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Hier — 28 mars 2024Ars Technica

Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy: Lawsuit

A promotional image for Sorry for Your Loss, with Elizabeth Olsen

Enlarge / A promotional image for Sorry for Your Loss, which was a Facebook Watch original scripted series. (credit: Facebook)

Last April, Meta revealed that it would no longer support original shows, like Jada Pinkett Smith's Red Table Talk talk show, on Facebook Watch. Meta's streaming business that was once viewed as competition for the likes of YouTube and Netflix is effectively dead now; Facebook doesn't produce original series, and Facebook Watch is no longer available as a video-streaming app.

The streaming business' demise has seemed related to cost cuts at Meta that have also included layoffs. However, recently unsealed court documents in an antitrust suit against Meta [PDF] claim that Meta has squashed its streaming dreams in order to appease one of its biggest ad customers: Netflix.

Facebook allegedly gave Netflix creepy privileges

As spotted via Gizmodo, a letter was filed on April 14 in relation to a class-action antitrust suit that was filed by Meta customers, accusing Meta of anti-competitive practices that harm social media competition and consumers. The letter, made public Saturday, asks a court to have Reed Hastings, Netflix's founder and former CEO, respond to a subpoena for documents that plaintiffs claim are relevant to the case. The original complaint filed in December 2020 [PDF] doesn’t mention Netflix beyond stating that Facebook “secretly signed Whitelist and Data sharing agreements” with Netflix, along with “dozens” of other third-party app developers. The case is still ongoing.

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Oregon governor signs nation’s first right-to-repair bill that bans parts pairing

Cables emanating from an iPhone under repair, with gloves hands holding a tweezer over the phone

Enlarge / Oregon's repair bill prohibits companies from implementing software locks that prohibit aftermarket or used parts from being installed in their devices.

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek today signed the state's Right to Repair Act, which will push manufacturers to provide more repair options for their products than any other state so far.

The law, like those passed in New York, California, and Minnesota, will require many manufacturers to provide the same parts, tools, and documentation to individuals and repair shops that they provide to their own repair teams.

But Oregon's bill goes further, preventing companies from implementing schemes that require parts to be verified through encrypted software checks before they will function. Known as parts pairing or serialization, Oregon's bill, SB 1596, is the first in the nation to target that practice. Oregon State Senator Janeen Sollman (D) and Representative Courtney Neron (D) sponsored and pushed the bill in the state senate and legislature.

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Puerto Rico declares public health emergency as dengue cases rise

Par : Beth Mole
Female Aedes aegypti mosquito as she was in the process of obtaining a

Female Aedes aegypti mosquito as she was in the process of obtaining a "blood meal." (credit: US Department of Health and Human Services)

Puerto Rico has declared a public health emergency amid an ongoing outbreak of dengue infections, a mosquito-spread viral infection that can cause fever, aches, rash, vomiting, and, in about 5 percent of cases, a severe disease marked by internal bleeding and shock.

The US territory has tallied 549 cases since the start of the year, representing a 140 percent increase compared with cases tallied at this point last year, according to the territory's health department. The Associated Press reported that more than 340 of the 549 cases have been hospitalized.

In 2023, the island nation of more than 3.2 million people had over 1,000 cases of dengue throughout the year.

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Facebook secretly spied on Snapchat usage to confuse advertisers, court docs say

Facebook secretly spied on Snapchat usage to confuse advertisers, court docs say

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Unsealed court documents have revealed more details about a secret Facebook project initially called "Ghostbusters," designed to sneakily access encrypted Snapchat usage data to give Facebook a leg up on its rival, just when Snapchat was experiencing rapid growth in 2016.

The documents were filed in a class-action lawsuit from consumers and advertisers, accusing Meta of anticompetitive behavior that blocks rivals from competing in the social media ads market.

"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who has since rebranded his company as Meta) wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

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The company building a rotating detonation engine is pushing the tech forward

A Venus Aerospace drone makes a powered flight.

Enlarge / A Venus Aerospace drone makes a powered flight. (credit: Venus Aerospace)

Venus Aerospace conducted its first powered flight last month, reaching Mach 0.9 with a drone.

The 8-foot-long vehicle was dropped from an Aero L-29 Delfín aircraft at 12,000 feet and flew under the power of a hydrogen peroxide monopropellant engine. This engine was not fired at full thrust because the location of the test flight, an unspecified range in the United States, did not permit flight faster than the speed of sound, said Andrew Duggleby, co-founder and chief technology officer of the Houston-based company.

This first powered flight came as the company announced a long-duration test firing of its rotating detonation rocket engine, an experimental approach to propulsion that could be about 15 percent more efficient than a conventional chemical rocket engine. The company's long-term ambition is to develop a commercial aircraft that can travel at Mach 9—far faster than any previous airplane. That's clearly a ways off, but these are important, if early, steps on that path.

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À partir d’avant-hierArs Technica

“The king is dead”—Claude 3 surpasses GPT-4 on Chatbot Arena for the first time

Two toy robots fighting, one knocking the other's head off.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Benj Edwards)

On Tuesday, Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus large language model (LLM) surpassed OpenAI's GPT-4 (which powers ChatGPT) for the first time on Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced leaderboard used by AI researchers to gauge the relative capabilities of AI language models. "The king is dead," tweeted software developer Nick Dobos in a post comparing GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3 Opus that has been making the rounds on social media. "RIP GPT-4."

Since GPT-4 was included in Chatbot Arena around May 10, 2023 (the leaderboard launched May 3 of that year), variations of GPT-4 have consistently been on the top of the chart until now, so its defeat in the Arena is a notable moment in the relatively short history of AI language models. One of Anthropic's smaller models, Haiku, has also been turning heads with its performance on the leaderboard.

"For the first time, the best available models—Opus for advanced tasks, Haiku for cost and efficiency—are from a vendor that isn't OpenAI," independent AI researcher Simon Willison told Ars Technica. "That's reassuring—we all benefit from a diversity of top vendors in this space. But GPT-4 is over a year old at this point, and it took that year for anyone else to catch up."

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Cows in Texas and Kansas test positive for highly pathogenic bird flu

Par : Beth Mole
Image of cows

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Peter Cade)

Wild migratory birds likely spread a deadly strain of bird flu to dairy cows in Texas and Kansas, state and federal officials announced this week.

It is believed to be the first time the virus, a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), has been found in cows in the US. Last week, officials in Minnesota confirmed finding an HPAI case in a young goat, marking the first time the virus has been found in a domestic ruminant in the US.

According to the Associated Press, officials with the Texas Animal Health Commission confirmed the flu virus is the Type A H5N1 strain, which has been ravaging bird populations around the globe for several years. The explosive ongoing spread of the virus has led to many spillover events into mammals, making epidemiologists anxious that the virus could adapt to spread widely in humans.

