This Halloween, face the specter of human mortality with The Midnight Club

Enlarge / Eight terminally ill teens in hospice cope with their fate by telling scary stories in The Midnight Club (credit: Netflix)

If you're looking for a solid, binge-worthy scary series this Halloween, you could do a lot worse than The Midnight Club, the latest Netflix horror series from Mike Flanagan (Haunting of Hill House, Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass). Based on the young adult horror novel of the same name by Christopher Pike, it mines the haunting specter of human mortality for its chills and thrills and ends up being both an entertaining horror story and a moving reflection on how we all cope differently with the harsh truth of our finite lives.

(WARNING: Major spoilers for the 1994 book below. We'll give you another heads-up when we get to major spoilers for the TV series.)

The novel features seven terminally ill teenaged residents of the fictional Rotterdam Home hospice who are facing the prospect of their own imminent deaths. There are regular therapy sessions, but the teens find an even better way to cope with their fate. They meet at midnight every night in the library to tell scary stories. (If you're thinking it sounds like a ripoff of Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, think again. Flanagan and Pike are both too smart for that.) Eventually, the teens make a pact that whichever of them dies first will attempt to communicate with the others from the Beyond—just to let them know what it's like, so they're better prepared. Then the first member of the group does indeed die.

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Reports: Musk plans big Twitter layoffs and $20 monthly charge for verification

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

The Elon Musk-led Twitter is reportedly planning big layoffs and a $20 monthly charge for any user who wants to be verified or keep their current account verification.

According to The Verge, Musk ordered employees to raise the price of the Twitter Blue subscription from $4.99 a month to $19.99 and require anyone with a verified account to subscribe in order to keep their blue verification checkmark. Citing "people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence," The Verge article said the plan is that "verified users would have 90 days to subscribe [to Twitter Blue] or lose their blue checkmark. Employees working on the project were told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired."

Turning verification into a paid feature could make it easier for scammers to impersonate real people. As Twitter's website notes, "the blue Verified badge on Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic. To receive the blue badge, your account must be authentic, notable, and active." Corporations might see the charge as part of the cost of doing business, but individuals are less likely to pay that much just to keep their blue checks.

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Microsoft promises eternal support for Call of Duty on PlayStation

Enlarge / PlayStation gamers will continue to be able to dress up like this in Call of Duty games indefinitely, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft Xbox chief Phil Spencer said he intends to continue to ship Call of Duty games on PlayStation "as long as there's a PlayStation out there to ship to." The new promise comes weeks after Sony lambasted an "inadequate" offer to extend Call of Duty's cross-platform access for three years past the current agreement and as Microsoft faces continuing scrutiny from international governments over its proposed $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard.

"We're not taking Call of Duty from PlayStation," Spencer said directly in an interview with the Same Brain podcast. "That's not our intent."

Instead, Spencer said Microsoft's plan for Call of Duty is "similar to what we've done with Minecraft," which has remained a cross-platform staple since Microsoft's $2.5 billion purchase of developer Mojang in 2014. Since then, Spencer said, "we've expanded the places where people can play Minecraft... and it's been good for the Minecraft community, in my opinion. I want to do the same as we think about where Call of Duty can go over the years."

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Massive pandemic relief fraud has Congress eyeing digital IDs

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

When the US government began offering financial aid to Americans struggling to cope with a pandemic-fueled economic collapse in 2020, the Department of Treasury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation urged Americans to be ever more vigilant about their personal information. COVID-19 scams seemed to be everywhere, and for government agencies, it became difficult to ensure that all the money it was sending out actually made it to the citizens most in need of aid—and not into the hands of bad actors.

It’s now estimated that hundreds of billions in COVID relief funds were stolen, Bloomberg reported, with no way of knowing the true cost of the losses.

It has perhaps never been clearer to the federal government how impactful it could be during times of emergency to already have trusted nationwide digital identification verification systems in place.

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Thawing permafrost exposes old pathogens—and new hosts

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Burton/Getty)

The Arctic—that remote, largely undisturbed, 5.5 million square miles of frozen terrain—is heating up fast. In fact, it’s warming nearly four times quicker than the rest of the world, with disastrous consequences for the region and its inhabitants. Many of these impacts you probably know from nature documentaries: ice caps melting, sea levels rising, and polar bears losing their homes. But good news! There is another knock-on effect to worry about: the warming landscape is rewiring viral dynamics, with the potential to unleash new pathogens.

An underappreciated consequence of climate change is how it will exacerbate the spread of infectious disease. As the world heats up, many species are expected to up sticks and meander many miles away from their typical habitat, bringing various pathogens along with them for the ride. This means that previously unacquainted viruses and hosts will meet for the first time, potentially leading to viral spillover—where a virus jumps from one reservoir host to a new one, like our old friend SARS-CoV-2.

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The 499P: Meet Ferrari’s beautiful new Le Mans hybrid prototype

Enlarge / After 50 years away, Ferrari is building a works endurance prototype again. (credit: Ferrari)

Ferrari provided flights from DC to Bologna and back, plus three nights in a hotel so we could meet the 499P and drive the 296 GTS. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

IMOLA, ITALY—After a break of 50 years, Ferrari is returning to top-level endurance racing with a new hybrid prototype race car. It's called the 499P, and in 2023 Ferrari will campaign a pair of cars in the World Endurance Championship, a series with the 24 Hours of Le Mans as its crown jewel.

As I've written before, 2023 is going to be an exciting time for fans of prototype racing. After the cubic megabucks-era of LMP1h collapsed under the weight of unsustainable budgets, the top class of the World Endurance Championship has spent a few years in the doldrums as Toyota faced minimal opposition from much smaller teams. But the Automobile Club de l'Ouest (which runs the Le Mans race) has a new ruleset now, called LMH (Le Mans Hypercar), designed to attract the interest of automakers by keeping costs sane—€30 million versus the €80-200 million that LMP1h cost—and, with less reliance on aerodynamic downforce, allowing for a closer visual link to their road-going products.

