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(credit: Marcelo Graciolli)

The Federal Communications Commission's annual review of broadband deployment says that advanced Internet service is still not being offered to all Americans.

34 million Americans, about 10 percent of the country, "still lack access to fixed broadband at the FCC’s benchmark speed of 25Mbps for downloads, 3Mbps for uploads," the FCC said in a fact sheet released today. This isn't a question of not being able to afford broadband or deciding to go without—when the FCC says you don't have access, that means no providers are willing to serve your home at modern broadband speeds at any price.

There is good news, though. In 2012, a full 20 percent of Americans could not buy 25Mbps/3Mbps broadband. The number dropped to 17 percent in 2013 and then to 10 percent in 2014. Data for 2015 isn't available yet. The annual Broadband Progress Report is based on filings by Internet service providers, and it takes a while to crunch all the numbers, so the reports are always a little behind.

Enlarge / A list of the 13 malicious apps in the Brain Test family found hosted on Google Play. (credit: Lookout)

Google has banished 13 Android apps from its Play marketplace after security researchers found the apps made unauthorized downloads and attempted to gain root privileges that allowed them to survive factory resets.

One of the 13 apps, which was known as Honeycomb, had as many as one million downloads before it was removed, according to researchers from Lookout, the mobile security provider that spotted the malicious entries. The apps boasted a large number of downloads and highly favorable user ratings, presumably thanks to the ability of one app to automatically download other apps and then leave rave user reviews for them. In a blog post, Lookout researcher Chris Dehghanpoor wrote:

The explanation for the apps’ high ratings and hundreds-of-thousands of downloads is the malware itself. First off, some of the apps are fully-functioning games. Some are highly rated because they are fun to play. Mischievously, though, the apps are capable of using compromised devices to download and positively review other malicious apps in the Play store by the same authors. This helps increase the download figures in the Play Store. Specifically, it attempts to detect if a device is rooted, and if so, copies several files to the /system partition in an effort to ensure persistence, even after a complete factory reset. This behavior is very similar to several other malware families we’ve seen recently, specifically Shedun, ShiftyBug, and Shuanet.

As Ars reported in November, members of the Shedun, Shuanet, and ShiftyBug families expose phones to potentially dangerous root exploits that can make app removal extremely hard for many users. That's because the apps are often able to root the infected device and install themselves as system applications. That can make them hard to remove using conventional methods, such as the uninstall button or factory reset in the Android options menu.

A screen capture from the new ESA video shows a concept of a human lunar settlement. (credit: ESA)

NASA has made it clear for the last half decade that it considers Mars the next destination for its astronauts. Nevertheless, since President Obama took the Moon off the table during a 2010 space policy speech, potential partners for NASA's "Journey to Mars" have fallen by the wayside.

Earlier this decade, both China and Russia, the two nations now capable of launching humans into space, signaled their intentions to first explore the Moon. Now they have been joined by arguably NASA's most important partner in the coming years, the European Space Agency (ESA). In a new video titled "The Moon Awakens," the agency says it will take lessons learned from the International Space Station and team with other interested partners to return humans to Earth’s natural satellite by the end of the next decade.

"This new exploration will be achieved not in competition, as in the past, but through peaceful, international cooperation," the narrator says. "Eventually we will see a sustained infrastructure for research and exploration where humans will live and work for prolonged periods. Here we will put into practice the lessons of the International Space Station, to establish a facility akin to those we see in Antarctica today. In the future the moon can become a place where the nations of the world work together."

(credit: Davide Restivo)

The Latvian programmer who was involved in the creation of the Gozi virus—what American authorities called "one of the most financially destructive computer viruses in history"—has been sentenced to time served and will be sent back home soon. Denniss Calovskis previously pleaded guilty to one count of "conspiring to commit computer intrusion" in September 2015.

According to the Associated Press, US District Judge Kimba Wood said she was "impressed" by Calovskis' "rehabilitation" and that she would take into account the 10 months he already spent behind bars in Latvia prior to be extradited in February 2015. (Calovskis has also served 10 months behind bars in the US.)

“What I did was wrong. … I must say it was the biggest mistake,” Calovskis said, according to the AP.

A typical perovskite, similar in structure to the one being tested here. (credit: Texas Tech)

Given how fantastically cheap silicon-based photovoltaic cells have gotten, it might be hard to muster much excitement for developing any other material. But the cost of silicon-based PV has created a potential niche—it's so cheap that installation costs now dominate the price of solar power. If we could squeeze more energy out of a single installation, it could drop the costs even further.

That's one of the reasons researchers have been trying to develop perovskites. Not only are these made from chemicals that are cheap and easy to manufacture, there are indications that they can be tuned to absorb some wavelengths while allowing others to pass through to an underlying silicon photovoltaic. The big problem: they tend to decompose when exposed to intense light.

Now, an Oxford-Berlin collaboration is reporting they may have solved the decomposition problem and, in the process, accidentally made a material where they could tune the absorbance across a wide range of wavelengths. With some additional improvements, they suggest a combined silicon-perovskite cell could reach 30 percent efficiencies—up from the neighborhood of 22 for silicon alone.

This is just as awkward as it looks. (credit: Selenia Dimension)

In a bracing op-ed published yesterday in the British Medical Journal, researchers questioned the idea that cancer screening "saves lives" as many PSAs for these services promise. Cancer researcher Vinay Prasad and his colleagues warn that cancer screening has "never been shown" to affect general mortality rates, arguing that patients are being over-screened and often misdiagnosed.

The problem they highlight is a common one in the medical field: statistics on how cancer screening affects mortality rates have been widely misunderstood and misreported. Prasad and his colleagues explain that studies show cancer screening can lower mortality rates for people who already have specific diseases such as lung cancer, but the general mortality rate has remained unchanged since the advent of common tests for breast cancer, colon cancer, neuroblastoma, and prostate cancer. In other words, screening may be slightly improving mortality rates for people who have a disease, but screening is not improving mortality overall. As the researchers put it in their op-ed, people are "simply...trading one type of death for another." More simply: even if you're screened for cancer, your risk of dying every year remains the same.

This wouldn't be cause for concern if it weren't for the fact that cancer screening is expensive for both patients and the healthcare industry. On top of that, screening can itself cause health problems. False positives, which are common, can lead to extreme anxiety, unnecessary treatments, and even death.

(credit: Katherine Martinelli/Flickr)

The federal government’s dietary guidelines, updated every five years, just received its regularly scheduled refresh.

The big takeaways largely stand in the revised version, released jointly Thursday by the Agriculture and Health and Human Services Departments. Generally, people should load their diet with “vegetables, fruits, grains, low-fat and fat-free dairy, lean meats and other protein foods and oils, while limiting saturated fats, trans fats, added sugars and sodium.”

But there are some interesting changes to chew on, too. These include a notable ditching of a specific limit on cholesterol—what some might say is a win for the egg industry (and egg lovers)—plus sterner warnings about added sugar in the diet. For the first time, the guidelines also call out adolescent and adult males for eating too much protein and give a definitive nod of approval to moderate coffee drinking— that is, three-to-five 8-ounce cups a day.