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SCOTUS mifepristone case: Justices focus on anti-abortion groups’ legal standing

Par : Beth Mole
Demonstrators participate in an abortion-rights rally outside the Supreme Court as the justices of the court hear oral arguments in the case of the <em>US Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine</em> on March 26, 2024 in Washington, DC.

Enlarge / Demonstrators participate in an abortion-rights rally outside the Supreme Court as the justices of the court hear oral arguments in the case of the US Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine on March 26, 2024 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Anna Moneymaker)

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday heard arguments in a case seeking to limit access to the abortion and miscarriage drug mifepristone, with a majority of justices expressing skepticism that the anti-abortion groups that brought the case have the legal standing to do so.

The case threatens to dramatically alter access to a drug that has been safely used for decades and, according to the Guttmacher Institute, was used in 63 percent of abortions documented in the health care system in 2023. But, it also has sweeping implications for the Food and Drug Administration's authority over drugs, marking the first time that courts have second-guessed the agency's expert scientific analysis and moved to restrict access to an FDA-approved drug.

As such, the case has rattled health experts, reproductive health care advocates, the FDA, and the pharmaceutical industry alike. But, based on the line of questioning in today's oral arguments, they have reason to breathe a sigh of relief.

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Thousands of phones and routers swept into proxy service, unbeknownst to users

Par : Dan Goodin
Thousands of phones and routers swept into proxy service, unbeknownst to users

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Crooks are working overtime to anonymize their illicit online activities using thousands of devices of unsuspecting users, as evidenced by two unrelated reports published Tuesday.

The first, from security firm Lumen, reports that roughly 40,000 home and office routers have been drafted into a criminal enterprise that anonymizes illicit Internet activities, with another 1,000 new devices being added each day. The malware responsible is a variant of TheMoon, a malicious code family dating back to at least 2014. In its earliest days, TheMoon almost exclusively infected Linksys E1000 series routers. Over the years it branched out to targeting the Asus WRTs, Vivotek Network Cameras, and multiple D-Link models.

In the years following its debut, TheMoon’s self-propagating behavior and growing ability to compromise a broad base of architectures enabled a growth curve that captured attention in security circles. More recently, the visibility of the Internet of Things botnet trailed off, leading many to assume it was inert. To the surprise of researchers in Lumen’s Black Lotus Lab, during a single 72-hour stretch earlier this month, TheMoon added 6,000 ASUS routers to its ranks, an indication that the botnet is as strong as it’s ever been.

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Missouri AG sues Media Matters over its X research, demands donor names

A photo of Elon Musk next to the logo for X, the social network formerly known as Twitter,.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey yesterday sued Media Matters in an attempt to protect Elon Musk and X from the nonprofit watchdog group's investigations into hate speech on the social network. Bailey's lawsuit claims that "Media Matters has used fraud to solicit donations from Missourians in order to trick advertisers into removing their advertisements from X, formerly Twitter, one of the last platforms dedicated to free speech in America."

Bailey didn't provide much detail on the alleged fraud but claimed that Media Matters is guilty of "fraudulent manipulation of data on X.com." That's apparently a reference to Media Matters reporting that X placed ads for major brands next to posts touting Hitler and Nazis. X has accused Media Matters of manipulating the site's algorithm by endlessly scrolling and refreshing.

Bailey yesterday issued an investigative demand seeking names and addresses of all Media Matters donors who live in Missouri and a range of internal communications and documents regarding the group's research on Musk and X. Bailey anticipates that Media Matters won't provide the requested materials, so he filed the lawsuit asking Cole County Circuit Court for an order to enforce the investigative demand.

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Flying coach? At least you’ll be able to watch movies on an in-seat OLED TV soon

  • This is one of the Panasonic Avionics Astrova in-flight entertainment systems, set to debut in Icelandair, Qantus, and United Airlines flights in the next couple of years. [credit: Panasonic ]

Flying on commercial airlines today might be a lot more of a pain than it used to be, but new tech is going to bring some improvement to one part of the experience—in-flight entertainment. Panasonic Avionics' brand Astrova in-flight entertainment systems are starting to roll out on commercial flights on certain airlines, promising 4K HDR TVs and other features to the backs of seats that should be a huge upgrade over the abysmal screens we normally watch in-flight movies on.

Look at most commercial airlines today, and you'll find a tiny, terrible LCD TV embedded in the seat in front of you. These HD, standard dynamic range screens have terrible contrast and poor viewing angles, and they aren't bright enough to achieve a good viewing experience when the overhead lights are on.

They're bad enough that I always bring my own hardware for flights—most recently, I took three flights with Apple's Vision Pro headset, which I plan to write about later this week. But most people just bring a tablet.

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Mozilla’s privacy service drops a provider with ties to people-search sites

Mozilla Monitor Plus dashboard

Enlarge (credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla's Monitor Plus, a service launched by the privacy-minded tech firm in February, notes on its pitch page that there is "a $240 billion industry of data brokers selling your private information for profit" and that its offering can "take back your privacy."

Mozilla's most recent move to protect privacy has been to cut out one of the key providers of Monitor Plus' people-search protections, Onerep. That comes after reporting from security reporter Brian Krebs, who uncovered Onerep CEO and founder Dimitri Shelest as the founder of "dozens of people-search services since 2010," including one, Nuwber, that still sells the very kind of "background reports" that Monitor Plus seeks to curb.

Shelest told Krebs in a statement (PDF) that he did have an ownership stake in Nuwber, but that Nuwber has "zero cross-over or information-sharing with Onerep" and that he no longer operates any other people-search sites. Shelest admitted the bad look but said that his experience with people search gave Onerep "the best tech and team in the space."

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Lawsuit from Elon Musk’s X against anti-hate speech group dismissed by US judge

A smartphone displays Elon Musk's profile on X, the app formerly known as Twitter.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Dan Kitwood )

A US judge has struck down a lawsuit brought by X against a nonprofit group that researched toxic content on the social media platform, finding the Elon Musk-owned company’s case appeared to be an attempt at “punishing” the group for exercising free speech.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate had sought to dismiss the case from X, which alleged the nonprofit unlawfully accessed and scraped X data for its studies. The CCDH found a rise in hate speech and misinformation on the platform. X had also alleged the group “cherry-picked” from posts on the platform to conduct a “scare campaign” to drive away advertisers, costing it tens of millions of dollars.

In a stinging ruling, US judge Charles Breyer in California granted the motion. “Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation, and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to surmise a plaintiff’s true purpose. Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the defendants for their speech,” he wrote in the decision.

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Elon Musk’s improbable path to making X an “everything app”

Elon Musk’s improbable path to making X an “everything app”

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | NurPhoto / Getty Images)

X used to be called Twitter, but soon it will become "the Everything App," and that day is "closer than everyone thinks," X CEO Linda Yaccarino promised in one of her first X posts of 2024.

"Nothing can slow us down," Yaccarino said.

