The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday finalized a ban on the only type of asbestos still used in the US, chrysotile asbestos. This move was decades in the making.
Chrysotile asbestos, aka "white asbestos," is still imported, processed, and used in the US for diaphragms (including those used to make sodium hydroxide and chlorine), sheet gaskets, brake blocks, aftermarket automotive brakes/linings, other vehicle friction products, and other gaskets, the EPA notes.
Exposure to asbestos is known to cause lung cancer, mesothelioma, ovarian cancer, and laryngeal cancer. And asbestos is linked to more than 40,000 deaths annually just in the US.
PC gaming is often regarded as a solitary pursuit, but the advent of PC gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck has made sharing favorite titles far easier—at least unofficially. Valve's Steam platform, which previously didn't have too much in the way of sharing, has embraced this hand-off reality with Steam Families.
Steam Families, now in beta, replaces both the more limited Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View. You invite up to five family members (for a six-person total family), share games with them (if developers allow it), and then family members can see their family library games in a subsection of their list. Anyone can play a shared game and keep their own save files and achievements.
Steam Families is, on the surface, more permissive than Family Sharing. You can play a game from a family member's library even if they're already online and playing something else. Multiple members of a Steam Family can play the same game at the same time, although the total number of people playing must match the total number of purchased copies among household members. All games are automatically shared with all other family members, though parents can use parental controls to limit games, playtime, and tune other features.
The Steam Deck's OS is purpose-built for handheld gaming, but it's confined to one device, unless you're willing to head out to the bleeding edge. Beyond SteamOS, there is Windows, which can let down ambitious Deck-likes, there is the Nintendo Switch, and there are Android-based devices that are a lot like Android phones. This setup has got at least one company saying, in infomercial tones, that there has got to be a better way.
That company is Playtron, a new software startup that aims to fix that setup with a Linux-based gaming OS that's tied to no particular game store or platform. Playtron has $10 million, coders from open source projects like ChimeraOS and Heroic Games Launcher, and the former CEO of Cyanogen. With that, it aims to have "Playtron-native devices shipping worldwide in 2025," and to capture the 1 billion "core casual" gamers they see as under-served.
Demo of Playtron running on a Lenovo Legion Go, uploaded by Playtron CEO Kirk McMaster.
What devices will Playtron use to serve them? Some of them might be Steam Decks, as you will "soon be able to install Playtron on your favorite handheld PC," according to Playtron's ambitious, somewhat scattershot single-page website. Some might be "Playtron-powered 5G devices coming soon to markets around the world." Really, though, Playtron aims to provide a gaming platform to any device with a CPU and a screen, be it desktop or mobile, ARM or x86, TV or car.
9to5Google reports that Google has killed off the Google Phone app's "nearby places" feature. Google announced the impending death of the feature in February, saying: "We’ve found only a very small number of people use this feature, and the vast majority of users go to Google Search or Maps when seeking business-related phone numbers." Now it's really dead.
The "Nearby Places" feature in the Google Phone app seemed like a useful and common-sense feature. It connected the power of Google Maps to the phone app, allowing the phone search bar to not only look through your contacts but also businesses listed in Google Maps. When you want to call the local pizza place, just type in the name, rather than some arcane string of numbers, and hit "dial."
The feature has been around on Pixel phones since at least the Pixel 2 and has been generally available to anyone who downloaded the "Phone by Google" app in the Play Store for the past few years. It was a perfect "Google" feature, combining the company's OS, breadth of online data, and search into a useful function. Google has made its AI-infused phone app a primary selling point of Pixel phones over the years, so stripping it of features is weird.
A couple of weeks ago, Apple released macOS Sonoma 14.4 with the usual list of bug fixes, security patches, and a couple of minor new features. Since then, users and companies have been complaining of a long list of incompatibilities, mostly concerning broken external accessories like USB hubs and printers but also extending to software like Java.
MacRumors has a good rundown of the list of issues, which has been steadily getting longer as people have run into more problems. It started with reports of malfunctioning USB hubs, sourced from users on Reddit, the Apple Support Communities forums, and elsewhere—USB hubs built into various displays stopped functioning for Mac users after the 14.4 update.
Other issues surfaced in the days after people started reporting problems with their USB hubs, including some instances of broken printer drivers, unexpected app crashes for some Java users, and problems launching apps that rely on the PACE anti-piracy software (and iLok hardware dongles) to authenticate.
On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Apple is in talks to license Google's Gemini model to power AI features like Siri in a future iPhone software update coming later in 2024, according to people familiar with the situation. Apple has also reportedly conducted similar talks with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
The potential integration of Google Gemini into iOS 18 could bring a range of new cloud-based (off-device) AI-powered features to Apple's smartphone, including image creation or essay writing based on simple prompts. However, the terms and branding of the agreement have not yet been finalized, and the implementation details remain unclear. The companies are unlikely to announce any deal until Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
Gemini could also bring new capabilities to Apple's widely criticized voice assistant, Siri, which trails newer AI assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) in understanding and responding to complex questions. Rumors of Apple's own internal frustration with Siri—and potential remedies—have been kicking around for some time. In January, 9to5Mac revealed that Apple had been conducting tests with a beta version of iOS 17.4 that used OpenAI's ChatGPT API to power Siri.
Japan-based IT behemoth Fujitsu said it has discovered malware on its corporate network that may have allowed the people responsible to steal personal information from customers or other parties.
