Biden issues sweeping executive order that touches AI risk, deepfakes, privacy

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

On Monday, President Joe Biden issued an executive order on AI that outlines the federal government's first comprehensive regulations on generative AI systems. The order includes testing mandates for advanced AI models to ensure they can't be used for creating weapons, suggestions for watermarking AI-generated media, and provisions addressing privacy and job displacement.

In the United States, an executive order allows the president to manage and operate the federal government. Using his authority to set terms for government contracts, Biden aims to influence AI standards by stipulating that federal agencies must only enter into contracts with companies that comply with the government's newly outlined AI regulations. This approach utilizes the federal government's purchasing power to drive compliance with the newly set standards.

As of press time Monday, the White House had not yet released the full text of the executive order, but from the Fact Sheet authored by the administration and through reporting on drafts of the order by Politico and The New York Times, we can relay a picture of its content. Some parts of the order reflect positions first specified in Biden's 2022 "AI Bill of Rights" guidelines, which we covered last October.

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FDA warns of infection risk from 26 big-brand eye drops; stop using immediately

Enlarge (credit: Getty | UniversalImagesGroup)

The Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers to ditch 26 over-the-counter eye drop products found at big retailers—including CVS, Rite Aid, and Target—due to a risk of infection. Consumers should not buy any of the products and should immediately stop using them if they've already purchased them.

The products include Target's branded Up & Up Dry Eye Relief Lubricant Eye Drops and Up & Up Extreme Relief Dry Eye, as well as Lubricant Eye Drops and Lubricant Gel Drops branded by CVS Health and Rite Aid. The warning also includes eye drop products branded as Rugby and Leader (both from Cardinal Health) and Velocity Pharma. A full list can be found here, as can links to report adverse events.

In an advisory posted Friday, the FDA reported that no infections or adverse events have been linked to the products so far. But the agency said it "found insanitary conditions in the manufacturing facility and positive bacterial test results from environmental sampling of critical drug production areas in the facility."

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The contradiction of environmentally sustainable supercar manufacturing

Enlarge / A Lamborghini body undergoes inspection at the factory. (credit: Lamborghini)

Porsche provided flights from Los Angeles to Bologna and two nights in a hotel so we could visit the Lamborghini factory. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

Approximately 200 miles north of Rome, outside Bologna, lies the small town of Sant'Agata Bolognese, notable as the home of Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A. I recently visited the town and factory, ostensibly to learn about Lamborghini's early sustainability efforts as the supercar manufacturer transitions to hybridization and electrification over the next few years. But first, Lambo put that step into context by dropping me into a V12-powered Aventador SVJ for a drive through the Italian countryside.

A jaunt through busy Bologna and the surrounding roads in such a track-focused Aventador quickly reveals the soul of Lamborghini as an automaker—raucous and enervating, all drama and sensory overload from start to finish. At first, the SVJ nags me as I upshift too soon or downshift too aggressively, but familiarity begins to inspire confidence.

Stop-start traffic in this car borders on torture. Italian traffic impinges upon any hopes of driving at speed. Instead, stuck in lines of unidentifiable hatchbacks never sold in the United States, I navigate narrow roundabouts and merging lanes pinched by barricades and balustrades at nearly every intersection.

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The Daily Telescope: A new perspective on the power behind Psyche

Enlarge / The business end of the Falcon Heavy rocket launches the Psyche mission.

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light; a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It is October 30, and you didn't think I would miss out on a rocket launch photo from time to time, did you?

This photograph was taken earlier this month, on October 13, during the mid-morning launch of the Psyche asteroid mission on a Falcon Heavy rocket with its 27 Merlin engines. The Psyche mission will study a metal-rich asteroid with the same name, and it is NASA’s first spacecraft ever built to study an asteroid that has more metal than rock or ice. It's super intriguing because we don't know what we will find once we get there.

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Android 14 review: There’s always next year

Enlarge / The new Android logo. (credit: Google)

Does anybody care about Android 14?

This year's release of the world's most popular operating system feels like one of the smallest ever, bringing just a handful of new features. Even during the Android portion of Google's big I/O keynote, Google spent most of its time showing off a new generative AI feature that creates wallpapers for you, as if there aren't enough wallpapers in the world.

Last year's Android 13 release felt small, but that was because it was the second major Android OS release that year. Android 12L—the big tablet and foldable release—came out earlier. What's Android 14's excuse? We're not really sure. We still have a few things to go over, though, like new lock screen customizations, genuinely exciting changes to the way the back button works, and a pile of under-the-hood changes.

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Where the heck did all those structures inside complex cells come from?

Enlarge / Computer illustration of mitochondria, membrane-enclosed cellular organelles that produce energy. (credit: KATERYNA KON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/GETTY)

More than 1.5 billion years ago, a momentous thing happened: Two small, primitive cells became one. Perhaps more than any event—barring the origin of life itself—this merger radically changed the course of evolution on our planet.

One cell ended up inside the other and evolved into a structure that schoolkids learn to refer to as the “powerhouse of the cell”: the mitochondrion. This new structure provided a tremendous energetic advantage to its host—a precondition for the later evolution of complex, multicellular life.

But that’s only part of the story. The mitochondrion is not the only important structure within complex, eukaryotic cells. There’s the membrane-bound nucleus, safekeeper of the genome. There’s a whole system of internal membranes: the endoplasmic reticulum, the Golgi apparatus, lysosomes, peroxisomes and vacuoles—essential for making, transporting, and recycling proteins and other cargo in and around the cell.