Turning Twitter into an everything app is arguably the reason that Elon Musk purchased Twitter. He openly craved the success of the Chinese everything app WeChat, telling Twitter staff soon after purchasing the app that "you basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life, and I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success,” The Guardian reported.

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Samsung users ask, “Why does the S-Pen smell so bad?“

Par : Ron Amadeo
The Galaxy S24 line.

Enlarge / The Galaxy S24 line. (credit: Samsung)

Electric design is a field full of varying opinions and trade-offs. Companies agonize over the physical shapes of their devices and the materials used, all trying to create a high-quality, premium-feeling device that fits with the constraints of mass production. Material choices usually center around cost, feeling, and durability, but how often do manufacturers take into account smell? Samsung users are finding that if you pop out the Galaxy S24 Ultra's "S-Pen" stylus and give it a whiff like you're huffing a marker, you'll find that it... smells bad?

9to5Google found the following incredible post from Reddit user "LatifYil" titled, "Why does my s pen smell so bad?" The post has almost 250 comments of users all mostly agreeing with the post's sentiment that "the S-Pen in my Galaxy S24 Ultra absolutely reeks. Either I have a sensitive nose or this thing is being barbequed by the internals while it's unsheathed." The top-rated, very-online comment is, "Op got me to smell my pen. Can confirm it's a stinky boi."

Those describing the smell all seem to agree Samsung's stylus often smells like an electrical fire. One user writes that it's "a very burnt and plastics smell." Another says the S23 Ultra stylus "smells like new tech with a hint of burning." A more descriptive commenter says it smells like "an electric mixer that's turned on, but the beaters are jammed up and can't turn, so the motor is overheating." The S-Pen is mostly plastic but has a soft rubber tip, and a lot of users identify that soft bit as the smelly part.

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Never-before-seen data wiper may have been used by Russia against Ukraine

Par : Dan Goodin
Never-before-seen data wiper may have been used by Russia against Ukraine

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Researchers have unearthed never-before-seen wiper malware tied to the Kremlin and an operation two years ago that took out more than 10,000 satellite modems located mainly in Ukraine on the eve of Russia’s invasion of its neighboring country.

AcidPour, as researchers from security firm Sentinel One have named the new malware, has stark similarities to AcidRain, a wiper discovered in March 2022 that Viasat has confirmed was used in the attack on its modems earlier that month. Wipers are malicious applications designed to destroy stored data or render devices inoperable. Viasat said AcidRain was installed on more than 10,000 Eutelsat KA-SAT modems used by the broadband provider seven days prior to the March 2022 discovery of the wiper. AcidRain was installed on the devices after attackers gained access to the company’s private network.

Sentinel One, which also discovered AcidRain, said at the time that the earlier wiper had enough technical overlaps with malware the US government attributed to the Russian government in 2018 to make it likely that AcidRain and the 2018 malware, known as VPNFilter, were closely linked to the same team of developers. In turn, Sentinel One’s report Thursday noting the similarities between AcidRain and AcidPour provides evidence that AcidPour was also created by developers working on behalf of the Kremlin.

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World’s first global AI resolution unanimously adopted by United Nations

The United Nations building in New York.

Enlarge / The United Nations building in New York. (credit: Getty Images)

On Thursday, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously consented to adopt what some call the first global resolution on AI, reports Reuters. The resolution aims to foster the protection of personal data, enhance privacy policies, ensure close monitoring of AI for potential risks, and uphold human rights. It emerged from a proposal by the United States and received backing from China and 121 other countries.

Being a nonbinding agreement and thus effectively toothless, the resolution seems broadly popular in the AI industry. On X, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith wrote, "We fully support the @UN's adoption of the comprehensive AI resolution. The consensus reached today marks a critical step towards establishing international guardrails for the ethical and sustainable development of AI, ensuring this technology serves the needs of everyone."

The resolution, titled "Seizing the opportunities of safe, secure and trustworthy artificial intelligence systems for sustainable development," resulted from three months of negotiation, and the stakeholders involved seem pleased at the level of international cooperation. "We're sailing in choppy waters with the fast-changing technology, which means that it's more important than ever to steer by the light of our values," one senior US administration official told Reuters, highlighting the significance of this "first-ever truly global consensus document on AI."

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Choose your side in a civil war with House of the Dragon’s dueling S2 trailers

This short teaser for S2 of HBO's House of the Dragon lets you choose between two full trailers.

It's been a long wait for the second season of HBO's House of the Dragon, in which House Targaryen descends into civil war over the heir to the Iron Throne. It's set to premiere in June, and HBO is ramping up its marketing with a rather clever twist: not one official trailer, but two, each presenting the perspective of one side in the bloody conflict. And we get to choose which trailer we'd like to view—although if you're like us, you'll elect to watch both.

(Spoilers for the first season below.)

As I've written previously, HBO's House of the Dragon debuted in 2022 with a solid, promising pilot episode, and the remainder of the season lived up to that initial promise. The series is set nearly 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones and chronicles the beginning of the end of House Targaryen's reign. The primary source material is Fire and Blood, a fictional history of the Targaryen kings written by George R.R. Martin. As book readers know, those events culminated in a civil war and the extinction of the dragons—at least until Daenerys Targaryen came along.

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After appeal to Musk, X suspends accounts that outed neo-Nazi cartoonist

Par : WIRED
keyboard with hate speech key

Enlarge (credit: iStock/Getty Images)

X has locked and suspended the accounts of journalists and researchers who shared the alleged identity of a neo-Nazi cartoonist known as Stonetoss after the cartoonist appealed to site owner Elon Musk.

The incident, critics say, highlights once again how Musk has not only welcomed extremists onto his platform but has repeatedly boosted their conspiracies, engaged with their accounts, and seems to have protected them from scrutiny.

A lengthy X thread posted by the antifascist research group Anonymous Comrades Collective last week claimed that Stonetoss is a man named Hans Kristian Graebener from Spring, Texas. Stonetoss cartoons, which feature simple and colorful imagery coupled with racist, homophobic, and antisemitic language, have become hugely popular among right-wing communities since they were first published at least seven years ago.

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Unpatchable vulnerability in Apple chip leaks secret encryption keys

Par : Dan Goodin
Unpatchable vulnerability in Apple chip leaks secret encryption keys

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Apple)

A newly discovered vulnerability baked into Apple’s M-series of chips allows attackers to extract secret keys from Macs when they perform widely used cryptographic operations, academic researchers have revealed in a paper published Thursday.

The flaw—a side channel allowing end-to-end key extractions when Apple chips run implementations of widely used cryptographic protocols—can’t be patched directly because it stems from the microarchitectural design of the silicon itself. Instead, it can only be mitigated by building defenses into third-party cryptographic software that could drastically degrade M-series performance when executing cryptographic operations, particularly on the earlier M1 and M2 generations. The vulnerability can be exploited when the targeted cryptographic operation and the malicious application with normal user system privileges run on the same CPU cluster.

