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Enlarge / No bugs, or even weapons beyond a pistol, are seen in Rogue Core's initial screenshots. But you get the sense that it's a more cavern-like, combat-minded experience.
A lot of things can go wrong during a Deep Rock Galactic mission. Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core, a new roguelite spinoff from the makers of the cult co-op shoot-and-mine game, suggests that something has gone even more deeply, terribly wrong on Hoxxes IV. Now you, your friends, and a Processor Drone have to figure out what.
And you'll die—a lot, probably—then try again with new gear and lessons learned, if the title and announcement trailer are anything to go by.
Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core announcement trailer.
A dusty (or snowy?) piece of the abandoned core mine on Hoxxes IV. Your job is to keep moving through it. [credit: Ghost Ship Games ]
Then again, the plot of Deep Rock Galactic itself, while certainly peppered with lore, is essentially “We need these minerals, these bugs are in the way, sorry if they kill you.” Rogue Core will have the same fully destructible environments, procedurally generated levels, co-op interplay, and greedy corporations, but with a focus on getting farther into a run each time.
Your means of success is through customizing and upgrading your weapons and Phase Suit, using salvaged gear and Expenite, “a new wonder-mineral.” You complete tasks, find stuff, go deeper, and get stronger, until you inevitably fail and start again. Given the roguelite framing, you can expect some upgrades to stick with you from session to session. But Rogue may differ significantly from the far more casual, dig-by-dig nature of its foundation, if the claustrophobic, abandoned-station screenshots and trailer are any clue.
Samsung's new smart tags. [credit: Samsung ]
Samsung has announced its next Tile/AirTag competitor, the Galaxy SmartTag 2. The new Bluetooth trackers are $30 each and ship globally on October 10.
The design is interesting, with a giant ring on the top and a large overall size. Samsung says the battery, a removable CR2032, will last for 500 days in "normal" mode, while a new "Power Saving" mode will last 700 days (Samsung did not expand on what "power saving" mode does). It's also IP67-rated.
The big ring on top feels like it should somehow attach to an object, but it's a solid ring that never opens; it's not a clip. The press release says you'll need a "clip or keyring" to attach the SmartTag 2 to something. Samsung's hero shot shows the tag directly attached to some objects like a key, but this does not appear to be possible outside the world of Photoshop.
Enlarge / The flu virus, showing the H and N proteins on its surface. (credit: CDC)
Vaccine advisers for the Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously (12 to 0) Thursday to remove, "as soon as possible," a component of annual flu shots that targets a strain of the virus that appears to have gone extinct amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The vote follows a similar recommendation from the World Health Organization last week, which stated that "every effort should be made to exclude this component as soon as possible."
Exactly how soon that removal could happen is unclear, though, and some advisers on the FDA's panel expressed frustration that plans for the removal appear to have been slow-walked in the last couple of years, as it only became more apparent that the strain may be gone for good.
Enlarge / Purnima, the sniper you can recruit, is an assassin who refused to do a job for the evil Council because it involved a child murder. Now, as part of your team, she will kill a gazillion goons. Strange times. (credit: Harebrained Schemes / Paradox Interactive)
Lamplighters League is a modern XCOM-style turn-based strategy game with a Weird War-ish, Indiana Jones-like feel, and a light stealth element, and it’s made by the folks who made Battletech and the Shadowrun Returns series. If you pay for Game Pass, or you see this game at any price that feels reasonable (including its debut $50), that should tell you enough about whether to try it. I think you should.
I wanted to get that out of the way because I have some nits to pick with Lamplighters League (technically The Lamplighters League and the Tower at the End of the World), some technical and some tactical. But I don’t want to lose sight of how excited I am to have a meaty new tactics game to sink into, especially one based on an original, if heavily referential, world. If you’re a fan of tile-based movements, two actions per turn, home bases full of upgrade potential, and engaging little interactions between your troops, you don’t get that many solid games like this per year, so take note of Lamplighters League The number of years between XCOM titles is getting longer, not shorter—we need some reserves.
Enlarge / FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel speaks during the US Chamber of Commerce's Global Aerospace Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)
With the Federal Communications Commission preparing to reimpose net neutrality rules and common-carrier regulation on Internet service providers, the broadband industry is almost certain to sue the FCC once the decision is made.
The Democratic-majority FCC is expected to define broadband as a telecommunications service, which means it would face common-carrier regulations under Title II of the Communications Act. Industry trade groups that represent Internet service providers will likely argue, as they have unsuccessfully argued before, that the FCC does not have authority to classify broadband as a telecommunications service.
Federal appeals courts upheld previous FCC decisions on whether to apply common carrier rules to broadband, a fact that current agency officials point to in their plan to revive Obama-era regulation of ISPs under Title II. But some legal commentators claim the FCC is doomed to fail this time because of the Supreme Court's evolving approach on whether federal agencies can decide "major questions" without explicit instructions from Congress.
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The beginning of this year saw a big change to the federal tax incentives applied to electric vehicles, altering which cars were eligible. And from next year, another change is coming, one that we think is long overdue. From January 1, 2024, you'll be able to have the amount of the credit applied immediately to the car's price at purchase rather than waiting until tax time.
The original IRS section 30D tax credit, meant to spur the adoption of plug-in vehicles, was tied to the storage capacity of a car's battery pack. But from this year, the $7,500 credit is now linked to domestic battery manufacturing rather than just battery capacity, with annually escalating percentages of the battery required to come from the US or a country with a free trade agreement in order to qualify.
The changes to the credit—which were made under 2022's Inflation Reduction Act—also address several problems with the old scheme. A $4,000 credit (IRS section 25E) was created for buyers of used EVs, and there are now income and price caps to address criticisms that the credit merely subsidized those wealthy enough not to need it.
YouTube has removed one video and stopped monetizing YouTube influencer Cynthia G's channel after finding that the account repeatedly violated YouTube policies by posting videos over the past two years that accumulated tens of thousands of views by calling for Black abortions.
