Cruise failed to disclose disturbing details of self-driving car crash

Enlarge / A Cruise robotaxi test vehicle in San Francisco. (credit: Cruise)

A law firm hired by the General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary Cruise to investigate the company’s response to a gruesome San Francisco crash last year found that the company failed to fully disclose disturbing details to regulators, the tech company said today in a blog post. The incident in October led California regulators to suspend Cruise’s license to operate driverless vehicles in San Francisco.

The new report by law firm Quinn Emanuel says that Cruise failed to tell California’s Department of Motor Vehicles that after striking a pedestrian knocked into its path by a human-driven vehicle, the autonomous car pulled out of traffic—dragging her some 20 feet. Cruise said it had accepted the firm’s version of events, as well as its recommendations.

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The life and times of Cozy Bear, the Russian hackers who just hit Microsoft and HPE

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) said Wednesday that Kremlin-backed actors hacked into the email accounts of its security personnel and other employees last May—and maintained surreptitious access until December. The disclosure was the second revelation of a major corporate network breach by the hacking group in five days.

The hacking group that hit HPE is the same one that Microsoft said Friday broke into its corporate network in November and monitored email accounts of senior executives and security team members until being driven out earlier this month. Microsoft tracks the group as Midnight Blizzard. (Under the company’s recently retired threat actor naming convention, which was based on chemical elements, the group was known as Nobelium.) But it is perhaps better known by the name Cozy Bear—though researchers have also dubbed it APT29, the Dukes, Cloaked Ursa, and Dark Halo.

“On December 12, 2023, Hewlett Packard Enterprise was notified that a suspected nation-state actor, believed to be the threat actor Midnight Blizzard, the state-sponsored actor also known as Cozy Bear, had gained unauthorized access to HPE’s cloud-based email environment,” company lawyers wrote in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “The Company, with assistance from external cybersecurity experts, immediately activated our response process to investigate, contain, and remediate the incident, eradicating the activity. Based on our investigation, we now believe that the threat actor accessed and exfiltrated data beginning in May 2023 from a small percentage of HPE mailboxes belonging to individuals in our cybersecurity, go-to-market, business segments, and other functions.”

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Rocket Report: Iran reaches orbit; Chinese firm achieves impressive landing test

Enlarge / First and second stages of Blue Origin's "New Glenn" test vehicle. (credit: Blue Origin)

Welcome to Edition 6.28 of the Rocket Report! There's a lot going on in the world of launch as always, but this week I want to take this space for a personal message. I have just announced the forthcoming publication of my second book, REENTRY, on the Falcon 9 rocket, Dragon spacecraft, and development of reusable launch. Full details here. I worked very hard to get the inside story.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Europe seeks to support small launch companies. The European Space Agency and European Commission have selected five launch companies to participate in a new program to provide flight opportunities for new technologies, a sign of a greater role the European Union intends to play in launch, Space News reports. The effort seeks to stimulate demand for European launch services by allowing companies to compete for missions in the European Union’s In-Orbit Demonstration and Validation technology program. Proposals for the program's first phase are due to ESA at the end of February.

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Here’s the production version of Porsche’s first electric Macan SUV

Enlarge / On the left, the 2024 Porsche Macan 4, on the right, the 2024 Porsche Macan Turbo. Both are electric. (credit: Porsche)

This morning, Porsche unveiled its next Macan SUV. It has dropped internal combustion engines in the process—the new Macan is entirely battery electric, built on a dedicated EV platform. We've been following the car's development for some time, but today's news fills in a lot of the gaps, and it's the first time we've seen the Macan not covered in camouflage. Porsche is launching with two specifications. There's a Macan 4 that starts at $78,800, and a Macan Turbo starting at $105,300.

Last year Ars took a dive into the engineering that has gone into the new Macan and its underlying architecture, a new platform called PPE or Premium Platform Electric. Developed together with Audi, it uses an 800 V powertrain that's an incremental improvement upon the one you'd find in a Porsche Taycan.

We also already know it's fun to drive, especially the Macan Turbo. Rear-wheel steering makes it very nimble, and the two-valve dampers do a good job of making you think the car weighs less than it does. The Macan 4 isn't a slouch and can send up to 402 hp (300 kW) and 479 lb-ft (650 Nm) to its wheels, so launching up a highway on-ramp to 60 mph should take 4.9 seconds.

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Did an AI write that hour-long “George Carlin” special? I’m not convinced.

Enlarge / "Well, we all have a face/That we hide away forever" (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

If you've paid any attention to the intersection of AI and culture this month, you’ve probably stumbled across a video billed as a “comedy AI” doing a 60-minute impression of a stand-up routine by the late, great George Carlin. Even if you didn’t watch “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead,” you probably stumbled on some of the many, many headlines suggesting that AI had brought the legendary comedian “back from the dead” in some sense.

Or maybe you saw some of the disgusted and/or panicked responses to the special among Carlin fans, comedy purists, and AI fearmongers. Those included Carlin’s daughter, Kelly, who told The Daily Beast that she’s talking to lawyers about the possibility of legal action against the special’s creators, the comedy podcast Dudesy.

But I think that anger is at least partially misplaced. After spending the last few weeks diving down a distractingly deep rabbit hole, I’m convinced that Dudesy’s “AI-generated” George Carlin special was actually written by a human, using voice- and image-generation tools to essentially perform in “AI face” as part of an ongoing comedy bit.

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Aluminum mining waste could be a source of green steel

Enlarge / A red mud retaining pond in Germany. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The metals that form the foundation of modern society also cause a number of problems. Separating the metals we want from other minerals is often energy-intensive and can leave behind large volumes of toxic waste. Getting them in a pure form can often require a second and considerable energy input, boosting the associated carbon emissions.

A team of researchers from Germany has now figured out how to handle some of these problems for a specific class of mining waste created during aluminum production. Their method relies on hydrogen and electricity, which can both be sourced from renewable power and extracts iron and potentially other metals from the waste. What's left behind may still be toxic but isn't as environmentally damaging.

Out of the mud

The first step in aluminum production is the isolation of aluminum oxide from the other materials in the ore. This leaves behind a material known as red mud; it's estimated that nearly 200 million tonnes are produced annually. While the red color comes from the iron oxides present, there are a lot of other materials in it, some of which can be toxic. And the process of isolating the aluminum oxide leaves the material with a very basic pH.

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Wild Apples: The 12 weirdest and rarest Macs ever made

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / Jonathan Zufi / Apple)

Forty years ago today, Apple released the first Macintosh. Since that fateful day in 1984, Apple has released hundreds of Mac models that run the gamut from amazing to strange. In honor of this birthday, we thought it would be fun to comb through history and pull out the rarest and most unusual production Mac models ever made—including one from another company.

Each machine listed below was manufactured and sold to the public—no prototypes here. These computers highlight not only Apple's innovative spirit but also its willingness to take risks and experiment with design and functionality. It's worth noting that what is "weird" in this case is a matter of opinion, so you might have your own personal picks that we missed. If that's the case, let us know in the comments. And we'd love to hear what the Macintosh means to you on this 40th anniversary.

Special thanks to Jonathan Zufi for providing several photos for this article. In 2014, Zufi created an excellent coffee table book called Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation and formerly ran the Shrine of Apple website.

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