“We confirmed the presence of malware on several of our company's work computers, and as a result of an internal investigation, it was discovered that files containing personal information and customer information could be illegally taken out,” company officials wrote in a March 15 notification that went largely unnoticed until Monday. The company said it continued to “investigate the circumstances surrounding the malware's intrusion and whether information has been leaked.” There was no indication how many records were exposed or how many people may be affected.
Fujitsu employs 124,000 people worldwide and reported about $25 billion of revenue in its fiscal 2023, which ended at the end of last March. The company operates in 100 countries. Past customers include the Japanese government. Fujitsu’s revenue comes from sales of hardware such as computers, servers, and telecommunications gear, storage systems, software, and IT services.
It looks like Sony's PlayStation VR2 is not living up to the company's sales expectations just over a year after it first hit the market. Bloomberg reports that the PlayStation-maker has stopped producing new PSVR2 units as it tries to clear out a growing backlog of unsold inventory.
Bloomberg cites "people familiar with [Sony's] plans" in reporting that PSVR2 sales have "slowed progressively" since its February 2023 launch. Sony has produced "well over 2 million" units of the headset, compared to what tracking firm IDC estimates as just 1.69 million unit shipments to retailers through the end of last year. The discrepancy has caused a "surplus of assembled devices... throughout Sony’s supply chain," according to Bloomberg's sources.
IDC estimates a quarterly low of 325,000 PSVR2 units shipped in the usually hot holiday season, compared to a full 1.3 million estimated holiday shipments for Meta's then-new Quest 3 headset, which combined with other Quest products to account for over 3.7 million estimated sales for the full year.
Starting in May, Dell employees who are fully remote will not be eligible for promotion, Business Insider (BI) reported Saturday. The upcoming policy update represents a dramatic reversal from Dell's prior stance on work from home (WFH), which included CEO Michael Dell saying: "If you are counting on forced hours spent in a traditional office to create collaboration and provide a feeling of belonging within your organization, you’re doing it wrong."
Dell employees will mostly all be considered "remote" or "hybrid" starting in May, BI reported. Hybrid workers have to come into the office at least 39 days per quarter, Dell confirmed to Ars Technica, which equates to approximately three times a week. Those who would prefer to never commute to an office will not "be considered for promotion, or be able to change roles," BI reported.
"For remote team members, it is important to understand the trade-offs: Career advancement, including applying to new roles in the company, will require a team member to reclassify as hybrid onsite," Dell's memo to workers said, per BI.
Tesla has settled with a Black former factory worker who won a $3.2 million judgment in a racial discrimination case, a court filing on Friday said.
Both sides were challenging the $3.2 million verdict in a federal appeals court but agreed to dismiss the case in the Friday filing. The joint stipulation for dismissal said that "the Parties have executed a final, binding settlement agreement that fully resolves all claims."
Tesla presumably agreed to pay Owen Diaz some amount less than $3.2 million, ending a case in which Diaz was once slated to receive $137 million. As we've previously written, a jury in US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that Tesla should pay $137 million to Diaz in October 2021.
MUNICH—Audi's new electric car platform is an important one for the company. Debuting in the new 2025 Q6 e-tron, it will provide the bones for many new electric Audis—not to mention Porsches and even Lamborghinis and Bentleys—in the coming years. Its development hasn't been entirely easy, either; software delays got in the way of plans to have cars in customer hands in 2023. But now the new Q6 e-tron is ready to meet the world.
There's some rather interesting technology integrated into the Q6 e-tron's new electric vehicle architecture. Called PPE, or Premium Platform Electric, it's been designed with flexibility in mind. Audi took the role of leading its development within Volkswagen Group, but the other brands within that corporate empire that target the upper end of the car market will also build EVs with PPE.
Since SUVs are still super-popular, Audi is kicking off the PPE era with an SUV. But the platform allows for other sizes and shapes—next year, we should see the A6 sedan and, if we're really lucky, an A6 Avant station wagon.
Qualcomm's newest smartphone SoC is the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3. Years of iPhone "S" upgrades might lead you to assume this was a mid-cycle refresh to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is a "specially curated" version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. That means it's a slightly slower, cheaper chip than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which is still Qualcomm's best smartphone chip.
The older, better Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has a core layout of one 3.3 GHz "Prime" Arm Cortex X4 core, five "medium" A720 cores (three at 3.2 GHz, two at 2.0 GHz), and two "small" 2.3 GHz A520 cores for background processing. This new "S" chip swaps a medium core for a small one, for a 1+4+3 configuration instead of 1+5+2. Everything is clocked lower, too: 3 GHz for the Prime core, 2.8 GHz for all the medium cores, and 2 GHz for the small cores.
The modem is downgraded to an X70 instead of the X75 in the 8 Gen 3 chip. That theoretically means a lower max download speed (5Gbps instead of 10) but since you would actually need to be granted those speeds by your carrier, It's not clear anyone would ever notice this. It also sounds like the X70 is more power-hungry, since it only has "Qualcomm 5G PowerSave Gen 3" instead of "Qualcomm 5G PowerSave Gen 4" on the flagship chip. We don't think Qualcomm has ever given a technical explanation of what this means, though. The SoC is still 4nm, just like the 8 Gen 3. Video maxes out at 4K now instead of 8K.