The decision came after an Ars reader asked Ars to investigate why these videos do not violate YouTube's community guidelines.
The video that YouTube removed was titled "If Aborting Black Males Isn't The Solution, What Is?" It was posted in November 2021 and, as of last week, still qualified for ad monetization. In the video, Cynthia G said that "a lot of people" considered the "solution" to be "something horrible that is genocidal" and provided a racist justification, saying that the only way to counter Black male violence is to "eliminate" Black men.
Enlarge / Cue files used to be much better-known, back when we all used CD-Rs to make legal backup copies of material that we owned outright. (credit: Getty Images)
It has been a very long time since the average computer user thought about .cue files, or cue sheets, the metadata bits that describe the tracks of an optical disc, like a CD or DVD. But cue sheets are getting attention again, for all the wrong reasons. They're at the heart of a one-click exploit that could give an attacker code execution on Linux systems with GNOME desktops.
CVE-2023-43641, disclosed by GitHub on October 9, is a memory corruption (or out-of-bounds array writing) issue in the libcue library, which parses cue sheets. NIST has yet to provide a score for the issue, but GitHub's submission rates it an 8.8, or "High." While the vulnerability has been patched in the core library, Linux distributions will need to update their desktops to fix it.
GNOME desktops have, by default, a "tracker miner" that automatically updates whenever certain file locations in a user's home directory are changed. If a user was compelled to download a cue sheet that took advantage of libcue's vulnerability, GNOME's indexing tracker would read the cue sheet, and code in that sheet could be executed.
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On Wednesday, Microsoft revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing and blog post that the Internal Revenue Service says the company owes the US Treasury $28.9 billion in back taxes, plus penalties and interest, reports the Associated Press. The claim comes as a result of a lengthy IRS audit that examined how Microsoft distributed its profits across different countries from 2004 to 2013. Microsoft disagrees with the IRS's claim and intends to appeal the decision.
According to the AP, the ongoing IRS probe began in 2007 and is described as "one of the largest in the Service's history" in court documents released last year. Recently, Microsoft received notification that the audit phase has concluded, triggering the next steps for settling the dispute. At the core of the IRS investigation is the practice known as "transfer pricing," which some critics argue allows companies to report lower profits in countries with higher taxes and vice versa, minimizing their overall tax obligations.
Microsoft maintains that it has complied with IRS rules all along and will proceed to appeal the agency's decision—a process expected to last for years. Here's how the company described the episode in Section 8.01 of its SEC filing:
Enlarge / Look into my eyes... all three of them. (credit: Meta)
You'd be forgiven for not realizing that the Quest 3 is actually the fourth headset in Meta's popular Quest line. In fact, Meta would probably prefer that everyone forget about last year's ill-considered Quest Pro, which paired a handful of minor improvements with an absolutely massive $1,500 starting price. Even a quick price drop to $1,000 couldn't save this over-engineered stopgap gadget.
What a difference a year makes—or three years, for VR aficionados who wisely stuck with 2020's Quest 2 until now. The Quest 3 offers distinct improvements over previous Quest headsets in the areas that matter most (resolution, form factor, etc.) without many of the Pro's more expensive, heavy, and least necessary indulgences (eye-tracking cameras, rechargeable controllers, charging dock, etc.). The Quest 3 also offers a usable (but rough) suite of new mixed-reality features, providing an intriguing glimpse of a world where VR content is routinely layered over our view of reality.
Most importantly, the Quest 3 does this all at a mass-market price (starting at $500) and in a way that ensures continuity with Quest's existing software. While there's nothing here that will usher in the long-sought virtual reality revolution, this is the kind of incremental improvement the space needs if it's going to continue to increase the size of its niche.
Enlarge / The Analogue 3D is the company's next FPGA-based retro console, but the company isn't showing the whole thing off yet. (credit: Analogue)
Retro game enthusiasts will know Analogue for its consoles’ dedication to accuracy. From the original Analogue Nt, which used chips harvested from broken NES consoles, to the Analogue Pocket, which uses an FPGA chip to accurately emulate handheld hardware, the company has always focused on modern hardware that can play actual game cartridges while preserving the idiosyncrasies of the original game consoles.
Today, Analogue is announcing the Analogue 3D, a console that will use an FPGA to run games made for 1996’s Nintendo 64. Because FPGAs emulate consoles at a hardware level, they're much better at replicating all of the specific quirks of the original hardware, making games look and run like they would have on the original consoles without any performance problems or rendering inaccuracies. Like Analogue's other home console replicas, the Analogue 3D is designed to play original cartridges and not ROM files, and the cartridge slot is region-free, so it'll work with games from all over the world.
Analogue didn't reveal a price or a specific launch date for the Analogue 3D, just that the console will show up sometime in 2024. It also didn't show off the design of the console itself or the controller, though it did tease both—if you look closely, you'll see an 8BitDo logo on the controller, the same company that made Analogue's replica controllers for its Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and TurboGrafx retro consoles.
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For such a car-centric nation, it's a little depressing that the US lags behind the European Union and China when it comes to electric vehicle adoption. Without a large investment to redesign our towns and cities to make them walkable and accessible via public transport, switching en masse to electric cars is the main remaining avenue left to decarbonize our transport, after all. So it is rather encouraging to see signs that more US car buyers are opting to go electric, as sales have climbed 50 percent, year on year, as uptake reaches almost 8 percent.
According to Kelly Blue Book, US car buyers bought 313,086 battery EVs between the months of July and September 2023, compared to just 209,030 BEVs for the same three months of last year. Add in the 882 Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell EVs and 68 Hyundai Nexo FCEVs that found homes in Q3 2023 and that's a 50.1 percent increase, year on year.
The cumulative totals for all of 2023 so far are also looking healthy. KBB estimates that 873,082 BEVs have been bought this year, versus 586,965 for the first nine months of 2022. Add in about 2,800 FCEVs compared to around 1,000 last year, and clean vehicle sales grew 49 percent, year on year.
