Month: August 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | imagedepotpro)

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday rejected requests to eliminate an upcoming requirement that Internet service providers list all of their monthly fees.

Five major trade groups representing US broadband providers petitioned the FCC in January to scrap the requirement before it takes effect. In June, Comcast told the FCC that the listing-every-fee rule "impose[s] significant administrative burdens and unnecessary complexity in complying with the broadband label requirements."

The five trade groups kept up the pressure earlier this month in a meeting with FCC officials and in a filing that complained that listing every fee is too hard. The FCC refused to bend, announcing yesterday that the rules will take effect without any major changes.

Enlarge / NASA has three Deep Space Network stations in California, Spain, and Australia, collectively tracking dozens of space missions. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingall's)

NASA officials sounded an alarm Tuesday about the agency's Deep Space Network, a collection of antennas in California, Spain, and Australia used to maintain contact with missions scattered across the Solar System.

Everything from NASA's Artemis missions to the Moon to the Voyager probes in interstellar space rely on the Deep Space Network (DSN) to receive commands and transmit data back to Earth. Suzanne Dodd, who oversees the DSN in her position at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, likes to highlight the network's importance by showing gorgeous images from missions like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Perseverance rover on Mars.

"All these images, and all these great visuals for the public, and all the science for the scientists come down through the Deep Space Network," Dodd said Tuesday in a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council's Science Committee.

Enlarge / Sarah Silverman attends The Bedwetter book signing at the Barnes and Noble Union Square in New York City. (credit: Lars Niki / Contributor | Corbis Entertainment)

This week, OpenAI finally responded to a pair of nearly identical class-action lawsuits from book authors—including Sarah Silverman, Paul Tremblay, Mona Awad, Chris Golden, and Richard Kadrey—who earlier this summer alleged that ChatGPT was illegally trained on pirated copies of their books.

In OpenAI's motion to dismiss (filed in both lawsuits), the company asked a US district court in California to toss all but one claim alleging direct copyright infringement, which OpenAI hopes to defeat at "a later stage of the case."

The authors' other claims—alleging vicarious copyright infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment—need to be "trimmed" from the lawsuits "so that these cases do not proceed to discovery and beyond with legally infirm theories of liability," OpenAI argued.

Enlarge (credit: Steve McDowell / Agefotostock)

In late May, researchers drove out a team of China state hackers who over the previous seven months had exploited a critical vulnerability that gave them backdoors into the networks of a who’s who of sensitive organizations. Barracuda, the security vendor whose Email Security Gateway was being exploited, had deployed a patch starting on May 18, and a few days later, a script was designed to eradicate the hackers, who in some cases had enjoyed backdoor access since the previous October.

But the attackers had other plans. Unbeknownst to Barracuda and researchers at the Mandiant security firm Barracuda brought in to remediate, the hackers commenced major countermoves in the days following Barracuda’s disclosure of the vulnerability on May 20. The hackers tweaked the malware infecting their valued targets to make it more resilient to the Barracuda script. A few days later, the hackers unleashed DepthCharge, a never-before-seen piece of malware they already had on hand, presumably because they had anticipated the takedown Barracuda was attempting.

Preparing for the unexpected

Knowing their most valued victims would install the Barracuda fixes within a matter of days, the hackers, tracked as UNC4841, swept in and mobilized DepthCharge to ensure that newly deployed appliances replacing old, infected ones would reinfect themselves. The well-orchestrated counterattacks speak to the financial resources of the hackers, not to mention their skill and the effectiveness of their TTPs, short for tactics, techniques, and procedures.

Enlarge / A new kind of Bing pop-up appears for some Windows 11 users, apparently generated by a Microsoft-signed executable separate from the OS's notification system. (credit: The Verge)

In July, Microsoft began to let web browsers other than Microsoft Edge access and use its AI-powered Bing Chat service.

This is unsurprising and not a big deal in and of itself. Microsoft has been pushing its “new Bing” preview relentlessly all year, and the potential user base gets a whole lot bigger if you don’t restrict the service to a browser that fights with Firefox and Safari for Google Chrome’s scraps.

Now, multiple users and The Verge have all noticed a new notification that's being shown to users of Windows 10 and Windows 11, prompting them to use the Bing search engine with Chrome, their default browser. Microsoft semi-regularly pushes Bing on Edge users who have already gone out of their way to select a different search engine. Windows 10 and 11 periodically encourage you to use Edge, and some of Microsoft’s sites will also recommend Bing to non-Edge users, something that many of Google’s sites also do to encourage Chrome use. But this is, to my memory, the first example of an operating-system-level notification trying to get you to use Bing in a third-party browser.

Enlarge / $27,000 is a lot to pay for a 2006 Ford Econoline, but this one is not your average van. (credit: Chicago Motors)

Yesterday afternoon, I came across a rather intriguing bit of government surplus, courtesy of the fine people at the Autopian. Normally, a Ford Econoline E-250 van would not be the sort of thing to warrant even a cocked eyebrow. But this particular gray van is not your average Econoline—it's a fully kitted-out surveillance wagon. However, it's not one of those vans that sometimes shows up in a list of SSIDs. Its time in government service was spent surveilling stuff for NASA.

For sale in Chicago, the 2006 Econoline E-250 has remarkably few miles on the odometer—just 1,863. The $26,795 asking price is a lot higher than price guides suggest for an example of that vintage, but those price guides don't consider the retractable cameras, radios, audio and video recorders, and monitors that take up much of this van's interior.

(credit: Chicago Motors)

Per a manufacturer's plate, the van was converted by Innovative Surveillance Technology in Florida on behalf of NASA's Protective Services division. NASA's website explains that among its duties, Protective Services enforces "state and federal laws and administrative regulations, providing emergency medical care, fire and rescue services, and providing an appropriate incident response to any situation."