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(credit: Mike Mozart)

As expected, Comcast will officially offer a paid television service over the Internet. For now, the new service will only allow Roku and Samsung Smart TV owners to purchase access to the cable giant’s broadcast offerings. The program likely will be expanded over time.

As Ars reported two months ago, the Federal Communications Commission approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that would force pay-TV companies to provide content and programming information to makers of third-party hardware and applications. This would create a software-based replacement for CableCard, allowing other companies to build set-top boxes or mobile applications that display a pay-TV subscriber's channels without a physical CableCard. (That vote has gotten support from the White House as recently as last week.)

Comcast’s new "Xfinity TV Partner Program" appears to be in direct response to that FCC move, although the company stated earlier this year in an FAQ that such a service was coming in 2016.

Fortuately, the computer systems at the Gundremmingen nuclear power facility in Germany don't have Internet access, because they certainly weren't secure. (credit: Felix König)

A nuclear power plant 75 miles from Munich has been harboring malware—including remote-access trojans and file-stealing malware—on the computer system that is used to monitor the plant's fuel rods. Fortunately, as Reuters reported, the computer isn't connected to the Internet, and the malware was never able to be activated.

The malware was discovered on computer systems at the Gundremmingen nuclear power facility by employees of the German electrical utility company RWE. It included Conficker, a worm first detected in 2008 designed to steal user credentials and personal financial data and turn infected computers into "bots" to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. W32.Ramnit, a worm that provides attackers with a remote access tool and allows them to steal files and inject code into webpages to capture banking data, was also discovered on the system.

In addition to the infected computer system, last upgraded in 2008, malware was discovered on 18 USB removable storage devices. Both Conficker and W32.Ramnit spread themselves through USB drives. The malware did no harm because it required Internet access to contact a command-and-control network, and it appears that the plant was not specifically targeted by attackers since the malware was focused largely on financial fraud.

Comcast today announced that it will boost its data cap from 300GB per month to 1TB beginning June 1, but the company will also charge more to customers who want unlimited data.

Comcast has been trialling different caps in various cities in preparation for a potential nationwide rollout. Typically, customers would get 300GB per month and have to pay another $10 for each additional 50GB when they go over. Comcast also allowed customers to pay an extra $30 to $35 a month for unlimited data, depending on the city.

After the June 1 change, fewer customers will need to buy unlimited data—but it will cost them $50 a month to do so instead of $30 or $35. Overage fees will stay the same, $10 for each additional 50GB. Thus far, Comcast has allowed customers to exceed the cap in three "courtesy months" before charging them overage fees.

Microsoft is buying ten million strands of DNA from biology startup Twist Bioscience to investigate the use of genetic material to store data.

The data density of DNA is orders of magnitude higher than conventional storage systems, with 1 gram of DNA able to represent close to 1 billion terabytes (1 zettabyte) of data. DNA is also remarkably robust; DNA fragments thousands of years old have been successfully sequenced.

These properties make it an intriguing option for long-term data archiving. Binary data has already been successfully stored as DNA base pairs, with estimates in 2013 suggesting that it would be economically viable for storage of 500 years or more.

Pretty soon, there's going to be a Fallout 4 bobblehead for every month of the year. Then every week... then every day...

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I do a lot of traveling to various gaming conventions for this job, but PAX East is the show I look forward to more than any other on the calendar. The convention straddles the marketing-heavy vibe of a show like E3 and the geeky/wonky vibe of the Game Developers Conference with aplomb. It then mixes in the passion of actual gamers who don't work in the industry and who have paid hundreds or thousands of dollars for a chance to commune with their fellow fans for the weekend.

Indie games have never been a rare sight at PAX East through outfits like the Indie Megabooth, but this year's show floor showed a marked shift away from massive booths for big publishers toward the "little guy." Everywhere you looked was another practically unknown, two-person developer team with a booth barely bigger than a folding table and a pixel-art aesthetic. Simply spending 10 minutes with every game on offer could easily take an entire week, much less a weekend (and that's without the massive queues of show-goers).

Check out the above gallery to get a feel for some of the best costumes, booths, and random sightings at this year's show.

The Bangladesh central bank had no firewall and was using a second-hand $10 network when it was hacked earlier this year. Investigation by British defense contractor BAE Systems has also shown that the SWIFT software used to make payments was compromised, enabling the hackers to send money around the world without leaving any trace in Bangladesh.

In February, unknown hackers broke into the Bangladesh Bank and almost got away with just shy of $1 billion. In the event, their fraudulent transactions were cancelled after they managed to transfer $81 million when a typo raised concerns about one of the transactions. That money is still unrecovered, but BAE has published some of its findings.

The SWIFT organization is owned by 3,000 financial companies and operates a network for sending financial transactions between financial institutions. Institutions using the network must have existing banking relationships; SWIFT transactions do not actually send money but instead send payment orders that must then be settled by having the institutions involved moving money between accounts.

Organic compounds in Titan’s seas and lakes. (credit: ESA)

Liquid seas exist on the surface of just two worlds in the Solar System: Earth and Saturn's moon Titan. Discovered by NASA's Cassini spacecraft about a decade ago, the hydrocarbon seas of Titan are more exotic, of course, as they exist in liquid form at temperatures around -180 degrees Celsius.

Now, after the Cassini spacecraft has made a number of flybys of Titan, scientists assessing light and other radiation emanating from the moon's surface say they have a better handle on exactly what is in one of those seas. And to their surprise, they have found that the second largest lake on Titan, Ligeia Mare, is composed of nearly pure methane.

“We expected to find that Ligeia Mare would be mostly ethane, which is produced in abundance in the atmosphere when sunlight breaks methane molecules apart,” said Alice Le Gall, lead author of the new study. “Instead, this sea is predominantly made of pure methane."

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