This slide from a presentation by Lee Feinberg, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, shows concepts for a space telescope fitting inside the volumes of a SpaceX Starship rocket and a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket. (credit: NASA/Lee Feinberg)
Launching a follow-on to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on Starship, for example, could unshackle the mission from onerous mass and volume constraints, which typically drive up complexity and cost, a panel of three astronomers recently told the National Academies' Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics.
"The availability of greater mass and volume capability, at lower cost, enlarges the design space," said Charles Lawrence, the chief scientist for astronomy and physics at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We want to take advantage of that.”
Enlarge / The four private astronauts who flew into orbit with SpaceX on the Inspiration4 mission in 2021, the first fully commercial human spaceflight mission to low-Earth orbit. (credit: Inspiration4/John Kraus)
There are three US companies now capable of flying people into space—SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic—and representatives from those three companies told lawmakers on Wednesday that the industry is not yet mature enough for a new set of federal safety regulations for their customers.
A nearly 20-year moratorium on federal regulations regarding the safety of passengers on commercial human spaceflight missions is set to expire on January 1. It was scheduled to lapse at the beginning of October, but Congress added a three-month extension to a stopgap spending bill signed into law to prevent a government shutdown.
That allows a bit more time for lawmakers to write a more comprehensive commercial space bill addressing several issues important to the commercial space industry. These include industry-wide concerns about the Federal Aviation Administration's ability to quickly license commercial launch and reentry operations, a hurdle SpaceX is eager to overcome as it waits for FAA approval to launch the second full-scale test flight of its giant Starship rocket.
Enlarge / Detail from left panel of the Melun Diptych (circa 1455) by medieval French painter and miniaturist Jean Fouquet. The strangely shaped rock in the lower right hand corner is most likely a Stone Age handaxe, a recent analysis concluded. (credit: Public domain)
Around 1455, a medieval French painter and miniaturist named Jean Fouquet painted a small diptych with two panels, one of which depicts St. Stephen holding a strangely shaped stone—usually interpreted as a symbol of the saint's martyrdom by stoning. A new analysis by researchers from Dartmouth University and the University of Cambridge has concluded that the stone depicted in the so-called Melun Diptych is most likely a prehistoric stone hand axe, according to a recent paper published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
Originally housed in the Collegiate Church of Notre-Dame in Melun in Northwest France, the diptych is painted in oil. The left panel depicts Etienne Chevalier, who served as treasurer to King Charles VII, clad in a crimson robe while kneeling in prayer. The figure to his right is St. Stephen, Chevalier's patron saint, in dark blue robes, holding a book in his left hand with the mysterious jagged rock resting on it, while his right arm drapes across Chevalier's shoulder. The right panel depicts the Madonna breastfeeding the Christ Child, possibly a portrait of the king's mistress Agnes Sorel, or possibly the king's wife, Catherine Bude.
The two panels were once connected by a hinge, with a small medallion believed to be a mini-portrait of Fouquet as a kind of signature (he otherwise never signed his work). By 1775, the Collegiate Church was in dire need of funds for a restoration and sold the diptych, breaking it apart. The left panel is now housed at the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, while the right panel belongs to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. As for the medallion, it's now part of the Louvre's collection in Paris.
Enlarge / Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin's founder, meets NASA Administrator Bill Nelson with a mock-up of the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander behind them. (credit: NASA)
Blue Origin has unveiled a mock-up of the Blue Moon lander it says will be ready to fly to the Moon within the next three years as a precursor to human landings on a larger vehicle, perhaps at the end of the decade.
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Blue Origin, recently showed off the "low-fidelity" mock-up to NASA officials at the company's engine production facility in Huntsville, Alabama. The vehicle is undoubtedly large and will take advantage of the 23-foot-wide (7-meter) payload volume on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket.
This is the Mark 1 variant of the Blue Moon lander. It's designed to deliver up to 3 metric tons (about 6,600 pounds) of cargo anywhere on the lunar surface. Blue Origin revealed the design on Friday.
Enlarge / A fully updated iPhone (left) after being force crashed by a Flipper Zero (right). (credit: Jeroen van der Ham)
One morning two weeks ago, security researcher Jeroen van der Ham was traveling by train in the Netherlands when his iPhone suddenly displayed a series of pop-up windows that made it nearly impossible to use his device.
“My phone was getting these popups every few minutes and then my phone would reboot,” he wrote to Ars in an online interview. “I tried putting it in lock down mode, but it didn't help.”
To van der Ham’s surprise and chagrin, the same debilitating stream of pop-ups hit again on the afternoon commute home, not just against his iPhone but the iPhones of other passengers in the same train car. He then noticed that one of the same passengers nearby had also been present that morning. Van der Ham put two and two together and fingered the passenger as the culprit.
Enlarge / Jeff Bezos walks near Blue Origin’s New Shepard after flying into space on July 20, 2021 in Van Horn, Texas. (credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Virgin Galactic smoothly completed its sixth human spaceflight in six months on Thursday, continuing an impressive cadence of missions with its VSS Unity spacecraft. This performance has made the company the clear leader in suborbital space tourism.
A key question is where this leaves the other company with a launch system capable of carrying private astronauts above the atmosphere: Blue Origin. That company's New Shepard rocket and spacecraft have been grounded since an engine failure nearly 14 months ago. During that uncrewed flight, the rocket broke apart, but the capsule safely parachuted to the West Texas desert.
Blue Origin finished its accident analysis this spring and implemented a fix to the issue, including design changes to the BE-3 engine combustion chamber. In May, the company said it planned to return to flight "soon." Then, in September, the Federal Aviation Administration closed its mishap investigation. So where is New Shepard?
A critical vulnerability in Atlassian’s Confluence enterprise server app that allows for malicious commands and resets servers is under active exploitation by threat actors in attacks that install ransomware, researchers said.
“Widespread exploitation of the CVE-2023-22518 authentication bypass vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence Server has begun, posing a risk of significant data loss,” Glenn Thorpe, senior director of security research and detection engineering at security firm GreyNoise, wrote on Mastodon on Sunday. “So far, the attacking IPs all include Ukraine in their target.”
