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

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

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

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

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

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Aluminum mining waste could be a source of green steel

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

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

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

Out of the mud

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

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Wild Apples: The 12 weirdest and rarest Macs ever made

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

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

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

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

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Netflix will stream WWE Raw in $5 billion deal

Enlarge / Santos Escobar and Joaquin Wilde at WWE Smackdown held at Barclay's Center on December 1, 2023, in Brooklyn, New York. (credit: Sportico via Getty)

Netflix has agreed to a $5 billion deal to screen World Wrestling Entertainment’s flagship Raw program over the next decade, in the group’s biggest foray so far into streaming live events.

The streaming service is betting that screening three live programs a week will allow it to capture the large and loyal fan base for a show that helped launch the careers of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, John Cena, and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin.

The deal, which starts in January 2025, will significantly expand Netflix’s use of the technology that is required to broadcast live sporting events.

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Daily Telescope: Looking up to brilliant skies Down Under

Enlarge / The night sky from Australia. (credit: Erin Mikan)

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's January 23, and today's image showcases the night sky as seen from the Southern Hemisphere. It's a simple image of the Milky Way from a mobile phone, but it manages to capture so much grandeur.

Erin Mikan said she was inspired to send in this photo after our recent image from Playa Grande, Mexico, showcasing the Milky Way Galaxy above a bioluminescent bay.

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Will demand for the Volkswagen ID Buzz outstrip supply?

Enlarge / You don't have to get a two-tone paint job on your ID Buzz, but it helps. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Volkswagen's forthcoming electric minivan couldn't be better named. Simply put, in the years that we've been writing about cars, nothing on four wheels has created quite as much buzz as the VW ID Buzz with its adorably retro styling. But if all that attention translates into actual buyers, the electric microbus may end up being oversubscribed, at least to begin with.

Charlie Hall, chairman of the Volkswagen National Dealer Advisory Council, says the US may only see 20,000 ID Buzzes imported this year, according to an interview today in Automotive News. "It sounds like we may have the opportunity for additional European capacity if we need it, but we're still trying to sort out where the demand is going to be globally," Hall said.

Years in the making

VW's plan to resurrect the iconic T1 Microbus goes back to 2001 during the industry's flirtation with retro car design. While vehicles like the new VW Beetle, Ford's porthole-a-licious Thunderbird, and the ever-customizable Chrysler PT Cruiser made it to production, the Microbus concept never did.

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NASA loses, and then recovers, contact with its historic Mars helicopter

Enlarge / NASA's Mars Ingenuity helicopter has been flying across the red planet for nearly three years. (credit: NASA)

The US space agency prompted widespread dismay in the spaceflight community on Friday evening when it announced that communication had been lost with the Mars Ingenuity helicopter during its most recent flight on Thursday, January 18.

"During its planned descent, communications between the helicopter and rover terminated early, prior to touchdown," according to a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The Ingenuity team is analyzing available data and considering next steps to reestablish communications with the helicopter."

This seemed like a bad sign for the plucky little helicopter, which has vastly outperformed its planned lifetime of a handful of test flights since it landed on Mars in February 2021 and began flying two months later. Rather, the communications loss occurred on the 72nd flight of the 4-pound flying machine—the first on another planet.

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What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?

Enlarge / The STS-51-B mission begins with the liftoff of the Challenger from Pad 39A in April 1985. (credit: NASA)

Taylor Wang was deeply despondent.

A day earlier, he had quite literally felt on top of the world by becoming the first Chinese-born person to fly into space. But now, orbiting Earth on board the Space Shuttle, all of his hopes and dreams, everything he had worked on for the better part of a decade as an American scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had come crashing down around him.

Wang was the principal investigator of an experiment called the Drop Dynamics Module, which aimed to uncover the fundamental physical behavior of liquid drops in microgravity. He had largely built the experiment, and he then effectively won a lottery ticket when NASA selected him to fly on the 17th flight of the Space Shuttle program, the STS-51-B mission. Wang, along with six other crew members, launched aboard Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1985.