The 499P might be the prettiest LMH car to date. You'll detect styling cues from cars like the new 296 GTB at the nose.

And so far, it's working. Toyota was first to LMH with its GR010, followed by boutique manufacturer Glickenhaus, then this year saw Peugeot ease its way back into to endurance racing with its new 9X8—still not sporting a rear wing—ahead of a full campaign in 2023. But none of those brands have quite the same magic as Ferrari. Even though it last won Le Mans outright in 1965, it still has more of those overall wins (nine) than Toyota (five) and Peugeot (three) combined, trailing just Audi (13) and Porsche (19).

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Biotechnology is creating ethical worries—and we’ve been here before

Enlarge (credit: TEK IMAGE / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

Matthew Cobb is a zoologist and author whose background is in insect genetics and the history of science. Over the past decade or so, as CRISPR was discovered and applied to genetic remodeling, he started to get concerned—afraid, actually—about three potential applications of the technology. He’s in good company: Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for discovering and harnessing CRISPR, is afraid of the same things. So he decided to delve into these topics, and As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age is the result.

Summing up fears

The first of his worries is the notion of introducing heritable mutations into the human genome. He Jianqui did this to three human female embryos in China in 2018, so the three girls with the engineered mutations that they will pass on to their kids (if they’re allowed to have any) are about four now. Their identities are classified for their protection, but presumably their health is being monitored, and the poor girls have probably already been poked and prodded incessantly by every type of medical specialist there is.

The second is the use of gene drives. These allow a gene to copy itself from one chromosome in a pair to the other so it will be passed on to almost all offspring. If that gene causes infertility, the gene drive spells the extinction of the population that carries it. Gene drives have been proposed as a way to eradicate malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and they have been tested in the lab, but the technology has not been deployed in the wild yet.

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Now in charge of Twitter, Musk is expected to reverse bans—including Trump’s

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Chesnot )

Elon Musk reportedly appointed himself to the CEO role at Twitter and is expected to reverse lifelong bans on users—including the ban imposed on former President Donald Trump.

As reported last night, Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter and immediately fired CEO Parag Agrawal and several other high-ranking executives. Bloomberg reported today that Musk appointed himself CEO but cited an anonymous source as saying that Musk "may eventually cede the Twitter CEO role in the longer term." Musk is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.

Bloomberg's source provided details on Musk's plan to reverse lifelong bans:

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US embassies may have accidentally improved air quality

Enlarge (credit: Reynold Andika Tinus / 500px)

In 2008, the United States embassy in Beijing installed an air-quality monitor and started tweeting out its findings every hour. Since then, these monitors have popped up in more than 50 embassies in countries and cities around the globe.

Something unexpected happened in each of the cities in which the monitors appeared. Researchers found that, overall, air quality improved in the cities where embassies were tweeting out air-quality data. “We were surprised,” Akshaya Jha, assistant professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the paper’s authors, told Ars.

Monitoring micrograms

According to the World Health Organization, in 2019, more than 90 percent of the world’s population lived in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution. Further, according to Jha’s paper, this phenomenon tends to be worse in low- and middle-income countries. However, air-quality monitoring in those countries is quite rare.

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A scientist’s quest for an accessible, unhackable voting machine

Enlarge / Juan Gilbert demonstrates his transparent voting machine, which he says is a breakthrough in election security. (credit: Lawren Simmons for Undark)

In late 2020, a large box arrived at Juan Gilbert’s office at the University of Florida. The computer science professor had been looking for this kind of product for months. Previous orders had yielded poor results. This time, though, he was optimistic.

Gilbert drove the package home. Inside was a transparent box, built by a French company and equipped with a 27-inch touchscreen. Almost immediately, Gilbert began modifying it. He put a printer inside and connected the device to Prime III, the voting system he has been building since the first term of the George W. Bush administration.

After 19 years of building, tinkering, and testing, he told Undark this spring, he had finally invented “the most secure voting technology ever created.”

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Meet the Windows servers that have been fueling massive DDoSes for months

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

A small retail business in North Africa, a North American telecommunications provider, and two separate religious organizations: What do they have in common? They’re all running poorly configured Microsoft servers that for months or years have been spraying the Internet with gigabytes-per-second of junk data in distributed-denial-of-service attacks designed to disrupt or completely take down websites and services.

In all, recently published research from Black Lotus Labs, the research arm of networking and application technology company Lumen, identified more than 12,000 servers—all running Microsoft domain controllers hosting the company’s Active Directory services—that were regularly used to magnify the size of distributed-denial-of-service attacks, or DDoSes.

A never-ending arms race

For decades, DDoSers have battled with defenders in a constant, never-ending arms race. Early on, DDoSers simply corralled ever-larger numbers of Internet-connected devices into botnets and then used them to simultaneously send a target more data than they can handle. Targets—be they game companies, journalists, or even crucial pillars of Internet infrastructure—often buckled at the strain and either completely fell over or slowed to a trickle.

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Lego to discontinue Mindstorms robot line after a 24-year run

Enlarge / The Lego Mindstorms Robot Inventor kit (51515), apparently the last of the Mindstorms series. (credit: Lego)

Yesterday, The Lego Group announced it will discontinue its Mindstorms-branded products at the end of 2022, as first reported by Brick Fanatics and several other Lego fan websites. In an official statement, the company said it will redirect its internal Mindstorms team into "different areas of the business" and that its Mindstorms Robot Inventor App digital platforms will remain live until the end of 2024.

