Month: November 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | traffic_analyzer)

Internet service providers and their lobby groups are fighting a US plan to prohibit discrimination in access to broadband services. In particular, ISPs want the Federal Communications Commission to drop the plan's proposal to require that prices charged to consumers be non-discriminatory.

In 2021, Congress required the Federal Communications Commission to issue rules "preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin" within two years. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel last month released her draft plan to comply with the congressional mandate and scheduled a November 15 commission vote on adopting final rules.

The plan is likely to pass in a party-line vote as Rosenworcel has a 3-2 Democratic majority, but aspects of the draft could be changed before the vote. Next week's meeting could be a contentious one, judging by a statement issued Monday by Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr.

Enlarge (credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Google is hoping regulators will bail it out of the messaging mess it has created for itself after years of dysfunctional product reboots. The Financial Times reports that Google and a few cell carriers are asking the EU to designate Apple's iMessage as a "core" service that would require it to be interoperable under the new "Digital Markets Act." The EU's Digital Markets Act targets Big Tech "gatekeepers" with various interoperability, fairness, and privacy demands, and while iMessage didn't make the initial cut of services announced in September, Apple's messenger is under a "market investigation" to determine if it should qualify.

So far various services from Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft have been hit with "gatekeeper" status because the EU says they "provide an important gateway between businesses and consumers in relation to core platform services." The list targets OSes and app stores, ad platforms, browsers, social networks, instant messaging, search, and video sites, and notably leaves out web mail and cloud storage services.

The criteria for gatekeeper services all revolve around business usage. The services the EU wants to include would have more than 45 million monthly active EU users and more than 10,000 yearly active business in the EU, a business turnover of at least 7.5 billion euros, or a market cap of 75 billion euros, with the caveat that these are just guidelines and the EU is open to arguments in both directions. When the initial list was announced back in September, the EU said that iMessage actually met the thresholds for regulation, but it was left off the list while it listens to Apple's arguments that it should not qualify.

Enlarge / A Roman bad girl: Tullia was the younger daughter of a Roman king, Servius Tullius. She plotted the king's overthrow and murder—callously running over his body in the street—so her husband Lucius Tarquinius could become king. (credit: Public domain)

Around 186 BCE, a former slave turned courtesan named Hispala Faecenia fell in love with a young upper-middle class Roman man named Publius Aebutius. Then she learned his mother and stepfather planned to have Aebutius initiated into the Mysteries of Bacchus, a religious cult that, legend holds, featured drunken orgies and frenzied women tearing young men limb from limb. Hispala objected strenuously, fearing her lover's reputation would be ruined or he would be injured or killed. And she questioned the parents' motives—with good reason. Apparently Aebutius's mother had squandered the young man's inheritance and he was about to come of age, thereby exposing her financial mismanagement.

Eventually the local consul got involved and set up an investigation into this Bacchanalian scandal, with Hispala reluctantly testifying about what she knew of the "obscene rites" from her younger days as a sex slave. Deeming it a religious conspiracy, the Senate issued a formal decree prohibiting the Bacchanalia throughout Italy—all because a lowly freedwoman wanted to protect her lover.

Chances are you've never heard Hispala's story (she is only mentioned in Livy's History of Rome), but historian Emma Southon is out to change that with her new book, A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire. Southon earned a PhD in ancient history from the University of Birmingham and is also the author of the wittily irreverent 2021 book, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome, discussing how the people of ancient Rome viewed life, death, and what it means to be human. She brings that same sensibility—combining solid scholarship with a breezy conversational tone—to her female-centric revisionist history of the Roman Empire.

Enlarge / I'm just so good at this game, it would be disheartening for you to see my progress in your feed. Yep, that's it. (credit: Getty Images)

Steam has long sought to strike the right balance between convenience, community, and private refuge. Until recently, sharing your gaming history was either public, exclusive to your friends, or turned off entirely. A screenshot from a noted Steam watcher suggests that a "Mark as Private" option could be coming for individual games that you're not keen on anyone, including friends, knowing you've put some time into.

