Enlarge / The HP LaserJet M106w is one of the printer models that is mysteriously appearing for some users in Windows 10 and 11. (credit: HP)

Earlier this month, Microsoft disclosed an odd printer bug that was affecting some users of Windows 10, Windows 11, and various Windows Server products. Affected PCs were seeing an HP printer installed, usually an HP LaserJet M101-M106, even when they weren’t actually using any kind of HP printer. This bug could overwrite the settings for whatever printer the user actually did have installed and also prompted the installation of an HP Smart printer app from the Microsoft Store.

Microsoft still hasn’t shared the root cause of the problem, though it did make it clear that the problem wasn’t HP’s fault. Now, the company has released a fix for anyone whose PC was affected by the bug, though as of this writing it requires users to download and run a dedicated troubleshooting tool available from Microsoft’s support site.

The December 2023 Microsoft Printer Metadata Troubleshooter Tool is available for all affected Windows versions, and it will remove all references to the phantom HP LaserJet model (as long as you don’t actually have one installed, anyway). The tool will also remove the HP Smart app as long as you don’t have an HP printer attached and the app was installed after November 25, presumably the date that the bug began affecting systems. These steps should fix the issue for anyone without an HP printer without breaking anything for people who do use HP printers.

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)

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)

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

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.

Enlarge / A compact dwarf galaxy, which may have features that are difficult to explain with standard models of dark matter. (credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA)

It is impossible for a telescope to image and far from being completely understood, yet dark matter is everywhere.

The deepest mysteries about dark matter relate to its nature and behavior. The prevailing idea regarding dark matter is the cold dark matter theory (CDM), which posits that dark matter is made up of low-velocity particles that do not interact with each other. This thinking has been debated—and it is up for debate again. Led by astrophysicist Hai-Bo Yu, a team of researchers from the University of California Riverside have come up with an alternative idea that explains two extremes where cold dark matter doesn’t work well.

Galaxies and galaxy clusters are thought to be surrounded by halos of dark matter. At one end of the controversy are galactic dark matter halos that are too dense to be consistent with CDM, and at the other are galactic dark matter halos too diffuse for CDM to make sense of. Yu and his colleagues instead suggest that some dark force (sorry Star Wars fans—not the Force) causes dark matter particles to smash into each other. This is Self-Interacting Dark Matter, or SIDM.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

After Epic Games proved that Google’s Android app store monopoly violates antitrust law, Google has agreed to pay a $700 million settlement with US states and consumers, Reuters reported.

Once a judge approves the settlement, the largest chunk—$630 million—will go to consumers who allegedly were hit with unnecessary fees for in-app transactions. Google has not admitted to any wrongdoing, but each eligible consumer will receive at least $2, and some will receive more. Individual payouts will vary, depending on how much consumers spent in the Google Play Store between August 16, 2016 and September 30, 2023.

The remaining $70 million will go to states that joined the settlement, which includes all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

Enlarge (credit: J Marshall/NASA/ESA/T. Pesquet/Alamy)

As Hurricane Larry curved north in the Atlantic in 2021, sparing the eastern seaboard of the United States, a special instrument was waiting for it on the coast of Newfoundland. Because hurricanes feed on warm ocean water, scientists wondered whether such a storm could pick up microplastics from the sea surface and deposit them when it made landfall. Larry was literally a perfect storm: Because it hadn’t touched land before reaching the island, anything it dropped would have been scavenged from the water or air, as opposed to, say, a highly populated city, where you’d expect to find lots of microplastics.

As Larry passed over Newfoundland, the instrument gobbled up what fell from the sky. That included rain, of course, but also gobs of microplastics, defined as bits smaller than 5 millimeters, or about the width of a pencil eraser. At its peak, Larry was depositing over 100,000 microplastics per square meter of land per day, the researchers found in a recent paper published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment. Add hurricanes, then, to the growing list of ways that tiny plastic particles are not only infiltrating every corner of the environment, but readily moving between land, sea, and air.

As humanity churns out exponentially more plastic in general, so does the environment get contaminated with exponentially more microplastics. The predominant thinking used to be that microplastics would flush into the ocean and stay there: Washing synthetic clothing like polyester, for instance, releases millions of microfibers per load of laundry, which then flow out to sea in wastewater. But recent research has found that the seas are in fact burping the particles into the atmosphere to blow back onto land, both when waves break and when bubbles rise to the surface, flinging microplastics into sea breezes.

Enlarge / James Webb Space Telescope captures a wide view of Uranus. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)

This amazingly cool image of Uranus comes from the Near-Infrared Camera on the James Webb Space Telescope. This wide-field image shows Uranus with an assortment of background galaxies and 14 of its 27 moons, including Oberon and Titania. We can also see the north polar cap gleaming a bright white, as well as the planet’s rather faint (in visible light) inner and outer rings.

I’ve also included the close-up image of Uranus, which is really quite stunning with all of its various rings.

Enlarge / The Apple Watches Series 9 released in September 2023. (credit: Apple)

Apple will pause sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 starting December 21, it revealed today in a statement to 9to5Mac. The move comes as the products are facing a potential import ban until August 2028, due to rulings that the watches infringe on patents from Masimo.

