Month: May 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino)

A European Commission proposal could force tech companies to scan private messages for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and evidence of grooming, even when those messages are supposed to be protected by end-to-end encryption.

Online services that receive "detection orders" under the pending European Union legislation would have "obligations concerning the detection, reporting, removal and blocking of known and new child sexual abuse material, as well as solicitation of children, regardless of the technology used in the online exchanges," the proposal says. The plan calls end-to-end encryption an important security tool but essentially orders companies to break that end-to-end encryption by whatever technological means necessary:

In order to ensure the effectiveness of those measures, allow for tailored solutions, remain technologically neutral, and avoid circumvention of the detection obligations, those measures should be taken regardless of the technologies used by the providers concerned in connection to the provision of their services. Therefore, this Regulation leaves to the provider concerned the choice of the technologies to be operated to comply effectively with detection orders and should not be understood as incentivising or disincentivising the use of any given technology, provided that the technologies and accompanying measures meet the requirements of this Regulation.

That includes the use of end-to-end encryption technology, which is an important tool to guarantee the security and confidentiality of the communications of users, including those of children. When executing the detection order, providers should take all available safeguard measures to ensure that the technologies employed by them cannot be used by them or their employees for purposes other than compliance with this Regulation, nor by third parties, and thus to avoid undermining the security and confidentiality of the communications of users.

A questions-and-answers document describing the plan emphasizes the importance of scanning end-to-end encrypted messages. "NCMEC [National Center for Missing and Exploited Children] estimates that more than half of its CyberTipline reports will vanish with end-to-end encryption, leaving abuse undetected, unless providers take measures to protect children and their privacy also on end-to-end encrypted services," it says.

Enlarge / Adenoviruses remain the leading suspect, though no cause has been identified. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

The global tally of unexplained hepatitis cases in children has reached about 450, including 11 reported deaths, according to an update from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

The cases come from more than two dozen countries around the world, with about 14 countries reporting more than five cases. The countries with the largest case counts so far are the United Kingdom and the United States.

In the UK, officials have identified 163 cases in children under the age of 16, 11 of whom required liver transplants. Last week, the US Centers for Disease Control reported 109 cases under investigation in children under the age of 10 from 25 states. Of those cases, 14 percent required liver transplants, and five children died.

Enlarge / This weirdly squished Duke-ification of classic art should tell you everything you need to know about this week's surprise leak of a build of Duke Nukem Forever. (credit: 3D Realms)

Earlier this week, a retro game leaker teased '90s shooter fans with something they'd never seen before: in-game footage of 3D Realms' infamous vaporware game Duke Nukem Forever, based on an unfinished build from 2001. (That's not to be confused with the game of the same name that Gearbox eventually launched in 2011.) Was this an elaborate fan-made fake of Duke-like content in a dated 3D engine, or would this turn out to be the real deal?

We thought we'd have to wait until June for an answer, as this week's leaker suggested that the build and its source code would be released to coincide with the 21st anniversary of the game's tantalizing E3 2001 trailer. But after this week's tease, the leakers decided to jump the gun. On Tuesday, 1.9GB of Duke Nukem Forever files landed on various file-sharing sites (which we will not link here), and Ars Technica has confirmed that those files are legitimate.

Want to fight a robot that lands somewhere between Terminator and Robocop? Duke Nukem Forever will let you do that, licenses be damned. (When it's about to die, by the way, this robot distorts players' perspectives with a video-fuzz effect and the all-caps word "degaussing.") (credit: 3D Realms)

As it turns out, this is a surprisingly playable version of Duke Nukem Forever from October 2001, though with so many bugs and incomplete sections, that's not saying much. Most of this content, which includes moments from the aforementioned E3 trailer, was shelved by the time the game reached a cobbled-together retail state in 2011. So we're finally getting a closer look at how the game could have turned out differently if it had launched closer to 2001.

Enlarge (credit: David Aubrey)

Over the last decade or so, the science community has been concerned about what has been called the "reproducibility crisis": the apparent failure of some significant experiments to produce the same results when they're repeated. That failure has led to many suggestions about what might be done to improve matters, but we still don't fully understand why experiments are failing to reproduce results.

A few recent studies have attempted to pinpoint the underlying problem. A new study approached reproducibility failure by running a set of identical behavioral experiments in several labs in Switzerland and Germany. It found that many of the differences come down to the lab itself. But there's also variability in the results that can't be ascribed to any obvious cause and may just arise from differences between individual mice.

Try and try again

The basic outline of the work is pretty simple: Get three labs to perform the same set of 10 standard behavioral experiments on mice. But the researchers took a number of additional steps to allow a detailed look at the underlying factors that might drive variation in experimental results. The experiments were done on two different mouse strains, both of which had been inbred for many generations, limiting genetic variability. All the mice were ordered from the same company. They were housed in identical conditions and were tested while they were the same age.

Enlarge / Sound Recorder is back, but it's wearing Voice Recorder's clothes. (credit: Microsoft)

Windows' Sound Recorder app has gone through a few iterations since its initial release in Windows 3.0 back in 1990, when it launched as a simple app that could only record 60 seconds of audio at a time. But the app vanished altogether in Windows 10, replaced by a totally new app called Voice Recorder, which can record and trim basic sound recordings and save them as m4a files.

Sound Recorder is now making a comeback, and Microsoft is currently testing a revamped version for Windows Insiders in the Dev channel. The company announced the redesign in a blog post summarizing Windows 11's updates to built-in Windows apps.

The new Sound Recorder uses a two-column layout similar to Voice Recorder's, with playback and trimming controls to the right and a list of all the files you've recorded on the left. But it adds some old Sound Recorder features that disappeared from the app years ago, when it was boiled down to almost nothing in Windows Vista.