He pointed to a page showing that between 12 am and 8 am on Sunday UTC (around 5 pm Saturday to 1 am Sunday Pacific Time), three different IP addresses began exploiting the critical vulnerability, which allows attackers to restore a database and execute malicious commands. The IPs have since stopped those attacks, but he said he suspected the exploits are continuing.
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As the football season gets underway every season, two things are certain: There will be some headline-grabbing concussions, and we'll hear the National Football League (NFL) tell us that player health and safety remain a top priority.
The contrast between appearances and that claim is striking. Few fans could forget Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa stumbling on the field after a huge hit, being cleared to play and then sustaining another scary injury a few days later. The scene of a wobbly player being escorted off the field after a head impact is all too familiar on high school fields, in college stadiums, and, of course, in the NFL. Yet we hear claims that the game has gotten safer, as the NFL regularly reports progress in the fight against concussions, citing new rules and equipment, greater awareness, improvements in its concussion protocol, and continued research into the issue.
Can we be confident that all of these efforts are making a difference? As we’ll see, the answer may well be no.
Advertisers with zero-tolerance policies for antisemitism spent the weekend urging the CEO of X (formerly Twitter), Linda Yaccarino, to follow their lead, save her reputation, and ditch Elon Musk's toxic social media platform, according to a pair of reports.
Advertising industry insiders told the Financial Times and Forbes that Yaccarino got bombarded all weekend by industry friends advising her to resign, or else face a "credibility crisis" as major brands—including Apple, Disney, IBM, Lionsgate, Paramount Global, Sony, and Warner Bros.—have stopped advertising on X.
This latest X advertiser scare followed two Media Matters reports of ads appearing next to antisemitic content. But the backlash goes beyond stemming just from those reports and is also connected to an antisemitic X post from Musk. In the post, Musk explicitly endorses as "the actual truth" the great replacement theory. That theory, as The New York Times explained, claims that "Jews have organized nonwhite immigrants to replace the white race" and "was embraced by Robert Bowers, who killed 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018."
Enlarge / Artist's illustration of a New Glenn rocket on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida. (credit: Blue Origin)
The first flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket seems to have a payload. Instead of launching a sports car, as SpaceX did with its first Falcon Heavy rocket, Jeff Bezos's space company will likely launch a pair of Mars probes for NASA.
NASA is aware of the risk of launching a real science mission on the first flight of a new rocket. But this mission, known by the acronym ESCAPADE, is relatively low cost. The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers mission has a budget of approximately $79 million, significantly less than any mission NASA has sent to Mars in recent history.
This mission will use two spacecraft to measure plasma and magnetic fields around the red planet. With simultaneous observations from two locations around Mars, scientists hope to learn more about the processes that strip away atoms from the magnetosphere and upper atmosphere, which drive Martian climate change.
Enlarge / DOS_deck is an impressive technical feat, sure. But it's also a very keen curation of some DOS shareware classics (pun somewhat intended). (credit: DOS_deck/Martin Kool)
Revisiting a classic game from the AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS era of MS-DOS can be a fun distraction. But the more friction and configuration between you and a playable game, the more likely you are to fall off before you ever hit the menu screen. You spend enough time fine-tuning your modern systems; doing so within an arcane framework, for a single game, is not everybody's idea of fun.
DOS_deck seems to get this, providing the most frictionless path to playing classic DOS shareware and abandonware, like Doom, Jazz Jackrabbit, Command & Conquer, and Syndicate, with reconfigured controller support and a simplified interface benevolently looted from the Steam Deck. You can play it in a browser, right now, the one you're using to read this post.
In fact, I stopped between that last sentence and this one to play a couple levels of Doom in a Chrome browser. And now I've taken another punctuation break to play the first level of Syndicate, which moves much faster than I remember. The control schemes are clever, the interface is easy to get used to and move around, and there's a host of little extras to appreciate, including constant game progress (game state) saving, and linking and setting certain games as favorites.
Enlarge / A Pixel 3, messaging a savvy iPhone owner, one with the kinds of concerns Beeper hopes to resolve for its customers. (credit: Kevin Purdy)
In the past week, I have sent an iMessage to one friend from a command-line Python app and to another from a Pixel 3 Android phone.
Sending an iMessage without an Apple device isn't entirely new, but this way of doing it is. I didn't hand over my Apple credentials or log in with my Apple ID on a Mac server on some far-away rack. I put my primary SIM card in the Pixel, I installed Beeper Mini, and it sent a text message to register my number with Apple. I never gave Beeper Mini my Apple ID.
From then on, my iPhone-toting friends who sent messages to my Pixel 3 saw them as other-iPhone blue, not noticeably distracting green. We could all access the typing, delivered/read receipts, emoji reactions, and most other iPhone-to-iPhone message features. Even if I had no active Apple devices, it seems, I could have chosen to meet Apple users where they were and gain end-to-end encryption by doing so.
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Hundreds of Windows and Linux computer models from virtually all hardware makers are vulnerable to a new attack that executes malicious firmware early in the boot-up sequence, a feat that allows infections that are nearly impossible to detect or remove using current defense mechanisms.
The attack—dubbed LogoFAIL by the researchers who devised it—is notable for the relative ease in carrying it out, the breadth of both consumer- and enterprise-grade models that are susceptible, and the high level of control it gains over them. In many cases, LogoFAIL can be remotely executed in post-exploit situations using techniques that can’t be spotted by traditional endpoint security products. And because exploits run during the earliest stages of the boot process, they are able to bypass a host of defenses, including the industry-wide Secure Boot, Intel’s Secure Boot, and similar protections from other companies that are devised to prevent so-called bootkit infections.
LogoFAIL is a constellation of two dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities that have lurked for years, if not decades, in Unified Extensible Firmware Interfaces responsible for booting modern devices that run Windows or Linux. The vulnerabilities are the product of almost a year’s worth of work by Binarly, a firm that helps customers identify and secure vulnerable firmware.