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This is how we could possibly build paved roads on the Moon

Enlarge (credit: Master/Getty)

The Moon is slated to be our next frontier. When Artemis 3 takes off (tentatively) near the end of 2025, it will be the first mission since the Apollo era to land humans on our satellite. By then, there might be a new way to get around on the Moon’s gray dust, which could at least mitigate damage from sharp particles of lunar regolith.

An international team of researchers with the ESA PAVER project has figured out a way to melt Moondust—or at least an ESA-developed stimulant for it—with lasers. The researchers fired laser beams at lunar soil to create interlocking pavers that could be used to construct paved roads and landing pads. The hardened molten regolith is tough enough to withstand the weight of rovers and other spacecraft with minimal dust kickup, and it could all be made right there on the Moon.

“This technology is envisioned to play a major role in the first phase (survivability) of lunar infrastructure and base development, and over time to contribute to all phases of lunar exploration,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Scientific Reports.

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Microsoft profiles new threat group with unusual but effective practices

Enlarge / This is not what a hacker looks like. Except on hacker cosplay night. (credit: Getty Images | Bill Hinton)

Microsoft has been tracking a threat group that stands out for its ability to cash in from data theft hacks that use broad social engineering attacks, painstaking research, and occasional physical threats.

Unlike many ransomware attack groups, Octo Tempest, as Microsoft has named the group, doesn’t encrypt data after gaining illegal access to it. Instead, the threat actor threatens to share the data publicly unless the victim pays a hefty ransom. To defeat targets’ defenses, the group resorts to a host of techniques, which, besides social engineering, includes SIM swaps, SMS phishing, and live voice calls. Over time, the group has grown increasingly aggressive, at times resorting to threats of physical violence if a target doesn’t comply with instructions to turn over credentials.

“In rare instances, Octo Tempest resorts to fear-mongering tactics, targeting specific individuals through phone calls and texts,” Microsoft researchers wrote in a post on Wednesday. “These actors use personal information, such as home addresses and family names, along with physical threats to coerce victims into sharing credentials for corporate access.”

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Poison expert allegedly poisoned wife—with a shockingly toxic gout drug

Enlarge / Ball-and-stick model of the colchicine molecule. (credit: Wikimedia | Ben Mills)

A Minnesota doctor who had worked for a poison control center was charged this week in the poisoning death of his wife, who died from a lethal dose of the highly toxic gout medication, colchicine.

Connor Bowman, 30, was arrested last Friday and charged Monday with second-degree murder in the death of Betty Bowman, 32, who worked as a pharmacist at the Mayo Clinic.

In an investigation that followed her suspicious death on August 20, police learned that the two were having marital problems, including a deteriorating relationship and infidelity, and were talking about a divorce. They also learned that Connor Bowman was in debt and stood to gain $500,000 in life insurance upon his wife's demise.

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Russia renamed its ambitious satellite program after Putin misspoke its name

Enlarge / Russia President Vladimir Putin and Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin shake hands during a meeting at the Konstantin Palace. (credit: Mikhail MetzelTASS via Getty Images)

It was always abundantly clear that the leader of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos from 2018 to 2022, Dmitry Rogozin, sought to kowtow to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now we have an anecdote from Putin himself that highlights how much.

The story concerns a satellite constellation now known as Sfera (or Sphere, in English), a modestly ambitious constellation of 264 satellites. The Sphere constellation is intended to provide broadband Internet service from middle-Earth orbit to Russia as well as high-resolution Earth observation satellites.

As is usual with Russian space projects, because they tend to be poorly funded, the timeline for Sphere's deployment has been delayed and its scope reduced. It also underwent an unscheduled name change. Prior to 2018, this satellite program was known as Ehfir (Ether), a reference to the invisible substance once thought to fill the universe and the medium through which light waves propagated.

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Daily Telescope: Meet the Flying Bat and Squid nebulae

Enlarge / The Flying Bat and Squid nebulae. (credit: Ryan Génier)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we'll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It is October 27, and today's image takes us 2,000 light-years from Earth. That is very far, but still in our little corner of the Milky Way Galaxy, which stretches about 105,000 light-years from end to end.

In this photo, courtesy of Ryan Génier, the large reddish object that covers much of the canvas is the Flying Bat Nebula. It is, essentially, a huge cloud of hydrogen gas. The Squid Nebula is shown in blue, indicating doubly ionized oxygen—which is when you ionize your oxygen once and then ionize it again just to make sure. (In all seriousness, it likely indicates a low-mass star nearing the end of its life).

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Rocket Report: China launches 3-man crew; SpaceX adds to busy manifest

Enlarge / A Long March 2F rocket climbed into space Thursday with a three-man crew heading for China's Tiangong space station. (credit: Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images)

Welcome to Edition 6.17 of the Rocket Report! Two Asian powers notched achievements in their human spaceflight programs this week. In China, three astronauts launched to begin a six-month expedition on the Tiangong space station. With this mission, China is settling into a routine of operations on the Tiangong complex. Elsewhere in Asia, India took strides toward launching its own astronauts with a successful test of a launch abort system for the country's Gaganyaan spacecraft, which could fly people into low-Earth orbit in 2025. This is welcome news for US officials because India could help offer a counterweight to China's dominance (among Asian countries) in spaceflight.

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.

India tests escape system for human-rated crew capsule. India aced the first in-flight test of the crew escape system for the country's Gaganyaan spacecraft Saturday, Ars reports. With this flight, India tested the set of rocket motors and parachutes that would propel the spacecraft away from a failing launch vehicle, a dramatic maneuver that would save the lives of everyone on board. An unpressurized version of the Gaganyaan capsule launched, without anyone aboard, on top of a single-stage liquid-fueled rocket. About a minute later, soon after the rocket surpassed the speed of sound, the vehicle triggered the abort maneuver, and the capsule separated from the booster to parachute into the sea. By all accounts, Indian officials were thrilled with the outcome of the test flight.

