Month: December 2022

Enlarge / Comcast's xFi Advanced Gateway. (credit: Getty Images | Jeff Fusco )

People with low incomes can get free Internet service through Comcast and a government program, but signing up is sometimes harder than it should be because of confusion within Comcast's customer service department.

Massachusetts resident Tonia Williams qualified for the US government's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provides $30 monthly discounts, and for Comcast's Internet Essentials Plus, a $30 monthly service for low-income people that is essentially free when combined with the ACP discount. But when she tried to use the ACP discount with Comcast's low-income service, Comcast incorrectly told her she wasn't eligible because she was already a Comcast customer.

Williams, a certified nursing assistant who was not working when she spoke to Ars, was eventually able to get free home Internet service for her family. But she faced several hassles and said she would have given up if it hadn't been for David Isenberg, a Falmouth resident who's been helping low-income people in his town navigate the process. Isenberg knew Williams because she was previously a home health aide taking care of Isenberg's wife's uncle.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a fictional time traveler named Stelfie during the construction of the pyramids. (credit: StelfieTT)

Throughout December, a social media user known as Stelfie the Time Traveller has been crafting a time-hopping travelogue using generative AI. Thanks to Stable Diffusion and fine-tuning, an anonymous artist has created a fictional photorealistic character that he can insert into faux historical photographs set in different eras, such as ancient Egypt or the time of the dinosaurs.

Stable Diffusion is a deep learning image synthesis model that allows people to create fictional scenes using text descriptions called prompts. With an additional technique called Dreambooth, people can insert their own subject or character into scenes generated by Stable Diffusion. It can also be used to insert real people into fictional situations.

So far, "Stelfie" has taken historical selfies during the ice age (being chased by a woolly mammoth), in ancient Egypt (during the construction of the pyramids), in ancient Greece (with the Trojan Horse), hanging out with Leonardo da Vinci (while creating the Mona Lisa), in the old West, while running from a tyrannosaurus rex, and while sailing with Christopher Columbus.

Enlarge / Katherine Langford starred as Hannah Baker, a teen who dies by suicide, in the controversial Netflix series 13 Reasons Why. (credit: Netflix)

The controversial 2017 Netflix series 13 Reasons Why sparked years of contradictory academic studies on whether the show sparked a rise in teen suicides (suicide contagion, or copycat suicides). Some showed negative impacts, while others found beneficial impacts. The most damning study appeared in 2019, which reported a sharp increase in suicide rates among young people between the ages of 10 and 17 in the months after the first season's release—although it stopped short of finding a direct causal link between the two. In response, the streaming service edited out the original graphic three-minute bathtub suicide scene that ignited the controversy.

But Dan Romer, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center who studies media and social influences on adolescent health, was skeptical about that 2019 study. His latest paper on the subject, published in the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, found a seasonal pattern to teen suicide rates that seems to coincide with the school year, declining in the summer months. Taking this and other factors into account effectively eliminated the contagion effect reported in the 2019 paper. (For an in-depth look at the controversy and an overview of several of those studies, see my 2021 feature.)

As I've written previously, suicide contagion is a phenomenon in which exposure to suicide within a family, among friends, or through the media may be associated with increased suicidal behavior. There have been many studies over the years on suicide contagion—sometimes called the "Werther effect," after the young protagonist of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. However, the extent to which fictional portrayals of suicide may contribute to suicide contagion remains a matter of genuine academic debate.

Enlarge / Fawley Oil Refinery on a bright day. (credit: Getty Images)

One of the Kremlin’s most active hacking groups targeting Ukraine recently tried to hack a large petroleum refining company located in a NATO country. The attack is a sign that the group is expanding its intelligence gathering as Russia’s invasion of its neighboring country continues.

The attempted hacking occurred on August 30 and was unsuccessful, researchers with Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 said on Tuesday. The hacking group—tracked under various names including Trident Ursa, Gamaredon, UAC-0010, Primitive Bear, and Shuckworm—has been attributed by Ukraine’s Security Service to Russia’s Federal Security Service.

Setting sights on the energy industry

In the past 10 months, Unit 42 has mapped more than 500 new domains and 200 samples and other bread crumbs Trident Ursa has left behind in spear phishing campaigns attempting to infect targets with information-stealing malware. The group mostly uses emails with Ukrainian-language lures. More recently, however, some samples show that the group has also begun using English-language lures.