Lego Mindstorms debuted on September 1, 1998, as a breakthrough educational tool—originally developed at MIT—that allowed kids and adults alike to craft robotic systems using standard Lego parts and a computerized control brick.

The set gained a key part of its appeal by allowing owners to program the control brick easily on a personal computer using a drag-and-drop visual programming language, making sophisticated robots possible with a relatively simple set of parts. Over the years, hobbyists and researchers took the Mindstorms series in unexpected new directions while Lego itself iterated the product line with increasingly sophisticated offerings.

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Musk visits Twitter HQ, promises staff he won’t fire 75% of them

Enlarge / Elon Musk walking into Twitter headquarters, carrying a sink. (credit: Elon Musk)

Elon Musk visited Twitter headquarters in San Francisco yesterday and reportedly assured staff that he doesn't plan to eliminate 75 percent of their jobs. Musk told employees "that he doesn't plan to cut 75 percent of the staff when he takes over the company, according to people familiar with the matter," Bloomberg wrote.

Musk's statement comes a week after a Washington Post report stated that "Musk told prospective investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter's 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000." Twitter employees reportedly slammed Musk in an open letter circulating within the company, writing that "Elon Musk's plan to lay off 75 percent of Twitter workers will hurt Twitter's ability to serve the public conversation" and that a "threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users' and customers' trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation."

According to Bloomberg, Musk "denied the previously reported number in an address to employees" at the San Francisco office. Despite telling workers he won't get rid of three-quarters of them, Musk "is still expected to cut staff as part of the takeover," the article said.

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“Too much and too soon”—Steven Sinofsky looks back at Windows 8, 10 years later

Enlarge / A billboard showing Windows 8 in Times Square in New York at the Microsoft Store in October 2012. (credit: Personal photo from Steven Sinofsky)

On October 26, 2012, Microsoft released Windows 8, a hybrid tablet/desktop operating system that took bold risks but garnered mixed reviews. Ten years later, we've caught up with former Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky to explore how Windows 8 got started, how it predicted several current trends in computing, and how he feels about the OS in retrospect.

In 2011, PC sales began to drop year over year in a trend that alarmed the industry. Simultaneously, touch-based mobile comping on smartphones and tablets dramatically rose in popularity. In response, Microsoft undertook the development of a flexible operating system that would ideally scale from mobile to desktop seamlessly. Sinofsky accepted the challenge and worked with many others, including Julie Larson-Green and Panos Panay, then head of the Surface team, to make it happen.

Windows 8 represented the most dramatic transformation of the Windows interface since Windows 95. While that operating system introduced the Start menu, Windows 8 removed that iconic menu in favor of a Start screen filled with "live tiles" that functioned well on touchscreen computers like the purpose-built Microsoft Surface, but frustrated desktop PC users. It led to heavy pushback from the press, and PC sales continued to decline.

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Musk signals $44 billion Twitter deal on track to close this week

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Elon Musk has confirmed on a video call with his advisers that he intends to close his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter on Friday, potentially bringing an end to the turbulent acquisition process, according to people briefed about the matter.

In another sign that the deal will close by the end of the week, Musk’s lawyers at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom sent paperwork to equity investors in the deal, according to two investors and a person close to the Tesla boss.

A group of banks led by Morgan Stanley, which includes Bank of America and Barclays, committed $13 billion in financing for the deal back in April. Meanwhile, Musk has raised at least $7 billion for his bid from a roster of equity investors including Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and asset management groups Fidelity, Brookfield, and Sequoia Capital.

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2022 iPad review: The best one—except for all the others

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  The front of the 2022 iPad. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

There was a time when Apple’s focus was on simplicity in its product lineups—on making a one-size-fits-all design for just about every consumer. In other words, it wasn’t too long ago that there was only one iPad.

Today, nothing could be further from reality. The iPad lineup includes six different models, not counting different finish colors or storage configurations, of course. Apple’s new tablet brings some welcome changes to the aging base iPad design, but it doesn’t quite carve out a strong position for itself in a robust iPad lineup.

Nonetheless, it modernizes an aging design and doesn’t shed anything that was great about its predecessor in the process—well, except for one thing, but we’ll get to that.

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Shutterstock partners with OpenAI to sell AI-generated artwork, compensate artists

Enlarge / The Shutterstock logo over an image generated by DALL-E. (credit: Shutterstock / OpenAI)

Today, Shutterstock announced that it has partnered with OpenAI to provide AI image synthesis services using the DALL-E API. Once the service is available, the firm says it will allow customers to generate images based on text prompts. Responding to prevailing ethical criticism of AI-generated artwork, Shutterstock also says it will compensate artists "whose works have contributed to develop the AI models."

DALL-E is a commercial deep learning image synthesis product created by OpenAI that can generate new images in almost any artistic style based on text descriptions (called "prompts") by the person who wants to create the image. If you type "an astronaut riding a horse," DALL-E will create an image of an astronaut on a horse.

DALL-E and other image synthesis models, such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, have ignited a passionate response from artists who fear their livelihoods might be threatened by the new technology. In addition, the image synthesis models have "learned" to generate images by analyzing the work of human artists found on the web without artist consent.

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The outrageous electric Audi S1 Hoonitron stars in new Ken Block video

Enlarge / The Audi S1 Hoonitron is inspired by the company's 1987 rally car. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

The last time I wrote about one of rally driver Ken Block's jaw-dropping Gymkhana videos, it was about his trip to the summit of Pike's Peak in a 1,400-hp methanol-fueled 1965 Ford Mustang. Spectacular as it was, I couldn't help but feel it was time for Block to join the EV revolution. That time has now come, as Block released his latest demonstration of automotive acrobatics in Las Vegas on Tuesday. The video's name gives it away: Electrikhana.