Beware of hardware optimizations

The threat resides in the chips’ data memory-dependent prefetcher, a hardware optimization that predicts the memory addresses of data that running code is likely to access in the near future. By loading the contents into the CPU cache before it’s actually needed, the DMP, as the feature is abbreviated, reduces latency between the main memory and the CPU, a common bottleneck in modern computing. DMPs are a relatively new phenomenon found only in M-series chips and Intel's 13th-generation Raptor Lake microarchitecture, although older forms of prefetchers have been common for years.

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Antibodies against anything? AI tool adapted to make them

A ribbon-based string that represents the structure of the backbone of a protein.

Enlarge

Antibodies are incredibly useful. Lots of recently developed drugs rely on antibodies that bind to and block the activity of specific proteins. They're also great research tools, allowing us to identify proteins within cells, purify both proteins and cells, and so on. Therapeutic antibodies have provided our first defenses against emerging viruses like Ebola and SARS-CoV-2.

But making antibodies can be a serious pain, because it involves getting animals to make antibodies for us. You need to purify the protein you want the antibodies to stick to, inject it into an animal, and get the animal to produce antibodies as part of an immune response. From there, you either purify the antibodies or purify the cells that produce them. It's time-consuming, doesn't always work, and sometimes produces antibodies with properties that you're not looking for.

But thanks to developments in AI-based protein predictions, all that hassle might become unnecessary. A recently developed diffusion model for protein structures has been adapted to antibody production and has successfully designed antibodies against flu virus proteins.

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New EPA, DOE fuel regs give automakers longer to reduce CO2 emissions

An EV charger and a fuel container on a balance

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

This week, the US Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency have published new fuel efficiency rules that will go into effect in 2026. The rules favor both battery-electric vehicles and also plug-in hybrid EVs, but not to the degree as proposed by each agency last April.

Those would have required automakers to sell four times as many electric vehicles as they do now. This was met with a rare display of solidarity across the industry—automakers, workers, and dealers all called on the White House to slow its approach.

Under the 2023 proposals, the DOE would change the way that Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations are calculated for model years 2027–2032 (which would take place from partway through calendar year 2026 until sometime in calendar year 2031), and the EPA would implement tougher vehicle emissions standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles for the same time period.

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Alien: Romulus teaser has all the right elements to pique our interest

The long-standing science fiction franchise looks to be returning to its horror roots with Alien: Romulus.

We learned way back in 2019 that horror director Fede Alvarez (Don't Breathe, Evil Dead) would be tackling a new standalone film in the Alien franchise. Personally, I had mixed feelings on the heels of the disappointing Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017). But the involvement of Alvarez was a hint that perhaps the franchise was returning to its stripped-down space horror roots. Now we have the first teaser for Alien: Romulus, and yep—that seems to be the case. And that's very good news for those of us who adored the original Alien (1979) and its terrifying sequel, Aliens (1986).

(Spoilers for Alien and Aliens below.)

Alien: Romulus is set between the events of Alien and Aliens. That is, after Ellen Ripley, the sole survivor of the Nostromo, destroyed the killer Xenomorph and launched herself into space in the ship's lifeboat—along with the ginger cat, Jonesy—and before she woke up after 57 years in hypersleep and battled more Xenomorphs while protecting the young orphan, Newt. Per the official premise: "While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe."

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Entirely accurate 3D-printed Mac Plus built in these 29 painstaking steps

Booted Mac replica with MacPaint open,

Enlarge (credit: Kevin Noki)

Have you ever worked on a hobby project where modifying and compiling the source code for a Linux-based emulator was possibly the easiest and most straightforward part of the whole thing?

Kevin Noki really, really wanted a functioning Macintosh Plus, complete with a functioning, auto-ejecting disk drive that it could boot from. The German maker already had a Mac Plus (1Mb) from eBay, but it had both a busted power supply and floppy drive. Rather than carve out the busted Plus' one-of-a-kind internals and slap a Raspberry Pi in there like some DIY slacker, Noki went… a different path.

47 minutes and 25 seconds of a tour-de-force of modern maker technology.

Noki 3D-printed his own Macintosh, the "Brewintosh." I would like you to consider what you think that last sentence means and then wipe your expectations clean. I have watched the entire 48-minute journey of Noki's Brewintosh, which is both very soothing on some ASMR-adjacent gut level and also low-key maddening for the way it plays down all the individual accomplishments along the way. Any one of the Brewintosh's pieces would be my entire weekend, and my spouse would not enjoy my mood while I was sunk into it.

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Darkness rises in an age of light in first trailer for Star Wars: The Acolyte

Amandla Stenberg stars as a former padawan turned dangerous warrior in Star Wars: The Acolyte.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Galactic Republic and its Jedi masters symbolized the epitome of enlightenment and peace. Then came the inevitable downfall and outbreak of war as the Sith, who embraced the Dark Side of the Force, came to power. Star Wars: The Acolyte is a forthcoming new series on Disney+ that will explore those final days of the Republic as the seeds of its destruction were sown—and the streaming platform just dropped the first trailer.

The eight-episode series was created by Leslye Headland, who co-created Russian Doll with Natasha Lyonne and Amy Poehler. It's set at the end of the High Republic Era, about a century before the events of The Phantom Menace. Apparently Headland rather cheekily pitched The Acolyte as "Frozen meets Kill Bill," which is an intriguing combination. She drew on wuxia martial arts films for inspiration, much like George Lucas was originally inspired by Westerns and the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa.

(Some spoilers for the prequel trilogy below.)

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Health experts plead for unvaxxed Americans to get measles shot as cases rise

Par : Beth Mole
A view from a hospital as children receiving medical treatment, in capital Kabul, Afghanistan on April 18, 2022. More than 130 children have died from the measles in Afghanistan since the beginning of this year.

Enlarge / A view from a hospital as children receiving medical treatment, in capital Kabul, Afghanistan on April 18, 2022. More than 130 children have died from the measles in Afghanistan since the beginning of this year. (credit: Getty | Sayed Khodaiberdi Sadat)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Medical Association sent out separate but similar pleas on Monday for unvaccinated Americans to get vaccinated against the extremely contagious measles virus as vaccination rates have slipped, cases are rising globally and nationally, and the spring-break travel period is beginning.

In the first 12 weeks of 2024, US measles cases have already matched and likely exceeded the case total for all of 2023. According to the CDC, there were 58 measles cases reported from 17 states as of March 14. But media tallies indicate there have been more cases since then, with at least 60 cases now in total, according to CBS News. In 2023, there were 58 cases in 20 states.

"As evident from the confirmed measles cases reported in 17 states so far this year, when individuals are not immunized as a matter of personal preference or misinformation, they put themselves and others at risk of disease—including children too young to be vaccinated, cancer patients, and other immunocompromised people," AMA President Jesse Ehrenfeld said in a statement urging vaccination Monday.

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Nvidia unveils Blackwell B200, the “world’s most powerful chip” designed for AI

The GB200 "superchip" covered with a fanciful blue explosion.