In October, the US International Trade Commission (ITC) upheld a January ruling that Apple Watches with pulse oximeter features infringe on two Masimo patents. Since then, the case has been under a 60-day Presidential Review Period, which ends December 25. After that date, the watches are subject to an import ban until the patents’ expiration in 2028.

Apple told 9to5Mac:

Enlarge / Trevor Milton, founder of Nikola Corp., arrives at court in New York on Monday, Dec. 18, 2023. Milton is set to be sentenced on Monday after being found guilty of securities fraud and wire fraud in October 2022. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

The disgraced founder and former CEO of the “zero emissions” truck company Nikola, Trevor Milton, was sentenced to four years in prison on Monday, Bloomberg reported.

That’s a lighter sentence than prosecutors had requested after a jury found Milton guilty of one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud in 2022. During the trial, Milton was accused of lying about “nearly all aspects of the business,” CNBC reported.

From 2016 to 2020, Milton’s “extravagant claims” were fueled by a desire to pump up the value of Nikola stock, The New York Times reported. He was accused of misleading investors about everything from fake prototypes of emission-free long-haul trucks to billions worth of supposedly binding orders for hydrogen fuel cells and batteries that were never shipped. In a sentencing memo, prosecutors said that Milton targeted “less sophisticated investors,” the Times reported, engaging “in a sustained scheme to take advantage of” their inexperience.

Enlarge / Like it never even happened. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Stadia might be dead, but the controllers for Google’s cloud-based gaming platform are still out there. With the service permanently offline, the proprietary Stadia Controller threatened to fill up landfills until Google devised a plan to convert them to generic Bluetooth devices that can work on almost anything. The app to open up the controller to other devices is a web service, which previously had a shutdown date of December 2023. That apparently isn’t enough time to convert all these controllers, so the Stadia Controller Salvage operation will run for a whole additional year. X (formerly Twitter) user Wario64 was the first to spot the announcement, which says the online tool will continue running until December 31, 2024.

As a cloud-based gaming service, Stadia had all the game code run on remote servers, with individual video frames streaming live to the user and showing the gameplay. The user would press buttons on their local controller, and every single individual button press had to travel across the Internet to the remote game server to be processed. These services live and die by their latency; in an attempt to reduce latency, the Stadia Controller connected to the Internet directly over Wi-Fi instead of connecting via Bluetooth to your computer and then to the Internet. Google claimed that one less hop on the local network led to shorter latency, especially since  the service was originally built around the power-limited Chromecast dongle.

The official Stadia Controller in “clearly white.” (credit: Google)

With the service dead, the Wi-Fi-only controller wouldn’t work wirelessly, leaving old-school USB as the only way to use the controller. However, Stadia Controllers already came with a dormant Bluetooth chip, so Google cooked up a way to convert the orphaned controllers from Wi-Fi communication to Bluetooth, allowing them to wirelessly connect to computers and phones as a generic HID (Human Interface Device). Normally you’d expect a download for some kind of firmware update program, but Google being Google, the Stadia Controller update process happens entirely on a webpage. Google’s controller update page has a very fancy “WebUSB” API setup—you fire up a Chromium browser, plug in your controller, grant the browser access to the device, and the webpage can access the controller directly and update the firmware, without any program to install.

Enlarge / The fungus’ favorite food. (credit: Bishwo Adhikari, Brigham Young University)

Some of the scariest monsters are microscopic. The carnivorous fungus Arthrobotrys oligospora doesn’t seem like much while it’s eating away at rotting wood. But when it senses a live worm, it will trap its victim and consume it alive—pure nightmare fuel.

Until now, not much was known about how the attack of the killer fungus happens on a molecular level. Researchers from Academia Sinica in Taiwan have finally found out how the gene activity of the fungus changes when a nematode creeps too close to A. oligospora. Led by molecular biologist Hung-Che Lin, the research team discovered that the fungus synthesizes a sort of worm adhesive and additional trapping proteins to get ahold of its meal. It then produces enzymes that break down the worm so it can start feasting.

Caught in a trap

A. oligospora lives in the soil and is mostly saprotrophic, meaning it feeds on decaying organic matter. But that can quickly change if it finds itself deprived of nutrients or senses a tempting nematode nearby. This is when it goes into carnivore mode.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Chris Delmas)

The European Union has opened a formal investigation into whether Elon Musk’s X platform (formerly Twitter) violated the Digital Services Act (DSA), which could result in fines of up to 6 percent of global revenue. A European Commission announcement today said the agency “opened formal proceedings to assess whether X may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers.”

This is the commission’s first formal investigation under the Digital Services Act, which applies to large online platforms and has requirements on content moderation and transparency. The step has been in the works since at least October, when a formal request for information was sent amid reports of widespread Israel/Hamas disinformation.

The European Commission today said it “decided to open formal infringement proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act” after reviewing X’s replies to the request for information on topics including “the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel.” The commission said the investigation will focus on dissemination of illegal content, the effectiveness of measures taken to combat information manipulation on X, transparency, and “a suspected deceptive design of the user interface.”