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Convicted murderer, filesystem creator writes of regrets to Linux list

Enlarge / A portion of the cover letter attached to Hans Reiser's response to Fredrick Brennan's prompt about his filesystem's obsolescence. (credit: Fredrick Brennan)

With the ReiserFS recently considered obsolete and slated for removal from the Linux kernel entirely, Fredrick R. Brennan, font designer and (now regretful) founder of 8chan, wrote to the filesystem's creator, Hans Reiser, asking if he wanted to reply to the discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML).

Reiser, 59, serving a potential life sentence in a California prison for the 2006 murder of his estranged wife, Nina Reiser, wrote back with more than 6,500 words, which Brennan then forwarded to the LKML. It's not often you see somebody apologize for killing their wife, explain their coding decisions around balanced trees versus extensible hashing, and suggest that elementary schools offer the same kinds of emotional intelligence curriculum that they've worked through in prison, in a software mailing list. It's quite a document.

What follows is a relative summary of Reiser's letter, dated November 26, 2023, which we first saw on the Phoronix blog, and which, by all appearances, is authentic (or would otherwise be an epic bit of minutely detailed fraud for no particular reason). It covers, broadly, why Reiser believes his system failed to gain mindshare among Linux users, beyond the most obvious reason. This leads Reiser to detail the technical possibilities, his interpersonal and leadership failings and development, some lingering regrets about dealings with SUSE and Oracle and the Linux community at large, and other topics, including modern Russian geopolitics.

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DeepMind AI rivals the world’s smartest high schoolers at geometry

Enlarge / Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies and developer of AlphaGO, attends the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park on November 2, 2023 in Bletchley, England. (credit: Toby Melville - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

A system developed by Google’s DeepMind has set a new record for AI performance on geometry problems. DeepMind’s AlphaGeometry managed to solve 25 of the 30 geometry problems drawn from the International Mathematical Olympiad between 2000 and 2022.

That puts the software ahead of the vast majority of young mathematicians and just shy of IMO gold medalists. DeepMind estimates that the average gold medalist would have solved 26 out of 30 problems. Many view the IMO as the world’s most prestigious math competition for high school students.

“Because language models excel at identifying general patterns and relationships in data, they can quickly predict potentially useful constructs, but often lack the ability to reason rigorously or explain their decisions,” DeepMind writes. To overcome this difficulty, DeepMind paired a language model with a more traditional symbolic deduction engine that performs algebraic and geometric reasoning.

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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a new first-person Nazi-whipping journey

Enlarge / CGI Harrison Ford just can't believe he's getting roped into another globe-trotting adventure. (credit: Bethesda/Machine Games)

Almost two years ago to this day, Bethesda told everyone its Machine Games subsidiary was working on a new Indiana Jones game, one with "an original story." Now we can see what Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is going to look like, with a gameplay trailer showing up during Microsoft's Developer Direct event, and when it's arriving: "2024." You can now wishlist it on Steam and the Xbox store; it's exclusive to those platforms.

Gameplay reveal trailer for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

While the game has Harrison Ford's likeness, it's not Ford voicing your character. Troy Baker, the original voice of Joel in The Last of Us, picks up the role of the archaeologist.

From the trailer, Great Circle looks a lot like the modern Wolfenstein games that Machine Games made—and that's a good thing. The New Order and The New Colossus excelled at making you feel more like a human action hero than a shooting tank. They've got a knack for first-person platforming, stunts, and cinematic moments that are nowhere near as painful as in many shooters. They excel at balancing immersing you as a player and letting your character have a personality.

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Researcher uncovers one of the biggest password breaches in recent history

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Nearly 71 million unique credentials stolen for logging into websites such as Facebook, Roblox, eBay, and Yahoo have been circulating on the Internet for at least four months, a researcher said Wednesday.

Troy Hunt, operator of the Have I Been Pwned? breach notification service, said the massive amount of data was posted to a well-known underground market that brokers sales of compromised credentials. Hunt said he often pays little attention to dumps like these because they simply compile and repackage previously published passwords taken in earlier campaigns.