Enlarge / The GB200 "superchip" covered with a fanciful blue explosion. (credit: Nvidia / Benj Edwards)

On Monday, Nvidia unveiled the Blackwell B200 tensor core chip—the company's most powerful single-chip GPU, with 208 billion transistors—which Nvidia claims can reduce AI inference operating costs (such as running ChatGPT) and energy consumption by up to 25 times compared to the H100. The company also unveiled the GB200, a "superchip" that combines two B200 chips and a Grace CPU for even more performance.

The news came as part of Nvidia's annual GTC conference, which is taking place this week at the San Jose Convention Center. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered the keynote Monday afternoon. "We need bigger GPUs," Huang said during his keynote. The Blackwell platform will allow the training of trillion-parameter AI models that will make today's generative AI models look rudimentary in comparison, he said. For reference, OpenAI's GPT-3, launched in 2020, included 175 billion parameters. Parameter count is a rough indicator of AI model complexity.

Nvidia named the Blackwell architecture after David Harold Blackwell, a mathematician who specialized in game theory and statistics and was the first Black scholar inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. The platform introduces six technologies for accelerated computing, including a second-generation Transformer Engine, fifth-generation NVLink, RAS Engine, secure AI capabilities, and a decompression engine for accelerated database queries.

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Thomas Stafford, who flew to the Moon and docked with Soyuz, dies at 93

Apollo commander Tom Stafford (left) with Soyuz commander Alexei Leonov during the Apollo-Soyuz mission in July 1975.

Enlarge / Apollo commander Tom Stafford (left) with Soyuz commander Alexei Leonov during the Apollo-Soyuz mission in July 1975. (credit: NASA)

Former NASA astronaut Thomas Stafford, a three-star Air Force general known for a historic handshake in space with a Soviet cosmonaut nearly 50 years ago, died Monday in Florida. He was 93.

Stafford was perhaps the most accomplished astronaut of his era who never walked on the Moon. He flew in space four times, helping pilot the first rendezvous with another crewed spacecraft in orbit in 1966 and taking NASA's Apollo lunar landing craft on a final test run before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon in 1969.

By his own account, one of the greatest moments in Stafford's career came in 1975, when he commanded the final Apollo mission—not to the Moon but to low-Earth orbit—and linked up with a Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying two Soviet cosmonauts. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) planted the seeds for a decades-long partnership in space between the United States and Russia, culminating in the International Space Station, where US and Russian crews still work together despite a collapse in relations back on Earth.

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Playtron’s wildly ambitious gaming OS aims to unite stores, lure “core casuals”

Mock-up of a potential Playtron device

Enlarge / This isn't what the first PlaytronOS-powered device will look like. That could be your Steam Deck, a 5G device from your cell carrier, or maybe your car. (credit: Playtron)

The Steam Deck's OS is purpose-built for handheld gaming, but it's confined to one device, unless you're willing to head out to the bleeding edge. Beyond SteamOS, there is Windows, which can let down ambitious Deck-likes, there is the Nintendo Switch, and there are Android-based devices that are a lot like Android phones. This setup has got at least one company saying, in infomercial tones, that there has got to be a better way.

That company is Playtron, a new software startup that aims to fix that setup with a Linux-based gaming OS that's tied to no particular game store or platform. Playtron has $10 million, coders from open source projects like ChimeraOS and Heroic Games Launcher, and the former CEO of Cyanogen. With that, it aims to have "Playtron-native devices shipping worldwide in 2025," and to capture the 1 billion "core casual" gamers they see as under-served.

Demo of Playtron running on a Lenovo Legion Go, uploaded by Playtron CEO Kirk McMaster.

What devices will Playtron use to serve them? Some of them might be Steam Decks, as you will "soon be able to install Playtron on your favorite handheld PC," according to Playtron's ambitious, somewhat scattershot single-page website. Some might be "Playtron-powered 5G devices coming soon to markets around the world." Really, though, Playtron aims to provide a gaming platform to any device with a CPU and a screen, be it desktop or mobile, ARM or x86, TV or car.

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Elon Musk’s xAI releases Grok source and weights, taunting OpenAI

An AI-generated image released by xAI during the launch of Grok

Enlarge / An AI-generated image released by xAI during the open-weights launch of Grok-1. (credit: xAI)

On Sunday, Elon Musk's AI firm xAI released the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, a large language model designed to compete with the models that power OpenAI's ChatGPT. The open-weights release through GitHub and BitTorrent comes as Musk continues to criticize (and sue) rival OpenAI for not releasing its AI models in an open way.

Announced in November, Grok is an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT that is available to X Premium+ subscribers who pay $16 a month to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. At its heart is a mixture-of-experts LLM called "Grok-1," clocking in at 314 billion parameters. As a reference, GPT-3 included 175 billion parameters. Parameter count is a rough measure of an AI model's complexity, reflecting its potential for generating more useful responses.

xAI is releasing the base model of Grok-1, which is not fine-tuned for a specific task, so it is likely not the same model that X uses to power its Grok AI assistant. "This is the raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pre-training phase, which concluded in October 2023," writes xAI on its release page. "This means that the model is not fine-tuned for any specific application, such as dialogue," meaning it's not necessarily shipping as a chatbot. But it will do next-token prediction, meaning it will complete a sentence (or other text prompt) with its estimation of the most relevant string of text.

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Public officials can block haters—but only sometimes, SCOTUS rules

Public officials can block haters—but only sometimes, SCOTUS rules

Enlarge (credit: Larry Crain | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

There are some circumstances where government officials are allowed to block people from commenting on their social media pages, the Supreme Court ruled Friday.

According to the Supreme Court, the key question is whether officials are speaking as private individuals or on behalf of the state when posting online. Issuing two opinions, the Supreme Court declined to set a clear standard for when personal social media use constitutes state speech, leaving each unique case to be decided by lower courts.

Instead, SCOTUS provided a test for courts to decide first if someone is or isn’t speaking on behalf of the state on their social media pages, and then if they actually have authority to act on what they post online.

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Deadly morel mushroom outbreak highlights big gaps in fungi knowledge

Par : Beth Mole
Mature morel mushrooms in a greenhouse at an agriculture garden in Zhenbeibu Town of Xixia District of Yinchuan, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.

Enlarge / Mature morel mushrooms in a greenhouse at an agriculture garden in Zhenbeibu Town of Xixia District of Yinchuan, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. (credit: Getty | Xinhua/Wang Peng)

True morel mushrooms are widely considered a prized delicacy, often pricey and surely safe to eat. But these spongey, earthy forest gems have a mysterious dark side—one that, on occasion, can turn deadly, highlighting just how little we know about morels and fungi generally.