Now, you don't just go hooning any old EV around the strip, at least not if you're Ken Block. In this case, his ride is a stunning one-off electric Audi, the S1 Hoonicorn, inspired by the 1987 Audi Sport quattro S1 Pikes Peak car.

"Developing a fully electric prototype for the unique requirements of our partner Ken Block was a big and exciting challenge to which the whole team rose with flying colors. It is great to see how ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ is presented in an all-new environment," said Oliver Hoffman, Audi's board member for technical development.

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Nvidia RTX 4090’s power draw may be too much for its power connector to handle

Enlarge (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Nvidia's $1,599 GeForce RTX 4090 is an incredibly powerful graphics card, but its performance comes at the cost of high power draw. Like a few of the RTX 3000-series cards, Nvidia uses a new kind of 16-pin 12VHPWR power connector to supply all that power to the card—you can plug up to four 8-pin GPU power cables into the 12VHPWR adapter, which then plugs into the connector on the GPU, saving some board space.

But at least two RT 4090 users are now reporting that their 12VHPWR connectors have overheated and melted during use. These complaints are sourced from Reddit (via Tom's Hardware), so take them with a grain of salt—we don't know the exact configuration of either user's PC setup. The specific model of graphics card (a Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC for one user, an Asus RTX 4090 TUF Gaming OC Edition for the other), the power supply, and any number of other factors could have contributed to the connectors overheating.

For its part, Nvidia told Tom's that it is "investigating the reports" and that the company is "in contact with the first owner" and planned to reach out to the other. We've followed up with Nvidia and will update this article if the company has more information to share.

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The Galaxy S22 gets Android 13, Samsung posts timeline for older devices

Enlarge / The Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Hot off of releasing Android 12L last month, Samsung is shipping its first finished builds of Android 13 this week. The Galaxy S22 (regular, Plus, and Ultra) is the first phone to get the update, with carriers like Verizon listing the update as available.

Samsung's Android 12L release in September arrived six months after the official release on foldables and tablets, and this Android 13 release represents a two-month wait from the Google release. Part of the reason for the quick turnaround might be that Android 13 is a very small release, with only things like a notification permission and a new media player to point to as user-facing features. The Galaxy S22 never got Android 12L, so this is its first major OS update.

Samsung's Android 13 skin is called "One UI 5," and the company detailed some of its features earlier this month. Samsung's headline additions are "Bixby Text Call," which lets you answer a call and speak to the caller through text-to-speech. A "Routines" feature can automatically trigger functions based on the time of day. You can set a video as your background wallpaper, and you can stack widgets on top of each other to swipe through them.

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Bayonetta 3 review: An updated, over-the-top spectacle

Enlarge / Did you miss me?

Jumping between worlds, mastering new powers, adding unique and powerful weapons to your arsenal, and realizing that true strength comes from your bonds with others—Bayonetta 3 boasts a formula that would sound familiar to any Kingdom Hearts fan, which is somewhat appropriate considering both series have an almost decade-long gap between their second and third releases.

In its third entry, the Bayonetta series sees some real forward momentum that was missing from the second, especially in terms of its story. The first Bayonetta was a flashy introduction to our titular hero and her crew of vaguely unsavory friends and acquaintances, setting a precedent for time travel and other instances of reality-bending within its world. Its sequel was more focused on the bonds between Bayonetta and her loved ones, with a narrative that focused too much on explaining the first game. Eight years later, Bayonetta 3 takes some bold steps forward while keeping all the sexy swagger we've come to expect from the giant Umbra Witch.

A spectacular fantasy, emphasis on “spectacle”

We open on Bayonetta and Enzo (a stereotypical Italian gangster gone family man) on a shopping spree in New York City. Unsurprisingly, the witch has dragged him along to carry her bags in return for a past pro bono job. We get our first taste of Jennifer Hale voicing this role, and despite all of the recent controversy, she offers a quality interpretation of the character. I was expecting "British Commander Shepard," but Hale lived up to her iconic status, managing to give her own take on the witch that felt true to the character.

Shortly after Jeanne reappears, sporting an updated look and a sick motorcycle, her entrance is quickly overshadowed by a giant wave that quickly starts to completely submerge the city. The witches, along with Rodin—who now has a pizza side gig in addition to managing The Gates of Hell—try to determine the cause of the disaster and soon encounter new, gooey, green enemies that aren't from Paradiso (Heaven) or Inferno (Hell). This poses a bit of a problem for Bayonetta, as her demonic contracts require her to provide angels for feeding, and these creatures don't seem to count. But as an ancient and powerful witch, Bayonetta still has a few tricks up her sleeve.

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Apple’s app review fix fails to placate developers

Enlarge (credit: Jacqui VanLiew/Getty Images)

In January, Jake Nelson, a London-based developer, submitted a routine update to his popular new iPhone word game to Apple’s App Store for review, adding support for a slate of new languages. This wasn’t his first app, but he was unprepared for what followed: It took a month of frustrating discussion with Apple’s App Store reviewers and 15 revisions to his code—made more or less at random—before his update was mysteriously approved.

Nelson never learned exactly why his app was first rejected or later accepted. An appeal mechanism Apple introduced in 2020 after bad press about its control of the App Store didn’t help. Revenue from his game had been about $1,000 a month but dwindled during the weeks he couldn’t keep users engaged with new updates, and he contemplated no longer selling iOS apps for a living. “I felt as if it was an unending, completely opaque process,” he says.

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The ISS has had to maneuver yet again from Russian satellite debris

Enlarge / The International Space Station has had to maneuver again to avoid debris from a Russian satellite. (credit: NASA)

On November 15, 2021, Russia launched a Nudol missile at one of its aging satellites in low-Earth orbit. As intended, the missile struck the Cosmos 1408 satellite at an altitude of 480 km, breaking it into more than 1,000 fragments.