Post appearing on breach site advertising the availability of naz.api password data.

Not your typical password dump

Some glaring things prevented Hunt from dismissing this one, specifically the contents indicating that nearly 25 million of the passwords had never been leaked before:

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Apple lets devs use alternate in-app payment options, still takes commissions

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

A chapter in the ongoing Epic v. Apple court case closed yesterday when the US Supreme Court declined to hear further arguments from either company. This decision leaves the case where it was after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on it in April 2023.

The main issue at hand—to summarize days of arguments and multiple lengthy, technical court rulings in a couple of sentences—was whether Apple could continue to collect the 15–30 percent cut that it takes of all App Store purchases on its platforms and in-app purchases and subscriptions bought inside of those apps. The rulings, largely seen as victories for Apple, didn't open iOS or iPadOS up to third-party app stores or app sideloading as Epic had originally sought. However, the rulings establised that Apple's so-called "anti-steering" rules—language prohibiting developers from mentioning cheaper or alternative purchasing options that might be available outside of an app—were anticompetitive.

Apple has updated its App Store rules to allow developers to provide external links to other payment options, technically circumventing its normal fee structure. But they come with many extra conditions that developers have to meet. And instead of paying Apple a 15 or 30 percent cut, Apple will collect a 12–27 percent commission instead. After factoring in the fees from whatever non-Apple payment processor these developers decide to use, the revenue they give up will remain essentially unchanged.

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What to expect from the Apple Vision Pro in February

Enlarge / Apple Vision Pro. (credit: Apple)

After years of delays, preorders for the Apple Vision Pro are just a few days away. It’s been a long, winding road to get to this point, and the nature of the headset has shifted through numerous rumors, both true and false.

Because of all that, this is a good time to clarify exactly what you can (and can’t) expect from Apple’s most ambitious new product in many years.

Apple showed more or less what it had finally landed on at WWDC in June, and I got some hands-on time with it then, but I still had a lot of questions. Fortunately, a few relevant details have been clarified since.

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Twin Galaxies lawyer says settlement avoids “an inordinate amount of costs”

Enlarge / Billy Mitchell competes at a (presumably authentic) Donkey Kong cabinet. (credit: Flickr / daveynin)

After a nearly five-year legal battle between the scorekeepers at Twin Galaxies and Billy Mitchell over the veracity of Mitchell's contested Donkey Kong high score submissions, the recent settlement of the case before trial might feel a little anticlimactic. But Twin Galaxies attorney David Tashroudian tells Ars Technica that he wasn't surprised both sides opted for the cost savings and quick finality that come with avoiding arguments in front of a jury.

"A ton of cases end up settling prior to trial, just to avoid the expense and for all the parties to get finality and certainty on their own terms," Tashroudian told Ars. "There were going to be an inordinate amount of costs involved, and both parties were facing a lot of uncertainty at trial, and they wanted to get the matter settled on their own terms without putting it to a jury."

For Twin Galaxies, Tashroudian said he wasn't sure if cost "was our primary motivating factor, but I think the finality really is something that we wanted to achieve."

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Daily Telescope: The Cygnus Wall lights up the night sky

Enlarge / The Cygnus Wall. (credit: Mel Martin)

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's January 16, and today we're traveling 2,600 light-years outward into space to the Cygnus Wall.

Although this sounds like some kind of intergalactic barrier, the Cygnus Wall's nomenclature has a more mundane origin—it looks like a wall and is located in the Cygnus constellation. It is the brightest region of the so-called North American Nebula, which in some photographs looks like the outline of North America.

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Antifungals are going the way of antibiotics—overused, hitting resistance

Enlarge / Ringworm. (credit: CDC/Getty Images)

Clinicians in the US may be overprescribing topical antifungal treatments for skin infections, potentially exacerbating a growing problem of drug resistance, according to a new study.