On Sunday, Elon Musk's AI firm xAI released the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, a large language model designed to compete with the models that power OpenAI's ChatGPT. The open-weights release through GitHub and BitTorrent comes as Musk continues to criticize (and sue) rival OpenAI for not releasing its AI models in an open way.
Announced in November, Grok is an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT that is available to X Premium+ subscribers who pay $16 a month to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. At its heart is a mixture-of-experts LLM called "Grok-1," clocking in at 314 billion parameters. As a reference, GPT-3 included 175 billion parameters. Parameter count is a rough measure of an AI model's complexity, reflecting its potential for generating more useful responses.
xAI is releasing the base model of Grok-1, which is not fine-tuned for a specific task, so it is likely not the same model that X uses to power its Grok AI assistant. "This is the raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pre-training phase, which concluded in October 2023," writes xAI on its release page. "This means that the model is not fine-tuned for any specific application, such as dialogue," meaning it's not necessarily shipping as a chatbot. But it will do next-token prediction, meaning it will complete a sentence (or other text prompt) with its estimation of the most relevant string of text.
SpaceX is "building a network of hundreds of spy satellites" for a US intelligence agency under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021, Reuters reported on Saturday. Reuters cited "five sources familiar with the program" in its report on SpaceX's classified contract with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a Defense Department agency that deploys surveillance satellites and calls itself the "global leader in space-based intelligence."
"The satellites can track targets on the ground and share that data with US intelligence and military officials, the sources said," according to Reuters. The newly reported details are consistent with a Wall Street Journal report in February 2024 that said SpaceX had "entered into a $1.8 billion classified contract with the US government in 2021."
Reuters wrote that it "was unable to determine when the new network of satellites would come online" but stated that about a dozen prototype satellites have been launched in the past few years. The prototypes reportedly launched "among other satellites on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets."
Kombucha tea continues to grow in popularity as a healthy alternative to alcoholic beverages—and chemistry can help commercial and amateur brewers alike get faster and better results with their brews, according to a presentation yesterday at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans.
“Brewers typically see making kombucha as an art more than a science,” Jeb Kegerreis, a physical chemist at Shippensburg University, said of the research. “So when we are doing a consultation, we also walk the brewer through the biochemistry of what’s happening during fermentation.”
As we've previously reported, you need just three basic ingredients to make kombucha. Just combine tea and sugar with a kombucha culture known as a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), aka the "mother," also known as a tea mushroom, tea fungus, or a Manchurian mushroom. It's basically akin to a sourdough starter. A SCOBY is a firm, gel-like collection of cellulose fiber (biofilm), courtesy of the active bacteria in the culture creating the perfect breeding ground for the yeast and bacteria to flourish. Dissolve the sugar in non-chlorinated boiling water, then steep some tea leaves of your choice in the hot sugar water before discarding them.
For the first time ever, the United States is getting serious about fostering an economy on the Moon.
NASA, of course, is in the midst of developing the Artemis program to return humans to the Moon. As part of this initiative, NASA seeks to foster a lunar economy in which the space agency is not the sole customer.
That's easier said than done. A whole host of conditions must be met for a lunar economy to thrive. There must be something there that can be sold, be it resources, a unique environment for scientific research, low-gravity manufacturing, tourism, or another source of value. Reliable transportation to the Moon must be available. And there needs to be a host of services, such as power and communications for machines and people on the lunar surface. So yeah, it's a lot.
Does the Chinese government have officials inside TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, pulling the strings? And does the storing of data from the popular social media app outside of China protect Americans?
These questions appear to dominate the current thinking in the US over whether to ban TikTok if its owner, Chinese technology giant ByteDance, refuses to sell the platform.
But in my opinion—forged through 40 years as a scholar of China, its political economy, and business—both questions obscure a more interesting point. What’s more, they suggest a crucial misunderstanding of the relationship between state and private enterprise in China.
We’ve managed to discover quite a lot about our Universe from our relatively limited vantage point here on Earth. Many of those discoveries have been worthy of nothing more than an updated entry in some catalog. But some have been deeply revolutionary, completely changing the way we view the cosmos and our relationship to it.
What follows is a list of what I, a theoretical cosmologist, believe to be the most impactful discoveries ever made in astronomy. To help winnow down the possibilities to a manageable top-five ranking, I had to concoct some criteria. First, we're looking at discoveries that are both broad and deep (in the scientific sense), findings that simultaneously reached further than any previous discovery and also enabled (or at least accelerated) a new paradigm or branch of astronomy.
Second, I want to emphasize discoveries that were not obvious and didn’t just need someone to build a big enough telescope or powerful enough computer. I want discoveries that needed radical leaps of intuition and science-minded daring—where an enterprising scientist went out on a limb and followed their curiosity wherever it led.
What can live for over 3,000 years, weigh over 150 tonnes and could be sitting almost unnoticed in your local park? Giant sequoias (known as giant redwoods in the UK) are among the tallest and heaviest organisms that have ever lived on Earth, not to mention they have the potential to live longer than other species.
My team’s new study is the first to look at the growth of giant sequoias in the UK—and they seem to be doing remarkably well. Trees at two of the three sites we studied matched the average growth rates of their counterparts in the US, where they come from. These remarkable trees are being planted in an effort to help absorb carbon, but perhaps more importantly they are becoming a striking and much-admired part of the UK landscape.