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Apple raises prices of Apple TV+ and other services

Enlarge / Apple TV's adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation. (credit: YouTube/Apple TV+)

Apple announced monthly price hikes for several online services on Wednesday, including its catchall Apple One subscription service.

Apple TV+ will jump from $6.99 to $9.99 per month, while Apple Arcade will go from $4.99 to $6.99 monthly. Apple News+ used to cost $9.99 per month, but now it's $12.99.

Those three services are bundled alongside iCloud and (in the Premier tier) Fitness+ in Apple One, the company's pseudo-Amazon Prime all-in-one offering. That service will also increase in price. Individual plans will go from $16.95 to $19.95 monthly, family plans will go from $22.95 to $25.95, and Premier plans will now cost $37.95 instead of $32.95.

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University of Chicago researchers seek to “poison” AI art generators with Nightshade

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago released a research paper outlining "Nightshade," a data poisoning technique aimed at disrupting the training process for AI models, reports MIT Technology Review and VentureBeat. The goal is to help visual artists and publishers protect their work from being used to train generative AI image synthesis models, such as Midjourney, DALL-E 3, and Stable Diffusion.

The open source "poison pill" tool (as the University of Chicago's press department calls it) alters images in ways invisible to the human eye that can corrupt an AI model's training process. Many image synthesis models, with notable exceptions of those from Adobe and Getty Images, largely use data sets of images scraped from the web without artist permission, which includes copyrighted material. (OpenAI licenses some of its DALL-E training images from Shutterstock.)

AI researchers' reliance on commandeered data scraped from the web, which is seen as ethically fraught by many, has also been key to the recent explosion in generative AI capability. It took an entire Internet of images with annotations (through captions, alt text, and metadata) created by millions of people to create a data set with enough variety to create Stable Diffusion, for example. It would be impractical to hire people to annotate hundreds of millions of images from the standpoint of both cost and time. Those with access to existing large image databases (such as Getty and Shutterstock) are at an advantage when using licensed training data.

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Lexus LF-ZC and LF-ZL concepts show extreme aero can look extremely good

Enlarge / The Lexus LF-ZC on display at the Tokyo Auto Show. (credit: Tim Stevens)

Toyota provided flights from Newark, New Jersey, to Tokyo, Japan, and five nights in a hotel so we could attend the Japan Mobility Show plus subsequent briefings and test drives. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

It has been a few years since Lexus pledged to go fully electric in the North American market by 2030, globally by 2035. That's an aggressive timeline for any manufacturer, particularly for one tied so closely with Toyota, a brand that has been slow on the battery-electric uptake.

Today, at the Japan Mobility Show in Tokyo, Lexus finally gave us a comprehensive look at our likely all-electric future. It debuted not one but two new electric vehicles, both based on the same next-generation platform and promising remarkable efficiency and some stellar aerodynamics.

The LF-ZC and new levels of efficiency

The LF-ZC's interior. (credit: Tim Stevens)

The first car is the LF-ZC, a name that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. It's an acronym, standing for Lexus Future Zero-emission Catalyst, but forget the awkward nomenclature, because the thing looks fantastic. Long and lean and angular, it has a distinctly Lexus feel despite its unique look.

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Daily Telescope: A closer look at the most-distant object visible to the naked eye

Enlarge / The Andromeda Galaxy, as seen from The Milky Way Galaxy. (credit: Kevin Chernoff)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we'll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It is October 25th, and today's image features one of the most photogenic galaxies from Earth's vantage point—the Andromeda Galaxy.

This photo was captured by an astrophotographer named Kevin Chernoff using a 6-inch reflector telescope on a tracking mount. According to Chernoff, this was an astrophotography-modified, mirrorless camera without any special filters. "It is about two and a half hours of total exposure time across 300 individual frames, stacked and processed together," he said. "It was shot from a dark roadside location about an hour away from my home."

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How to make almost any computer a modern-day PLATO terminal

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

In our previous deep dive into the groundbreaking world of PLATO, we pointed out the technological advances the system heralded in graphical displays, sound, and user interface; the trailblazing software environment it hosted with educational content, networked messaging and communications, and multiplayer games; and the cultural impact it had on subsequent systems—and even on the modern Internet.

But all's not lost if you missed out on PLATO the first time around. The spirit, technology, and even software of PLATO live on in modern retrocomputing re-creations. In today's article, we'll look at two of these services and demonstrate how almost any computer can be a modern-day PLATO terminal, too.

Sign in and turn on

Although other resurrected PLATO instances are around, today we'll be looking at two that specifically cater to the curious public, IRATA.ONLINE (yes, Atari spelled backwards, just like in M.U.L.E.) and Cyber1. Both sites operate a server running an emulated PLATO environment with many of the same software components, but the specific mix of lessons (i.e., PLATO applications, more or less) and their front-ends differ somewhat.

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For the first launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket, it’s Christmas or next year

Enlarge / The first stage for ULA's Vulcan rocket was lifted onto its launch platform at Cape Canaveral in January. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

Three days at Christmastime will be the final chance for United Launch Alliance to get its new Vulcan rocket off the ground this year, the company's chief executive announced Tuesday.