On Thursday, Montana health officials published an outbreak analysis of poisonings linked to the honeycombed fungi in March and April of last year. The outbreak sickened 51 people who ate at the same restaurant, sending four to the emergency department. Three were hospitalized and two died. Though the health officials didn't name the restaurant in their report, state and local health departments at the time identified it as Dave’s Sushi in Bozeman. The report is published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The outbreak coincided with the sushi restaurant introducing a new item: a "special sushi roll" that contained salmon and morel mushrooms. The morels were a new menu ingredient for Dave's. They were served two ways: On April 8, the morels were served partially cooked, with a hot, boiled sauce poured over the raw mushrooms and left to marinate for 75 minutes; and on April 17, they were served uncooked and cold-marinated.

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US government agencies demand fixable ice cream machines

Taylor ice cream machine, with churning spindle removed by hand.

Enlarge / Taylor's C709 Soft Serve Freezer isn't so much mechanically complicated as it is a software and diagnostic trap for anyone without authorized access. (credit: iFixit/YouTube)

Many devices have been made difficult or financially nonviable to repair, whether by design or because of a lack of parts, manuals, or specialty tools. Machines that make ice cream, however, seem to have a special place in the hearts of lawmakers. Those machines are often broken and locked down for only the most profitable repairs.

The Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust division of the Department of Justice have asked the US Copyright Office (PDF) to exempt "commercial soft serve machines" from the anti-circumvention rules of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The governing bodies also submitted proprietary diagnostic kits, programmable logic controllers, and enterprise IT devices for DMCA exemptions.

"In each case, an exemption would give users more choices for third-party and self-repair and would likely lead to cost savings and a better return on investment in commercial and industrial equipment," the joint comment states. Those markets would also see greater competition in the repair market, and companies would be prevented from using DMCA laws to enforce monopolies on repair, according to the comment.

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SpaceX celebrates major progress on the third flight of Starship

SpaceX's Starship soars through the sky over South Texas, powered by 33 methane-burning Raptor engines.

Enlarge / SpaceX's Starship soars through the sky over South Texas, powered by 33 methane-burning Raptor engines. (credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica)

SpaceX's new-generation Starship rocket, the most powerful and largest launcher ever built, flew halfway around the world following liftoff from South Texas on Thursday, accomplishing a key demonstration of its ability to carry heavyweight payloads into low-Earth orbit.

SpaceX's third towering Starship rocket, standing some 397 feet (121 meters) tall and wider than the fuselage of a 747 jumbo jet, lifted off at 8:25 am CDT (13:25 UTC) Thursday from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility on the Texas Gulf Coast east of Brownsville. SpaceX delayed the liftoff time by nearly an hour and a half to wait for boats to clear out of restricted waters near the launch base.

Hitting its marks

The successful launch builds on two Starship test flights last year that achieved some, but not all, of their objectives and appears to put the privately funded rocket program on course to begin launching satellites, allowing SpaceX to ramp up the already-blistering pace of Starlink deployments.

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2024 Lincoln Nautilus first drive: A sea change for Lincoln’s middle child

A silver Lincoln Nautilus next to a sign that says Palm Springs

Enlarge / The Lincoln Nautilus is now in its fourth generation. (credit: Lincoln)

PALM SPRINGS, Calif.—Lincoln is one of those car companies that for years will give the impression that the people in charge are asleep at the proverbial wheel and then all of a sudden will debut a total knockout. It’s happened a few times throughout the brand’s long history, most recently with the fourth-generation Navigator. The introduction of the 2018 Navigator also sparked a huge overhaul in design and technology for the brand that catapulted it from “decent free rental car upgrade” to a maker of luxury SUVs that people might want to buy. The 2024 Lincoln Nautilus is just such an SUV.

In the hierarchy of Lincoln models, the Nautilus sits neatly between the Aviator and the smaller Corsair. It’s arguably one of the best looking of the current crop of Lincolns, and it’s positioned to compete with the likes of the Lexus RX, the Cadillac XT6 and Volvo’s XC60, among others. But does it actually compete? Or is it simply another car for the Enterprises and Hertzes of the world?

The 2024 Nautilus is available in two flavors: a purely internal combustion-powered version with a 250 hp (186 kW) turbocharged inline-four that also puts out 280 lb-ft (380 Nm) of torque and is paired with an eight-speed automatic transmission; and a much more interesting hybrid version, which offers up 310 combined hp (231 kW) that's paired with a CVT transmission. The Nautilus is only available with all-wheel drive.

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Death by neti pot: Why you shouldn’t use tap water to clean your sinuses

Par : Beth Mole
Death by neti pot: Why you shouldn’t use tap water to clean your sinuses

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Thomas Trutschel)

Just because something is safe to eat or drink doesn't mean it's safe to squirt deep inside your face, like your sinus cavities and eye sockets, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would like to remind you.

In a study published Wednesday in Emerging Infectious Diseases, CDC researchers looked at 10 cases where people developed life-threatening amoeba infections after cleaning out their sinuses, often with tap water via neti pots and squirt bottles. Such infections are relatively rare, but the number of people at risk of them is perhaps much greater than one might expect.

In a survey study published last year, researchers found that an alarming number of people in the US were completely misinformed about the safety of tap water for home medical uses. For instance, 33 percent of people incorrectly believed that US tap water is sterile, containing no living bacteria or other germs. Moreover, 62 percent of people wrongly thought it was safe to use tap water for rinsing your sinuses, 50 percent said it was safe for rinsing contact lenses, and 42 percent thought it was safe for cleaning respiratory devices.

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Bitcoin Fog operator convicted of laundering $400M in bitcoins on darknet

Bitcoin Fog operator convicted of laundering $400M in bitcoins on darknet

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

A US federal jury has convicted a dual Russian-Swedish national, Roman Sterlingov, for operating Bitcoin Fog, "the longest-running bitcoin money laundering service on the darknet," the Department of Justice announced yesterday.

Sterlingov ran Bitcoin Fog from 2011 to 2021, moving over 1.2 million bitcoin (approximately $400 million) before he was arrested, the DOJ said. In the press release, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said that the DOJ was "relentless" in efforts to "painstakingly" trace bitcoin "through the blockchain to hold Sterlingov and his Bitcoin Fog enterprise to account."

“Roman Sterlingov thought he could use the shadows of the Internet to launder hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoin without getting caught," Monaco said. "But he was wrong.”

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Blue cheese shows off new colors, but the taste largely remains the same

Scientists at University of the Nottingham have discovered how to create different colours of blue cheese.

Enlarge / Scientists at the University of Nottingham have discovered how to create different colors of blue cheese. (credit: University of Nottingham)

Gourmands are well aware of the many varieties of blue cheese, known by the blue-green veins that ripple through the cheese. Different kinds of blue cheese have distinctive flavor profiles: they can be mild or strong, sweet or salty, for example. Soon we might be able to buy blue cheeses that belie the name and sport veins of different colors: perhaps yellow-green, reddish-brown-pink, or lighter/darker shades of blue, according to a recent paper published in the journal Science of Food.