In the immediate aftermath of this test—which Russia carried out to demonstrate to other space powers its anti-satellite capabilities—American and Russian astronauts aboard the International Space Station scrambled into spacecraft in case an emergency departure was needed. They remained in these shelters for about six hours before getting an all clear to return to normal activities.

Following international condemnation for this test, Russian officials claimed that Americans and other officials had overreacted. "The United States knows for certain that the emerging fragments at the time of the test and in terms of the orbit’s parameters did not and will not pose any threat to orbital stations, satellites and space activity," the Defense Ministry of Russia said at the time.

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Passkeys—Microsoft, Apple, and Google’s password killer—are finally here

Enlarge (credit: Gertty Images)

For years, Big Tech has insisted that the death of the password is right around the corner. For years, those assurances have been little more than empty promises. The password alternatives—such as pushes, OAUTH single-sign ons, and trusted platform modules—introduced as many usability and security problems as they solved. But now, we’re finally on the cusp of a password alternative that’s actually going to work.

The new alternative is known as passkeys. Generically, passkeys refer to various schemes for storing authenticating information in hardware, a concept that has existed for more than a decade. What’s different now is that Microsoft, Apple, Google, and a consortium of other companies have unified around a single passkey standard shepherded by the FIDO Alliance. Not only are passkeys easier for most people to use than passwords; they are also completely resistant to credential phishing, credential stuffing, and similar account-take-over attacks.

On Monday, PayPal said US-based users would soon have the option of logging in using FIDO-based passkeys, joining Kayak, eBay, Best Buy, CardPointers and WordPress.com as online services that will offer the password alternative. In recent months, Microsoft, Apple, and Google have all updated their operating systems and apps to enable passkeys. Passkey support is still spotty. Passkeys stored on iOS or macOS will work on Windows, for instance, but the reverse isn’t yet available. In the coming months, all of that should be ironed out, though.

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We were not wowed by our first Meta Quest Pro experience

Enlarge / Out of the case and ready to demo.

Even virtual reality's biggest boosters may hesitate at the idea of spending nearly $1,500 for the Meta Quest Pro without trying it first. Fortunately, a retail partnership means that people can try the upcoming Quest Pro at select Best Buy locations during weekend demos.

After checking out one of those demos, though, we came away largely unimpressed with our first impressions. Even if the Quest Pro's new features end up justifying its massive price (and more time with a retail unit later this week should help answer that question fully), our retail demo did not put Meta's best foot forward.

Where do I go?

Upon entering Best Buy in Columbia, Maryland, on Sunday, I didn't find any signage suggesting that there was any special VR demo going on inside the store. Instead, I had to search the aisles until I found a lonely Quest display in an unloved back corner of the store, complete with a Quest 2 and Quest Pro under glass. Nearby, a demo staffer leaned on a counter playing with his phone next to a demo unit in a charging stand. When I approached, he said I was the first person all weekend who had expressed any interest in a demo (though one more came to see what it was about while I was in the headset).

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The $228 OnePlus Nord N300 packs good looks, 33 W charging

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  The OnePlus Nord N300. [credit: OnePlus ]

OnePlus is showing off a new low-end smartphone, the OnePlus Nord N300 5G. This is a $228 phone you can get at T-Mobile starting November 3. The highlights include a surprisingly handsome design for this price point, 33 W charging, and a 90 Hz display.

First up: specs. The SoC is a MediaTek Dimensity 810. That means a 6 nm chip with two 2.4 GHz Cortex A76 cores, six 2 GHz, Cortex A55 cores, and an ARM Mali-G57 MP2 GPU. There's 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and a 5000 mAh battery. The display is a 6.56-inch, 1,612×720, 90 Hz "HD+" display. A 90 Hz display on a phone this cheap sounds impressive, but this phone's predecessor, the Nord N200, didn't have the power to reliably ship 90 frames per second to the 1080p display, making it a bit of a waste. The downgrade to 720p (and maybe a slightly faster SoC) means OnePlus might actually hit 90 FPS this year, but it's not clear the resolution drop will be worth that.

33 W charging means this will charge faster than an $1,100 iPhone. There's a side fingerprint reader in the power button, and you get a microSD slot, NFC, and a headphone jack. For cameras, you get one rear 48MP main camera and a just-for-looks 2MP "depth" camera. The front camera is 8MP. The phone ships with Android 13, and OnePlus' usual update timeline for these cheap phones is one major update and three years of semi-regular security updates.

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Microsoft’s “Project Volterra” becomes an Arm-powered mini PC with 32GB of RAM

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would be releasing new hardware to encourage more developers to start using and supporting the Arm version of Windows. Dubbed "Project Volterra," all we knew about it at the time was that it would use an unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and NVMe-based storage, that it would support at least two monitors, and that it would have a decent number of ports.

Today, Microsoft is putting Volterra out into the world, complete with a snappy new name: the Windows Dev Kit 2023. The Dev Kit 2023 will use a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3—essentially the same chip as the Microsoft SQ3 in the new 5G version of the Surface Pro 9—plus 512GB of storage and a whopping 32GB of RAM for the surprisingly low price of $599.

The Dev Kit 2023 is powered by a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, similar to the Microsoft SQ3 chip in the Surface Pro 9 with 5G. (credit: Microsoft)

We don't know exactly how fast the 8cx Gen 3 will be (Qualcomm says "up to 85 percent faster" CPU performance than the 8cx Gen 2, which would put it somewhere below but within spitting distance of modern Core i5 laptop CPU). But 512GB of storage and 32GB of memory should make the Dev Kit 2023 useful as a development and testing environment.

