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"Early Access" was once a novel, quirky thing, giving a select set of Steam PC games a way to involve enthusiastic fans in pre-alpha-level play-testing and feedback. Now loads of games launch in various forms of Early Access, in a wide variety of readiness. It's been a boon for games like Baldur's Gate 3, which came a long way across years of Early Access.

Early Access, and the "Advanced Access" provided for complete games by major publishers for "Deluxe Editions" and the like, has also been a boon to freeloaders. Craven types could play a game for hours and hours, then demand a refund within the standard two hours of play, 14 days after the purchase window of the game's "official" release. Steam-maker Valve has noticed and, as of Tuesday night, updated its refund policy.

"Playtime acquired during the Advanced Access period will now count towards the Steam refund period," reads the update. In other words: Playtime is playtime now, so if you've played more than two hours of a game in any state, you don't get a refund. That closes at least one way that people could, with time-crunched effort, play and enjoy games for free in either Early or Advanced access.

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Will Chrome, the world's most popular browser, ever kill third-party cookies? Apple and Mozilla both killed off the user-tracking technology in 2020. Google, the world's largest advertising company, originally said it wouldn't kill third-party cookies until 2022. Then in 2021, it delayed the change until 2023. In 2022, it delayed everything again, until 2024. It's 2024 now, and guess what? Another delay. Now Google says it won't turn off third-party cookies until 2025, five years after the competition.

A new blog post cites UK regulations as the reason for the delay, saying, "We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem." The post comes as part of the quarterly reports the company is producing with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

Interestingly, the UK’s CMA isn't concerned about user privacy but instead is worried about other web advertisers that compete with Google. The UK wants to make sure that Google isn't making changes to Chrome to prop up its advertising business at the expense of competitors. While other browser vendors shut down third-party cookies without a second thought, Google said it wouldn't turn off the user-tracking feature until it built an alternative advertising feature directly into Chrome, so it can track user interests to serve them relevant ads. The new advertising system, called the Topics API and "Privacy Sandbox," launched in Chrome in 2023. Google AdSense is already compatible.

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California's electric grid, with its massive solar production and booming battery installations, is already on the cutting edge of the US's energy transition. And it's likely to stay there, as the state will require that all passenger vehicles be electric by 2035. Obviously, that will require a grid that's able to send a lot more electrons down its wiring and a likely shift in the time of day that demand peaks.

Is the grid ready? And if not, how much will it cost to get it there? Two researchers at the University of California, Davis—Yanning Li and Alan Jenn—have determined that nearly two-thirds of its feeder lines don't have the capacity that will likely be needed for car charging. Updating to handle the rising demand might set its utilities back as much as 40 percent of the existing grid's capital cost.

The lithium state

Li and Jenn aren't the first to look at how well existing grids can handle growing electric vehicle sales; other research has found various ways that different grids fall short. However, they have access to uniquely detailed data relevant to California's ability to distribute electricity (they do not concern themselves with generation). They have information on every substation, feeder line, and transformer that delivers electrons to customers of the state's three largest utilities, which collectively cover nearly 90 percent of the state's population. In total, they know the capacity that can be delivered through over 1,600 substations and 5,000 feeders.

Universal Studios has been going meta with its marketing for its forthcoming action comedy The Fall Guy. Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are the marquee stars; Gosling plays a Hollywood stuntman trying to make a movie with his estranged ex-girlfriend (Blunt). But it's the actual stuntmen standing in for Gosling during action sequences who get the spotlight in a new promotional video for the film.

As previously reported, The Fall Guy is directed by David Leitch, who also brought us the glorious John Wick (his uncredited directorial debut with Chad Stahelski). It's a loose adaptation of the popular 1980s TV series of the same name starring Lee Majors. Per the official synopsis:

Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling stars as Colt Seavers, a battle-scarred stuntman who, having left the business a year earlier to focus on both his physical and mental health, is drafted back into service when the star of a mega-budget studio movie—being directed by his ex, Jody Moreno, played by Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt—goes missing. While the film’s ruthless producer (Hannah Waddingham), maneuvers to keep the disappearance of star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) a secret from the studio and the media, Colt performs the film’s most outrageous stunts while trying (with limited success) to charm his way back into Jody’s good graces. But as the mystery around the missing star deepens, Colt will find himself ensnared in a sinister, criminal plot that will push him to the edge of a fall more dangerous than any stunt.

In this incarnation, Gosling's Colt Seavers isn't a bounty hunter on the side; he's just a stuntman—a bit past his prime—who stumbles into solving a mystery. Blunt costars as Jody Moreno, Colt's ex-girlfriend and a former camera operator who finally gets the chance to direct her first film. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays movie star Tom Ryder, who goes missing mid-shoot. Stephanie Hsu plays Ryder's personal assistant, and Winston Duke plays Colt's stunt coordinator and BFF. Ted Lasso's Hannah Waddingham appears as Gail, the producer of Jody's film. And OG Fall Guy Lee Majors (now in his 80s) is expected to have a cameo; perhaps he'll perform the theme song, "Unknown Stuntman," that he wrote and recorded for the original series.

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The Senate last night approved a bill that orders TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the company within 270 days or lose access to the US market. The House had already passed the bill, and President Biden signed it into law today.

The "Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" was approved as part of a larger appropriations bill that provides aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. It passed in a 79-18 vote. Biden last night issued a statement saying he will sign the appropriations bill into law "as soon as it reaches my desk." He signed the bill into law today, the White House announced.

The bill classifies TikTok as a "foreign adversary controlled application" and gives the Chinese company ByteDance 270 days to sell it to another entity. Biden can extend the deadline by up to 90 days if a sale is in progress.