“We’ve been interested in cheese fungi for over 10 years, and traditionally when you develop mould-ripened cheeses, you get blue cheeses such as Stilton, Roquefort, and Gorgonzola, which use fixed strains of fungi that are blue-green in color," said co-author Paul Dyer of the University of Nottingham of this latest research. "We wanted to see if we could develop new strains with new flavors and appearances."

Blue cheese has been around for a very long time. Legend has it that a young boy left his bread and ewe's milk cheese in a nearby cave to pursue a lovely young lady he'd spotted in the distance. Months later, he came back to the cave and found it had molded into Roquefort. It's a fanciful tale, but scholars think the basic idea is sound: people used to store cheeses in caves because their temperature and moisture levels were especially hospitable to harmless molds. That was bolstered by a 2021 analysis of paleofeces that found evidence that Iron Age salt miners in Hallstatt (Austria) between 800 and 400 BCE were already eating blue cheese and quaffing beer.

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Raspberry Pi-powered AI bike light detects cars, alerts bikers to bad drivers

Copilot mounted to the rear of a road bike

(credit: Velo AI)

Whether or not autonomous vehicles ever work out, the effort put into using small cameras and machine-learning algorithms to detect cars could pay off big for an unexpected group: cyclists.

Velo AI is a firm cofounded by Clark Haynes and Micol Marchetti-Bowick, both PhDs with backgrounds in robotics, movement prediction, and Uber's (since sold-off) autonomous vehicle work. Copilot, which started as a "pandemic passion project" for Haynes, is essentially car-focused artificial intelligence and machine learning stuffed into a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and boxed up in a bike-friendly size and shape.

A look into the computer vision of the Copilot.

While car-detecting devices exist for bikes, including the Garmin Varia, they're largely radar-based. That means they can't distinguish between vehicles of different sizes and only know that something is approaching you, not, for example, how much space it will allow when passing.

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Bill that could ban TikTok passes in House despite constitutional concerns

Bill that could ban TikTok passes in House despite constitutional concerns

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu / Contributor | Anadolu)

On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives passed a bill with a vote of 352–65 that could block TikTok in the US. Fifteen Republicans and 50 Democrats voted in opposition, and one Democrat voted present, CNN reported.

TikTok is not happy. A spokesperson told Ars, "This process was secret and the bill was jammed through for one reason: it's a ban. We are hopeful that the Senate will consider the facts, listen to their constituents, and realize the impact on the economy, 7 million small businesses, and the 170 million Americans who use our service."

Lawmakers insist that the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act is not a ban. Instead, they claim the law gives TikTok a choice: either divest from ByteDance's China-based owners or face the consequences of TikTok being cut off in the US.

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Chicago battles measles with calls for vaccination—in contrast with Florida

Par : Beth Mole
A brightly colored transmission microscope image of measles viruses.

Enlarge / A brightly colored transmission microscope image of measles viruses. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

A team of health experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention arrived in Chicago on Tuesday as officials identified three new measles cases amid a flare-up of cases at a migrant shelter in the city's Pilsen neighborhood.

So far, there have been seven cases identified at the Halsted Street shelter. In addition to the three cases identified today, there were two young children, one recovered and one hospitalized in good condition as of March 10, and according to an announcement on Monday, March 11, two adults who were reported in good condition.

The seven cases come just days after the city's health department announced a measles case in a Chicago resident with no recent travel outside of the city and no reported connection with the shelter. The case, announced on March 7, was the first measles case identified in the city since 2019, officials noted. It remains unclear how that resident contracted the highly infectious virus, though the health department noted that the person had been in contact with domestic and international travelers. The person was said to be recovering well at home, and their infectious period ended on March 6.

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Image-scraping Midjourney bans rival AI firm for scraping images

A burglar with flash light and papers in business office. Exactly like scraping files from Discord.

Enlarge / A burglar with a flashlight and papers in a business office—exactly like scraping files from Discord. (credit: Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Midjourney banned all employees from image synthesis rival Stability AI from its service indefinitely after it detected "botnet-like" activity suspected to be a Stability employee attempting to scrape prompt and image pairs in bulk. Midjourney advocate Nick St. Pierre tweeted about the announcement, which came via Midjourney's official Discord channel.

Prompts are the written instructions (like "a cat in a car holding a can of a beer") used by generative AI models such as Midjourney and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3) to synthesize images. Having prompt and image pairs could potentially help the training or fine-tuning of a rival AI image generator model.

Bot activity that took place around midnight on March 2 caused a 24-hour outage for the commercial image generator service. Midjourney linked several paid accounts with a Stability AI data team employee trying to "grab prompt and image pairs." Midjourney then made a decision to ban all Stability AI employees from the service indefinitely. It also indicated a new policy: "aggressive automation or taking down the service results in banning all employees of the responsible company."

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Op-ed: Charges against journalist Tim Burke are a hack job

Op-ed: Charges against journalist Tim Burke are a hack job

Enlarge (credit: natasaadzic/Getty)

Caitlin Vogus is the deputy director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation and a First Amendment lawyer. Jennifer Stisa Granick is the surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. The opinions in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of Ars Technica.

Imagine a journalist finds a folder on a park bench, opens it, and sees a telephone number inside. She dials the number. A famous rapper answers and spews a racist rant. If no one gave her permission to open the folder and the rapper’s telephone number was unlisted, should the reporter go to jail for publishing what she heard?

If that sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is. And yet, add in a computer and the Internet, and that’s basically what a newly unsealed federal indictment accuses Florida journalist Tim Burke of doing when he found and disseminated outtakes of Tucker Carlson’s Fox News interview with Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, going on the first of many antisemitic diatribes.

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These scientists built their own Stone Age tools to figure out how they were used

Testing replica Stone Age tools with a bit of wood-scraping.

Enlarge / Testing replica Stone Age tools with a bit of wood-scraping. (credit: A. Iwase et al., 2024/Tokyo Metropolitan University)

When Japanese scientists wanted to learn more about how ground stone tools dating back to the Early Upper Paleolithic might have been used, they decided to build their own replicas of adzes, axes, and chisels and used those tools to perform tasks that might have been typical for that era. The resulting fractures and wear enabled them to develop new criteria for identifying the likely functions of ancient tools, according to a recent paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. If these kinds of traces were indeed found on genuine Stone Age tools, it would be evidence that humans had been working with wood and honing techniques significantly earlier than previously believed.

The development of tools and techniques for woodworking purposes started out simple, with the manufacture of cruder tools like the spears and throwing sticks common in the early Stone Age. Later artifacts dating back to Mesolithic and Neolithic time periods were more sophisticated, as people learned how to use polished stone tools to make canoes, bows, and wells and to build houses. Researchers typically date the emergence of those stone tools to about 10,000 years ago. However, archaeologists have found lots of stone artifacts with ground edges dating as far back as 60,000 to 30,000 years ago. But it's unclear how those tools might have been used.

