsal surface area. But the ability to separate the head from the entire body—and not only survive, but regenerate—is an extreme form of autotomy that hasn't been observed until now.