Wolves survived the ice age as a single, global population

Enlarge / An Eastern Gray Wolf is a mix of Siberian ancestry and coyote DNA. (credit: Michael Cummings)

Man's best friend was the first of many animals humans have domesticated. But there was no clear before-and-after moment where dogs were suddenly a distinct population of wolves. While some ancient skeletons are clearly dogs, there are a lot of ambiguous skeletons earlier than that. It's possible to get a sense of what happened using the genomes of modern and ancient dogs. But this analysis depends heavily on what you think the wolf populations dogs were derived from look like.

Now, researchers have generated a much clearer picture of the last 100,000 years of wolf evolution. The picture it paints is a population that remained a single unit despite being spread across continents in the Arctic, with the population sporadically refreshed from a core centered in Siberia. Many breeds of dogs seem to have been derived from a population of East Asian wolves. But others seem to have also received significant input from a Middle East population—but it's unclear whether that population was wolves or dogs.

Wolves around the north

The ability to sequence ancient DNA was essential to this new work, which involved obtaining DNA from 66 wolf skeletons that collectively span about 100,000 years of evolution, including most of the last ice age. Wolves are found in the Northern Hemisphere, and the skeletons used here tend to be closer to the Arctic (probably in part because DNA survives better in cooler climes). But they are widely distributed, with Europe, Asia, and North America represented. The researchers also included five ancient wolf genomes that others had analyzed, along with some genomes of modern wolves.

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YouTube content creator credentials are under siege by YTStealer malware

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In online crime forums, specialization is everything. Enter YTStealer, a new piece of malware that steals authentication credentials belonging to YouTube content creators.

“What sets YTStealer aside from other stealers sold on the Dark Web market is that it is solely focused on harvesting credentials for one single service instead of grabbing everything it can get ahold of,” Joakim Kennedy, a researcher at security firm Intezer wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “When it comes to the actual process, it is very similar to that seen in other stealers. The cookies are extracted from the browser’s database files in the user’s profile folder.”

As soon as the malware obtains a YouTube authentication cookie it opens a headless browser and connects to YouTube’s Studio page, which content creators use to manage the videos they produce. YTStealer then extracts all available information about the user account, including the account name, number of subscribers, age, and whether channels are monetized.

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Avoiding USB-C on iPhones may get harder for Apple as Brazil considers mandate

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Brazil is the latest country to consider making USB-C charging a requirement for smartphones. On Tuesday, Anatel, Brazil's National Telecommunications Agency, announced a public consultation for a proposal to make USB-C charging a requirement for all cell phones sold in the country.

Anatel's announcement said it was following in the European Union's footsteps. The EU's USB-C policy will require all smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, and some other consumer electronics with wired charging to receive power over USB-C in order to be sold in the region. Laptops will eventually have to meet the requirement, too. Anatel is currently only discussing a mandate for phones in Brazil.

The regulator also noted that some US senators are seeking a universal charger strategy similar to the EU's policy.

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Blizzard will purchase 100-person Spellbreak studio to help make WoW content

Enlarge / Spellbreak battles are full of splashy elemental explosions and floaty acrobatic dodges.

Blizzard Entertainment has acquired Boston-based Proletariat, the studio behind the magic-heavy Battle Royale game Spellbreak. Spellbreak will shut down by early 2023 as the workers at the 100-person studio transition to work on World of Warcraft and its upcoming "Dragonflight" expansion.

VentureBeat reports that Proletariat and Blizzard have been in acquisition talks since last December and that the companies have been working together since last month. That's well before yesterday's public announcement that the studio would be ending development on Spellbreak after more than four years:

Our vision was to create a fresh, multiplayer action-spellcasting game with exceptional movement and class customization that would give players the chance to unleash their inner battlemage. We are grateful to everyone in the game’s community for exploring the magical worlds and experiences we created together. Spellbreak was an ambitious project that saw our team push new boundaries in design and development and we are excited to continue to innovate as we create new titles in the future.

After an impressive beta in early 2020, Proletariat bragged that it had over 5 million Spellbreak players in the weeks after the game's late 2020 launch. That player base seems to have declined substantially over time, though; data from SteamDB shows Spellbreak's concurrent player numbers on Steam sitting at well under a thousand and consistently declining over the last 12 months (though those numbers don't reflect players on consoles or the Epic Games Store, where the game had PC exclusivity for a year).

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Rudderless HTC builds a “Metaverse” smartphone with NFTs

Enlarge / HTC's metaverse phone. (credit: HTC)

HTC is somehow still making smartphones. The latest from the company is the HTC Desire 22 Pro, a 399 British pound (~$486) mid-ranger that represents the company's first smartphone of 2022.

HTC says this phone will somehow help you "enter the metaverse," as "the phone to carry you into the future." The metaverse is the latest tech buzzword companies have been hyping up. It's roughly used to mean "VR-related." The phone itself does not seem to have any actual VR features. HTC's latest VR goggles, the Vive Flow, use an Android phone as the controller and can show the phone screen inside the VR environment. This phone comes with that Vive Flow controller app, but you can install it on any Android phone that supports miracast and get the same features.

Presumably the buzzword gimmicks are meant as a distraction from the fact that the HTC Desire 22 Pro is a generic-looking mid-range phone. It has a Snapdragon 695, a 120 Hz, 6.6-inch, 2412×1080 LCD, 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 4520 mAh battery. It has Android 12, a fingerprint reader, wireless charging, a microSD slot, and an IP67 water-resistance rating, which HTC only describes as "splash proof." For cameras, you have a 65 MP main camera, a 13 MP ultrawide, 5 MP depth sensor, and 32 MP front camera. HTC's spec sheet curiously also lists "Face ID" as a feature, which is an Apple trademark. HTC probably means generic face recognition.