Posting on X (formerly Twitter), Pavel Djundik, creator of the Steam insight tool SteamDB, shows options on the three-dot menu to the right of a game, with the last being "Mark as Private." A tooltip on the option reads, "Mark this game as private and hide it from my friends." Djundik's example is Counter-Strike 2, which, perhaps in some circles, is a game worth hiding.

Tweet (Xeet?) from the SteamDB founder, pointing to a not-yet-public feature in Steam for hiding certain games from public or friends' profiles. (credit: X / Pavel Djundik)

Some folks may be concerned to show the massive hour counts they've put into certain games. Others might be concerned about certain obsessive or ignoble achievements in games standing out in their timeline. More likely, of course, are the kinds of adult and fetish games with which Steam has a highly confusing relationship. The replies to Djundik's tweet suggest that people get this, though they also have some suggestions about other refinements, like finer-grained friend management tools.

Enlarge / One of the first galaxies that Euclid observed is nicknamed the "Hidden Galaxy." This galaxy, also known as IC 342 or Caldwell 5, is difficult to observe because it lies behind the busy disk of our Milky Way. (credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi)

The European Space Agency released the first five science images from the Euclid space telescope Tuesday, showing how the wide-angle observatory will survey familiar cosmic wonders like galaxies and stars to study the unseen dark energy and dark matter that dominate the Universe.

Stationed nearly a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, Euclid will scan one-third of the sky over the next six years, collecting an estimated 1 million images of billions of galaxies. Scientists have developed sophisticated algorithms to analyze the data coming down from Euclid to measure the distances and shapes of each of these galaxies.

From that, scientists can infer how the influence of dark matter pulls on the galaxies, forming clusters and causing them to spin faster. Dark energy is the mysterious force that is driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe.

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Highly invasive malware targeting software developers is once again circulating in Trojanized code libraries, with the latest ones downloaded thousands of times in the last eight months, researchers said Wednesday.

Since January, eight separate developer tools have contained hidden payloads with various nefarious capabilities, security firm Checkmarx reported. The most recent one was released last month under the name "pyobfgood." Like the seven packages that preceded it, pyobfgood posed as a legitimate obfuscation tool that developers could use to deter reverse engineering and tampering with their code. Once executed, it installed a payload, giving the attacker almost complete control of the developer’s machine. Capabilities include:

• Exfiltrate detailed host information
• Steal passwords from the Chrome web browser
• Set up a keylogger
• Download files from the victim's system
• Capture screenshots and record both screen and audio
• Render the computer inoperative by ramping up CPU usage, inserting a batch script in the startup directory to shut down the PC, or forcing a BSOD error with a Python script
• Encrypt files, potentially for ransom
• Deactivate Windows Defender and Task Manager
• Execute any command on the compromised host

In all, pyobfgood and the previous seven tools were installed 2,348 times. They targeted developers using the Python programming language. As obfuscators, the tools targeted Python developers with reason to keep their code secret because it had hidden capabilities, trade secrets, or otherwise sensitive functions. The malicious payloads varied from tool to tool, but they all were remarkable for their level of intrusiveness.

Enlarge / Students decide between Lunchables and a walking taco during lunch at Pembroke Elementary School on Thursday September 7, 2023, in Pembroke, NC. (credit: Getty | Matt McClain)

For the first time, health experts who develop the federal government's dietary guidelines for Americans are reviewing the effects of ultra-processed foods on the country's health—a review that could potentially lead to first-of-their-kind warnings or suggested limits in the upcoming 2025 guidance, The Washington Post reports.

Such warning or limits would mark the first time that Americans would be advised to consider not just the basic nutritional components of foods, but also how their foods are processed.

Ultra-processed foods have garnered considerable negative attention in recent years. Dozens of observational studies have linked the food category to weight gain, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases, the Post notes. A small but landmark randomized controlled study in 2019, led by the National Institutes of Health's nutrition expert, Kevin Hall, found that when inpatient trial participants received diets with ultra-processed foods, they ate roughly 500 extra calories a day compared to a control group of inpatient participants who were served a diet that was matched in macronutrients but did not include ultra-processed foods.