To live so long, giant sequoias have evolved to be extraordinarily resilient. In their native northern California, they occupy an ecological niche in mountainous terrain 1,400–2,100 meters above sea level.
PUGLIA, ITALY—At a recent media drive program in Puglia, Italy, Maserati introduced the production version of the all-electric Grecale Folgore. The svelte SUV will join the American lineup for model-year 2025 as the company's second-ever EV, following the 2024 GranTurismo Folgore.
Similar to the GranTurismo, development of the Grecale chassis always included plans to electrify the model. But unlike the GT, Grecale does not receive a dogbone-style battery and triple drive unit layout, instead sticking with by-now-traditional skateboard underpinnings and dual 205-kilowatt motors that swap in for the spectacular twin-turbo "Nettuno" V6 engine used on the lower Modena and Trofeo trims.
Total combined output maxes out at 550 hp (410 kW) and 605 lb-ft (820 Nm) of torque, or about 30 hp (22 kW) more than the former top-spec internal-combustion Trofeo trim. Only a few years ago, those power figures for either a gasoline or battery-electric drivetrain would have placed the Grecale at the top of the SUV food chain. Throw in the reactive nature of instantaneous torque, as well as all-wheel-drive traction, and 605 lb-ft should sound pretty impressive.
If you have a dog or cat, chances are you’ve given your pet a flavored chewable tablet for tick prevention at some point. What if you could take a similar pill to protect yourself from getting Lyme disease?
Tarsus Pharmaceuticals is developing such a pill for humans—minus the tasty flavoring—that could provide protection against the tick-borne disease for several weeks at a time. In February, the Irvine, California–based biotech company announced results from a small, early-stage trial showing that 24 hours after taking the drug, it can kill ticks on people, with the effects lasting for up to 30 days.
“What we envision is something that would protect you before the tick would even bite you,” says Bobby Azamian, CEO of Tarsus.
Researchers have discovered a new way to hack AI assistants that uses a surprisingly old-school method: ASCII art. It turns out that chat-based large language models such as GPT-4 get so distracted trying to process these representations that they forget to enforce rules blocking harmful responses, such as those providing instructions for building bombs.
ASCII art became popular in the 1970s, when the limitations of computers and printers prevented them from displaying images. As a result, users depicted images by carefully choosing and arranging printable characters defined by the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, more widely known as ASCII. The explosion of bulletin board systems in the 1980s and 1990s further popularized the format.
@_____ \_____)| / /(""")\o o ||*_-||| / \ = / | / ___) (__| / / \ \_/##|\/ | |\ ###|/\ | |\\###&&&& | (_###&&&&&> (____|(B&&&& ++++\&&&/ ###(O)###\ ####AAA#### ####AAA#### ########### ########### ########### |_} {_| |_| |_| | | | | ScS| | | | |_| |_| (__) (__)
_._ . .--. \\ //\\ \ .\\ ///_\\\\ :/>` /(| `|'\\\ Y/\ )))\_-_/((\ \ \ ./'_/ " \_`\) \ \.-" ._ \ / \ \ _.-" (_ \Y/ _) | " )" | ""/|| .-' .' / || / ` / || | __ : ||_ | / \ \ '|\` | | \ \ | | `. \ | | \ \ | | \ \ | | \ \ | | \ \ /__\ |__\ /.| DrS. |.\_ `-'' ``--'
Five of the best-known AI assistants—OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Meta’s Llama—are trained to refuse to provide responses that could cause harm to the user or others or further a crime or unethical behavior. Prompting any of them, for example, to explain how to make and circulate counterfeit currency is a no-go. So are instructions on hacking an Internet of Things device, such as a surveillance camera or Internet router.
It's been four months since NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft sent an intelligible signal back to Earth, and the problem has puzzled engineers tasked with supervising the probe exploring interstellar space.
But there's a renewed optimism among the Voyager ground team based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. On March 1, engineers sent a command up to Voyager 1—more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth—to "gently prompt" one of the spacecraft's computers to try different sequences in its software package. This was the latest step in NASA's long-distance troubleshooting to try to isolate the cause of the problem preventing Voyager 1 from transmitting coherent telemetry data.
Officials suspect a piece of corrupted memory inside the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), one of three main computers on the spacecraft, is the most likely culprit for the interruption in normal communication. Because Voyager 1 is so far away, it takes about 45 hours for engineers on the ground to know how the spacecraft reacted to their commands—the one-way light travel time is about 22.5 hours.
Thirteen countries across Africa experienced Internet outages on Thursday due to damage to submarine fiber optic cables. Some countries, including Ghana and Nigeria, are still suffering from nationwide outages.
Multiple network providers reported Internet outages yesterday, and Cloudflare's Radar tool, which monitors Internet usage patterns, detailed how the outage seemingly moved from the northern part of West Africa to South Africa. All 13 countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa, The Gambia, and Togo) reportedly suffered nationwide outages, with most seeing multiple networks hit.
Some countries' Internet disruptions were short-lived, such as in Gambia and Guinea, as they lasted for 30 minutes, per Cloudflare. Other outages, like in South Africa (five hours) were longer, and some remain ongoing. As of this writing, Cloudflare reports that six countries, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Côte d'Ivoire, are still suffering outages.
NatGeo's new series, Photographer, gives us a glimpse behind the lens.
National Geographic is justly renowned for its incredible photographs and eye-popping video footage, capturing all manner of natural marvels in gorgeous, jaw-dropping detail. Now the people behind those amazing shots are getting their moment in the spotlight with the documentary series Photographer.