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Jury holds Charter responsible for death of woman murdered by cable technician

Enlarge / A Charter Spectrum service truck in McKinney, Texas, on Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

A Texas jury last week found that Charter Communications was responsible for the death of an 83-year-old woman murdered in her home by a Spectrum cable technician who is now serving a life sentence.

A six-member jury at Dallas County Court awarded the family of murder victim Betty Thomas $375 million in compensatory damages, of which Charter would have to pay 90 percent ($337.5 million). The jury unanimously found that Charter's negligence was a proximate cause in the 2019 death and assigned 90 percent of the responsibility to Charter and 10 percent to convicted murderer Roy Holden, according to a court document. Holden, who robbed and murdered Thomas one day after a service call, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison in April 2021.

Charter's financial liability could end up being much higher because the jury has not yet decided on punitive damages. The punitive damages phase of the trial is scheduled to begin on July 6.

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People are getting explosive gastroenteritis at the Grand Canyon

Enlarge / The Grand Canyon viewed from the South Rim adjacent to the El Tovar Hotel on November 11, 2019, in Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona. (credit: Getty | George Rose)

The Grand Canyon is an immense, vibrantly painted geological wonder, treasured for its awe-inspiring stratified architecture, which has been spectacularly sculpted over millions of years. Up close, it will blow your mind and take your breath away—and if you've visited recently, it may also violently flush your colon and have you projectile vomiting your granola bars.

That's right—the majestic natural wonder has been the site of a months-long outbreak of gastrointestinal illness, likely caused by norovirus. The virus was confirmed to be the cause of illnesses among at least eight rafting trips. Overall, more than 150 river rafters and backcountry campers have fallen ill since April, according to a recent update from the Grand Canyon National Park Service.

While many may have sought the outdoor grandeur in hopes of avoiding the pandemic coronavirus, it seems they were instead met with a different germ that has been savagely hollowing out innards at a pace many orders of magnitude faster than the Colorado River gutted the southwestern section of the Colorado Plateau. Amid the smoothly carved buttes and intricately chiseled chasms serenely shaped over eons, park-goers are blowing chunks from both ends in hot seconds. And instead of reaching both the North and South Rims during their visits, some are forced to remain perched on the edge of a far smaller basin.

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Return to Monkey Island trailer features an “adrift and unfulfilled” Guybrush

When Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman spoke to Ars in April, shortly after the surprise announcement of Return to Monkey Island, they weren't ready to discuss details on where the franchise's story would be going after LeChuck's Revenge. Today, though, a new trailer and marketing materials for the game give us our first hints of what Guybrush Threepwood himself says is "a story about the time I finally found the secret of Monkey Island" (and the first mention of a Switch version, which will be a console exclusive).

It is "many years" after Guybrush's last encounter with zombie pirate LeChuck, and "Guybrush himself is adrift and unfulfilled" as "Melee Island has taken a turn for the worse," according to the game's official website. Love interest Elaine Marley "has turned her focus away from governing," while a "hip, young" Captain Madison and his pirate crew "have shuffled the old guard from power." Manic salesman Stan, meanwhile, has been imprisoned for "marketing-related crimes," which you can learn more about in an interactive conversation on the game's website (something "non-fungible" may have played a role...).

All those characters and more show up in the trailer, which features signs of inter-ship cannon battles and plenty of sword fighting (no explicit signs of insults amid the sword fighting in the trailer, but we have to imagine we'll see some of that). Amid scenes depicting plenty of scrapes for Guybrush, there's also a brief hint that Elaine may be playable at some point in the game.

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MNT shrinks its open source Reform laptop into a 7-inch pocket PC throwback

Enlarge / MNT's "Pocket Reform" is the same open hardware in a smaller enclosure. (credit: MNT)

A few months ago, we reviewed the MNT Reform, which attempts to bring the dream of entirely open source hardware to an audience that doesn't want to design and build a laptop totally from scratch. Now, MNT is bringing its open-hardware ethos to a second PC, a 7-inch "Pocket Reform" laptop that recalls the design of old clamshell Pocket PCs, just like the big Reform references the design of chunky '90s ThinkPads.

The Pocket Reform borrows many of the big Reform laptop's design impulses, including a low-profile mechanical keyboard and trackball-based pointing device and a chunky, retro-throwback design. The device includes a 7-inch 1080p screen, a pair of USB-C ports (one of which is used for charging), a microSD slot for storage expansion, and a micro HDMI port for connecting to a display when you're at your desk.

The Pocket Reform's purple case does at least look a bit sleeker than the chunky black enclosure of the full-size Reform. (credit: MNT)

The full-size Reform is an interesting exercise in open source hardware and software, though a computer built around openness makes a lot of compromises that you don't have to make with a "closed" system. Our main complaint about the big Reform was its miserably slow ARM processor, which won't change for the Pocket Reform even though MNT continues to work on slightly more powerful processor options. You'll at least be able to augment the device's default 802.11ac Wi-Fi with a cellular modem and SIM card.

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Climate change is altering the chemistry of wine

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Soon after the devastating Glass Fire sparked in California’s Napa Valley in September 2020, wine chemist Anita Oberholster’s inbox was brimming with hundreds of emails from panicked viticulturists. They wanted to know if they could harvest their grapes without a dreaded effect on their wine: the odious ashtray flavor known as smoke taint.

Oberholster, of the University of California, Davis, could only tell them, “Maybe.”

Industry laboratories were slammed with grape samples to test, with wait times of up to six weeks. Growers didn’t know whether it was worth harvesting their crops. Eight percent of California wine grapes in 2020 were left to rot.

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