With Comcast trying to figure out how to stop losing broadband customers, the cable firm yesterday announced new plans that are available nationwide and do not have data caps.

Comcast said it is offering "four simple national Internet tiers that include unlimited data and the advanced Xfinity WiFi Gateway for one low monthly price." Customers whose current plans have data caps won't automatically get unlimited data and would have to switch to a new plan to remove that annoying limit from their accounts.

"Customers can repackage into one of our new plans that include unlimited data if they don't have it already with their existing plan," a Comcast spokesperson told Ars today.

Comcast's press release said there is a five-year price guarantee in which the plan costs range from $55 to $115 a month, before taxes and fees, for download speeds ranging from 300Mbps to 2Gbps. There's also a one-year guarantee in which the prices for the same plans range from $40 to $100.

The Comcast Xfinity website today indicated that the one- and five-year price guarantees are only available to new customers. However, the Comcast spokesperson indicated to us that existing customers can get the price guarantee when switching to an unlimited data plan. Getting promised deals can often be difficult, particularly while a cable company is changing its offerings, so we wouldn't be surprised if customers have difficulty obtaining the unlimited plan at the lowest advertised prices.

The five-year guarantee would be a better deal than the one-year guarantee in the long run because of the rise in price once the deal wears off. Comcast's "everyday prices" for these plans range from $70 to $130 a month. Comcast said the one- and five-year guarantees are "available with no contracts" and that "all plans include a line of Xfinity Mobile at no additional cost for a year."

Comcast exec: “We are not winning”

The Comcast data caps and their associated overage fees for exceeding the monthly limit have long been a major frustration for customers. Comcast has enforced the cap (currently 1.2TB a month) in most of its territory, but not in its Northeast markets where it faces competition from Verizon FiOS.

Comcast recently started offering five-year price guarantees and said it would continue adding more customer-friendly plans because of its recent struggles. After reporting a net loss of 183,000 residential broadband customers in Q1 2025, Comcast President Mike Cavanagh said during an April earnings call that "in this intensely competitive environment, we are not winning in the marketplace in a way that is commensurate with the strength of [our] network and connectivity products."

Cavanagh said Comcast executives "identified two primary causes. One is price transparency and predictability and the other is the level of ease of doing business with us." He said Comcast planned to simplify "our pricing construct to make our price-to-value proposition clearer to consumers across all broadband segments" and to make these changes "with the highest urgency."

Even after the recent customer loss, Comcast had 29.19 million residential Internet customers.

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Smartphones contain a treasure trove of personal data, which makes them a worthwhile target for hackers. However, law enforcement is not above snooping on cell phones, and their tactics are usually much harder to detect. Cell site simulators, often called Stingrays, can trick your phone into revealing private communications, but a change in Android 16 could allow phones to detect this spying.

Law enforcement organizations have massively expanded the use of Stingray devices because almost every person of interest today uses a cell phone at some point. These devices essentially trick phones into connecting to them like a normal cell tower, allowing the operator to track that device's location. The fake towers can also shift a phone to less secure wireless technology to intercept calls and messages. There's no indication this is happening on the suspect's end, which is another reason these machines have become so popular with police.

However, while surveilling a target, Stingrays can collect data from other nearby phones. It's not unreasonable to expect a modicum of privacy if you happen to be in the same general area, but sometimes police use Stingrays simply because they can. There's also evidence that cell simulators have been deployed by mysterious groups outside law enforcement. In short, it's a problem. Google has had plans to address this security issue for more than a year, but a lack of hardware support has slowed progress. Finally, in the coming months, we will see the first phones capable of detecting this malicious activity, and Android 16 is ready for it.

An example of the network notifications that could appear on future Android phones. Credit: Android Authority

As part of Google's mobile network security features, Android phones will be able to detect when a network requests a unique identifier or attempts to force an unencrypted connection. This produces a "network notification" to warn of the potential attack. This settings page will also include a toggle to disable insecure 2G networks, which is already supported in Android.

The problem, however, is that no current phones can do this. To unmask fake cell towers, Android phones need to have version 3.0 of Google's IRadio hardware abstraction layer, which has to be supported at the modem level. Even Google's latest Pixel phones lack support, so the network security settings page is hidden in current builds of Android 16.