Enlarge (credit: Dilok Klaisataporn | iStock / Getty Images Plus)
Governments have been secretly tracking the app activity of an unknown number of people using Apple and Google smartphones, US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) revealed today.
In a letter demanding that the Department of Justice update or repeal policies prohibiting companies from informing the public about these covert government requests, Wyden warned that "Apple and Google are in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps."
Push notifications are used to provide a wide variety of alerts to app users. A friendly ding or text alert on the home screen notifies users about new text messages, emails, social media comments, news updates, packages delivered, gameplay nudges—basically any app activity where notifications have been enabled could be tracked by governments, Wyden said.
Enlarge / The hardware used for these experiments. (credit: Harvard)
There's widespread agreement that most useful quantum computing will have to wait for the development of error-corrected qubits. Error correction involves distributing a bit of quantum information—termed a logical qubit—among a small collection of hardware qubits. The disagreements mostly focus on how best to implement it and how long it will take.
A key step toward that future is described in a paper released in Nature today. A large team of researchers, primarily based at Harvard University, have now demonstrated the ability to perform multiple operations on as many as 48 logical qubits. The work shows that the system, which shares a heritage with the quantum computing system made by the company QuEra, can correctly identify the occurrence of errors, and this can significantly improve the results of calculations.
Yuval Boger, QuEra's chief marketing officer, told Ars: "We feel it is a very significant milestone on the path to where we all want to be, which is large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers.
Enlarge (credit: L. Toshio Kishiyama/Getty Images)
The White House's plan to boost electric vehicle adoption came under heavy fire in Congress on Wednesday. Five Democratic Representatives joined the Republican majority to pass a bill that would prohibit the US Environmental Protection Agency from enacting stricter new corporate average fuel efficiency regulations that would require automakers to sell many more EVs by the year 2032.
Its passage in the House follows a letter-writing campaign by some US auto dealers to get the White House to abandon its climate targets as the dealers say they find it too difficult to sell electric vehicles.
As Ars detailed at the time, the tougher new regulations will require automakers to sell four times as many zero-emission vehicles to meet the new fleet averages. If the rules go into effect, two-thirds of all new passenger cars and light trucks would have to be EVs by 2032.
Windows' infamous "Blue Screen of Death" is a bit of a punchline. People have made a hobby of spotting them out in the wild, and in some circles, they remain a byword for the supposed flakiness and instability of PCs. To this day, networked PCs in macOS are represented by beige CRT monitors displaying a BSOD.
But the BSOD is supposed to be a diagnostic tool, an informational screen that technicians can use to begin homing in on the problem that caused the crash in the first place; that old Windows' BSOD error codes were often so broad and vague as to be useless doesn't make the idea a bad one. Today, version 255 of the Linux systemd project honors that original intent by adding a systemd-bsod component that generates a full-screen display of some error messages when a Linux system crashes.
The systemd-bsod component is currently listed as "experimental" and "subject to change." But the functionality is simple: any logged error message that reaches the LOG_EMERG level will be displayed full-screen to allow people to take a photo or write it down. Phoronix reports that, as with BSODs in modern Windows, the Linux version will also generate a QR code to make it easier to look up information on your phone.
Enlarge / I'd like to pretend I'd built a settlement this neatly compact and organized—with street grids, even—but alas, this is a provided screenshot. (credit: Hooded Horse)
Back when WarCraft, StarCraft, and other real-time strategy games were all the rage, I could never actually play them against other people. Even playing against the computer, I might only eke out a victory through dumb luck or an opponent's huge mistake.
The problem was, I was never ready to attack until I had my base perfectly in order—until the workers carrying oil or crystals or whatnot had the most efficient route from the mine to the base or until my buildings were arranged for optimal use of the revealed land. I just needed one more little guy, one more tower. OK, maybe two. I'm a turtler's turtler.
1.0 release date trailer for Against the Storm.
Against the Storm, which releases from Early Access on Steam for Windows today, has been a deeply satisfying outlet for this pent-up need to build and prosper—in a delightfully WarCraft-ian manner—without the messy business of war. There is still adversity: an ever-advancing "Impatience" meter, hostile spirits you uncover in the woods, and the typical constraints of resources, supply chains, and worker morale. Plus the rainstorms in the title, which occur both in-level, slowing you down, and at a macro level, washing away your little towns to make you start again.
Enlarge / The Homey Pro, settling in for some quiet network check-ins at dusk. (credit: Kevin Purdy)
I know there are people who will want to buy the Homey Pro. I’ve seen them on social media and in various home automation forums, and I’ve even noticed them in the comments on this website. For this type of person, the Homey Pro might serve as a specialized, locally focused smart home hub, one that's well worth the cost. But you should be really, truly certain that you’re that person before you take a $400 leap with it.
Homey Pro is a smart home hub pitched primarily at someone who wants to keep things local as much as possible, forgoing phone apps, speakers, and cloud connections. That means using the Homey Pro to boost a primarily Zigbee or Z-Wave network, while also looping in local Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even infrared remotes. It’s for someone willing to pay $400 for a device that offers robust local or cloud backups, professional design, advanced automation, and even a custom scripting language, along with access to some “experiments” and still-in-progress tech like Matter and Thread. It’s for someone who might want to add a select cloud service or two to their home, but not because they have no other option.
But this somebody has also, somehow, not already invested in Home Assistant, Hubitat, or HomeBridge, which are more open to both add-on hardware (like new capabilities added on by USB stick or GPIO pins) and deep tinkering. It's someone who is willing to check that every device they want to control will work with Homey. While the device offers a pretty sizable range of apps and integrations, it’s far from the near-universal nature of major open-source projects or even the big smart home platforms. And you have to do a little checking further, still, to ensure that individual products are supported, not just the brand.