Last year, a dermatologist in New York reported the country's first cases of a newly emerging skin fungus that is highly contagious and resistant to common antifungal treatments. Silent community spread appeared to be behind the unconnected cases. Overall, drug-resistant fungal skin infection cases (aka ringworm) have been identified in at least 11 US states to date.

With resistance on the rise, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took a closer look at how US clinicians prescribe topical antifungals. As is the case of antibiotics and bacterial infections, overuse of antifungals can drive the development of resistance. And properly diagnosing skin infections can be extremely difficult without diagnostics. A 2016 survey study found that even board-certified dermatologists were frequently wrong when trying to identify skin infections just by sight.

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Elon Musk’s recent all-hands meeting at SpaceX was full of interesting news

Enlarge / Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, recently held an all-hands meeting with employees at the company's Starbase facility in South Texas. (credit: SpaceX)

Last year was unquestionably the best year in SpaceX's history, CEO Elon Musk told his employees during an all-hands meeting in South Texas last week.

There were 96 flights of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, plus the first two test flights of the enormous new Starship rocket. In 2024, SpaceX said it aims for more than 140 launches of the Falcon rocket family. There may be up to 10 Starship test flights this year, according to the NASA official who manages the agency's contract with SpaceX to develop Starship into a human-rated Moon lander.

SpaceX posted a video late Friday on the social media platform X of Musk's all-hands meeting at the Starbase launch facility near Brownsville, Texas. The hour-long video includes Musk's comments on SpaceX's recent accomplishments and plans, but the video ends before employees ask questions of their boss.

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Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial

Enlarge / Billy Mitchell (left) and Twin Galaxies owner Jace Hall (center) attend an event at the Arcade Expo 2015 in Banning, California. (credit: Datagod / TwinGalaxies forums)

The long, drawn-out legal fight between famed high-score chaser Billy Mitchell and "International Scoreboard" Twin Galaxies appears to be over. Courthouse News reports that Mitchell and Twin Galaxies have reached a confidential settlement in the case months before an oft-delayed trial was finally set to start.

The settlement comes as Twin Galaxies counsel David Tashroudian had come under fire for legal misconduct after making improper contact with two of Mitchell's witnesses in the case. Tashroudian formally apologized to the court for that contact in a filing earlier this month, writing that he had "debased myself before this Court" and "allowed my personal emotions to cloud my judgement" by reaching out to the witnesses outside of official court proceedings.

But in the same statement, Tashroudian took Mitchell's side to task for "what appeared to me to be the purposeful fabrication and hiding of evidence." The emotional, out-of-court contact was intended "to prove what I still genuinely believe is fraud on this Court," he wrote.

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Getting “forever chemicals” out of drinking water is expensive

Enlarge (credit: Wachirawit Jenlohakit via Getty)

Situated in a former sand and gravel pit just a few hundred feet from the Kennebec River in central Maine, the Riverside Station pumps half a million gallons of fresh groundwater every day. The well station processes water from two of five wells on either side of the river operated by the Greater Augusta Utility District, or GAUD, which supplies drinking water to nearly 6,000 local households. Most of them reside in Maine’s state capital, Augusta, just a few miles to the south. Ordinarily, GAUD prides itself on the quality of its water supply. "You could drink it out of the ground and be perfectly safe," said Brian Tarbuck, GAUD's general manager.

But in March 2021, environmental sampling of Riverside well water revealed trace levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or "forever chemicals," as they're better known. The levels at Riverside didn't exceed Maine's drinking water standard of 20 parts per trillion (ppt), which was a relief, Tarbuck said. Still, he and his colleagues at the utility were wary. PFAS have been linked to a variety of health problems, and Maine lawmakers at the time were debating an even stricter limit for the chemicals. Tarbuck knew a lower standard was coming someday. The only question was when.