If you've ever wanted to know more about what it's really like to be a NatGeo photographer, this series will take you behind the scenes as the photographers strive to meet the challenges and inevitable surprise obstacles to get that timeless shot. Each episode focuses on a different photographer, combining vérité footage with in-depth interviews and archival footage to help viewers see the world through their eyes—whether it be capturing a hummingbird in flight, chronicling a campaign against oil rigs in the Bahamas, or recording protests, rocket launches, tornadoes, or the behavior of whales, to name a few.
The exclusive clip above features photographer Anand Varma, who started out studying marine biology, intent on following in his father's footsteps as a scientist. But after taking a job as a camera assistant, he fell in love with photography and has carved out his own niche at the interface of science and art. His latest project is a photographic series centered on metamorphosis—in this case, trying to capture the formation and hatching of a chicken embryo on camera.
It seems like AI large language models (LLMs) are everywhere these days due to the rise of ChatGPT. Now, a software developer named Ishan Anand has managed to cram a precursor to ChatGPT called GPT-2—originally released in 2019 after some trepidation from OpenAI—into a working Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It's freely available and is designed to educate people about how LLMs work.
"By using a spreadsheet anyone (even non-developers) can explore and play directly with how a 'real' transformer works under the hood with minimal abstractions to get in the way," writes Anand on the official website for the sheet, which he calls "Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need." It's a nod to the 2017 research paper "Attention is All You Need" that first described the Transformer architecture that has been foundational to how LLMs work.
Anand packed GPT-2 into an XLSB Microsoft Excel binary file format, and it requires the latest version of Excel to run (but won't work on the web version). It's completely local and doesn't do any API calls to cloud AI services.
A government investigation into a Boeing 737 Max 9 plane's door-plug blowout has been hampered by a lack of repair records and security camera footage, the National Transportation Safety Board's chair told US senators. Boeing was "unable to find the records" and told the NTSB that the security camera footage was overwritten.
"To date, we still do not know who performed the work to open, reinstall, and close the door plug on the accident aircraft," NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy wrote Wednesday in a letter to leaders of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. "Boeing has informed us that they are unable to find the records documenting this work. A verbal request was made by our investigators for security camera footage to help obtain this information; however, they were informed the footage was overwritten. The absence of those records will complicate the NTSB's investigation moving forward."
A Boeing spokesperson told Ars today that under the company's standard practice, "video recordings are maintained on a rolling 30-day basis" before being overwritten. The NTSB's preliminary report on the investigation said the airplane was delivered to Alaska Airlines on October 31, 2023, after a repair in a Boeing factory. On January 5, the plane was forced to return to Portland International Airport in Oregon when a passenger door plug blew off the aircraft during flight.
Broadcom CEO and President Hock Tan has acknowledged the discomfort VMware customers and partners have experienced after the sweeping changes that Broadcom has instituted since it acquired the virtualization company 114 days ago.
In a blog post Thursday, Tan noted that Broadcom spent 18 months evaluating and buying VMware. He said that while there's still a lot of work to do, the company has made "substantial progress."
That so-called progress, though, has worried some of Broadcom's customers and partners.
Accusations of research misconduct often trigger extensive investigations, typically performed by the institution where the misconduct allegedly took place. These investigations are internal employment matters, and false accusations have the potential to wreck someone's career needlessly. As a result, most of these investigations are kept completely confidential, even after their completion.
But all the details of a misconduct investigation performed by Harvard University became public this week through an unusual route. The professor accused of misconduct, Francesca Gino, had filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit, targeting both Harvard and a team of external researchers who had accused her of misconduct. Harvard submitted its investigator's report as part of its attempt to have part of the suit dismissed, and the judge overseeing the case made it public.
We covered one of the studies at issue at the time of its publication. It has since been retracted, and we'll be updating our original coverage accordingly.
There are some circumstances where government officials are allowed to block people from commenting on their social media pages, the Supreme Court ruled Friday.
According to the Supreme Court, the key question is whether officials are speaking as private individuals or on behalf of the state when posting online. Issuing two opinions, the Supreme Court declined to set a clear standard for when personal social media use constitutes state speech, leaving each unique case to be decided by lower courts.
Instead, SCOTUS provided a test for courts to decide first if someone is or isn’t speaking on behalf of the state on their social media pages, and then if they actually have authority to act on what they post online.
Human brains (and the brains of other vertebrates) are able to process information faster because of myelin, a fatty substance that forms a protective sheath over the axons of our nerve cells and speeds up their impulses. How did our neurons evolve myelin sheaths? Part of the answer—which was unknown until now—almost sounds like science fiction.
Led by scientists from Altos Labs-Cambridge Institute of Science, a team of researchers has uncovered a bit of the gnarly past of how myelin ended up covering vertebrate neurons: a molecular parasite has been messing with our genes. Sequences derived from an ancient virus help regulate a gene that encodes a component of myelin, helping explain why vertebrates have an edge when it comes to their brains.
Myelin is a fatty material produced by oligodendrocyte cells in the central nervous system and Schwann cells in the peripheral nervous system. Its insulating properties allow neurons to zap impulses to one another at faster speeds and greater lengths. Our brains can be complex in part because myelin enables longer, narrower axons, which means more nerves can be stacked together.