Enlarge / Saudi Arabia's presence at COP28 has reportedly been used to limit progress on fossil fuel cutbacks. (credit: Sean Gallup / Getty Images)
Oil-producing countries are apparently succeeding in their attempts to eliminate language from an international climate agreement that calls for countries to phase out the use of fossil fuels. Draft forms of the agreement had included text that called upon the countries that are part of the Paris Agreement to work toward "an orderly and just phase out of fossil fuels." Reports now indicate that this text has gone missing from the latest versions of the draft.
The agreement is being negotiated at the United Nations' COP28 climate change conference, taking place in the United Arab Emirates. The COP, or Conference of the Parties, meetings are annual events that attempt to bring together UN members to discuss ways to deal with climate change. They were central to the negotiations that brought about the Paris Agreement, which calls for participants to develop plans that should bring the world to net-zero emissions by the middle of the century.
Initial plans submitted by countries would lower the world's greenhouse gas emissions, but not by nearly enough to reach net zero. However, the agreement included mechanisms by which countries would continue to evaluate their progress and submit more stringent goals. So, additional COP meetings have included what's termed a "stocktake" to evaluate where countries stand, and statements are issued to encourage and direct future actions.
Enlarge / Blue Origin's New Shepard launch system consists of a booster and a capsule. (credit: Blue Origin)
Blue Origin is finally returning to flight.
On Tuesday the company announced, via the social media site X, that its New Shepard spacecraft would launch no earlier than next Monday.
"We’re targeting a launch window that opens on Dec. 18 for our next New Shepard payload mission," the company stated. "#NS24 will carry 33 science and research payloads as well as 38,000 @clubforfuture postcards to space."
Enlarge / This picture, taken several months ago, shows different parts for Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket inside the company's manufacturing facility in Florida. (credit: Blue Origin)
For the first time, it's starting to feel like Jeff Bezos's space company, Blue Origin, might have a shot at launching its long-delayed New Glenn rocket within the next 12 months.
Of course, there's a lot for Blue Origin to test and validate before New Glenn is ready to fly. First, the company's engineers need to fully assemble a New Glenn rocket and raise it on the company's sprawling seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. There's a good chance of this happening in the coming months as Blue Origin readies for a series of tanking tests and simulated countdowns at the launch site.
It's tempting to invoke Berger's Law, the guideline championed by my Ars colleague which states that if a launch is scheduled for the fourth quarter of a calendar year—and if it is at least six months away—the launch will delay into the next year. Given Blue Origin's history of New Glenn delays, that's probably the safer bet. New Glenn's inaugural flight has been delayed from 2020 until 2021, then 2022, and for now, is slated for 2024.
Enlarge / Jeff Bezos, shortly after he rode on New Shepard to space. (credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gives very few interviews, but he recently sat down with the computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman for a two-hour interview about Amazon, Blue Origin, his business practices, and more.
The discussion meanders somewhat, but there are some interesting tidbits about spaceflight, especially when the conversation turns to Blue Origin. This is the space company Bezos founded more than 23 years ago. He has invested an extraordinary amount of money into Blue Origin—likely somewhere between $10 billion and $20 billion—and it truly is a passion project.
But the inescapable truth about Blue Origin is that to date, it has been a disappointment in terms of execution. At present, Blue Origin employs approximately 11,000 people, about the same total as SpaceX. However, Blue Origin has launched zero rockets this year, whereas SpaceX has launched nearly 100, as well as building and launching thousands of satellites.
Enlarge / Extreme E travels to remote locations by boat and brings its own energy infrastructure with it. Currently, it makes its own hydrogen on site and uses that to charge EV batteries, but in 2025, the cars will switch to hydrogen fuel cells. (credit: Colin McMaster / LAT Images)
ANTOFAGASTA, Chile — On a picnic bench in Chile's Atacama Desert, one of the most remote locations on Earth, Alejandro Agag is holding court.
"Welcome to the edge of the world," he laughs, gesturing toward the vast desert around him. A gust of wind kicks a cloud of sand and dust across the table. "It's amazing, this place."
The 53-year-old Spanish entrepreneur is taking in the sights and sounds of the season 3 finale of Extreme E, the off-road electric racing series he launched in 2021. Part of the series' ethos is that it races exclusively in regions of the globe that are heavily impacted by climate change (such as the Atacama Desert—the driest, non-polar region on Earth), typically with no spectators present.
Enlarge / Trevor Milton, founder of Nikola Corp., arrives at court in New York on Monday, Dec. 18, 2023. Milton is set to be sentenced on Monday after being found guilty of securities fraud and wire fraud in October 2022. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)
The disgraced founder and former CEO of the "zero emissions" truck company Nikola, Trevor Milton, was sentenced to four years in prison on Monday, Bloomberg reported.
That's a lighter sentence than prosecutors had requested after a jury found Milton guilty of one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud in 2022. During the trial, Milton was accused of lying about “nearly all aspects of the business,” CNBC reported.
From 2016 to 2020, Milton's "extravagant claims" were fueled by a desire to pump up the value of Nikola stock, The New York Times reported. He was accused of misleading investors about everything from fake prototypes of emission-free long-haul trucks to billions worth of supposedly binding orders for hydrogen fuel cells and batteries that were never shipped. In a sentencing memo, prosecutors said that Milton targeted "less sophisticated investors," the Times reported, engaging "in a sustained scheme to take advantage of" their inexperience.
Enlarge / Blue Origin's New Shepard booster comes in for a landing in West Texas at the conclusion of Tuesday's suborbital flight. (credit: Blue Origin)
With redesigned engine components, Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket took off from West Texas and flew to the edge of space on Tuesday with a package of scientific research and technology demonstration experiments.
This was the first flight of Blue Origin's 60-foot-tall (18-meter) New Shepard rocket since September 12, 2022, when an engine failure destroyed the booster and triggered an in-flight abort for the vehicle's pressurized capsule. There were no passengers aboard for that mission, and the capsule safely separated from the failed booster and parachuted to a controlled landing.