Enlarge / Players will be able to throw down a few bucks to get the Python Mk 2 starting next month. (credit: Frontier Developments)

Elite: Dangerous players will soon be able to pay real money for access to in-game ships for the first time, a major change that already has some long-time players raging about a "pay-to-win" shift for the long-running game.

Since Elite Dangerous launched over nine years ago, the game has sold ships in exchange for in-game credits earned through gameplay. The separate ARX currency, which can be purchased with real money, has been reserved for cosmetic upgrades such as paint jobs.

That's all set to change next month, though, when owners of the Odyssey expansion will be able to purchase early access to the Python Mk II variant ship for 16,250 ARX (the equivalent of about $11 to $13, depending on how much ARX is purchased in bulk). Non-Odyssey owners won't be able to purchase the Python Mk II with regular credits until three months later, on August 7. At that point, the ship will also be available as an ARX-denominated "pre-built ship package" that "allow[s] you to kickstart your career in the latest ship, including a brand-new paintjob and ship kit."

Enlarge / SpaceX landed its 300th booster on Tuesday. (credit: SpaceX webcast)

SpaceX launches have become extremely routine. On Tuesday evening, SpaceX launched its 42nd rocket of the year, carrying yet another passel of Starlink satellites into orbit. Chances are, you didn't even notice.

All the same, the cumulative numbers are mind-boggling. SpaceX is now launching at a rate of one mission every 2.7 days this year. Consider that, from the mid-1980s through the 2010s, the record for the total number of launches worldwide in any given year was 129. This year alone, SpaceX is on pace for between 130 and 140 total launches.

But with Tuesday evening's mission, there was a singular number that stood out: 300. The Falcon family, which includes the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters, recorded its 300th successful first-stage landing.

Enlarge / Electric power has not robbed the G-Wagon of its off-road skills. If anything, it has enhanced them. (credit: Mercedes-Benz)

The Mercedes G-Wagon, a very capable off-roader typically purchased by people who never intend to take it anywhere near dirt, is getting an electric upgrade.

Unveiled in Beverly Hills—the most fitting of locations—the 2025 G 580 with EQ Technology spun its way onto the scene. The all-electric G-Wagon sports a 116 kWh capacity battery pack, four motors (one for each wheel), and a new sound system to replace the gas motor, called the G-Roar. Sadly, there's no word on price, delivery date, or range. But on paper, its impressive specs make it better than the ICE version off-road.

For serious off-roaders likely not residing in Beverly Hills, the luxury off-roader's four independent motors offer true torque vectoring and electronic differential locks. Each motor is coupled with a two-speed transmission for a reduced gear low range. The ideal use for this is rock crawling. In fact, there's an actual "Rock" crawling mode in the G 580. Mercedes is not playing.

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Cyber attackers are experimenting with their latest ransomware on businesses in Africa, Asia, and South America before targeting richer countries that have more sophisticated security methods.

Hackers have adopted a “strategy” of infiltrating systems in the developing world before moving to higher-value targets such as in North America and Europe, according to a report published on Wednesday by cyber security firm Performanta.

“Adversaries are using developing countries as a platform where they can test their malicious programs before the more resourceful countries are targeted,” the company told Banking Risk and Regulation, a service from FT Specialist.

Enlarge / Tesla shares rose by almost 11 percent in premarket trading despite the disastrous financial results. (credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Tesla had a terrible first quarter of 2024, according to its financial results posted yesterday. We already knew that it was a bad three months in terms of delivering cars—the automaker built tens of thousands of cars it couldn't sell as deliveries dropped by 8.5 percent year over year. If anything, the quarterly results paint an even worse picture.

The company has been engaged in a series of heavy price cuts, and that's showing up on the balance sheet. For all of Tesla CEO Elon Musk's statements about artificial intelligence being the future of the company, the vast majority of its income is still derived from automotive sales. These amounted to $16.5 billion in Q1, nearly $2.5 billion less than for Q1 2023. (Regulatory credits remain pretty steady at $442 million for the quarter.)

Total revenues were down by 9 percent year over year, with gross profits down 18 percent. But the net profit, once generally accepted accounting measures were applied, fell by 55 percent to $1.1 billion. (Non-GAAP net profit was down 48 percent.)

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Signs point to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processors showing up in actual, real-world, human-purchasable computers in the next couple of months after years of speculation and another year or so of hype.

For those who haven’t been following along, this will allegedly be Qualcomm’s first Arm processor for Windows PCs that does for PCs what Apple’s M-series chips did for Macs, promising both better battery life and better performance than equivalent Intel chips. This would be a departure from past Snapdragon chips for PCs, which have performed worse than (or, at best, similarly to) existing Intel options, barely improved battery life, and come with a bunch of software incompatibility problems to boot.

Early benchmarks that have trickled out look promising for the Snapdragon X. And there are other reasons to be optimistic—the Snapdragon X Elite’s design team is headed up by some of the same people who made Apple Silicon so successful in the first place.

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The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday announced that genetic fragments from the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 have been detected in the pasteurized, commercial milk supply. However, the testing completed so far—using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR)—only detects the presence of viral genetic material and cannot tell whether the genetic material is from live and infectious viral particles or merely remnants of dead ones killed by the pasteurization process.

Testing is now ongoing to see if viable, infectious H5N1 can be identified in milk samples.

So far, the FDA still believes that the milk supply is safe. "To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe," the agency said in a lengthy explanation of the finding and ongoing testing.

Enlarge / I have hundreds of UUIDs and I must scream. (credit: Getty Images)

The modern "smart" TV asks a lot of us. In exchange for connecting you to a few streaming services you use, a TV will collect data, show ads, and serve as another vector for bad actors. In a few reported cases, though, a modern connected TV has been blamed for attacks not on privacy, eyeballs, or passwords but on an entirely different computer.