Google Chrome's "Safe Browsing" feature—the thing that pops up a giant red screen when you try to visit a malicious website—is getting real-time updates for all users. Google announced the change on the Google Security Blog. Real-time protection naturally means sending URL data to some far-off server, but Google says it will use "privacy-preserving URL protection" so it won't get a list of your entire browsing history. (Not that Chrome doesn't already have features that log your history or track you.)
Safe Browsing basically boils down to checking your current website against a list of known bad sites. Google's old implementation happened locally, which had the benefit of not sending your entire browsing history to Google, but that meant downloading the list of bad sites at 30- to 60-minute intervals. There are a few problems with local downloads. First, Google says the majority of bad sites exist for "less than 10 minutes," so a 30-minute update time isn't going to catch them. Second, the list of all bad websites on the entire Internet is going to be very large and constantly growing, and Google already says that "not all devices have the resources necessary to maintain this growing list."
If you really want to shut down malicious sites, what you want is real-time checking against a remote server. There are a lot of bad ways you could do this. One way would be to just send every URL to the remote server, and you'd basically double Internet website traffic for all of Chrome's 5 billion users. To cut down on those server requests, Chrome is instead going to download a list of known good sites, and that will cover the vast majority of web traffic. Only the small, unheard-of sites will be subject to a server check, and even then, Chrome will keep a cache of your recent small site checks, so you'll only check against the server the first time.
Pornhub has disabled its website in Texas following a court ruling that upheld a state law requiring age-verification systems on porn websites. Visitors to pornhub.com in Texas are now greeted with a message calling the Texas law "ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous."
"As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas's stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors," Pornhub's message said.
Pornhub said it has "made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users."
True morel mushrooms are widely considered a prized delicacy, often pricey and surely safe to eat. But these spongey, earthy forest gems have a mysterious dark side—one that, on occasion, can turn deadly, highlighting just how little we know about morels and fungi generally.
On Thursday, Montana health officials published an outbreak analysis of poisonings linked to the honeycombed fungi in March and April of last year. The outbreak sickened 51 people who ate at the same restaurant, sending four to the emergency department. Three were hospitalized and two died. Though the health officials didn't name the restaurant in their report, state and local health departments at the time identified it as Dave’s Sushi in Bozeman. The report is published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The outbreak coincided with the sushi restaurant introducing a new item: a "special sushi roll" that contained salmon and morel mushrooms. The morels were a new menu ingredient for Dave's. They were served two ways: On April 8, the morels were served partially cooked, with a hot, boiled sauce poured over the raw mushrooms and left to marinate for 75 minutes; and on April 17, they were served uncooked and cold-marinated.
Many devices have been made difficult or financially nonviable to repair, whether by design or because of a lack of parts, manuals, or specialty tools. Machines that make ice cream, however, seem to have a special place in the hearts of lawmakers. Those machines are often broken and locked down for only the most profitable repairs.
The Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust division of the Department of Justice have asked the US Copyright Office (PDF) to exempt "commercial soft serve machines" from the anti-circumvention rules of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The governing bodies also submitted proprietary diagnostic kits, programmable logic controllers, and enterprise IT devices for DMCA exemptions.
"In each case, an exemption would give users more choices for third-party and self-repair and would likely lead to cost savings and a better return on investment in commercial and industrial equipment," the joint comment states. Those markets would also see greater competition in the repair market, and companies would be prevented from using DMCA laws to enforce monopolies on repair, according to the comment.
It's understandable if you're starting to experience AI fatigue; it feels like every week, there's another announcement of some company boasting about how an LLM chatbot will revolutionize everything—usually followed in short succession by news reports of how terribly wrong it's all gone. But it turns out that not every use of AI by an automaker is a public relations disaster. As it happens, General Motors has been using machine learning to help guide business decisions regarding where to install new DC fast chargers for electric vehicles.
GM's transformation into an EV-heavy company has not gone entirely smoothly thus far, but in 2022, it revealed that, together with the Pilot company, it was planning to deploy a network of 2,000 DC fast chargers at Flying J and Pilot travel centers around the US. But how to decide which locations?
"I think that the overarching theme is we're really looking for opportunities to simplify the lives of our customers, our employees, our dealers, and our suppliers," explained Jon Francis, GM's chief data and analytics officer. "And we see the positive effects of AI at scale, whether that's in the manufacturing part of the business, engineering, supply chain, customer experience—it really runs through threads through all of those.
Apple no longer sells the M1 MacBook Air as of earlier this month, discontinuing it and offering the M2 version of the Air as its entry-level model instead. But it looks like the M1 Air may live on, at least for a while—US retailer Walmart made a point of announcing today that it would carry and sell the M1 Air in its online store and at “select” retail locations for a much-lowered price of $699.
This is lower than the $999 that Apple was asking for the laptop just a few weeks ago, and it's lower than the $759 that the M1 Air goes for in Apple’s refurbished store. These prices are all for the base configuration of the M1 Air, with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage. Walmart offers all three color finishes for the M1 Air—silver, gold, and space gray—but doesn’t directly sell any versions with more RAM or storage.
This isn’t the Air config we’d recommend to most enthusiasts—for them, an M3 Air or a refurbished M2 model with more RAM and storage come with enough benefits to be worth the extra cost. But it is a surprisingly low price for what remains a solid entry-level laptop, especially given that Walmart doesn’t offer any other Macs in its stores (other Macs on Walmart’s website are available from third-party sellers).