The flight on Tuesday also didn't carry people. Instead, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, lofted 33 payloads for NASA, research institutions, and commercial companies. Some of these payloads were flown again on Tuesday's launch after failing to reach space on the failed New Shepard mission last year. Among these payloads were an experiment to demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell technology in microgravity and an investigation studying the strength of planetary soils under different gravity conditions.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
I like the idea of drawing the year to a close with some good news for a change, and I think maybe the US Environmental Protection Agency does as well. On Wednesday, the EPA published its Automotive Trends Report, which now included data for model-year 2022 vehicles.
And the data is good: record-low carbon emissions and record-high fuel economy, and the biggest improvement year on year for almost a decade.
For MY2022, the EPA says that the average real-world CO2 emissions for all new vehicles fell by 10 g/mile to 337 g/mile, the lowest average it has ever measured. Similarly, real-world fuel economy increased by 0.6 mpg for MY2022, to 26 mpg—this, too, is a record high and the single-largest year-on-year improvement for both CO2 and mpg for nine years.
When you drop money in the bank, it looks like it’s just sitting there, ready for you to withdraw. In reality, your institution makes money on your money by lending it elsewhere, including to the fossil fuel companies driving climate change, as well as emissions-heavy industries like manufacturing.
So just by leaving money in a bank account, you’re unwittingly contributing to worsening catastrophes around the world. According to a new analysis, for every $1,000 dollars the average American keeps in savings, each year they indirectly create emissions equivalent to flying from New York to Seattle. “We don’t really take a look at how the banks are using the money we keep in our checking account on a daily basis, where that money is really circulating,” says Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, which published the analysis. “But when we look under the hood, we see that there's a lot of fossil fuels.”
Enlarge / The Matter standard's illustration of how the standard should align a home and all its smart devices. (credit: CSA)
Matter, as a smart home standard, would make everything about owning a smart home better. Devices could be set up with any phone, for either remote or local control, put onto any major platform (like Alexa, Google, or HomeKit) or combinations of them, and avoid being orphaned if their device maker goes out of business. Less fragmentation, more security, fewer junked devices: win, win, win.
Matter, as it exists in late 2023, more than a year after its 1.0 specification was published and just under a year after the first devices came online, is more like the xkcd scenario that lots of people might have expected. It's another home automation standard at the moment, and one that isn't particularly better than the others, at least how it works today. I wish it was not so.
Setting up a Matter device isn't easy, nor is making it work across home systems. Lots of devices with Matter support still require you to download their maker's specific app to get full functionality. Even if you were an early adopting, Matter-T-shirt-wearing enthusiast, you're still buying devices that don't work quite as well, and still generally require a major tech company's gear to act as your bridge or router.
Enlarge / Aitana Lopez, an AI-generated influencer, has convinced many social media users she is real. (credit: FT montage/TheClueless/GettyImages)
Pink-haired Aitana Lopez is followed by more than 200,000 people on social media. She posts selfies from concerts and her bedroom, while tagging brands such as hair care line Olaplex and lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret.
Brands have paid about $1,000 a post for her to promote their products on social media—despite the fact that she is entirely fictional.
Aitana is a “virtual influencer” created using artificial intelligence tools, one of the hundreds of digital avatars that have broken into the growing $21 billion content creator economy.
Enlarge / These symbols might not mean anything to you now. But give it a few runs, and you might lose a few minutes strategizing this ship's ideal next turn, based on this image alone. (credit: Brace Yourself Games)
Games come and go through my Steam and Nintendo Switch libraries: a twitchy, grim action epic, then a metaphysical puzzle-platformer, and maybe a boomer shooter or turn-based tactical along the way. I try hard not to get stuck in one style or mindset—both for my enjoyment and my writing.
But there is always one type of game that is installed and ready to go for the next trip or idle couch moment: a roguelite deck-builder. Cobalt Core is the latest game in that slot, and it's on Steam for Windows (and definitely Steam Deck) and Switch. It's the most fun I've had in this particular obsession since Monster Train. Cobalt Core stretches into other genres, like perfect-knowledge turn-based tactics and space battle, but it's cards and randomness down to its electric-blue center.
Launch trailer for Cobalt Core.
A few years ago, I didn't know what a "roguelike deck-builder" was or what either of those compound phrases meant. Then, one day, there was a sale on Slay the Spire. That 2019 game refined the fusion of two game mechanics: constant failure against randomized encounters (a la Rogue, but with a "lite" gradual progression) and the refining of a deck of combat-minded cards (as in Magic: The Gathering, Dominion, and Netrunner). You attack and defend against increasingly tough enemies with your cards, you gain and upgrade and ditch cards as you go, you lose, and then you get slightly better tools on your next do-over.
Enlarge / An Analogue Pocket running Super Mario World on an openFPGA core with the scanline filter enabled. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
We've got a soft spot for the Analogue Pocket, the premium portable game console that melds 2020s technology with the design of the original Game Boy. Since its release, Analogue has added some new capabilities via firmware updates, most notably when it added support for emulating more consoles via its OpenFPGA platform in the summer of 2022. This allows the FPGA chip inside of the pocket to emulate the hardware of other systems, in addition to the portable systems the Pocket supports natively.
But aside from finalizing and releasing that 1.1 firmware, 2023 was mostly quiet for Pocket firmware updates. That changed in December when the company released not one but two major firmware upgrades for the Pocket that slipped under our radar during the holidays. These updates delivered a combination of fixes and long-promised features to the handheld, which Analogue has been re-releasing in different color palettes now that the original versions are more consistently in stock.
The most significant update for OpenFPGA fans is the ability to use display filters with third-party FPGA cores. Part of the appeal of the Pocket is its 1,600×1,440 screen, which is sharp enough to perfectly re-create the huge chunky pixels of the original Game Boy screens. By default, most FPGA cores now get access to a similarly high-quality CRT screen filter named after the Sony Trinitron TV, adding a touch of retro-blurriness to the sharp edges of 8- and 16-bit games. I've seen lots of bad, unconvincing scanline filters in retro game re-releases, and this isn't one of them.