The Stingray, made by Harris Corp., is now so ubiquitous in law enforcement that it has become a generic term for cell site simulators. Credit: US Patent and Trademark Office

According to Android Authority, Google allows OEMs to lock in certain hardware features at the time of a phone's release. So it's unlikely any current phone will be updated with modem drivers that are capable of Stingray detection. Phones that launch on Android 16 later this year, like the Pixel 10, will be the first to call out fake cell towers. In the meantime, you can still disable 2G connections to limit the impact of cell site simulators.

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On Tuesday, software engineer Doug Brown published his discovery of how to trigger a long-known but previously inaccessible Easter egg in the Power Mac G3's ROM: a hidden photo of the development team that nobody could figure out how to display for 27 years. While Pierre Dandumont first documented the JPEG image itself in 2014, the method to view it on the computer remained a mystery until Brown's reverse engineering work revealed that users must format a RAM disk with the text "secret ROM image."

Brown stumbled upon the image while using a hex editor tool called Hex Fiend with Eric Harmon's Mac ROM template to explore the resources stored in the beige Power Mac G3's ROM. The ROM appeared in desktop, minitower, and all-in-one G3 models from 1997 through 1999.

"While I was browsing through the ROM, two things caught my eye," Brown wrote. He found both the HPOE resource containing the JPEG image of team members and a suspicious set of Pascal strings in the PowerPC-native SCSI Manager 4.3 code that included ".Edisk," "secret ROM image," and "The Team."

A photo of Apple Power Mac development staff, hidden within certain Mac G3 ROM chips. Credit: Apple

The strings provided the crucial clue Brown needed. After extracting and disassembling the code using Ghidra, he discovered that the SCSI Manager was checking for a RAM disk volume named "secret ROM image." When found, the code would create a file called "The Team" containing the hidden JPEG data.

Solving the mystery

Brown initially shared his findings on the #mac68k IRC channel, where a user named Alex quickly figured out the activation method. The trick requires users to enable the RAM Disk in the Memory control panel, restart, select the RAM Disk icon, choose "Erase Disk" from the Special menu, and type "secret ROM image" into the format dialog.

"If you double-click the file, SimpleText will open it," Brown explains on his blog just before displaying the hidden team photo that emerges after following the steps.

The discovery represents one of the last undocumented Easter eggs from the pre-Steve Jobs return era at Apple. The Easter egg works through Mac OS 9.0.4 but appears to have been disabled by version 9.1, Brown notes. The timing aligns with Jobs' reported ban on Easter eggs when he returned to Apple in 1997, though Brown wonders whether Jobs ever knew about this particular secret.

The ungainly G3 All-in-One set the stage for the smaller and much bluer iMac soon after. Credit: Jonathan Zufi

In his post, Brown expressed hope that he might connect with the Apple employees featured in the photo—a hope that was quickly fulfilled. In the comments, a man named Bill Saperstein identified himself as the leader of the G3 team (pictured fourth from left in the second row) in the hidden image.

"We all knew about the Easter egg, but as you mention; the technique to extract it changed from previous Macs (although the location was the same)," Saperstein wrote in the comment. "This resulted from an Easter egg in the original PowerMac that contained Paula Abdul (without permissions, of course). So the G3 team wanted to still have our pictures in the ROM, but we had to keep it very secret."

He also shared behind-the-scenes details in another comment, noting that his "bunch of ragtag engineers" developed the successful G3 line as a skunk works project, with hardware that Jobs later turned into the groundbreaking iMac series of computers. "The team was really a group of talented people (both hw and sw) that were believers in the architecture I presented," Saperstein wrote, "and executed the design behind the scenes for a year until Jon Rubenstein got wind of it and presented it to Steve and the rest is 'history.'"

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A new site, FuckLAPD.com, is using public records and facial recognition technology to allow anyone to identify police officers in Los Angeles they have a picture of. The tool, made by artist Kyle McDonald, is designed to help people identify cops who may otherwise try to conceal their identity, such as covering their badge or serial number.

“We deserve to know who is shooting us in the face even when they have their badge covered up,” McDonald told me when I asked if the site was made in response to police violence during the LA protests against ICE that started earlier this month. “fucklapd.com is a response to the violence of the LAPD during the recent protests against the horrific ICE raids. And more broadly—the failure of the LAPD to accomplish anything useful with over $2B in funding each year.”

“Cops covering up their badges? ID them with their faces instead,” the site, which McDonald said went live this Saturday. The tool allows users to upload an image of a police officer’s face to search over 9,000 LAPD headshots obtained via public record requests. The site says image processing happens on the device, and no photos or data are transmitted or saved on the site. “Blurry, low-resolution photos will not match,” the site says.