So Akira Iwase of Tokyo Metropolitan University and co-authors made their own replicas of adzes and axes out of three raw materials common to the region between 38,000 and 30,000 years ago: semi-nephrite rocks, hornfels rocks, and tuff rocks. They used a stone hammer and anvil to create various long oval shapes and polished the edges with either a coarse-grained sandstone or a medium-grained tuff. There were three types of replica tools: adze-types, with the working edge oriented perpendicular to the long axis of a bent handle; axe-types, with a working edge parallel to the bent handle's long axis; and chisel-types, in which a stone tool was placed at the end of a straight handle.

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Matrix multiplication advancement could lead to faster, more efficient AI models

Futuristic huge technology tunnel and binary data.

Enlarge / When you do math on a computer, you fly through a numerical tunnel like this—figuratively, of course. (credit: Getty Images)

Computer scientists have discovered a new way to multiply large matrices faster than ever before by eliminating a previously unknown inefficiency, reports Quanta Magazine. This could eventually accelerate AI models like ChatGPT, which rely heavily on matrix multiplication to function. The findings, presented in two recent papers, have led to what is reported to be the biggest improvement in matrix multiplication efficiency in over a decade.

Multiplying two rectangular number arrays, known as matrix multiplication, plays a crucial role in today's AI models, including speech and image recognition, chatbots from every major vendor, AI image generators, and video synthesis models like Sora. Beyond AI, matrix math is so important to modern computing (think image processing and data compression) that even slight gains in efficiency could lead to computational and power savings.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) excel in handling matrix multiplication tasks because of their ability to process many calculations at once. They break down large matrix problems into smaller segments and solve them concurrently using an algorithm.

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Russia’s Starlink use sparks probe into SpaceX compliance with US sanctions

A Starlink satellite dish sits on the ground outside.

Enlarge / A Starlink terminal used by the Ukraine army for drone operations in May 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Pacific Press )

Democratic lawmakers are probing SpaceX over Russia's reported use of Starlink in Ukraine, saying that recent developments raise questions about SpaceX's "compliance with US sanctions and export controls."

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk last month denied what he called "false news reports [that] claim that SpaceX is selling Starlink terminals to Russia," saying that, "to the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia." But Musk's statement didn't satisfy US Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), who sent a letter to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell yesterday.

"Starlink is an invaluable resource for Ukrainians in their fight against Russia's brutal and illegitimate invasion. It is alarming that Russia may be obtaining and using your technology to coordinate attacks against Ukrainian troops in illegally occupied regions in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, potentially in violation of US sanctions and export controls," Raskin and Garcia wrote.

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Rooster Teeth, home of Red Vs. Blue and RWBY, shutting down after 21 years

Halo-helmeted greeter at RTX festival

Enlarge / Near the height of its powers in 2018, Rooster Teeth's annual RTX conference was drawing more than 62,000 people to Austin, Texas, each year. (credit: Nathan Mattise)

Rooster Teeth, a studio that pioneered machinima with its Red vs. Blue series and went on to develop a fandom-focused stable of shows, videos, and podcasts, is being shut down by parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) was unsuccessful in trying to sell the company as a whole, according to a company memo obtained by Variety (and later published on Rooster Teeth’s site). Rooster Teeth's general manager pinned the closure on "challenges facing digital media resulting from fundamental shifts in consumer behavior and monetization across platforms, advertising, and patronage."

WBD is still looking to sell certain Rooster Teeth series' backlogs and rights, including RWBY, Red vs. Blue, and Gen:Lock, an animated mecha series backed by actor Michael B. Jordan. WBD is also looking to offload the company's Roost podcast network.

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Anthropic’s Claude 3 causes stir by seeming to realize when it was being tested

A 3D rendering of a toy robot with a light bulb over its head in front of a brick wall.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Monday, Anthropic prompt engineer Alex Albert caused a small stir in the AI community when he tweeted about a scenario related to Claude 3 Opus, the largest version of a new large language model launched on Monday. Albert shared a story from internal testing of Opus where the model seemingly demonstrated a type of "metacognition" or self-awareness during a "needle-in-the-haystack" evaluation, leading to both curiosity and skepticism online.

Metacognition in AI refers to the ability of an AI model to monitor or regulate its own internal processes. It's similar to a form of self-awareness, but calling it that is usually seen as too anthropomorphizing, since there is no "self" in this case. Machine-learning experts do not think that current AI models possess a form of self-awareness like humans. Instead, the models produce humanlike output, and that sometimes triggers a perception of self-awareness that seems to imply a deeper form of intelligence behind the curtain.

In the now-viral tweet, Albert described a test to measure Claude's recall ability. It's a relatively standard test in large language model (LLM) testing that involves inserting a target sentence (the "needle") into a large block of text or documents (the "haystack") and asking if the AI model can find the needle. Researchers do this test to see if the large language model can accurately pull information from a very large processing memory (called a context window), which in this case is about 200,000 tokens (fragments of words).

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Elon Musk sued by former Twitter CEO over refusal to pay $57M severance

A smartphone displays Elon Musk's profile on X, the app formerly known as Twitter.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Dan Kitwood )

Elon Musk and X Corp. were sued yesterday by four former Twitter executives who say they were cheated out of more than $128 million in severance when Musk bought the social network and fired them.

Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal, former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, and former General Counsel Sean Edgett filed the lawsuit in US District Court for the Northern District of California. They say they are owed one year's salary, stock awards, and health insurance premiums.

"If anyone around Musk had been willing to tell him the truth, he would have learned that his scheme to deny Plaintiffs their contractual severance payments was a pointless effort that would not withstand legal scrutiny," the lawsuit said.

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Hackers exploited Windows 0-day for 6 months after Microsoft knew of it

Par : Dan Goodin
The word ZERO-DAY is hidden amidst a screen filled with ones and zeroes.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Hackers backed by the North Korean government gained a major win when Microsoft left a Windows zero-day unpatched for six months after learning it was under active exploitation.

Even after Microsoft patched the vulnerability last month, the company made no mention that the North Korean threat group Lazarus had been using the vulnerability since at least August to install a stealthy rootkit on vulnerable computers. The vulnerability provided an easy and stealthy means for malware that had already gained administrative system rights to interact with the Windows kernel. Lazarus used the vulnerability for just that. Even so, Microsoft has long said that such admin-to-kernel elevations don’t represent the crossing of a security boundary, a possible explanation for the time Microsoft took to fix the vulnerability.

A rootkit “holy grail”

“When it comes to Windows security, there is a thin line between admin and kernel,” Jan Vojtěšek, a researcher with security firm Avast, explained last week. “Microsoft’s security servicing criteria have long asserted that ‘[a]dministrator-to-kernel is not a security boundary,’ meaning that Microsoft reserves the right to patch admin-to-kernel vulnerabilities at its own discretion. As a result, the Windows security model does not guarantee that it will prevent an admin-level attacker from directly accessing the kernel.”

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