Enlarge / The current generation of hardware, which will see rapid iteration over the next several years. (credit: QuEra)
On Tuesday, the quantum computing startup Quera laid out a road map that will bring error correction to quantum computing in only two years and enable useful computations using it by 2026, years ahead of when IBM plans to offer the equivalent. Normally, this sort of thing should be dismissed as hype. Except the company is Quera, which is a spinoff of the Harvard Universeity lab that demonstrated the ability to identify and manage errors using hardware that's similar in design to what Quera is building.
Also notable: Quera uses the same type of qubit that a rival startup, Atom Computing, has already scaled up to over 1,000 qubits. So, while the announcement should be viewed cautiously—several companies have promised rapid scaling and then failed to deliver—there are some reasons it should be viewed seriously as well.
Current qubits, regardless of their design, are prone to errors during measurements, operations, or even when simply sitting there. While it's possible to improve these error rates so that simple calculations can be done, most people in the field are skeptical it will ever be possible to drop these rates enough to do the elaborate calculations that would fulfill the promise of quantum computing. The consensus seems to be that, outside of a few edge cases, useful computation will require error-corrected qubits.
Enlarge / The influenza virus from an image produced from an image taken with transmission electron microscopy. Viral diameter ranges from around 80 to 120 nm. (credit: Getty | BSIP)
Key indicators of seasonal flu activity declined in the first week of the year, signaling a possible reprieve from the high levels of respiratory virus transmission this season—but the dip may only be temporary.
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its latest flu data for the week ending on January 6. Outpatient visits for influenza-like illnesses (ILI) were down that week, the first decline after weeks of rapid increases. Flu test positivity and hospitalizations were also down slightly.
But transmission is still elevated around the country. Fourteen states have ILI activity at the "very high" level in the current data, down from 22 the week before. And 23 states have "high" activity level, up from 19 the week before. (You can see the week-by-week progression of this year's flu season in the US here.)
Enlarge / Anode and cathode "inks" are applied to carbon-fiber paper. (credit: GM/Honda)
BROWNSTOWN, Mich.—Today, a joint venture between General Motors and Honda Motor Company, named Fuel Cell System Manufacturing LLC (FCSM LLC), officially started producing its one and only product—a fuel cell system—on a commercial scale. FCSM officially began in January of 2017 with an initial investment between GM and Honda of $85,000,000. Now, the 70,000-square-foot (6,500 m2) facility in Brownstown, Michigan, houses 80 employees and enough robots, clean rooms, and all sorts of high-tech equipment to make Ironman blush.
FCSM managing to build fuel cells quickly, reliably, and cost effectively is what's new here, not the fuel cells themselves. And, according to Tetsuo Suzuki, vice president of FCSM LLC, that proved the biggest challenge. "Our fuel cell system consists of more than 300 individual cells [307 in total], each cell is composed of very expensive materials. If there is a defect in even one cell, the entire stack would be unusable," Suzuki said. "Therefore, we designed all of our mass production processes with a zero-defect mindset." Adding, "We introduced quality control into every process."
This is the assembly line. (credit: GM/Honda)
More specifically, each cell consists of several parts, starting with two different liquids that FCSM calls "inks." One ink forms an anode, the other, a cathode. FCSM then pours each liquid onto a carbon-fiber paper, which it then heats to dry. It then precisely cuts these two different papers into shape and bonds them together to form what it calls a unitized electrode assembly, or UEA; the cathode on one side, the anode on the other. Both of the anode and cathode sheets are black, but the cathode sheet is gloss, and the anode sheet is matte.
Some of the microbes that make carbon sequestration work. (credit: Andes Ag, Inc)
In 2022, humans emitted a staggering 36 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Along with reducing emissions, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is a key climate mitigation strategy. But Gonzalo Fuenzalida wasn’t looking to help solve climate change when he co-founded the US company Andes.
“We started this company with the idea of using microbes to make the process of growing food more resilient,” says Fuenzalida. “We stumbled upon these microbes that have the ability to create minerals in the soil which contain carbon, and that intrigued us.”
Fuenzalida, alongside his co-founder Tania Timmermann-Aranis, had an unconventional notion: They could harness the power of microbes residing in plant roots within the soil to remove carbon from the atmosphere. These naturally occurring microbes can be applied to the soil by blending them with pesticides or other soil treatments—they will strategically position themselves within the root structure of corn, wheat, and soy plants.
Enlarge (credit: Darrell Gulin | The Image Bank)
After more than a year as an exclusive invite-only social media platform, Bluesky is now open to the public, so anyone can join without needing a once-coveted invite code.
In a blog, Bluesky said that requiring invite codes helped Bluesky "manage growth" while building features that allow users to control what content they see on the social platform.
When Bluesky debuted, many viewed it as a potential Twitter killer, but limited access to Bluesky may have weakened momentum. As of January 2024, Bluesky has more than 3 million users. That's significantly less than X (formerly Twitter), which estimates suggest currently boasts more than 400 million global users.
Linux developers are in the process of patching a high-severity vulnerability that, in certain cases, allows the installation of malware that runs at the firmware level, giving infections access to the deepest parts of a device where they’re hard to detect or remove.
The vulnerability resides in shim, which in the context of Linux is a small component that runs in the firmware early in the boot process before the operating system has started. More specifically, the shim accompanying virtually all Linux distributions plays a crucial role in secure boot, a protection built into most modern computing devices to ensure every link in the boot process comes from a verified, trusted supplier. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability allows attackers to neutralize this mechanism by executing malicious firmware at the earliest stages of the boot process before the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface firmware has loaded and handed off control to the operating system.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-40547, is what’s known as a buffer overflow, a coding bug that allows attackers to execute code of their choice. It resides in a part of the shim that processes booting up from a central server on a network using the same HTTP that the the web is based on. Attackers can exploit the code-execution vulnerability in various scenarios, virtually all following some form of successful compromise of either the targeted device or the server or network the device boots from.
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