As it turns out, a tougher standard is expected early this year. That's when the US Environmental Protection Agency is set to finalize an enforceable cap on PFAS in drinking water that will require GAUD and thousands of other utilities around the country to update their treatment methods. The standard, which in regulatory terms is called a maximum contaminant level, or MCL, limits permissible amounts of the two most studied and ubiquitous PFAS compounds—PFOA and PFOS—to just 4 ppt in drinking water each. Roughly equivalent to a single drop in five Olympic-size swimming pools, this is the lowest concentration that current analytical instruments can reliably detect "within specific limits of precision and accuracy during routine laboratory operating conditions," according to the EPA. Four other PFAS—PFHxS, PFNA, PFBS, and HFPO-DA (otherwise known as GenX Chemicals)—will be regulated by combining their acceptable levels into a single value. Utilities will have three to five years to bring their systems into compliance.

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Daily Telescope: Life on Earth, and maybe in the heavens above, in a single photo

Enlarge / The Milky Way over the sea. (credit: Alfonso Tamés)

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's January 15, and today's image comes to us from Playa Grande, Mexico.

I realize that some readers may be tiring of seeing the Milky Way Galaxy, but not me! I love photos of our galaxy and so they are regularly featured in the Daily Telescope. However, this photo is truly special, as it highlights not just the heavens above, but one of the wonders here on Earth.

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The 5 most interesting PC monitors from CES 2024

Enlarge / Dell's upcoming UltraSharp U4025QW. (credit: Scharon Harding)

Each year, the Consumer Electronics show brings a ton of new computer monitor announcements, and it's often difficult to figure out what's worth paying attention to. When it comes to the most interesting models this year, there were two noteworthy themes.

First of all, my complaint in 2022 about there not being enough OLED monitors was largely addressed this year. CES revealed many plans for OLED monitors in 2024, with a good number of those screens set to be appropriately sized for desktops. That includes the introduction of 32-inch, non-curved QD-OLED options and other smaller screens for people who have been waiting for OLED monitors in more varied form factors.

Secondly, with more people blending their work and home lives these days, CES brought hints that the line between gaming monitors and premium monitors used for general or even professional purposes will be blurring more in the future. We're not at the point where the best productivity monitor and ideal gaming monitor perfectly align in a single product. But this week's announcements have me imagining ways that future monitors could better serve users with serious work and play interests.

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I parked a BMW from across the parking lot at CES 2024

Enlarge / Until now, remote parking systems have mostly required the parking lot or garage to fit expensive sensors and equipment. BMW's approach is different, requiring nothing that isn't already on the car. (credit: Tim Stevens)

If I had a dollar for every automated self-parking demo I've seen over the years, many of which happened at CES, I'd probably have enough money to tip a Las Vegas valet, folks whose jobs are still very secure.

But that might actually be changing soon. Given all those earlier demos that went nowhere, I wasn't particularly enthused when I heard that BMW and Valeo were demonstrating yet another implementation of a car parking itself for the 2024 CES in Las Vegas.

However, after a quick chat with the folks behind the technology and getting a chance to try it myself, I realized I was wrong. Remote Valet is impressive not only for what it can do but because it does it without any technology more advanced than what's already found in today's production cars.

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Child abusers are covering their tracks with better use of crypto

Enlarge (credit: Naufal MQ via Getty Images)

For those who trade in child sexual exploitation images and videos in the darkest recesses of the Internet, cryptocurrency has been both a powerful tool and a treacherous one. Bitcoin, for instance, has allowed denizens of that criminal underground to buy and sell their wares with no involvement from a bank or payment processor that might reveal their activities to law enforcement. But the public and surprisingly traceable transactions recorded in Bitcoin's blockchain have sometimes led financial investigators directly to pedophiles’ doorsteps.

Now, after years of evolution in that grim cat-and-mouse game, new evidence suggests that online vendors of what was once commonly called “child porn” are learning to use cryptocurrency with significantly more skill and stealth—and that it's helping them survive longer in the Internet's most abusive industry.

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Rocket Report: A Chinese launch you must see; Vulcan’s stunning debut

Enlarge / Vulcan launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Monday. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

Welcome to Edition 6.26 of the Rocket Report! We're just 11 days into the new year, and we've already had two stunning rocket debuts. Vulcan soared into space on Monday morning, and then a medium-lift rocket from China, Gravity-1, made a picture-perfect launch from a mobile pad in the Yellow Sea. It feels like this could be a great year for lift.