One of the best things about spaceflight is its power to dazzle us.
I will never forget seeing the first images of Pluto and its moon Charon for the first time, with their vibrant colors and exotic geology. A world with super-sized ice volcanoes? Oh my. Similarly affecting were up-close views of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, revealed by Europe's Philae lander. And it is difficult to forget the harrowing footage of NASA's Perseverance rover landing on Mars.
But no space agency or company has dazzled us more in the last 10 years than SpaceX. The company produces moments of wonder and originality that are both breathtaking and full of promise. What SpaceX does best is provide us a glimpse into a tantalizingly close future.
Welcome to Edition 6.35 of the Rocket Report! It's been a big week for rocket failures, with a small launch in Japan going sideways shortly after liftoff, a rare misstep for China's Long March family of rockets, and another Starship flight test. The latter mission was not really a failure, of course, in that the experimental vehicle took a big step toward becoming operational with a nominal first stage performance and good flight of Starship in space.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Japanese small-lift rocket lost shortly after liftoff. Tokyo-based startup Space One failed Wednesday to become Japan's first private firm to put a satellite into orbit after its solid-fuel Kairos rocket burst into flames just seconds after liftoff, The Japan Times reports. The 18-meter, 23-ton Kairos rocket, carrying a mockup of a government spy satellite, took off from a new space facility in Kushimoto, Wakayama Prefecture. The rocket exploded in midair five seconds after launch, with its remains falling onto a nearby mountainous area.
Previously, on "Weekend Projects for Homelab Admins With Control Issues," we created our own dynamically updating DNS and DHCP setup with bind and dhcpd. We laughed. We cried. We hurled. Bonds were forged, never to be broken. And I hope we all took a little something special away from the journey—namely, a dynamically updating DNS and DHCP setup. Which we're now going to put to use!
If you're joining us fresh, without having gone through the previous part and wanting to follow this tutorial, howdy! There might be some parts that are more difficult to complete without a local instance of bind (or other authoritative resolver compatible with nsupdate). We'll talk more about this when we get there, but just know that if you want to pause and go do part one first, you may have an easier time following along.
This article will walk through the process of installing step-ca, a standalone certificate authority-in-a-box. We'll then configure step-ca with an ACME provisioner—that's Automatic Certificate Management Environment, the technology that underpins LetsEncrypt and facilitates the automatic provisioning, renewal, and revocation of SSL/TLS certificates.
A dual Canadian-Russian national has been sentenced to four years in prison for his role in infecting more than 1,000 victims with the LockBit ransomware and then extorting them for tens of millions of dollars.
Mikhail Vasiliev, a 33-year-old who most recently lived in Ontario, Canada, was arrested in November 2022 and charged with conspiring to infect protected computers with ransomware and sending ransom demands to victims. Last month, he pleaded guilty to eight counts of cyber extortion, mischief, and weapons charges.
During an October 2022 raid on Vasiliev’s Bradford, Ontario, home, Canadian law enforcement agents found Vasiliev working on a laptop that displayed a login screen to the LockBit control panel, which members used to carry out attacks. The investigators also found a seed phrase credential for a bitcoin wallet address that was linked to a different wallet that had received a payment from a victim that had been infected and extorted by LockBit.
The race is on to generate new technologies to ready the battery industry for the transition toward a future with more renewable energy. In this competitive landscape, it’s hard to say which companies and solutions will come out on top.
Corporations and universities are rushing to develop new manufacturing processes to cut the cost and reduce the environmental impact of building batteries worldwide. They are working to develop new approaches to building both cathodes and anodes—the negatively and positively charged components of batteries—and even using different ions to hold charge. While we can't look at every technology that's in development, we can look at a few to give you a sense of the problems people are trying to solve.
The California-based company Sylvatex has developed a water-free, efficient process for manufacturing cathode active material (CAM). “This process innovation reduces the total cost of CAM by 25 percent, while using 80 percent less energy and eliminating water use and sodium sulfate waste streams,” said Virginia Klausmeier, CEO and founder of Sylvatex.
The Federal Communications Commission today voted to raise its Internet speed benchmark for the first time since January 2015, concluding that modern broadband service should provide at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds.
An FCC press release after today's 3-2 vote said the 100Mbps/20Mbps benchmark "is based on the standards now used in multiple federal and state programs," such as those used to distribute funding to expand networks. The new benchmark also reflects "consumer usage patterns, and what is actually available from and marketed by Internet service providers," the FCC said.
The previous standard of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream lasted through the entire Trump era and most of President Biden's term. There has been a clear partisan divide on the speed standard, with Democrats pushing for a higher benchmark and Republicans arguing that it shouldn't be raised.
Meta is discontinuing data analysis tool CrowdTangle on August 14. The closure will come three months ahead of the next US presidential election and three years after it was reported that the platform used for spotting misinformation on Facebook and Instagram was causing internal strife.
Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016. CrowdTangle has been used by researchers, reporters, and government officials to identify trends about conspiracies and other forms of misinformation spreading through Facebook. Meta is going to replace CrowdTangle with a technology currently under development called Meta Content Library, but it will only be available to academic and nonprofit researchers. For-profit organizations, like many news organizations, will lose access, as The Wall Street Journal points out.