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New Webb images illuminate the formation of a galaxy cluster

Enlarge / Separating out different wavelengths of light lets us track the movement of material toward and away from Earth. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)

A team of researchers is publishing a paper based on new images taken by the Webb Space Telescope. The images reveal a dense concentration of matter in the early Universe, potentially indicating early stages in the formation of a galaxy cluster. And thanks to the spectrograph present, Webb was able to confirm that several galaxies previously imaged by Hubble were also part of the cluster. It even tracked the flow of gas ejected by the largest galaxy present.

Graphing the spectrum

The key hardware for this work is NIRSpec, the Near Infrared Spectrograph that is part of Webb's instrument package. While the instrument itself is highly sophisticated, it works along principles that are important for the operation of things like your cell phone's camera.

In these consumer cameras, the sensors register the brightness of three different areas of the visible spectrum: red, green, and blue. The images that result are made by combining this information, with different areas of the image having distinct intensities of each of these colors.

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macOS 13 Ventura: The Ars Technica review

If you asked me to tell you all the most exciting things that happened to the Mac in the last two years, I'd start with hardware, not software.

The transition from Intel’s chips to Apple silicon has been transformative, ushering in huge battery-life boosts and allowing MacBook Airs and Mac minis to do the kind of work you would have needed a MacBook Pro or 27-inch iMac for a few years ago. The Mac Studio ably fills the longstanding gap between the Mac mini and Mac Pro in Apple’s desktop lineup, and new function-over-form redesigns for the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air seem purpose-built to address criticisms of the Mac hardware lineup circa 2016. These Macs would be exciting upgrades whether they were running Big Sur or Ventura.

On the software side, it's not as though nothing has happened to the Mac in the last two years. It's getting new features. I still find it comfortable to work in, even as Windows 11 has introduced some genuinely handy window-management features that I miss when I'm not using it (especially in multi-monitor mode).

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Company that makes rent-setting software for landlords sued for collusion

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images/Getty)

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Renters filed a lawsuit this week alleging that a company that makes price-setting software for apartments and nine of the nation’s biggest property managers formed a cartel to artificially inflate rents in violation of federal law.

The lawsuit was filed days after ProPublica published an investigation raising concerns that the software, sold by Texas-based RealPage, is potentially pushing rent prices above competitive levels, facilitating price-fixing, or both.

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The weekend’s best deals: Google Pixel 7, Apple MacBooks, 4K TVs, and more

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Another weekend, another roundup of the best tech deals from the week. Today's Dealmaster features generous gift card offers on the best android phones available, the newly-released Google Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. The Pixel 7 Pro is available on Amazon at its regular retail price of $899, but throws in a sizable $200 Amazon gift card with your new phone. Likewise, the Pixel 7 is on offer at $599 with an additional $100 Amazon gift card.

Our review of the new Pixels, published this week, was another overwhelmingly positive one. The Pixel's top-tier camera, snappy, bloat-free software, and sleek, functional design are standout features we've come to expect of Google year after year. We don't feel that the 7 and 7 Pro are substantially better than the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro (also on sale for $399 and $649, respectively). So, if you don't mind losing the macro camera, then the previous-generation Pixels are still an excellent buy, especially with their respective discounts.

There's also a slew of Google Nest smart speakers and smart displays on sale from Wellbots, all matching the all-time lows for each device. Elsewhere around the web, we have discounts on the previous generation Apple TV 4K, Macbook Pros and Airs from different generations, a handful of 4K OLED TVs from Samsung, LG, and Sony, and much more. Check out the full curated list of the week's best deals below.

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Hydrogen-powered startups shine at the Paris Auto Show

Enlarge / Olivier Lombard stands next to the Hopium Machina. (credit: Dhananjay Khadilkar )

PARIS—A 500 hp (373 kW) car with a 621-mile (1000-km) range reaching a maximum speed of 143 mph (230 km/h); the world’s first car partially powered by removable tanks… The stylish and innovative Hopium Machina and NAMX SUV, both hydrogen powered vehicles developed by startups, were among the chief attractions at this year’s Paris Auto Show.

Considering that Hopium was founded by a former Le Mans 24 hours winner, it isn’t a surprise that Machina is performance-focused. Olivier Lombard, who won in the LMP2 category in 2011 at Le Mans, also had a stint as a development driver of H24’s hydrogen-powered prototype that is set to run in future Le Mans races. “As a racing driver, for many years, I developed a race car with hydrogen technology. That is why I went for a performance car that also had range and took between three to four minutes to refuel,” Lombard, who is also the CEO of Hopium, told Ars Technica.

Lombard elaborated on the inspiration behind Machina. “When you are a race car driver, you have a close proximity with your car. You need to understand the car and feel its every move. We have the same closeness with Machina, whether it’s the car’s behavior on the road or the interactions inside like tactiles with haptic feedback,” he said.

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VMware bug with 9.8 severity rating exploited to install witch’s brew of malware

(credit: Pixabay)

Hackers have been exploiting a now-patched vulnerability in VMware Workspace ONE Access in campaigns to install various ransomware and cryptocurrency miners, a researcher at security firm Fortinet said on Thursday.

CVE-2022-22954 is a remote code execution vulnerability in VMware Workspace ONE Access that carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10. VMware disclosed and patched the vulnerability on April 6. Within 48 hours, hackers reverse-engineered the update and developed a working exploit that they then used to compromise servers that had yet to install the fix. VMware Workspace ONE access ​​helps administrators configure a suite of apps employees need in their work environments.

In August, researchers at Fortiguard Labs saw a sudden spike in exploit attempts and a major shift in tactics. Whereas before the hackers installed payloads that harvested passwords and collected other data, the new surge brought something else—specifically, ransomware known as RAR1ransom, a cryptocurrency miner known as GuardMiner, and Mirai, software that corrals Linux devices into a massive botnet for use in distributed denial-of-service attacks.