The TV in question is a Hisense TV, and the computer is a Windows PC, specifically one belonging to Priscilla Snow, a musician and audio designer in Montreal, Quebec. Her post about her Hisense experience reads like a mystery novel. Of course, because you already know the crime and the culprit, it's more like a Columbo episode. Either way, it's thrilling in a very specific I-can't-believe-that-fixed-it kind of way.

Disappearing Settings, keyboards, remote desktops, and eventually taskbars

Snow's Windows PC had "a few hiccups over the past couple of years," Snow wrote on April 19. She couldn't open display settings, for one. A MIDI keyboard interface stopped working. Task manager would start to hang until force-closed. Video-capture cards had trouble connecting. As Snow notes, any veteran of a Windows computer that has had lots of stuff installed on it can mentally write off most of these things, or at least stash them away until the next reinstall.

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True wine aficionados might turn up their noses, but canned wines are growing in popularity, particularly among younger crowds during the summer months, when style often takes a back seat to convenience. Yet these same wines can go bad rather quickly, taking on distinctly displeasing notes of rotten eggs or dirty socks. Scientists at Cornell University conducted a study of all the relevant compounds and came up with a few helpful tips for frustrated winemakers to keep canned wines from spoiling. The researchers outlined their findings in a recent paper published in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture.

“The current generation of wine consumers coming of age now, they want a beverage that’s portable and they can bring with them to drink at a concert or take to the pool,” said Gavin Sacks, a food chemist at Cornell. “That doesn’t really describe a cork-finished, glass-packaged wine. However, it describes a can very nicely.”

According to a 2004 article in Wine & Vines magazine, canned beer first appeared in the US in 1935, and three US wineries tried to follow suit for the next three years. Those efforts failed because it proved to be unusually challenging to produce a stable canned wine. One batch was tainted by "Fresno mold"; another batch resulted in cloudy wine within just two months; and the third batch of wine had a disastrous combination of low pH and high oxygen content, causing the wine to eat tiny holes in the cans. Nonetheless, wineries sporadically kept trying to can their product over the ensuing decades, with failed attempts in the 1950s and 1970s. United and Delta Airlines briefly had a short-lived partnership with wineries for canned wine in the early 1980s, but passengers balked at the notion.

Enlarge / Night view of company logos in Nestlé Avanca Dairy Products Plant on January 21, 2019, in Avanca, Portugal. This plant produces Cerelac, Nestum, Mokambo, Pensal, Chocapic and Estrelitas, among others. (credit: Getty | Horacio Villalobos)

In high-income countries, Nestlé brand baby foods have no added sugars them, in line with recommendations from major health organizations around the world and consumer pressure. But in low- and middle-income countries, Nestlé adds sugar to those same baby products, sometimes at high levels, which could lead children to prefer sugary diets and unhealthy eating habits, according to an investigation released recently by nonprofit groups.

The investigation, conducted by Public Eye and the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN), says the addition of added sugars to baby foods in poorer countries, against expert recommendations, creates an "unjustifiable double standard." The groups quote Rodrigo Vianna, an epidemiologist and professor at the Department of Nutrition of the Federal University of Paraíba in Brazil, who calls added sugars in baby foods "unnecessary and highly addictive."

"Children get used to the sweet taste and start looking for more sugary foods, starting a negative cycle that increases the risk of nutrition-based disorders in adult life," Vianna told the organizations for their investigation. "These include obesity and other chronic non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes or high blood-pressure."

Enlarge / The Thermonator robot flamethrower dog. (credit: Throwflame)

If you've been wondering when you'll be able to order the flame-throwing robot that Ohio-based Throwflame first announced last summer, that day has finally arrived. The Thermonator, what Throwflame bills as "the first-ever flamethrower-wielding robot dog" is now available for purchase. The price? $9,420.

Thermonator is a quadruped robot with an ARC flamethrower mounted to its back, fueled by gasoline or napalm. It features a one-hour battery, a 30-foot flame-throwing range, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity for remote control through a smartphone.

It also includes a LIDAR sensor for mapping and obstacle avoidance, laser sighting, and first-person view (FPV) navigation through an onboard camera. The product appears to integrate a version of the Unitree Go2 robot quadruped that retails alone for $1,600 in its base configuration.

Enlarge / Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan talks with guests during an event in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 03, 2024 (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today announced that it has issued a final rule banning noncompete clauses. The rule will render the vast majority of current noncompete clauses unenforceable, according to the agency.

"In the final rule, the Commission has determined that it is an unfair method of competition and therefore a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, for employers to enter into noncompetes with workers and to enforce certain noncompetes," the FTC said.

The US Chamber of Commerce said it will sue the FTC in an effort to block the rule, claiming the ban is "a blatant power grab that will undermine American businesses' ability to remain competitive."

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Hackers abused an antivirus service for five years in order to infect end users with malware. The attack worked because the service delivered updates over HTTP, a protocol vulnerable to attacks that corrupt or tamper with data as it travels over the Internet.

The unknown hackers, who may have ties to the North Korean government, pulled off this feat by performing a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack that replaced the genuine update with a file that installed an advanced backdoor instead, said researchers from security firm Avast today.

eScan, an AV service headquartered in India, has delivered updates over HTTP since at least 2019, Avast researchers reported. This protocol presented a valuable opportunity for installing the malware, which is tracked in security circles under the name GuptiMiner.

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On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a new, freely available lightweight AI language model named Phi-3-mini, which is simpler and less expensive to operate than traditional large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo. Its small size is ideal for running locally, which could bring an AI model of similar capability to the free version of ChatGPT to a smartphone without needing an Internet connection to run it.