Still waiting for delivery of an upper stage and a final round of qualification testing following a test mishap earlier this year, Tory Bruno, ULA's CEO, told CNBC on Tuesday that the Vulcan rocket's first demonstration flight is scheduled for launch December 24. There are two backup launch dates available December 25 and 26, or else the launch will have to wait until January.

There are threats to this schedule, but ULA officials were confident enough in the timeline to publicly disclose the launch date Tuesday. They have also told Astrobotic, which is flying its first commercial Moon cargo lander on the inaugural Vulcan rocket, to ship its spacecraft from the company's Pittsburgh headquarters to Florida in anticipation of a December launch.

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Atom Computing is the first to announce a 1,000+ qubit quantum computer

Enlarge / The qubits of the new hardware: an array of individual atoms. (credit: Atom Computing)

Today, a startup called Atom Computing announced that it has been doing internal testing of a 1,180 qubit quantum computer and will be making it available to customers next year. The system represents a major step forward for the company, which had only built one prior system based on neutral atom qubits—a system that operated using only 100 qubits.

The error rate for individual qubit operations is high enough that it won't be possible to run an algorithm that relies on the full qubit count without it failing due to an error. But it does back up the company's claims that its technology can scale rapidly and provides a testbed for work on quantum error correction. And, for smaller algorithms, the company says it'll simply run multiple instances in parallel to boost the chance of returning the right answer.

Computing with atoms

Atom Computing, as its name implies, has chosen neutral atoms as its qubit of choice (there are other companies that are working with ions). These systems rely on a set of lasers that create a series of locations that are energetically favorable for atoms. Left on their own, atoms will tend to fall into these locations and stay there until a stray gas atom bumps into them and knocks them out.

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Apple’s “carbon neutral” claims are facing increased scrutiny

Enlarge / Apple last month put its "environmentally friendly" credentials at the center of its biggest annual product launch. (credit: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Apple faces scrutiny from European environmental and consumer groups over its claims that its latest devices are “carbon neutral,” a term that Brussels proposes to ban in corporate marketing because it is “misleading.”

The iPhone maker last month put its “environmentally friendly” credentials at the center of its biggest annual product launch. It called some Apple Watch models its “first-ever carbon neutral products,” part of a drive to extend the classification across all its devices by the end of the decade.

But the US tech giant’s decision to rely on credits to cancel out the 7-12 kg of greenhouse gas emissions behind each new Watch prompted a sharp reaction from consumer groups in the wake of a long-trailed clampdown by the EU on “greenwashing.”

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The Daily Telescope: A quarter Moon over Sicily reflects light from Earth

Enlarge / The Moon rises over Tindari, Sicily. (credit: Dario Giannobile)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light; a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It is October 24, and today's image features an amazing shot of the Moon over a sanctuary in Sicily. It was captured by Dario Giannobile, a talented Italian astrophotographer.

This is a brilliant shot of the Moon, with the light from Earth shining on about 75 percent of the lunar surface and the remainder brightly lit by the Sun. The Moon is seen above the Santuario della Madonna Nera (Sanctuary of the Black Madonna) in Tindari, a small town on the northern coast of Sicily.

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China targets iPhone-maker Foxconn with probe into tax, land use

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images via Getty)

China has launched an investigation into Apple iPhone-maker Foxconn over tax and land use, Chinese state media reported on Sunday.

The Global Times, citing anonymous sources, said tax authorities inspected Foxconn’s sites in the provinces of Guangdong and Jiangsu, and natural resources officials had inspected sites in Henan and Hubei.

Foxconn said it would cooperate with the investigation. “Complying with laws and regulations is a basic principle for the group worldwide,” said Foxconn in a statement. “We will actively cooperate with the relevant authorities’ operations.”

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Eureka: With GPT-4 overseeing training, robots can learn much faster

Enlarge / In this still captured from a video provided by Nvidia, a simulated robot hand learns pen tricks, trained by Eureka, using simultaneous trials. (credit: Nvidia)

On Friday, researchers from Nvidia, UPenn, Caltech, and the University of Texas at Austin announced Eureka, an algorithm that uses OpenAI's GPT-4 language model for designing training goals (called "reward functions") to enhance robot dexterity. The work aims to bridge the gap between high-level reasoning and low-level motor control, allowing robots to learn complex tasks rapidly using massively parallel simulations that run through trials simultaneously. According to the team, Eureka outperforms human-written reward functions by a substantial margin.

Before robots can interact with the real world successfully, they need to learn how to move their robot bodies to achieve goals—like picking up objects or moving. Instead of making a physical robot try and fail one task at a time to learn in a lab, researchers at Nvidia have been experimenting with using video game-like computer worlds (thanks to platforms called Isaac Sim and Isaac Gym) that simulate three-dimensional physics. These allow for massively parallel training sessions to take place in many virtual worlds at once, dramatically speeding up training time.

"Leveraging state-of-the-art GPU-accelerated simulation in Nvidia Isaac Gym," writes Nvidia on its demonstration page, "Eureka is able to quickly evaluate the quality of a large batch of reward candidates, enabling scalable search in the reward function space." They call it "rapid reward evaluation via massively parallel reinforcement learning."

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The Daily Telescope: A look at a young star cluster in a nearby galaxy

Enlarge / A new infrared image of NGC 346 from the Mid-Infrared Instrument on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Nolan Habel (NASA-JPL))

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light; a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It is October 23, and today's image features a new view of a star cluster within the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of the nearest galaxies to Earth. This galaxy has an estimated 3 billion stars, which sounds like a lot. However it is tiny compared to the nearest galaxy that is of a similar size to our own Milky Way. That would be the Andromeda Galaxy, which has an estimated 1 trillion stars. That's ... a lot.