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.

Vega C return-to-flight mission gets a date. The European Space Agency said it is targeting November 15 for the return to flight of the grounded Avio-built Vega C launch vehicle, European Spaceflight reports. I'll be honest. I had to double-check the calendar to make sure that it is in fact January, because that's an oddly specific date for a launch 10 months from now. But it appears there is some, ahem, flexibility in that date. ESA director of space transportation Toni Tolker-Nielsen says: “The nominal date is 15 November. There is a very detailed plan that is leading to this.”

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Those Games turns crappy mobile game ads into actually good puzzles

Enlarge / Can you master the ornate physics and inscrutable game theory necessary to overcome this challenge? (credit: D3Publisher)

You've seen them. If you've tried to read almost anything on the Internet, especially on a social media site, you know these mobile game advertisements.

"Many failed before! Think you can do better?" one reads, positioned over an auto-playing video of a simple puzzle played by an unseen, incredibly stupid hand. It pulls the wrong pin, melting the gold and drowning the king. Or it can't do elementary math, so it sends a "10" fighter to its death against a "13" creature, ignoring the "8" it could have picked to add up to 18. Sometimes, there are colored liquids in tubes to be poured, and they are selected with an almost elegant idiocy.

They're infuriating, but you know they work, because these ads keep showing up. If you actually downloaded these games, you'd discover they were stuffed with pop-up ads, relentlessly barking micro-transactions, or they're some unrelated and cynically monetized game entirely. What if you could actually play the original bait games, for a reasonable one-time fee, crafted by a developer who was in on the joke?

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Kids start paying attention to accuracy at about age four

Enlarge / Why wouldn't you trust this little guy? He's so cute! (credit: Thamrongpat Theerathammakorn)

Making mistakes is human, but it's not limited to humans. Robots can also glitch. As we fast-forward into a future with upgraded AI technology making its way into the classroom (and beyond), are kids willing to trust information from a robot, or would they prefer it to come from a human?

That's the question researchers Li Xiaquian and Yow Wei Quin of Singapore University of Technology and Design wanted to answer. To see whether human or machine was more reliable, they ran an experiment with kids ages 3–5, giving them a screen that paired each of them with an accurate human, an inaccurate human, an accurate robot, or an inaccurate robot.

It turned out that both younger and older children trusted an accurate human or robot equally. However, younger kids given information by an inaccurate human or robot were more likely to trust the human—but why?

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The key to fighting pseudoscience isn’t mockery—it’s empathy

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

As a scientist heavily engaged in science communication, I’ve seen it all.

People have come to my public talks to argue with me that the Big Bang never happened. People have sent me handwritten letters explaining how dark matter means that ghosts are real. People have asked me for my scientific opinion about homeopathy—and scoffed when they didn’t like my answer. People have told me, to my face, that what they just learned on a TV show proves that aliens built the pyramids and that I didn’t understand the science.

People have left comments on my YouTube videos saying… well, let’s not even go there.

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Network-connected wrenches in factories can be hacked for sabotage or ransomware

Enlarge / The Rexroth Nutrunner, a line of torque wrench sold by Bosch Rexroth. (credit: Bosch Rexroth)

Researchers have unearthed nearly two dozen vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to sabotage or disable a popular line of network-connected wrenches that factories around the world use to assemble sensitive instruments and devices.

The vulnerabilities, reported Tuesday by researchers from security firm Nozomi, reside in the Bosch Rexroth Handheld Nutrunner NXA015S-36V-B. The cordless device, which wirelessly connects to the local network of organizations that use it, allows engineers to tighten bolts and other mechanical fastenings to precise torque levels that are critical for safety and reliability. When fastenings are too loose, they risk causing the device to overheat and start fires. When too tight, threads can fail and result in torques that are too loose. The Nutrunner provides a torque-level indicator display that’s backed by a certification from the Association of German Engineers and adopted by the automotive industry in 1999. The NEXO-OS, the firmware running on devices, can be controlled using a browser-based management interface.