The AI field typically measures AI language model size by parameter count. Parameters are numerical values in a neural network that determine how the language model processes and generates text. They are learned during training on large datasets and essentially encode the model's knowledge into quantified form. More parameters generally allow the model to capture more nuanced and complex language-generation capabilities but also require more computational resources to train and run.

Some of the largest language models today, like Google's PaLM 2, have hundreds of billions of parameters. OpenAI's GPT-4 is rumored to have over a trillion parameters but spread over eight 220-billion parameter models in a mixture-of-experts configuration. Both models require heavy-duty data center GPUs (and supporting systems) to run properly.

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Grindr is facing a class action lawsuit from hundreds of users over the sharing of HIV statuses and other sensitive personal information with third-party firms.

UK law firm Austen Hays filed the claim in the High Court in London yesterday, the firm announced. The class action "alleges the misuse of private information of thousands of affected UK Grindr users, including highly sensitive information about their HIV status and latest tested date," the law firm said.

The law firm said it has signed up over 670 potential class members and "is in discussions with thousands of other individuals who are interested in joining the claim." Austen Hays said that "claimants could receive thousands in damages" from Grindr, a gay dating app, if the case is successful.

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Last year, Apple introduced the ability to set multiple timers at once in the Clock app on its various platforms.

“We truly live in an age of wonders,” deadpanned Apple’s Craig Federighi in the company’s official presentation, tacitly acknowledging the gap between the apparent simplicity of the feature and the amount of time that Apple took to implement it.

The next version of iPadOS may contain another of these "age of wonders" features, an apparently simple thing that Apple has chosen never to do for reasons that the company can't or won't explain. According to MacRumors, iPadOS 18 may finally be the update that brings a version of Apple's first-party Calculator app to the iPad.

Enlarge / At critical pressures, the fluid's spheres become a mixture of different states. (credit: Adel Djellouli/Harvard SEAS)

Building a robot that could pick up delicate objects like eggs or blueberries without crushing them took lots of control algorithms that process feeds from advanced vision systems or sensors that emulate the human sense of touch. The other way was to take a plunge into the realm of soft robotics, which usually means a robot with limited strength and durability.

Now, a team of researchers at Harvard University published a study where they used a simple hydraulic gripper with no sensors and no control systems at all. All they needed was silicon oil and lots of tiny rubber balls. In the process, they’ve developed a metafluid with a programmable response to pressure.

Swimming rubber spheres

“I did my PhD in France on making a spherical shell swim. To make it swim, we were making it collapse. It moved like a [inverted] jellyfish,” says Adel Djellouli, a researcher at Bertoldi Group, Harvard University, and the lead author of the study. “I told my boss, 'hey, what if I put this sphere in a syringe and increase the pressure?' He said it was not an interesting idea and that this wouldn’t do anything,” Djellouli claims. But a few years and a couple of rejections later, Djellouli met Benjamin Gorissen, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Leuven, Belgium, who shared his interests. “I could do the experiments, he could do the simulations, so we thought we could propose something together,” Djellouli says. Thus, Djellouli’s rubber sphere finally got into the syringe. And results were quite unexpected.

Engineers have partially restored a 1970s-era computer on NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft after five months of long-distance troubleshooting, building confidence that humanity's first interstellar probe can eventually resume normal operations.

Several dozen scientists and engineers gathered Saturday in a conference room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or connected virtually, to wait for a new signal from Voyager 1. The ground team sent a command up to Voyager 1 on Thursday to recode part of the memory of the spacecraft's Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), one of the probe's three computers.

“In the minutes leading up to when we were going to see a signal, you could have heard a pin drop in the room," said Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA's two Voyager spacecraft at JPL. "It was quiet. People were looking very serious. They were looking at their computer screens. Each of the subsystem (engineers) had pages up that they were looking at, to watch as they would be populated."

Enlarge / The 2020 4K Chromecast with Google TV. It comes in colors. (credit: Google)

It sounds like Google is cooking up another Google TV dongle. 9to5Google's sources say a new 4K model of the Chromecast with Google TV is in the works. It would be a sequel to the aging 2020 model that was never really fit for the job in the first place. It would also sit alongside the 2022 HD model.

The report says the new device would stay at the $50 price point and come with a new remote. A new chip would be the primary motivation for a new device. The current 4K dongle has an Amlogic S905X3 (it's just for Cortex A55 CPUs), and if Google sticks with Amlogic, a good upgrade would be the upcoming Amlogic S905X5. Besides a faster CPU and GPU, it also supports the AV1 video codec, something Google has been pushing across its ecosystem because it can cut down on what must be an incredible YouTube bandwidth bill. It has made AV1 a requirement for some new devices in order to get the YouTube app, and despite forcing it on competitors like Roku, Google's best dongle doesn't have hardware support for the codec yet. Technically the S905X5 is not official yet, so we don't have a full spec sheet, but partners have been talking about it since last year.

The No. 1 thing a new Google TV dongle needs, and has needed for years, is more storage. Google Hardware is supposed to make devices that are purpose-built for Google's software, but the 4K and HD Chromecasts with Google TV have never really been up to the task thanks to the 8GB of total device storage. Back in the early Chromecast days when these dongles ran a custom OS and only showed video streams, that was fine. These new devices run full-fat Android now, complete with a Play Store, access to millions of apps, and lots of preinstalled software. 8GB is not nearly enough.

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  The "Laugh it Up" emote is one of four that can now be blocked using a setting in Fortnite. [credit: Epic Games ]

For online players tired of being harassed by randos over voice chat, animated emotes have long served as a "safe" way to communicate in-game via simple, pre-approved non-verbal messages. In Fortnite, though, a few of those emotes have become so "confrontational" (as developer Epic puts it) that individual players can now choose to block them with an in-game settings toggle.

