Jared Mauch, the Michigan man who built a fiber-to-the-home internet provider because he couldn’t get good broadband service from AT&T or Comcast, is expanding with the help of $2.6 million in government money. When we wrote about Mauch in January 2021, he was providing service to about 30 rural homes, including his own, with his … Read more
Google is official kicking off the merger of its two video chat apps, Google Meet and Google Duo. Google announced the merger in June, with the plan to keep the Google Meet brand name while merging the best of both code bases into the Google Duo app. According to Google’s PR email (no links, sorry), … Read more
Charter Communications has agreed to settle piracy lawsuits filed by the major record labels, which accused the cable internet provider of failing to terminate the accounts of subscribers who illegally download copyrighted songs. Sony, Universal, Warner, and their various subsidiaries sued Charter in US District Court in Colorado in March 2019 in a suit that … Read more
In the US government’s ongoing campaign to protect data in the age of quantum computers, a new and powerful attack that used a single traditional computer to completely break a fourth-round candidate highlights the risks involved in standardizing the next generation of encryption algorithms. Last month, the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards … Read more
Martin Shkreli—the notorious ex-pharmaceutical executive fresh from prison after his 2017 fraud conviction—announced his latest, eyebrow-raising venture this week: the creation of a blockchain-based Web3 drug discovery platform that traffics in his own cryptocurrency, MSI, aka Martin Shkreli Inu. The platform, still in the early development phase, is called Druglike, according to a press release … Read more
On June 20, Microsoft-owned Mojang announced that NFTs and blockchain technology would no longer be allowed to “integrate” with Minecraft. That was bad news for NFT Worlds, which has spent months building an entire crypto-economy on top of a collection of the randomized seeds needed to make specific Minecraft maps. Now, the team behind NFT … Read more
For years, people have wondered not if, but how much, the Department of Homeland Security accesses mobile location data to monitor US citizens. This week, the American Civil Liberties Union released thousands of heavily redacted pages of documents that provide a “glimpse” of how DHS agencies came to leverage “a shocking amount” of location data, … Read more
All of the companies included in the investigation were asked to explain “the impacts of your facilities on energy costs to local families and businesses,” but none could describe any existing estimates or models that tracked those impacts. Those who engaged with the question said this was because they did not expect to have a … Read more
Retbleed can leak kernel memory from Intel CPUs at about 219 bytes per second and with 98 percent accuracy. The exploit can extract kernel memory from AMD CPUs with a bandwidth of 3.9 kB per second. The researchers said that it’s capable of locating and leaking a Linux computer’s root password hash from physical memory … Read more
The Covid-19 pandemic is considered by many experts to be a mass disabling event. Though most people fully recover from a battle with the highly infectious coronavirus, a significant chunk of patients develop lingering, sometimes debilitating symptoms — aka long Covid. Estimates of how many Covid patients endure long-term symptoms vary considerably. But the U.S. … Read more