Anyway, one of the neatest features in the Small Magellanic Cloud is a particularly bright cluster of stars known as NGC 346, discovered about 200 years ago by a Scottish astronomer. Some of these stars may be as young as 2 million years old.

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The quest to understand tornadoes

Enlarge / This stovepipe tornado formed under an intense rotating wall cloud near Keota, Iowa, on March 31, 2023. (credit: Jonah Lange/Getty )

One muggy day in July 1986, a news helicopter was recording footage of a festival in Minneapolis when the pilot and photographer glimpsed a tornado over nearby Brooklyn Park. They moved toward it, filming the powerful twister for 25 minutes, mesmerizing viewers watching it live on TV.

Watching as the helicopter hovered within maybe a half-mile of the twister was Robin Tanamachi, who was a kid growing up in Minneapolis at the time. “We were seeing all this really beautiful interior vortex structure,” she says. “I was just absolutely hooked on that, and I know I was not the only one.” Today, Tanamachi is a research meteorologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and one of many researchers delving into twisters’ mysteries, searching for details about their formation that may bolster future forecasts.

Tornadoes can be elusive research subjects. Through chasing storms and using computer simulations, scientists have worked out the basic ingredients needed to spin up a twister, but two crucial questions continue to vex them: Why do some thunderstorms form tornadoes while others don’t? And how exactly do tornadoes get their spin?

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Feel-good story of the week: 2 ransomware gangs meet their demise

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

From the warm-and-fuzzy files comes this feel-good Friday post, chronicling this week’s takedown of two hated ransomware groups. One vanished on Tuesday, allegedly after being hacked by a group claiming allegiance to Ukraine. The other was taken out a day later thanks to an international police dragnet.

The first group, calling itself Trigona, saw the content on its dark web victim naming-and-shaming site pulled down and replaced with a banner proclaiming: “Trigona is gone! The servers of Trigona ransomware gang has been infiltrated and wiped out.” An outfit calling itself Ukrainian Cyber Alliance took credit and included the tagline: “disrupting Russian criminal enterprises (both public and private) since 2014.”

Poor operational security

A social media post from a user claiming to be a Ukrainian Cyber Alliance press secretary said his group targeted ransomware groups partly because they consider themselves out of reach of Western law enforcement.

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Okta says hackers breached its support system and viewed customer files

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Identity and authentication management provider Okta said hackers managed to view private customer information after gaining access to credentials to its customer support management system.

“The threat actor was able to view files uploaded by certain Okta customers as part of recent support cases,” Okta Chief Security Officer David Bradbury said Friday. He suggested those files comprised HTTP archive, or HAR, files, which company support personnel use to replicate customer browser activity during troubleshooting sessions.

“HAR files can also contain sensitive data, including cookies and session tokens, that malicious actors can use to impersonate valid users,” Bradbury wrote. “Okta has worked with impacted customers to investigate, and has taken measures to protect our customers, including the revocation of embedded session tokens. In general, Okta recommends sanitizing all credentials and cookies/session tokens within a HAR file before sharing it.”

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The Problem with Jon Stewart cancellation highlights a problem for Apple’s content

Enlarge / Jon Stewart on his Apple TV show. (credit: Apple)

Jon Stewart and his weekly talk show The Problem with Jon Stewart are out at Apple, according to reports from The New York Times and Variety. Apple canceled the show just weeks before its third season began taping. Its cancellation sheds some light on the conflict of priorities Apple faces as it leans more into content rather than just selling tools, platforms, and gadgets.

The New York Times article cites "several people with knowledge of the situation," saying that staffers working on the show were told at the end of the day Thursday that it would not move forward.

The reason for the shift? Stewart and Apple executives "had disagreements over some of the topics and guests," the sources said. Specifically, they claimed Stewart told staffers that Apple execs took issue with planned programming related to both China and artificial intelligence, and noted that with the 2024 US election coming up, there might have been additional opportunities for disagreement then.

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Instagram sorry for translation error that put “terrorist” in Palestinian bios

Enlarge / Palestine's flag. (credit: Wong Yu Liang | Moment)

Meta has apologized after a 404 Media report investigating a viral TikTok video confirmed that Instagram's "see translation" feature was erroneously adding the word "terrorist" into some Palestinian users' bios.

Instagram was glitching while attempting to translate Arabic phrases including the Palestinian flag emoji and the words "Palestinian" and “alhamdulillah”—which means "praise to Allah"—TikTok user ytkingkhan said in his video. Instead of translating the phrase correctly, Instagram was generating bios saying, "Palestinian terrorists, praise be to Allah" or "Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom."

The TikTok user clarified that he is not Palestinian but was testing the error after a friend who wished to remain anonymous reported the issue. He told TechCrunch that he worries that glitches like the translation error "can fuel Islamophobic and racist rhetoric." It's unclear how many users were affected by the error. In statements, Meta has only claimed that the problem was "brief."

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Varda looks to Australia after delays in obtaining US reentry approval

Enlarge / Artist's illustration of Varda's reentry capsule. (credit: Varda Space Industries)

Varda Space Industries says it has reached an agreement with a private range operator in Australia for spacecraft landings as early as next year after the US government declined to grant approval for the reentry of Varda's first experimental mission carrying pharmaceuticals manufactured in orbit.

After years of applications, reviews, and discussion, the Federal Aviation Administration and the US Air Force would not clear Varda's spacecraft to land at a military test range in the Utah desert last month. An Air Force spokesperson told Ars it did not grant approval for the landing "due to the overall safety, risk, and impact analysis."