The new "See Confrontational Emotes" setting, announced Tuesday, can be set to automatically block the appearance (and associated sound effects) of four emotes "that are sometimes used in confrontational ways," Epic wrote. Those four emotes are (links go to video examples):

• Laugh It Up
• Take the L
• Whipcrack
• Make It Plantain

By default, the toggle will be set to only display these emotes from friends in an online party, Epic wrote. That setting can be changed to always allow or always block those emotes at any time.

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Apple is going to announce some new things on Tuesday, May 7, at 10 am Eastern, according to an invitation the company sent out to members of the press (and posted to its website) this morning.

The name Apple has given the event (“Let Loose”) doesn’t tell us much about what the company might announce, but the art does: It’s a hand holding an Apple Pencil, which almost certainly means the event will be iPad-focused.

Apple has reportedly been on the cusp of releasing new iPads since late March, and the rumor mill has already delivered most of the key details. The headliner is likely to be a pair of new iPad Pros with M3 chips, OLED displays, slightly larger screens, and refined designs. Riding shotgun will be a refreshed 10.9-inch iPad Air with an M2 chip, plus a brand-new 12.9-inch Air meant to give large-screened iPad fans an option that doesn’t cost as much as the iPad Pro.

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There's a new Linux distro on the scene today, and it's a bit specialized. Its development was led by the automotive electronics supplier Elektrobit, and it's the first open source OS that complies with the automotive industry's functional safety requirements.

One of the more interesting paradigm shifts underway in the automotive industry is the move to software-defined vehicles. Cars have increasingly been controlled by electronic systems during the past few decades, but it's been piecemeal. Each added new function, like traction control, antilock braking, or a screen instead of physical gauges, required its own little black box added to the wiring loom.

There can now be more than 200 discrete controllers in a modern vehicle, all talking to each other through a CAN bus network. The idea behind the software-defined vehicle is to take a clean-sheet approach. Instead, you'll find a small number of domain controllers—what the automotive industry is choosing to call "high performance compute" platforms—each responsible for a different set of activities.

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For almost a decade, Nick Roy has been scanning North Korea’s tiny Internet presence, spotting new websites coming online and providing a glimpse of the Hermit Kingdoms’ digital life. However, at the end of last year, the cybersecurity researcher and DPRK blogger stumbled across something new: signs North Koreans are working on major international TV shows.

In December, Roy discovered a misconfigured cloud server on a North Korean IP address containing thousands of animation files. Included in the cache were animation cells, videos, and notes discussing the work, plus changes that needed to be made to ongoing projects. Some images appeared to be from an Amazon Prime Video superhero show and an upcoming Max (aka HBO Max) children’s anime.

Enlarge / The third-generation Porsche Macan drops the internal combustion engine—this one is only available as a battery-electric vehicle. (credit: Porsche)

Porsche's Taycan has been a nice electric vehicle for the German brand, and the recently updated model is supposed to offer more of the good stuff and less of the bad. The sedan is on the expensive side, and it doesn't scream "family lugger," which is where the new electric Macan comes in. Porsche's volume-selling entry-level SUV is now electric, and it might be just the car to convince skeptics and non-Porsche people alike that EV is the way to go. Maybe.

At launch, you'll be able to pick up a Macan 4 or Macan Turbo. Peak power sits at 402 hp (300 k) and 630 hp (470 kW) respectively, but that's just when you use the car's overboost. Most of the time, you'll have to make do with an adequate 382 hp (285 kW) and 576 hp (430 kW). Torque for both is a healthy 479 lb-ft (650 Nm) and 833 lb-ft (1,130 Nm). With all that grunt on board, Porsche reckons you'll be able to hit 62 mph from rest in 4.9 and 3.1 seconds, respectively (0–100 km/h takes 5.2 and 3.3 seconds, respectively), as well as topping out at 137 mph (220 km/h) and 162 mph (260 km/h). Not having a gas motor under the hood isn't a penalty when it comes to performance.

The electric Macan sits on the all-new PPE (Premium Platform Electric) architecture. Shared with Audi and its upcoming Q6 e-tron, PPE was built with electricity in mind. Its party piece is a hefty 100 kWh battery (95 kWh usable) that sits under the cabin, giving the Macan 4 381 miles (613 km) of range and the Turbo 367 miles (590 km), although that's according to the less-accurate WLTP testing scheme used in Europe—EPA range estimates will be available closer to the Macan's arrival in the US in the second half of this year.

Enlarge / This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features NGC 3783, a bright barred spiral galaxy about 130 million light-years from Earth. (credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. C. Bentz, D. J. V. Rosario)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's April 23, and today's photo comes from the Hubble Space Telescope. It features a lovely, barred spiral galaxy and a photobombing star on the right-hand side of the image.

The galaxy is NGC 3783, which can be found 130 million light-years away from Earth. Astronomical distances are all mind-boggling, but to try to put things into perspective, that means this galaxy is about 1,000 times the distance farther from us compared to the diameter of our own Milky Way Galaxy. So it's far, far away.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Daniel Bockwoldt)

Researchers around the world are growing more uneasy with the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) in US dairy cows as the virus continues to make its way into new herds and states. Several experts say the US is not sharing enough information from the federal investigation into the unexpected and growing outbreak, including genetic information from isolated viruses.

To date, the US Department of Agriculture has tallied 32 affected herds in eight states: Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota, and Texas. In some cases, the movement of cattle between herds can explain the spread of the virus. But the USDA has not publicly clarified if all the herds are linked in a single outbreak chain or if there is evidence that the virus has spilled over to cows multiple times. Early infections in Texas were linked to dead wild birds (pigeons, blackbirds, and grackles) found on dairy farms. But the USDA reportedly indicated to Stat News that the infections do not appear to be all linked to the Texas cases.