NEXO-OS's management web application. (credit: Nozomi)

Nozomi researchers said the device is riddled with 23 vulnerabilities that, in certain cases, can be exploited to install malware. The malware could then be used to disable entire fleets of the devices or to cause them to tighten fastenings too loosely or tightly while the display continues to indicate the critical settings are still properly in place. B

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Daily Telescope: The Milky Way above one of my favorite places on Earth

Enlarge / The Milky Way above Mauna Kea. (credit: Samuel Muller)

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's January 9, and today's image showcases the Milky Way Galaxy rising above the visitor's center on Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii.

The Big Island is one of my favorite places on Earth. It has some of the world's best beaches, some of its most active volcanoes, wonderful people, and a world-class observatory on the great mountain, which climbs about 13,800 feet above sea level. Astronomers say the atmosphere up there, so remote from major landmasses, has some of the best "seeing" quality in the world.

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Cerne Abbas Giant is a depiction of Hercules

Enlarge / Behold, the "Rude Man" chalk giant carved on a hill above the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset, England. (credit: Barry Batchelor/PA Images/Getty Images)

A major attraction of Dorset, England, is the Cerne Abbas Giant, a 180-foot-tall figure of a naked man wielding a large club carved with chalk into a hilltop. A pair of historians offers a strong case that this figure was originally meant to represent Hercules from Greek mythology, perhaps to inspire West Saxon armies, who could have used the site as a muster station. They outlined their arguments in a recent paper published in the journal Speculum. The authors also found a possible early reference to the giant in texts dating back to the mid-11th and early 12th centuries, a period in which the carving may have been reinterpreted as representing Saint Eadwold of Cerne.

“It’s become clear that the Cerne giant is just the most visible of a whole cluster of early medieval features in the landscape,” said co-author Helen Gittos, an early medieval historian at the University of Oxford, told The Guardian. “I think we’ve found a compelling narrative that fits the giant into the local landscape and history better than ever before, changing him from an isolated mystery to an active participant in the local community and culture.”

As reported previously, the Cerne Abbas Giant's generously sized erect phallus has earned it the nickname "Rude Man," which undoubtedly contributes to its popularity as a tourist attraction. Archaeologists have long speculated about exactly when and why the geoglyph was created.

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Intel’s CPU branding was already confusing, and today’s new CPUs made it worse

Enlarge / Intel's Core chips are here, and they have dropped the i and the 14th-generation branding. But unlike the Core Ultra, they are fundamentally "14th-generation" processors. (credit: Intel)

Intel usually uses CES to fill out the processor lineups that it launched late the year before, and that hasn't changed this year. The company has announced a full range of 14th-generation Core desktop CPUs, some new 14th-generation Core CPUs for high-end gaming and workstation laptops, and the first non-Ultra chips to bear the new "Core 3/5/7" branding that sheds the generational branding entirely. We'll go over the updates shortly.

But my main takeaway, as a long-time observer of processor branding, is that Intel had made its new naming system even more confusing for people who actually want to know what kind of processor they're getting.

Intel said in October that it was sticking with the 14th-generation branding for its new desktop CPUs because they were so similar to the 13th-generation chips (they all use the same underlying Raptor Lake architecture, itself a minor revision of the 12th-gen Alder Lake). It makes some degree of sense that it's being extended to the HX-series laptop chips, because these have always been desktop silicon repackaged for laptop use. So far so good.

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What I learned from using a Raspberry Pi 5 as my main computer for two weeks

Enlarge / The Raspberry Pi 5 inside its official case. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

I bought an 8GB Raspberry Pi 5 as soon as they went up for preorder, just like I have bought every full-size Pi model since the Pi 3 Model B launched back in 2016, including the Pi 3B+, with its better Wi-Fi and more efficient chip, and the Pi 4, with its substantial performance and RAM boost.