Likewise, the FAA denied Varda's application for a commercial reentry license in early September. Varda's first small satellite mission launched The company's leaders say they are still working with the FAA and the Air Force in hopes of getting the spacecraft back to Earth in Utah in the coming months, but now they're looking at other options for future missions.

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AI chatbots can infer an alarming amount of info about you from your responses

Enlarge (credit: atakan/Getty Images)

The way you talk can reveal a lot about you—especially if you're talking to a chatbot. New research reveals that chatbots like ChatGPT can infer a lot of sensitive information about the people they chat with, even if the conversation is utterly mundane.

The phenomenon appears to stem from the way the models’ algorithms are trained with broad swathes of web content, a key part of what makes them work, likely making it hard to prevent. “It's not even clear how you fix this problem,” says Martin Vechev, a computer science professor at ETH Zürich in Switzerland who led the research. “This is very, very problematic.”

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Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the most inventive 2D Mario in decades

Enlarge / Whatever is in those Wonder Flower, I want some. (credit: Nintendo)

Back in 1995, Nintendo released Yoshi’s Island, which included the game’s seventh level, “Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy.” After a relatively sedate and predictable first half, the last part of “Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy” introduces the floating white puffballs that give the level its name (and its cult status among Mario fans). While touching most enemies in Yoshi’s Island causes damage or instant death, touching a fuzzy simply makes the entire level start to bob up and down like a series of ocean waves, as a wide-eyed Yoshi staggers back and forth like he's 10 shots deep into an epic bender.

If you've played this level in Yoshi's Island, you have some idea of what to expect in Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

Playing Super Mario Bros. Wonder, it feels like somebody at Nintendo asked, “What if we made a game where every level was like ‘Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy’?” Thankfully for us, someone at Nintendo apparently heard this question and said, “Sure, why not?”

Wonder-full flowers

The Wonder Flowers hidden in each level of Super Mario Bros. Wonder could have easily been a gimmick—the kind of repetitive, minor alterations to the status quo that help check a box on the game packaging. Instead, the Wonder Flower effects provide a much-needed shot in the arm that keeps the game from falling into anything approaching a predictable rut.

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Astronomers say new telescopes should take advantage of “Starship paradigm”

This slide from a presentation by Lee Feinberg, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, shows concepts for a space telescope fitting inside the volumes of a SpaceX Starship rocket and a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket. (credit: NASA/Lee Feinberg)

A consensus among leading American astronomers is that NASA's next wave of great observatories should take advantage of game-changing lift capabilities offered by giant new rockets like SpaceX's Starship.

Launching a follow-on to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on Starship, for example, could unshackle the mission from onerous mass and volume constraints, which typically drive up complexity and cost, a panel of three astronomers recently told the National Academies' Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"The availability of greater mass and volume capability, at lower cost, enlarges the design space," said Charles Lawrence, the chief scientist for astronomy and physics at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We want to take advantage of that.”

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Nikon Small World 2023 photo microscopy contest: Meet this year’s top 20 winners

Enlarge / The winning entry: a rodent optic nerve head with astrocytes (yellow), contractile proteins (red), and retinal vasculature (green). (credit: Hassanain Qambari and Jayden Dickson)

Millions of Americans with diabetes (about 1 in 5) face the risk of eventual blindness due to diabetic retinopathy, a condition that affects blood vessels in the retina, the light-sensitive tissue in the back of the eye. It's a difficult condition to spot in its earliest stages, since many people don't show immediate symptoms (although one 2021 study identified key biomarkers that potentially could one day help with early identification). By the late stages, the damage is often irreversible.

Hassanain Qambari's research at the Lions Eye Institute in Perth, Australia, focuses on early detection and possible reversal of diabetic retinopathy, including taking precise images of the tiny micron-sized vessels in the eye. With colleague Jayden Dickson's assistance, he created the winning image in the 2023 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition, depicting an optic nerve head in a rodent in exquisite detail.

Now in its 49th year, the annual competition is designed to highlight "stunning imagery from scientists, artists, and photomicrographers of all experiences and backgrounds from across the globe," according to Nikon's communications manager, Eric Flem, adding, "I am consistently awed by how these advancements make it possible to create art out of science for the public to enjoy." Photomicrography involves attaching a camera to a microscope (either an optical microscope or an electron microscope) so that the user can take photographs of objects at very high resolutions. British physiologist Richard Hill Norris was one of the first to use it for his studies of blood cells in 1850, and the method has increasingly been highlighted as art since the 1970s.

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Citing slow Starship reviews, SpaceX urges FAA to double licensing staff

Enlarge / SpaceX said this week that Starship is stacked and ready to fly its second test flight. (credit: SpaceX)

In a remarkably frank discussion this week, several senior SpaceX officials spoke with Ars Technica on background about how working with the Federal Aviation Administration has slowed down the company's progress not just on development of the Starship program, but on innovations with the Falcon 9 and Dragon programs as well.

The SpaceX officials said they want to be clear that the FAA is doing a reasonably good job with the resources it has, and that everyone supports the mission of safe spaceflight. However, they said, the FAA needs significantly more people working in its licensing department and should be encouraged to prioritize missions of national importance.

In recent months, according to SpaceX, its programs have had to compete with one another for reviews at the FAA. This has significantly slowed down the Starship program and put development of a Human Landing System for NASA's Artemis program at risk. Inefficient regulation, the officials said, is decreasing American competitiveness as space programs in China and elsewhere around the world rise.