Spread of the virus via cattle movements indicates that there is cow-to-cow transmission occurring, the USDA said. But it's unclear how the virus is spreading between cows. Given that even the most symptomatic cows show few respiratory symptoms, the USDA speculates that the most likely way it is spreading is via contaminated milking equipment.

Enlarge / A Day octopus (Octopus cyanea) named Scarlet parachutes her web over a coral head while Dr. Alex Schnell observes. (credit: National Geographic/Disney/Craig Parry)

With Earth Day fast approaching once again, it's time for another new documentary from National Geographic and Disney+:  Secrets of the Octopus. It's the third in what has become a series, starting with the remarkable 2021 documentary Secrets of the Whales (narrated by Sigourney Weaver) and 2023's Secrets of the Elephants (Natalie Portman as narrator). James Cameron served as producer on all three.

Secrets of the Octopus is narrated by Paul Rudd. Per the official synopsis:

Octopuses are like aliens on Earth: three hearts, blue blood and the ability to squeeze through a space the size of their eyeballs. But there is so much more to these weird and wonderful animals. Intelligent enough to use tools or transform their bodies to mimic other animals and even communicate with different species, the secrets of the octopus are more extraordinary than we ever imagined.

Each of the three episodes focuses on a specific unique feature of these fascinating creatures: "Shapeshifters," "Masterminds," and "Social Networks." The animals were filmed in their natural habitats over 200 days and all that stunning footage is accompanied by thoughtful commentary by featured scientists.  One of those scientists is Dr. Alex Schnell,  a native Australian and self described storytelling who has worked at Macquarie University, the University of Cambridge, and the Marine Biological Laboratory, among other institutions. Her research focuses on the intelligence of marine animals, particularly cuttlefish and octopuses.

Enlarge / Computer illustration of Candida fungi. (credit: Kateryna Kon | Science Photo Library | Getty)

Fungi are an indispensable part of your microbiome, keeping the body’s host of microorganisms healthy as part of a system of checks and balances. But when you’re hit by an infection, fungi can be thrown out of equilibrium with other organisms inside you, leading to a more severe infection and other symptoms of illness.

For this reason, the pandemic immediately set off alarms for Iliyan Iliev, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medical School. “We were thinking, the first thing that’s going to happen is people will start getting fungal co-infections,” he says. With the microbiome unbalanced, fungi might start running riot inside Covidpatients, Iliev reasoned. His fears were soon realized.

In research published in Nature Immunology, he and his team discovered that in patients with severe Covid, certain strains of gut fungi—knocked off-kilter by the virus—set off a prolonged immune response that could last long after the initial infection. This response potentially led to some of the respiratory symptoms experienced by these patients. These results, Iliev says, point to the critical role of the gut microbiome in the human immune response and could lead to better disease treatments down the line.

Enlarge / The nukes went off in 2077 in Fallout's universe. The show tells us more about this event than we've learned from the games before. (credit: Amazon)

It's been just over a week since the Fallout TV series premiered on Amazon Prime, and one thing's for sure: It's a huge hit. You can hardly open a social media app without seeing content about it, the reviews are positive, and the active players for the Fallout games have doubled over the past week.

A few days ago, I shared some spoiler-free impressions of the first three episodes. I loved what I'd seen up to that point—the show seemed faithful to the games, but it was also a great TV show. A specific cocktail of tongue-in-cheek humor, sci-fi campiness, strong themes, great characters, and visceral violence really came together into a fantastic show.

Still, I had some questions at that point: Would the franchise's penchant for satire and its distinct political and social viewpoint come through? Where was all this headed?

Enlarge / For the previous EcoCar 3 competition, student teams turned Camaro sportscars into hybrids. For the EcoCar EV challenge, their job is to improve on the Cadillac Lyriq. (credit: EcoCar)

Across the country, teams of students at 15 different universities are in the middle of a four-year project, dissecting an electric vehicle and figuring out ways to make it even better. The program, called the EcoCar EV Challenge, was founded more than three decades ago by the US Department of Energy and is run by the DOE's Argonne National Laboratory.

Over the last 35 years, more than 30,000 students from 95 universities have participated in the EcoCar Challenge, part of the DOE's Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition. Each segment spans four years, with the most recent cycle beginning in 2023 with a new Cadillac Lyriq donated by the General Motors automaker.

The students take this competition very seriously, as participation alone brings a lot of benefits, including the potential for a lifelong career path.

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About seven years ago, Aaron Silverbook and his then-girlfriend, a biologist, were perusing old scientific literature online. “A romantic evening,” joked Silverbook. That night, he came across a study from 2000 that surprised him. Scientists had genetically engineered an oral bacterium that they said could possibly prevent tooth decay: “I read it and sort of boggled at it and said, ‘Wow, this is a cavity vaccine. Why don't we have this?’”

So, Silverbook tracked down the primary author, Jeffrey Hillman, a now-retired oral biologist formerly at the University of Florida, to see if he could pick up the torch.

In 2023, Silverbook founded Lantern Bioworks, which made a deal with Oragenics, the company Hillman co-founded and that owned the technology, for the materials. Lantern Bioworks then launched the genetically engineered bacteria under the name Lumina Probiotic. “I didn’t expect it to happen in my lifetime,” said Hillman.

Enlarge / Daniel Dennett, a leading philosopher with provocative takes on consciousness, free will, and AI, has died at 82. (credit: Alonso Nichols/Tufts University)

World renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett, who championed controversial takes on consciousness and free will among other mind-bending subjects, died today at the age of 82.

(Full disclosure: This loss is personal. Dennett was our friend and a colleague of my spouse, Sean Carroll. Sean and I have many fond memories of shared meals and stimulating conversations on an enormous range of topics with Dan over the years. He was a true original and will be greatly missed.)