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AI tool colorizes black-and-white photos automatically

Enlarge / Palette.fm does AI photo colorization using text prompts for refinement. (credit: Benj Edwards / Ars Technica)

A Swedish machine learning researcher named Emil Wallner has released a free web tool called Palette.fm that automatically colorizes black-and-white photos using AI. After uploading a photo, users can choose a color filter or refine the colors using a written text description.

Palette.fm uses a deep learning model to classify images, which guides its initial guesses for the colors of objects in a photo or illustration. "I’ve made a custom AI model that uses the image and text to generate a colorization," Wallner wrote in a message to Ars. "One model creates the text and the other takes the image and the text to generate the colorization."

After you upload an image, the site's sleek interface provides an estimated caption (description) of what it thinks it sees in the picture. If you don't like any of the preset color filters, you can click the pencil icon to edit the caption yourself, which guides the colorization model using a text prompt.

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The world’s energy situation is not as terrible as you might expect

Enlarge (credit: Tunvarat Pruksachat)

The past several years have seen a lot of unexpected turbulence in the global energy market. Lockdowns during the early pandemic response caused energy use to plunge in 2020, but carbon emissions soared as the economy rebounded in 2021. Early 2022, however, saw Russia invade Ukraine and attempt to use its energy exports as leverage over European countries, leading to worries about a resurgence in coal use and a corresponding surge in emissions.

As 2022 draws to a close, however, there are many indications that things aren't going to be all that bad. Coal use has risen, but not as much as feared, and the booming renewables market has largely offset its impact on emissions. Meanwhile, Europe has made rapid adjustments to its energy supplies and appears to be in a position to handle this winter's likely energy demands.

Europe has gotten ready

In many parts of Europe, energy use peaks in the winter with the onset of cold weather. A lot of the heating demand, along with some demand for electricity, is met by burning natural gas, and Russia is a major supplier for the continent. With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, European sanctions initiated a series of threats and then curtailments in Russia's delivery of natural gas, ultimately ending with the apparent sabotage of one of the most significant natural gas pipelines.

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Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 Remake modernizes some now-dated gameplay tropes

Enlarge / Leon brings a knife to a zombie fight.

Game design has come a long way since Resident Evil 4 first hit the GameCube and PlayStation 2 in 2005. That's why the upcoming remake of the game, highlighted during Capcom's Resident Evil Showcase Thursday night, will be "modernizing the playfeel," according to producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, by updating mechanics that might seem dated to a modern audience.

Watching gameplay footage from that event, one of the most immediately apparent changes is the ability to move and shoot at the same time, something that was previously possible only in the recent virtual reality version of the game. That might seem like a necessary part of any action-oriented third-person shooter today, but Resident Evil 4 still had one foot in the more awkward "stand your ground" shooting of its PlayStation 1 predecessors when it launched. The more modern control scheme should make the remake feel a bit more dynamic.

The new footage also showed off Leon's new knife parry move, which lets him fend off attacks from encroaching undead Ganados with a quick slash. Even the fearsome Chainsaw Man can be temporarily held off with a well-timed parry.

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Sonos backtracks on Arc, Sub audio tweaks following user backlash

Enlarge / Sonos' Arc and Sub. (credit: Sonos)

Sonos issued a software update this week to address audio quality complaints brought on by a prior software update. Numerous customers said that update 14.12 made their Sonos devices play at lower volumes and that they lost bass when using Sonos' Trueplay tuning.

As detailed in a couple of threads on Sonos' troubleshooting forum, as well as on Reddit and YouTube, Sonos' 14.12 update, which promised "improvements to the clarity of Arc’s audio while playing dialogue," had undesirable effects as well.

As spotted by What Hi-Fi and The Verge, a Sonos staff member responded to commenters on Sonos' forum this week, saying that the 14.12 update changed the Sonos Arc soundbar's sound profile to improve audio quality, especially dialogue clarity, but also created "issues."

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YouTube’s latest revenue grab: A 27 percent price increase for family plans

Enlarge (credit: Jericho / Ron Amadeo)

Not content with doing $28.8 billion in revenue in 2021, YouTube has recently gone on the hunt for more revenue-generating strategies. So far, we've seen canceled experiments like saddling videos with up to 10 unskippable pre-roll ads and charging for 4K content. Now, the Google division has announced a price hike for YouTube Premium family plans.

As 9to5Google was the first to spot, the family plan is jumping over 27 percent in the US, from $17.99 to $22.99, with other regions also seeing price hikes. Instead of making an official announcement, Google is quietly emailing existing subscribers. So far, it does not seem like the single-person YouTube Premium price (still $11.99 per month) is going up. The family plan lets a user share ad-free YouTube Premium with up to five same-household family members for a discounted rate.

On iOS, all the prices are higher if you sign up through the App Store, which charges a 30 percent fee on every transaction. In Apple land, YouTube Premium's family plan was always $22.99, and now it's jumping up to $29.99 a month. You can avoid the Apple tax by just paying Google directly through the YouTube website.

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US might bail Musk out by blocking Twitter deal over national security

Enlarge (credit: John Shearer / Contributor | Getty Images Entertainment)

After the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, decided he would move forward with his plan to buy Twitter for what experts say is nearly four times its current worth, even Twitter doubted that Musk actually meant to see the deal through. Now, as Musk remains under federal investigation for his merger conduct, the Washington Post reports that if Musk does take over Twitter, he plans to gut Twitter’s staff by 75 percent. And Bloomberg reports that the Biden administration is considering launching national security reviews into Musk’s Twitter and Starlink satellite Internet deals. Those reviews could end up blocking the Twitter deal after all, which many commenters think is exactly what Musk wants.

Twitter immediately sent out a staff memo denying any company-wide layoffs, according to Bloomberg. Musk seemingly isn’t talking about any of this on the record, but he did tweet to show how humorous he finds the situation.