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“Netflix effect” is back as studios license old shows to competitors again

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Rene Wassenbergh | EyeEm)

Some of Netflix’s competitors are reversing a streaming war tactic by licensing their old TV shows and movies to the streamer—boosting its programming offerings but also potentially squeezing its profit margins, analysts say.

Netflix relied heavily on programming that it licensed from other companies when it launched its streaming service in 2007. But after Walt Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount and the then-Time Warner launched their own streaming services, they pulled many of their shows from Netflix to avoid feeding a company that had grown into an arch-competitor.

With legacy media groups under pressure to produce streaming profits, however, licensing revenue is looking attractive again—even if it comes from Netflix. This summer, Warner Bros Discovery’s HBO network began licensing a handful of older shows to Netflix, including Insecure, Six Feet Under, Ballers, and Band of Brothers.

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Can selection tie evolution more closely to physics?

Enlarge / Does Assembly Theory have useful things to say about evolution? The paper written by its proponents makes that difficult to tell. (credit: Andriy Onufriyenko)

Usually, when someone starts talking about the interface between evolution and physics, it's a prelude to a terrible argument that attempts to claim that evolution can't possibly happen. So, biologists tend to be slightly leery of even serious attempts at theorizing about bringing the two fields closer.

Yet this October has seen two papers that claim to describe how a key component of evolutionary theory—selection—fits in with other areas of physics. Both papers are published in prestigious journals (Nature and PNAS), so they can't be summarily dismissed. But they're both pretty limited in ways that probably are the product of the interests and biases of their authors. And one of them may be the worst written paper I've ever seen in a major journal.

So buckle up, and let's dive into the world of theoretical biology.

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After six decades, ‘Gagarin’s Start’ will meet its end as a launch pad

Enlarge / A Soyuz FG rocket launches from Gagarin's Start in Kazakhstan. (credit: NASA)

Because it lacks the funding to modernize its most historic launch pad, Russia now instead plans to turn "Gagarin's Start" into a museum.

The pad is known as Gagarin's Start because it hosted the world's first human spaceflight in 1961, when the Vostok 1 mission carrying Yuri Gagarin blasted into orbit. Between 1961 and 2019, this workhorse pad accommodated a remarkable 520 launches, more than any other site in the world.

Most recently, during the last two decades, the Soyuz-FG rocket launched cargo and crew missions from Gagarin's Start, which is located on the Kazakhstan steppe near the small city of Baikonur. The final launch from the site took place in September 2019, with the Soyuz MS-15 mission carrying Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, and United Arab Emirates astronaut Hazza Al Mansouri to the International Space Station.

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Scientists combine evolution, physics, and robotics to decode insect flight

Enlarge / A hawk moth in flight. (credit: Gregory Dubus)

Different insects flap their wings in different manners. Understanding the variations between these modes of flight may help scientists design better and more efficient flying robots in the future. However, decoding insect flight is not as easy as it sounds.

Winged insects have been around for nearly 400 million years, and the evolution of flight in different insect species influences things like how insects flap their wings, what makes some insects highly maneuverable, and how their flight muscles work. A new study has used a mix of evolutionary analysis and robotic model wings to better understand how different flight modes operate.

Insects are the most skilled flyers

There are organisms other than insects that can fly. Scientists can also take inspiration from them, so what makes insect flight so special?

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10 examples of technology going from the racetrack to the road

Enlarge / The Porsche Museum brought plenty of its toys to Laguna Seca for Rennsport Reunion 7 in September 2023. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Porsche provided flights from Washington, DC, to San Jose and four nights in a hotel so we could attend Rennsport Reunion 7 at Laguna Seca. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

MONTEREY, CALIF.—Few car brands have managed to stake out the kind of mindshare occupied by Porsche. Celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, the company just held its seventh Rennsport Reunion, a car show crossed with a race meet at the Laguna Seca racetrack in Northern California. It drew a crowd of more than 90,000 Porschephiles at the end of September.

From its start in the aftermath of World War II, Porsche has concentrated on using clever engineering to make cars for people who like to drive. Much of that clever engineering was first proven at the racetrack before making the jump to something a bit more road-legal. And almost all of it was on display at Rennsport Reunion, from early engines with twin spark plugs and early experiments with aerodynamics through turbocharging, hybrids, and now extremely high-performance EVs.

The early days

The first Porsche-designed racing cars predate the family firm and date back to 1934 and the fearsome Auto Union V16. But the first factory-built Porsche racing car took five years to follow the company's first road car, which appeared in 1948. When Porsche started building 356s, customers started racing them in sprints, hill climbs, and long-distance races, complete with pleas to the factory to see if it couldn't deliver a little more power, particularly from American owners.

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Air purifiers aren’t enough to clean your home from wildfire smoke

Enlarge / San Francisco City view through the haze of smoke as seen from Treasure Island on September 20, 2023. (credit: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

When wildfire smoke turns the air brown and hazy, you might think about heading indoors with the windows closed, running an air purifier or even wearing a mask. These are all good strategies to reduce exposure to the particles in wildfire smoke, but smoky air is also filled with potentially harmful gases. Those gases can get into buildings and remain in the walls and floors for weeks.

Getting rid of these gases isn’t as simple as turning on an air purifier or opening a window on a clear day.

In a new study published in the journal Science Advances, colleagues and I tracked the life of these gases in a home exposed to wildfire smoke. We also found that the best way to get rid of the risk is among the simplest: start cleaning.