Stunned reactions to Dennett's unexpected passing began proliferating on social media shortly after the news broke. "Wrenching news. He's been a great friend and incredible inspiration for me throughout my career," the Santa Fe Institute's Melanie Mitchell, author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, wrote on X. "I will miss him enormously."

Enlarge (credit: Getty | David Jennings)

Intermittent fasting, aka time-restricted eating, can help people lose weight—but the reason why may not be complicated hypotheses about changes from fasting metabolism or diurnal circadian rhythms. It may just be because restricting eating time means people eat fewer calories overall.

In a randomized-controlled trial, people who followed a time-restricted diet lost about the same amount of weight as people who ate the same diet without the time restriction, according to a study published Friday in Annals of Internal Medicine.

The finding offers a possible answer to a long-standing question for time-restricted eating (TRE) research, which has been consumed by small feeding studies of 15 people or fewer, with mixed results and imperfect designs.

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On March 29, 2022, CNN+, CNN's take on a video streaming service, debuted. On April 28, 2022, it shuttered, making it the fastest shutdown of any launched streaming service. Despite that discouraging superlative, CNN has plans for another subscription-based video streaming platform, Financial Times (FT) reported on Wednesday.

Mark Thompson, who took CNN's helm in August 2023, over a year after CNN+'s demise, spoke with FT about evolving the company. The publication reported that Thompson is "working on plans for a digital subscription streaming service." The executive told the publication that a digital subscription, including digital content streaming, is "a serious possibility," adding, "no decisions had been made, but I think it’s quite likely that we’ll end up there."

CNN++, or whatever a new CNN streaming package might be named, would not just be another CNN+, per Thompson.

Enlarge / This mysterious model appeared on eBay with little fanfare. (credit: eBay)

The first-ever model of Star Trek's USS Enterprise NCC-1701 has been returned to the Roddenberry family, according to an ABC News report.

The three-foot model was used to shoot the pilot and credits scene for Star Trek's original series in the 1960s and was used occasionally for shots throughout the series. (Typically, a larger, 11-foot model was used for shots after the pilot.) The model also sat on series creator Gene Roddenberry's desk for several years.

It went missing in the late 1970s; historians and collectors believe it belonged to Roddenberry himself, that he lent it to a production house working on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and that it was never returned. Its whereabouts were unknown until last fall, when a listing for a mysterious model of the Enterprise appeared on eBay.

Enlarge / Like the Beach Properties DLC itself, this property looks a bit unfinished and in need of some focus. (credit: Paradox Interactive)

Perhaps the first clue that something was not quite right about Beach Properties, the first $10 DLC "expansion" for the already off-kilter city-building sim Cities: Skylines 2, was that it did not contain a real beach house, which one might consider a key beach property. The oversight seemed indicative of a content pack that lacked for content.

C:S2's developers and publisher now agree and have published a letter to Cities fans, in which they offer apologies, updates, and refunds. Beach Properties is now a free add-on, individual buyers will be refunded (with details at a FAQ page), and Ultimate Edition owners will receive additional Creator Packs and Radio Stations, since partial refunds are tricky across different game stores.

"We thought we could make up for the shortcomings of the game in a timeframe that was unrealistic, and rushed out a DLC that should not have been published in its current form. For all this, we are truly sorry," reads the letter, signed by the CEOs of developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive. "When we’ve made statements like this one before, it’s included a pledge to keep making improvements, and while we are working on these updates, they haven’t happened at a speed or magnitude that is acceptable, and it pains us that we've now lost the trust of many of you. We want to do better."

Enlarge / A cropped image showing Raw TV's poster for the Netflix documentary What Jennifer Did, which features a long front tooth that leads critics to believe it was AI-generated. (credit: Raw TV)

An executive producer of the Netflix hit What Jennifer Did has responded to accusations that the true crime documentary used AI images when depicting Jennifer Pan, a woman currently imprisoned in Canada for orchestrating a murder-for-hire scheme targeting her parents.

What Jennifer Did shot to the top spot in Netflix's global top 10 when it debuted in early April, attracting swarms of true crime fans who wanted to know more about why Pan paid hitmen $10,000 to murder her parents. But quickly the documentary became a source of controversy, as fans started noticing glaring flaws in images used in the movie, from weirdly mismatched earrings to her nose appearing to lack nostrils, the Daily Mail reported, in a post showing a plethora of examples of images from the film.

Futurism was among the first to point out that these flawed images (around the 28-minute mark of the documentary) "have all the hallmarks of an AI-generated photo, down to mangled hands and fingers, misshapen facial features, morphed objects in the background, and a far-too-long front tooth." The image with the long front tooth was even used in Netflix's poster for the movie.

Enlarge / The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra. That red ring around the camera lens is how far it moves. (credit: Huawei)

Huawei is still out there making phones, even if it has been shunned by the US government and the US-aligned tech ecosystem. The latest phone has a new name: "Huawei Pura 70." While you wouldn't ever want to deal with the cobbled-together SoC or whatever is going on with Huawei's software, the "Ultra" model does have a cool party trick up its sleeve: a pop-out main camera lens.

In the years before the smartphone took over all entry-level photography, there used to be a thing called a "point-and-shoot camera." This was a purpose-built device that only took photos, couldn't go on the Internet, and wouldn't let you watch the latest TikTok videos. The trademark feature of these devices was a retractable camera lens, where the front lens (there was only one!) would grow out of the front of the camera when you turned it on. This would give your camera better, longer lens geometry to work with when the camera was on, and would collapse down for easier storage when it was off.

