Month: June 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Steven Puetzer)

More than 10.6 million US households have no access to wired Internet service with download speeds of at least 25Mbps, and an additional 46.1 million households live in areas with just one provider offering those speeds, a new analysis has found. That adds up to more than 56 million households lacking any high-speed broadband choice over wired connections. Even when counting access to fixed wireless connections, there are still nearly 50 million households with one 25Mbps provider or none at all.

The data comes from a report by researchers who evaluated Federal Communications Commission data in order to shed more light on broadband deployment, or lack thereof. The FCC's own reports on this data show the percentage of developed census blocks that have ISPs offering broadband at various speeds. The researchers attempted to improve upon that analysis by comparing the census block information to household data from the US Census Bureau's 2015 American Community Survey in order to determine how many homes have or don't have high-speed broadband access.

"We believe that looking at the household access counts is a better measure of access because many un/under-served census blocks are in very remote areas with few households," they wrote. (The report was written by Hal Singer of Economists Incorporated and Ed Naef and Alex King of CMA Strategy Consulting.)

Enlarge / A computer screen displaying Eternalromance, one of the hacking tools dumped Friday by Shadow Brokers. (credit: Matthew Hickey)

Update:This post was revised throughout to reflect changes F-Secure made to Thursday's blog post. The company now says that the NotPetya component completed in February didn't have any definitive bearing on when the NSA exploits were obtained. F-Secure Security Advisor Sean Sullivan tells Ars that the component weaves in the NSA exploits so well that it's likely the developers had access to the NSA code. "It strongly hints at this possibility," he said. "We feel strongly that this is the best theory to debunk." This post is being revised to make clear the early access is currently an unproven theory.

The people behind Tuesday's massive malware outbreak might have had access to two National Security Agency-developed exploits several weeks before they were published on the Internet, according to evidence unearthed by researchers from antivirus F-Secure.

EternalBlue and EternalRomance, as the two exploits were codenamed, were two of more than a dozen hacking tools leaked on April 14 by an as-yet unknown group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. Almost immediately, blackhat and grayhat hackers used EternalBlue to compromise large numbers of computers running out-of-date versions of Microsoft Windows. Within a week or two, blackhats started using EternalBlue to install cryptomining malware. No one really noticed until the outbreak of the WCry ransomware worm on May 12, which infected an estimated 727,000 computers in 90 countries.

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One could claim that the IBM PC was not really IBM's first PC at all. In September 1975 the company introduced the IBM 5100, its first "portable" computer. ("Portable" meant that it weighed just 55 pounds and you could buy a special travel case to lug it around in.)

The 5100 was not technically a microcomputer; it used a processor IBM had developed in-house called the PALM which was spread over an entire circuit board rather than being housed in a single microchip. From the end user's standpoint, however, that made little difference; certainly it would seem to qualify as a personal computer if not a microcomputer. It was a self-contained, Turing complete, programmable machine no larger than a suitcase, with a tape drive for loading and saving programs, a keyboard, and a 5-inch screen all built right in along with 16K or more of RAM.