Previously, CrowdTangle had some features available to the public, like Live Displays, which tracked how people discussed trending topics on certain social media channels like Facebook Pages. Journalists working at for-profit news outlets were able to apply for access to the full CrowdTangle service, as were publishers, including music labels, content creators, and public figures.
SpaceX's new-generation Starship rocket, the most powerful and largest launcher ever built, flew halfway around the world following liftoff from South Texas on Thursday, accomplishing a key demonstration of its ability to carry heavyweight payloads into low-Earth orbit.
SpaceX's third towering Starship rocket, standing some 397 feet (121 meters) tall and wider than the fuselage of a 747 jumbo jet, lifted off at 8:25 am CDT (13:25 UTC) Thursday from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility on the Texas Gulf Coast east of Brownsville. SpaceX delayed the liftoff time by nearly an hour and a half to wait for boats to clear out of restricted waters near the launch base.
The successful launch builds on two Starship test flights last year that achieved some, but not all, of their objectives and appears to put the privately funded rocket program on course to begin launching satellites, allowing SpaceX to ramp up the already-blistering pace of Starlink deployments.
The last version of Star Wars: Battlefront, released by Electronic Arts, was so stuffed full of loot boxes and pay-to-play systems that EA admitted it "got it wrong" and overhauled the game.
So it was that when the well-regarded, pre-EA versions of Star Wars: Battlefront were announced for a modern remaster and re-release, by experienced porting firm Aspyr Media, there was (forgive us) a new hope. As we wrote at the announcement:
[T]here was nothing quite like the originals, which were PC games first and foremost ... There was a purity to those games that's lost in the general, well, EA-ness of the reboots.
And, lo, was there much rejoicing when Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection arrived? There was not. Reviews of the $35 package are "Mostly Negative" on Steam as this is written, with roughly 20 percent of reviews positive. Players are reporting numerous bugs and (rightfully, we might suggest) complaining about the lack of an option to invert joystick axes. There's also a lack of aim assist for console players, which typically helps round out their relative disadvantage to PC players using a mouse and keyboard.
Cellulose is the primary component of the cell walls of plants, making it the most common polymer on Earth. It's responsible for the properties of materials like wood and cotton and is the primary component of dietary fiber, so it's hard to overstate its importance to humanity.
Given its ubiquity and the fact that it's composed of a bunch of sugar molecules linked together, its toughness makes it very difficult to use as a food source. The animals that manage to extract significant calories from cellulose typically do so via specialized digestive tracts that provide a home for symbiotic bacteria—think of the extra stomachs of cows and other ruminants.
Amazingly, humans also play host to bacteria that can break down cellulose—something that wasn't confirmed until 2003 (long after I'd wrapped up my education). Now, a new study indicates that we're host to a mix of cellulose-eating bacteria, some via our primate ancestry, and others through our domestication of herbivores such as cows. But urban living has caused the number of these bacteria to shrink dramatically.
PC enthusiasts who have been around the block a couple of times might remember the stretch from the '90s into the early 2000s when ever-increasing clock speeds were Intel's primary metric for increasing processor performance. AMD participated, too—it managed to beat Intel to 1 GHz in what was considered a major coup at the time—but Intel's Pentium 4 processors specifically prioritized boosting clock speeds at the cost of instructions-per-clock.
Today, the company is ever so briefly revisiting those old days with the $689 Core i9-14900KS, its newest flagship desktop processor. The i9-14900KS can hit speeds of 6.2 GHz out of the box, a small push past the last-generation i9-13900KS and the i9-14900K that topped out at 6.0 GHz. Like other recent high-end Intel desktop chips, it also features Intel's "Adaptive Boost Technology," which will allow the chip to increase its power consumption and performance until it hits 100° Celsius.
This kind of clock speed boosting is both impressive and impractical. On the one hand, Intel has managed to push clock speeds even higher without changing its architecture or manufacturing process, a culmination of years of iteration across the 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation processor families. On the impractical side, the i9-14900KS can use a ridiculous amount of power to achieve marginally faster performance, reminding us of the laws of physics that helped shut down the megahertz wars in the first place.
"Overwhelming evidence" shows that Australian computer scientist Craig Wright is not bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, a UK judge declared Thursday.
In what Wired described as a "surprise ruling" at the closing of Wright's six-week trial, Justice James Mellor abruptly ended years of speculation by saying:
Dr. Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper. Dr. Wright is not the person that operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Dr. Wright is not the person that created the Bitcoin system. Nor is Dr. Wright the author of the Bitcoin software.
Wright was not in the courtroom for this explosive moment, Wired reported.
Epic Games yesterday urged a federal court to sanction Apple for alleged violations of an injunction that imposed restrictions on the iOS App Store. Epic cited a 27 percent commission charged by Apple on purchases completed outside the usual in-app payment system and other limits imposed on developers.
"Apple is in blatant violation of this Court's injunction," Epic wrote in a filing in US District Court for the Northern District of California. "Its new App Store policies continue to impose prohibitions on developers that this Court found unlawful and enjoined. Moreover, Apple's new policies introduce new restrictions and burdens that frustrate and effectively nullify the relief the Court ordered."
The permanent injunction issued by the court in September 2021 said that Apple may not prohibit app developers from including external links to alternate sales channels "or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms" that aren't Apple's in-app purchasing system. The injunction also said that Apple may not prohibit developers from "communicating with customers through points of contact obtained voluntarily from customers through account registration within the app."