Month: June 2025

On Tuesday, software engineer Doug Brown published his discovery of how to trigger a long-known but previously inaccessible Easter egg in the Power Mac G3's ROM: a hidden photo of the development team that nobody could figure out how to display for 27 years. While Pierre Dandumont first documented the JPEG image itself in 2014, the method to view it on the computer remained a mystery until Brown's reverse engineering work revealed that users must format a RAM disk with the text "secret ROM image."

Brown stumbled upon the image while using a hex editor tool called Hex Fiend with Eric Harmon's Mac ROM template to explore the resources stored in the beige Power Mac G3's ROM. The ROM appeared in desktop, minitower, and all-in-one G3 models from 1997 through 1999.

"While I was browsing through the ROM, two things caught my eye," Brown wrote. He found both the HPOE resource containing the JPEG image of team members and a suspicious set of Pascal strings in the PowerPC-native SCSI Manager 4.3 code that included ".Edisk," "secret ROM image," and "The Team."

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The Supreme Court today reversed a ruling that threatened the future of the Federal Communications Commission's Universal Service Fund. In a 6–3 opinion, the high court said the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit erred when it found that Universal Service fees on phone bills are an illegal tax.

Universal Service is an $8 billion-a-year system that is used to expand telecom networks and make access more affordable through programs such as Lifeline discounts and deployment grants for Internet service providers. The program was challenged in multiple circuits by Consumers' Research, a nonprofit that fights "woke corporations," and a mobile virtual network operator called Cause Based Commerce.

The 5th Circuit ruling focused on Congress delegating its taxing power to the FCC and the FCC then subdelegating that taxing power to the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), a private organization that administers the fund. In a 9–7 en banc ruling, the 5th Circuit found that "the combination of Congress's sweeping delegation to FCC and FCC's unauthorized subdelegation to USAC violates the Legislative Vesting Clause in Article I, § 1."

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The Supreme Court today reversed a ruling that threatened the future of the Federal Communications Commission's Universal Service Fund. In a 6–3 opinion, the high court said the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit erred when it found that Universal Service fees on phone bills are an illegal tax.

Universal Service is an $8 billion-a-year system that is used to expand telecom networks and make access more affordable through programs such as Lifeline discounts and deployment grants for Internet service providers. The program was challenged in multiple circuits by Consumers' Research, a nonprofit that fights "woke corporations," and a mobile virtual network operator called Cause Based Commerce.

The 5th Circuit ruling focused on Congress delegating its taxing power to the FCC and the FCC then subdelegating that taxing power to the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), a private organization that administers the fund. In a 9–7 en banc ruling, the 5th Circuit found that "the combination of Congress's sweeping delegation to FCC and FCC's unauthorized subdelegation to USAC violates the Legislative Vesting Clause in Article I, § 1."

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Most Windows computers aren’t nearly as crash-prone today as they were a few decades ago. But crashes to happen, and for the past forty years Microsoft has shown some form of a “Blue Screen of Death” when that happens. After taking a brief detour to show a black screen for Windows 11 a few years […]

The post Lilbits: Microsoft is replacing the Blue Screen of Death with a Black one, extensions are coming to Chrome for Android (kind of), and an NES emulator that lets you play classic games in 3D appeared first on Liliputing.

Smartphones contain a treasure trove of personal data, which makes them a worthwhile target for hackers. However, law enforcement is not above snooping on cell phones, and their tactics are usually much harder to detect. Cell site simulators, often called Stingrays, can trick your phone into revealing private communications, but a change in Android 16 could allow phones to detect this spying.

Law enforcement organizations have massively expanded the use of Stingray devices because almost every person of interest today uses a cell phone at some point. These devices essentially trick phones into connecting to them like a normal cell tower, allowing the operator to track that device's location. The fake towers can also shift a phone to less secure wireless technology to intercept calls and messages. There's no indication this is happening on the suspect's end, which is another reason these machines have become so popular with police.

However, while surveilling a target, Stingrays can collect data from other nearby phones. It's not unreasonable to expect a modicum of privacy if you happen to be in the same general area, but sometimes police use Stingrays simply because they can. There's also evidence that cell simulators have been deployed by mysterious groups outside law enforcement. In short, it's a problem. Google has had plans to address this security issue for more than a year, but a lack of hardware support has slowed progress. Finally, in the coming months, we will see the first phones capable of detecting this malicious activity, and Android 16 is ready for it.

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The Supreme Court today upheld a Texas law that requires age verification on porn sites, finding that the state's age-gating law doesn't violate the First Amendment.

The 6–3 decision delivered by Justice Clarence Thomas rejected an appeal by the Free Speech Coalition, an adult-industry lobby group. Pornhub disabled its website in Texas last year because of the state law.

The Supreme Court's conservative majority decided that the law should be reviewed under the standard of intermediate scrutiny "because it only incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults." The law "survives intermediate scrutiny because it 'advances important governmental interests unrelated to the suppression of free speech and does not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further those interests,'" the court said.

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Food poisoning is never fun—and a lot of the time, it can seem quite forceful. Take the common gut-buster norovirus for example. It can ignite forces that might make jet propulsion researchers jealous. Victims may fear liftoff from a porcelain launch pad, or a vomitous blast with a reverse thrust that seems powerful enough to drop a military jet from the sky.

But then there are the rare illnesses that produce truly violent forces. Such was the case for one unfortunate man in China who made the near-fatal decision to eat some dubious street food.

It's unclear what the 59-year-old ate exactly—but it's a safe bet he'll never eat it again. Soon after, his innards vigorously ignited. According to a case report in this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the man, in fact, vomited with so much explosive force that he blew apart his esophagus—the muscular tube through which food passes from the throat to the stomach.

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Die sich ständig ändernden Gesetze und Vorschriften im Bereich IT-Sicherheit stellen Unternehmen vor neue Herausforderungen. Dieses Training vermittelt alles Wichtige zu CRA, AI Act, NIS 2, Kritis, Dora und Co. (Golem Karrierewelt, Sicherheitslücke)

In the summer of 2024, corporate anti-malware provider CrowdStrike pushed a broken update to millions of PCs and servers running some version of Microsoft's Windows software, taking down systems that both companies and consumers relied on for air travel, payments, emergency services, and their morning coffee. It was a huge outage, and it caused days and weeks of pain as the world's permanently beleaguered IT workers brought systems back online, in some cases touching each affected PC individually to remove the bad update and get the systems back up and running.

The outage was ultimately CrowdStrike's fault, and in the aftermath of the incident, the company promised a long list of process improvements to keep a bad update like that from going out again. But because the outage affected Windows systems, Microsoft often had shared and sometimes even top billing in mainstream news coverage—another in a string of security-related embarrassments that prompted CEO Satya Nadella and other executives to promise that the company would refocus its efforts on improving the security of its products.

The CrowdStrike crash was possible partly due to how anti-malware software works in Windows. Security vendors and their AV products generally have access to the Windows kernel, the cornerstone of the operating system that sits between your hardware and most user applications. But most user applications don't have kernel access specifically because a buggy app (or one hijacked by malware) with kernel access can bring the entire system down rather than just affecting the app. The bad CrowdStrike update was bad mostly because it was being loaded so early in Windows' boot process that many systems couldn't check for and download CrowdStrike's fix before they crashed.

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When FriendlyElec launched the NanoPi R3S last year, the tiny single-board computer was positioned as a router board that packed two Gigabit Ethernet ports and a Rockchip RK3566 processor into a board measuring just 57 x 57mm (2.24″ x 2.24″). Now the company has added a new model to its lineup that adds a few […]

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