Month: December 2023

Enlarge / Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) speaks to reporters after the weekly Senate Republican caucus lunch on November 14, 2023, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Anna Rose Layden )

Republican members of Congress blasted a program that gives $30 monthly broadband discounts to people with low incomes, accusing the Federal Communications Commission of being "wasteful." The lawmakers suggested in a letter to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel that they may try to block funding for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which is expected to run out of money in April 2024.

"As lawmakers with oversight responsibility over the ACP, we have raised concerns, shared by the FCC Inspector General, regarding the program's effectiveness in connecting non-subscribers to the Internet," the lawmakers wrote. "While you have repeatedly claimed that the ACP is necessary for connecting participating households to the Internet, it appears the vast majority of tax dollars have gone to households that already had broadband prior to the subsidy."

The letter was sent Friday by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), and Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio). Cruz is the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee and Thune is the top Republican on the Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband. McMorris Rodgers is chair of the House Commerce Committee, and Latta is chair of the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology.

Enlarge (credit: Ryan Young/Cornell University)

Mathematician and early AI theorist David Rothenberg was fascinated by pattern recognition algorithms. By 1968, he'd already done lots of work in missile trajectories (as one did back then), speech, and accounting, but he had another esoteric area he wanted to explore: the harmonic scale, as heard by humans. With enough circuits and keys, you could carve up the traditional music octave from 12 tones into 31 and make all kinds of between-tone tunes.

Happily, he had money from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and he also knew just the person to build this theoretical keyboard: Robert Moog, a recent graduate from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who was just starting to work toward a fully realized Moog Music.

The plans called for a 478-key keyboard, an analog synthesizer, a bank of oscillators, and an impossibly intricate series of circuits between them. Moog "took his time on this," according to Travis Johns, instructional technologist at Cornell. He eventually delivers a one-octave prototype made from "1960s-era, World-War-II-surplus technology." Rothenberg held onto the keyboard piece, hoping to one day finish it, until his death in 2018. His widow, Suhasini Sankaran, donated the kit to Cornell in 2022.

Enlarge / Founder and CEO of Binance Changpeng Zhao, commonly known as "CZ," in May 10, 2022, in Rome, Italy. (credit: Antonio Masiello / Contributor | Getty Images Europe)

Now that a federal court has approved a settlement with Binance, the world largest cryptocurrency exchange is hoping to move past a money-laundering scandal that forced its founder and CEO, Changpeng Zhao, to resign and overnight drained more than $1 billion in assets from its platform.

Under the settlement, Binance will "disgorge $1.35 billion of ill-gotten transaction fees and pay a $1.35 billion penalty" to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal agency announced in a press release.

Additionally, Zhao will personally pay a $150 million civil monetary penalty. According to a plea agreement with the US Department of Justice—which ordered Binance to pay a "historic" penalty of $4.3 billion—Zhao's previously ordered $50 million fine can be credited under certain terms against the amount that Zhao owes the CFTC.

Enlarge (credit: Google Play)

One of the neatest features of the Play Store is remote app installation. If you have multiple devices signed into the same Google account, the Play Store's "install" button will let you pick any of those devices as an installation target. If you find an app you like, it's great to queue up installs on your phone, watch, TV, tablet, laptop, and car, all from a single device. It makes sense, then, that you might want to be able to uninstall apps from all your devices, too.

The new feature coming to the Play Store will let you do exactly that: remote uninstalls from any device on your account. The first sign of the feature is in the latest Android patch notes, which list a "New feature to help you uninstall apps on connected devices." It doesn't seem like this has been activated yet, but the news site TheSpAndroid has photos of the feature, showing what you would expect. Opening the Play Store and uninstalling an app will bring up a list of devices, just like installing does now.

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  After hitting the "uninstall" button, this list of devices will pop up. [credit: TheSpAndroid ]

It might not look like it, but under the hood, all installs from the Play Store happen via Android's push notification system. By default, the press of the Play Store install button requests Google to send an app push to your current device, but there's no need for the target device of a remote app install to be turned on and unlocked. Just like any other push notification, when the device connects to the Internet and sees the push, it will wake up and do whatever business it needs to do—usually, that's "show a message and beep," but in this case, that business is "install an app." Google has slowly exposed its remote install functionality to the world, first with the Android Market (now Play Store) website in 2011. It took 11 years for a similar feature to come to the Play Store phone app.

Enlarge / Mercedes-Benz receives approvals for turquoise-colored automated driving marker lights in California and Nevada (credit: Mercedes-Benz)

Authorities in California and Nevada have both granted Mercedes-Benz permission to test out a new car-to-human communication idea. While we're still some way away from road cars emoting like some of the concepts we've seen in the past few years, the automaker will use turquoise-colored marker lights to indicate when its advanced partially automated driver assistance feature is operating so other road users are aware.

Mercedes' Drive Pilot system is what's known as Level 3, or conditionally automated driver assist, according to the SAE International's classification system. In some ways, it's similar to so-called Level 2+ systems like General Motors' Super Cruise or Ford's BlueCruise in that it has a tightly controlled operational design domain that only allows it to operate on pre-mapped restricted access highways.

But unlike those systems, Drive Pilot lets you take your hands and eyes off the road. That's because it will only work at speeds of up to 40 mph (65 km/h)—it's not meant for cruising at speed. The lower speed envelope means there's enough time for Drive Pilot to warn the human behind the wheel that it's time to think about driving and take over.

Enlarge / Terrapin is coming for your data. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Sometime around the start of 1995, an unknown person planted a password sniffer on the network backbone of Finland’s Helsinki University of Technology (now known as Aalto University). Once in place, this piece of dedicated hardware surreptitiously inhaled thousands of user names and passwords before it was finally discovered. Some of the credentials belonged to employees of a company run by Tatu Ylönen, who was also a database researcher at the university.

The event proved to be seminal, not just for Ylönen's company but for the entire world. Until that point, people like Ylönen connected to networks using tools which implemented protocols such as Telnet, rlogin, rcp, and rsh. All of these transmitted passwords (and all other data) as plaintext, providing an endless stream of valuable information to sniffers. Ylönen, who at the time knew little about implementing strong cryptography in code, set out to develop the Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) in early 1995, about three months after the discovery of the password sniffer.

As one of the first network tools to route traffic through an impregnable tunnel fortified with a still-esoteric feature known as "public key encryption," SSH quickly caught on around the world. Besides its unprecedented security guarantees, SSH was easy to install on a wide array of operating systems, including the myriad ones that powered the devices administrators used—and the servers those devices connected to remotely. SSH also supported X11 forwarding, which allowed users to run graphical applications on a remote server.

Enlarge / Lagrange points are positions in space where the gravitational forces of a two-body system like the Sun and Earth produce enhanced regions of attraction and repulsion. (credit: NASA)

A bipartisan committee in the US House of Representatives recently issued a report on the economic and technological competition between the United States and China, and offered nearly 150 recommendations to "fundamentally reset" the relationship.

The report followed a year-long study of the competition between the countries since China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.

"The Chinese Communist Party has pursued a multi-decade campaign of economic aggression against the United States and its allies in the name of strategically decoupling the People’s Republic of China from the global economy, making the PRC less dependent on the United States in critical sectors, while making the United States more dependent on (China)," the report states.