Famed mixed martial arts fighter Nik Lentz tweeted, “It would be hysterical if the government stopped Elon from overpaying for Twitter.” Musk replied with two emojis: a 100 percent sign and a cry-laughing face.

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Car feature subscriptions should be illegal, New Jersey legislators say

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One of the most egregious moneymaking trends in the auto industry today is the rise of the subscription feature. Sometimes, it's for software functions like navigation—Tesla recently announced that owners of cars will have to pay $99 per year or $9.99 per month to access navigation, maps, and voice commands once their cars reach a certain age, for example. And previously, BMW made headlines by making Apple CarPlay a subscription feature before backtracking in 2019.

But we're also starting to see automakers sell cars with built-in hardware features that must be activated through a subscription. Again, BMW is a notable example here; in markets like Korea and the United Kingdom, the company offers a subscription for features like heated seats. Tesla provides another example. It ships every car with the hardware required for its "Full Self Driving" feature but charges a fee—just increased from $12,000 to $15,000 in September—to activate it.

Some legislators in New Jersey are unhappy about that business model. In late September, Assemblymen Paul Moriarty and Joe Danielsen introduced a bill that would prohibit car makers or dealers from offering subscriptions in New Jersey for any feature that uses hardware already installed on the vehicle at the time of purchase unless that feature would represent an ongoing expense to the dealer, manufacturer, or a third party.

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How Vice Society got away with a global ransomware spree

Enlarge (credit: Suebsiri Srithanyarat / EyeEm / Getty Images)

A ransomware attack on the Los Angeles Unified School District in the first week of September crippled digital operations across the system, which includes more than 1,000 schools and serves roughly 600,000 students. Two weeks after the initial attack, as the district worked to recover and restore its systems, the hackers said that they would leak the 500 gigabytes of data they claimed to have stolen from LAUSD if the school system didn't pay a ransom.

After the school system refused to pony up, the hackers released the trove, which contained sensitive data of students who had attended LAUSD between 2013 and 2016, including their Social Security numbers, financial and tax information, health details, and even legal records. And as LAUSD set up a hotline for worried families and scrambled to deal with the fallout, the hacking group behind the attack moved on, seemingly without making any money off the incident.

That's Vice Society for you.

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Smugglers are using TikTok, Instagram to dupe Americans into smuggling migrants

Enlarge (credit: Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images News)

Sometimes attracting drivers as young as 14 with emoji-filled posts that promise thousands of dollars “for just a few hours of driving,” smugglers often rely on social media to recruit Americans to help migrants illegally cross the US-Mexico border, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Popular platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitter all told the WSJ that they prohibit these posts. However, the Journal talked to local and federal law-enforcement officials, as well as defense attorneys for Americans recruited on social media, who confirmed that despite those bans, the trend is “increasingly common.”

When contacted by Ars, a Twitter spokesperson pointed out that the Journal's report didn't include specific examples of this activity happening on the platform. The spokesperson linked to Twitter's Transparency Center, where the company tracks reports on this content.

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Vampire Survivors—a cheap, minimalistic indie game—is my game of the year

Enlarge / Kill monsters, pick up XP gems, upgrade character.

If you’re a fan of roguelites and haven’t heard of Vampire Survivors, let me be the first to welcome you to your new obsession.

The “gothic horror casual game with roguelike elements,” as its developer calls it, has been taking the indie world by storm over the past year, racking up over 120,000 “overwhelmingly positive” reviews on Steam and capturing effusive praise from critics. And until today, it was still in Early Access.

The game has even spawned a new sub-subgenre, with games of its ilk incorporating ideas from bullet-hell shoot-em-ups, roguelites, and timed horde-survival games. These games are almost all in Early Access, and every last one is curiously cheap—$5 seems to be the price cap. But while many pretenders to the throne have arisen, Vampire Survivors still reigns supreme. It was the second real game of its kind, after the 2021 Android-exclusive Magic Survival.

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74% say connected cars and EV chargers need cybersecurity ratings

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Almost 3 in 4 people think that connected cars and electric vehicle chargers should be rated for their ability to resist cybersecurity threats. That's the finding from a survey conducted last week by Blackberry to see whether people consider Internet-connected devices (also known as the Internet of Things) to be secure from hacking threats.

The survey was commissioned in response to a new White House initiative announced on Wednesday. The Biden administration plans to launch a labeling program for IoT devices in 2023, similar to the EnergyStar ratings that tell consumers how much electricity a TV or appliance will use.

The White House wants the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Federal Trade Commission to come up with a basic set of security standards so that Americans can tell at a glance whether that new speaker or washing machine is in danger of joining a botnet or getting hit with ransomware.

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Why are racing cars driving up and down an abandoned railway tunnel?

Enlarge / A Mazda RT-24P emerges from the Catesby Tunnel. (credit: Multimatic)

A tip of the hat to the editor over at Dailysportscar this morning for reminding me of one of the cooler bits of industrial repurposing in the automotive world. It's a Victorian railway tunnel in England that saw its last train in 1966 but is now entering its second life as an advanced aerodynamics test facility and an interesting alternative to a wind tunnel.

The Catesby Tunnel can be found in Northamptonshire, but more importantly it's in the heart of what's sometimes called the UK's motorsport valley because of the concentration of Formula 1 teams—Mercedes, Aston Martin, Alpine, Williams, and Red Bull—and their suppliers. Originally built in 1897, it was part of the Great Central Line and connected London with the industrial cities of Manchester and Sheffield.

But the UK's train network was devastated in 1963 by the Beeching cuts, where 3,000 miles of railway were torn up, market towns and villages were cut off from the rail network, and the nation—like so many others—started becoming much more car-centric. Ironic, then, that the tunnel is, too, more than 50 years later, thanks to a company called Aero Research Partners.

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