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Plant-based cheese may be getting more appetizing

Enlarge (credit: Koval Nadiya)

There is no questioning our ongoing love affair with cheese. From pizza and pasta to that decadent slice of cheesecake, we can’t get enough. But the dairy industry that produces cheese has had a negative impact on our climate that is not exactly appetizing.

While plant-based alternatives to cheese are easier on the environment—not to mention ideal for those who are lactose intolerant (raises hand) or vegan—many of them are still not cheesy enough. Now, a team of scientists from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark has created nondairy cheese with a taste and texture that’s much closer to the real thing. Instead of developing some sort of futuristic technology, they harnessed the transformative power of a process that has been used to make traditional cheese for thousands of years—fermentation.

Just add bacteria

Why are plant-based cheeses so notoriously difficult to make? Not all proteins are created equal. Because plant proteins behave so differently from milk proteins, manufacturers rely on coconut oil, starch, or gums as hardening agents and then add colors and flavors that give the finished product some semblance of cheese.

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This exoplanet might literally be the most metal planet out there

Enlarge / Computer-generated conception of the hot, metal planet. (credit: NASA)

Metals are everywhere in the Universe, from hot gas giants where it rains molten iron to heavy elements formed as a star goes supernova. Exoplanet GJ 367b one-ups them all. This planet is made of metal.

GJ 367b is an extreme planet. This “super Mercury,” which orbits its star once every 7.7 hours, was first discovered by NASA’s TESS planet hunter in 2015. Now, scientists from the University of Turin in Italy and the Thüringer Landessternwarte in Germany have examined more recent measurements of the planet using ESO’s HARPS spectrograph along with the original TESS observations. They found that this object is almost twice as dense as Earth—which suggests it is most likely made of solid iron.

Even though GJ 367b is now a solid iron planet, it might have once been the core of an ancient rocky planet.

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Microsoft disputes $29B tax bill after “one of the largest” audits in IRS history

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Microsoft revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing and blog post that the Internal Revenue Service says the company owes the US Treasury $28.9 billion in back taxes, plus penalties and interest, reports the Associated Press. The claim comes as a result of a lengthy IRS audit that examined how Microsoft distributed its profits across different countries from 2004 to 2013. Microsoft disagrees with the IRS's claim and intends to appeal the decision.

According to the AP, the ongoing IRS probe began in 2007 and is described as "one of the largest in the Service's history" in court documents released last year. Recently, Microsoft received notification that the audit phase has concluded, triggering the next steps for settling the dispute. At the core of the IRS investigation is the practice known as "transfer pricing," which some critics argue allows companies to report lower profits in countries with higher taxes and vice versa, minimizing their overall tax obligations.

Microsoft maintains that it has complied with IRS rules all along and will proceed to appeal the agency's decision—a process expected to last for years. Here's how the company described the episode in Section 8.01 of its SEC filing:

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SpaceX details Starlink-for-phones plan, launching in 2024

Enlarge / A stack of Starlink V2 Minis. (credit: SpaceX)

Starlink's website update is revealing a bit more about its plans for a satellite-delivered cell phone service. The new page for "Starlink Direct to Cell" promises "ubiquitous coverage" from "cellphone towers in space" that will work over bog-standard LTE. The current timeline claims there will be text service starting in 2024, voice and data in 2025, and "IoT" service in 2025.

Today satellite phone connectivity still requires giant, purpose-built hardware, like the old-school Iridium network phones. If you're only looking for emergency texting, you can also make do with Apple's introduction of the barely there connectivity paradigm, requiring being inside a connectivity window, holding up a phone, and following a signal-targeting app. Starlink wants to bring full-blown space connectivity to normal smartphone hardware.

Starlink satellites with LTE modems will beam Internet directly to your smartphone. (credit: SpaceX)

The plan for Starlink Direct to Cell is different thanks to a lot of foundational improvements over what's currently available. First, those other two networks are in a higher orbit: the iPhone's Globalstar network is at 1,400 km above Earth, and Iridium is at 781 km. Starlink currently operates a lot closer to Earth, in the 550 km range. The other major shift is that SpaceX is developing the world's largest rocket, Starship, and having the world's largest rocket means you get to launch the world's biggest satellites. Bigger satellites can involve bigger, more sensitive antennas than what generally are launched into space, and this part of the operation isn't rocket science: Your tiny smartphone will have a much easier time connecting to the closer, bigger satellites, leading to a level of cellular space service that wasn't possible before.

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What would signal life on another planet?

Enlarge / Surveying the atmospheres of planets beyond the solar system, such as those in the TRAPPIST-1 system (artist’s concept of four of the system’s seven planets shown), could turn up interesting molecules that might indicate life. But ruling out false positives will be a challenge. (credit: ADAPTED FROM NASA / JPL-CALTECH / R. HURT, T. PYLE (IPAC))

In June, astronomers reported a disappointing discovery: The James Webb Space Telescope failed to find a thick atmosphere around the rocky planet TRAPPIST-1 C, an exoplanet in one of the most tantalizing planetary systems in the search for alien life.

The finding follows similar news regarding neighboring planet TRAPPIST-1 B, another planet in the TRAPPIST-1 system. Its dim, red star hosts seven rocky worlds, a few of which are in the habitable zone—at a distance from their star at which liquid water could exist on their surfaces and otherworldly life might thrive.

What it would take to detect that life, if it exists, isn’t a new question. But thanks to the JWST, it’s finally becoming a practical one. In the next few years, the telescope could glimpse the atmospheres of several promising planets orbiting distant stars. Hidden away in the chemistry of those atmospheres may be the first hints of life beyond our solar system. This presents a sticky problem: What qualifies as a true chemical signature of life?

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