Huawei's latest phone is replicating that. The giant rear camera lens actually grows out of the phone somewhat, thanks to some complicated gearing inside the phone. It's only the tiniest few millimeters, but it's a start. Smartphone manufacturers often resist adding bigger lenses to their devices because they want to still have pocketable devices. A pop-up lens would give the camera engineers more room to work with while still maintaining pocketability.

Enlarge (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Thomas Thomopoulos)

Ever since the Voyager mission sent home images of Jupiter's moon Io spewing material into space, we've gradually built up a clearer picture of Io's volcanic activity. It slowly became clear that Io, which is a bit smaller than Mercury, is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System, with all that activity driven by the gravitational strain caused by Jupiter and its three other giant moons. There is so much volcanism that its surface has been completely remodeled, with no signs of impact craters.

A few more details about its violence came to light this week, with new images being released of the moon's features, including an island in a lake of lava, taken by the Juno orbiter. At the same time, imaging done using an Earth-based telescope has provided some indications that this volcanism has been reshaping Io from almost the moment it formed.

Fiery, glassy lakes

The Juno orbiter's mission is primarily focused on studying Jupiter, including the dynamics of its storms and its internal composition. But many of its orbital passes have taken it right past Io, and this week, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory released some of the best images from these flybys. They include a shot of Loki Patera, a lake of lava that has an island within it. Also featured: the impossibly sheer slopes of Io's Steeple Mountain.

Enlarge / Its creator calls the "Short Stack" the world's smallest scale model replica of the Nintendo Wii (bottom). (credit: James Smith)

The miniaturization of retro tech has always been a major obsession for modders, from the person who fit an original NES into a Game Boy-sized portable to the person who made a mini-er version of Apple's Mac mini.

One mod in this storied genre that caught our eye this week is the "Short Stack," a scale model of the Nintendo Wii that packs the 2006 console's internal hardware into a 3D-printed enclosure roughly the size of a deck of playing cards.

"You could fit 13.5 of these inside an original Wii," writes James Smith (aka loopj), the person behind the project. All the design details, custom boards, and other information about recreating the mod are available on GitHub.

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Everyone with a Roku TV or streaming device will eventually be forced to enable two-factor authentication after the company disclosed two separate incidents in which roughly 600,000 customers had their accounts accessed through credential stuffing.

Credential stuffing is an attack in which usernames and passwords exposed in one leak are tried out against other accounts, typically using automated scripts. When people reuse usernames and passwords across services or make small, easily intuited changes between them, actors can gain access to accounts with even more identifying information and access.

In the case of the Roku attacks, that meant access to stored payment methods, which could then be used to buy streaming subscriptions and Roku hardware. Roku wrote on its blog, and in a mandated data breach report, that purchases occurred in "less than 400 cases" and that full credit card numbers and other "sensitive information" was not revealed.

Enlarge / An Apple Store in Shanghai, China, on April 11, 2024. (credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Apple said it complied with orders from the Chinese government to remove the Meta-owned WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China. Apple also removed Telegram and Signal from China.

"We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree," Apple said in a statement quoted by several news outlets. "The Cyberspace Administration of China ordered the removal of these apps from the China storefront based on their national security concerns. These apps remain available for download on all other storefronts where they appear."

The Wall Street Journal paraphrased a person familiar with the matter as saying that the Chinese cyberspace agency "asked Apple to remove WhatsApp and Threads from the App Store because both contain political content that includes problematic mentions of the Chinese president [Xi Jinping]."

Enlarge (credit: apomares | E+)

A jury has unanimously convicted Avi Eisenberg in the US Department of Justice's first case involving cryptocurrency open-market manipulation, the DOJ announced Thursday.

The jury found Eisenberg guilty of commodities fraud, commodities market manipulation, and wire fraud in connection with the manipulation on a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange called Mango Markets.

Eisenberg is scheduled to be sentenced on July 29 and is facing "a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison on the commodities fraud count and the commodities manipulation count, and a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on the wire fraud count," the DOJ said.

Enlarge / The X-62A VISTA Aircraft flying above Edwards Air Force Base, California. (credit: Kyle Brasier, U.S. Air Force)

An AI test pilot has successfully flown a jet fighter in dogfights against human opponents. It's the latest development for DARPA's Air Combat Evaluation program, which is trying to develop aerospace AI agents that can be trusted to perform safely.

Human test pilots have a bit of a reputation thanks to popular culture—from The Right Stuff to Top Gun: Maverick, the profession has been portrayed as a place for loose cannons with a desire to go fast and break the rules. The reality is pretty far from that these days, especially where DARPA is concerned.

The agency instead wants a machine-learning agent that can safely fly a real aircraft autonomously, with no violations of training rules. After all, neural networks have their own reputation—at this point well-earned—for finding ways to exploit situations that hadn't occurred to humans. And the consequences when controlling a real jet fighter can be a lot more severe than just testing in silico.

Enlarge / This image taken by NASA's Orion spacecraft shows its view just before the vehicle flew behind the Moon in 2022. (credit: NASA)

Although NASA is unlikely to speak about it publicly any time soon, the space agency is privately considering modifications to its Artemis plan to land astronauts on the surface of the Moon later this decade.

Multiple sources have confirmed that NASA is studying alternatives to the planned Artemis III landing of two astronauts on the Moon, nominally scheduled for September 2026, due to concerns about hardware readiness and mission complexity.

Under one of the options, astronauts would launch into low-Earth orbit inside an Orion spacecraft and rendezvous there with a Starship vehicle, separately launched by SpaceX. During this mission, similar to Apollo 9, a precursor to the Apollo 11 lunar landing, the crew would validate the ability of Orion and Starship to dock and test habitability inside Starship. The crew would then return to Earth. In another option NASA is considering, a crew would launch in Orion and fly to a small space station near the Moon, the Lunar Gateway, and then return to Earth.