Month: March 2021

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | McCaig)

Internet service providers could be required to release "broadband nutrition labels" with detailed information about prices, speeds, and data caps under legislation introduced by US Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.).

Craig's "Broadband Consumer Transparency Act" would bring back expanded transparency requirements that were eliminated when then-Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai repealed net neutrality rules and deregulated the broadband industry in December 2017.

The bill "would require straightforward disclosures in an easily understandable format to help consumers better understand the services they are purchasing and protect against hidden fees and sub-standard Internet performance," Craig said in a press release yesterday. The press release said the bill "would require sellers of broadband services to provide the following information to all consumers":

Enlarge / Penguins aren't all equally trustworthy. (credit: Bernard Spragg)

In a message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List yesterday, founding developer Linus Torvalds warned the world not to use the 5.12-rc1 kernel in his public git tree.

Hey peeps - some of you may have already noticed that in my public git tree, the "v5.12-rc1" tag has magically been renamed to "v5.12-rc1-dontuse". It's still the same object, it still says "v5.12-rc1" internally and it is still is signed by me, but the user-visible name of the tag has changed.

As it turns out, when Linus Torvalds flags some code dontuse, he really means it—the problem with this 5.12 release candidate broke swapfile handling in a very unpleasant way. Specifically, the updated code would lose the proper offset pointing to the beginning of the swapfile. Again, in Torvalds' own words, "swapping still happened, but it happened to the wrong part of the filesystem, with the obvious catastrophic end results."

If your imagination is insufficient, this means that when the kernel paged contents of memory out to disk, the data would land on random parts of the same disk and partition the swapfile lived on... not as files, mind you, but as garbage spewed directly to raw sectors on the disk. This means overwriting not only data in existing files, but also rather large chunks of metadata whose corruption would likely render the entire filesystem unmountable and unusable.

Enlarge / The White House South Lawn, which is unfortunately not the view most folks working for a presidential administration have. (credit: Joe Daniel Price | Getty Images)

Longtime tech critic Tim Wu is joining the Biden administration as an adviser on technology and competition, a signal that the White House is likely to push for policies that rein in Big Tech.

Wu will be serving on the National Economic Council as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, the White House said this morning. Wu confirmed the news in a tweet.

Wu is best known in tech circles as the man who coined the term "net neutrality" in the early 2000s. He has held several positions at the federal level before, including advisory roles with both the Federal Trade Commission and the National Economic Council. He has also been a full professor at Columbia University law school since 2006, where he teaches First Amendment and antitrust law.

The idea of using video games as a way to achieve some form of Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE) on classic hardware has come a long way since seven years ago, when TASbot publicly reprogrammed a Super NES on the fly via Super Mario World. There are now dozens of examples of similar glitches that use nothing but controller inputs to insert new programming instructions into classic games, including many that can be performed by humans (and not just button-mashing robots).

Even given all that history, though, we’re still a bit wowed by the speedrunning community that found a way to insert new code into Paper Mario for the N64, leading to a new record-setting speedrun of the game. Their new method requires some extremely careful character positioning, the exploitation of “junk” memory in the N64’s RAM expansion pack and, amazingly, playing a couple of games of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Enter the effects matrix

The story of how this incredible method was discovered goes back two months, when a Paper Mario speedrunner who goes by Morpheus stumbled on a mysterious game crash in the middle of a livestreamed run. Players eventually discovered that Morpheus had accidentally triggered a situation where the game was storing too much data in the “effects matrix,” a data structure the game uses to store details of visual effects like smoke from Mario’s hammer blows.

Enlarge / Liang Wannian (2nd L) and Peter Ben Embarek (3rd R) both members of the WHO-China joint study team, shake hands after the WHO-China joint study press conference in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, on Feb. 9, 2021. (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency )

Facing intense international pressure and criticism, the World Health Organization has abandoned plans to release a summary report of its investigation into the possible origin of the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.

Instead, the health agency of the United Nations is skipping the summary report and plans to release a full report the week of March 15. The WHO had previously said it would release a summary report in mid-February.

“By definition, a summary report does not have all the details,” Dr. Ben Embarek, a WHO expert who led the investigation, told The Wall Street Journal. “So since there [is] so much interest in this report, a summary only would not satisfy the curiosity of the readers.”

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  This is the 2021 Toyota Highlander hybrid, one of the few three-row SUVs you can buy with a hybrid powertrain.

I'm not quite sure exactly when the three-row SUV became the American family car, but we're firmly in that era now. The country has always liked its vehicles to be big, and the extra height of an SUV makes it extra-bigger. Which is why it's disappointing that there are so few hybrid three-rows to choose from, particularly if you don't want a luxury badge on the front. There are really only two options in 2021. You could go for the Kia Sorento Hybrid, which we tested in January. But for a little more—starting at $38,510 for a front-wheel-drive version—you could get an even bigger one: the new Toyota Highlander hybrid.

The country seems obsessed with imposing, bluff-fronted SUVs and trucks these days, and the Highlander conforms to this trend, albeit with less implicit menace than others have achieved. Toyota knows how to style attractive SUVs, but it's a challenge for any automaker to make something this big look elegant as opposed to slab-sided. And you do get a heck of a lot of vehicle when you get a Highlander. It's 195 inches (4,950 mm) long, 76 inches (1,930 mm) wide, and 68 inches (1.730 mm) tall, and it has a 112-inch (2,850 mm) wheelbase, all of which puts it in the "midsize" segment (something that still baffles an immigrant like me who considers it ginormous).

The result is an interior that goes beyond spacious. From the driver's seat, you have plenty of room between you and the passenger seat, and the door is far enough away that I started complaining there was nowhere convenient to rest my elbow. As is usually the case with press fleet vehicles, our test Highlander hybrid was fully loaded, in this case a $50,315 Platinum AWD model, so the interior is generously trimmed with leather. There are plenty of cubbies and shelves for storage, and I rather like the way the 12.3-inch infotainment system is framed by a bar that stretches out to the passenger-side A pillar. (As an infotainment system it's fine; it's the same one you'll find in the Venza hybrid crossover, with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.)