The difference is that I didn't really have anything in mind for the Pi 5 when I bought it. But years of Pi shortages made me worried about its scarcity, and I figured I'd buy first and ask questions later rather than want it later and be totally unable to get one. In the end, it will probably knock each of my other Pis down a level in my tech setup: the Pi 5 becomes the retro emulation box, the Pi 4 becomes the multi-use always-on light-duty server (currently running a combo of HomeBridge, WireGuard, and a dynamic DNS IP address updater), the Pi 3B+ joins the Pi 3B as either "test hardware for small one-off projects" or "the retro emulation box I lent to a friend which may or may not have been ruined when their basement flooded."

Before I did that, though, I wanted to take another crack at trying to use a Pi as an everyday general-purpose desktop computer. The Raspberry Pi's operating system has always included many of the tools you'd need to take a crack at this, including a lightweight desktop environment and a couple of web browser options, and the Pi 4-based Pi 400 variant has always been pitched specifically as a general-purpose computer.

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Daily Telescope: The Wizard Nebula captured above Germany

Enlarge / The Wizard Nebula. (credit: George Amanakis)

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's January 6, and today's image features a newish star cluster in the constellation Cepheus.

The stars in this cluster are relatively young, estimated at an age of about 4 million–12 million years old. The cluster is formally known as NGC 7380, and the feature is known more informally as the Wizard Nebula. It was first reported by German astronomer William Herschel, who said it was discovered by his sister, Caroline Herschel, in 1787.

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Navajo objection to flying human ashes to the Moon won’t delay launch

Enlarge / The Moon sets over sandstone formations on the Navajo Nation. (credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

Science instruments aren't the only things hitching a ride to the Moon on a commercial lunar lander ready for launch Monday. Two companies specializing in "space burials" are sending cremated human remains to the Moon, and this doesn't sit well with the Navajo Nation.

The Navajo people, one of the nation's largest Indigenous groups, hold the Moon sacred, and putting human remains on the lunar surface amounts to desecration, according to Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren.

"The sacredness of the Moon is deeply embedded in the spirituality and heritage of many Indigenous cultures, including our own," Nygren said in a statement. "The placement of human remains on the Moon is a profound desecration of this celestial body revered by our people."

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East Coast land continues to collapse at a worrying rate

Enlarge / Lower Manhattan and One World Trade Center in New York City are reflected on a monument as the sun rises on December 22, 2023, as seen from Jersey City, New Jersey. (credit: Gary Hershorn / Getty Images)

Unless you’re sinking into quicksand, you might assume that the land beneath your feet is solid and unmoving. In actual fact, your part of the world may well be undergoing “subsidence,” which is where the ground collapses as sediments settle or when people over-extract groundwater. New York City is sinking, too, due to the weight of all those buildings pushing on the ground. In extreme cases, like in California’s agriculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley, elevations have plummeted not by inches, but by dozens of feet.

Last year, scientists reported that the US Atlantic Coast is dropping by several millimeters annually, with some areas, like Delaware, notching figures several times that rate. So just as the seas are rising, the land along the eastern seaboard is sinking, greatly compounding the hazard for coastal communities.

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Big evolutionary change tied to lots of small differences

Enlarge / An example of a Littorina species, the common periwinkle. (credit: Bjoern Wylezich)

The version of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin focused on slow, incremental changes that only gradually build into the sort of differences that separate species. But that doesn't rule out the potential for sudden, dramatic changes. Indeed, some differences make it difficult to understand what a transitional state would look like, suggesting that a major leap might be needed.

A new study looks at one major transition: the shift from egg-laying to live births in a set of related snail species. By sequencing the genomes of multiple snails, the researchers identified the changes in DNA that are associated with egg-laying. It turns out that a large number of genes are associated with the change despite its dramatic nature.

Giving up eggs

The snails in question are in a genus called Littorina, which are largely distributed around the North Atlantic. Many of these species lay eggs, but a number of them have transitioned to live births. In these species, an organ that coats eggs with a protein-rich jelly in other species instead acts as an incubator, allowing eggs to develop until young snails can crawl out of their parent's shells. This is thought to be an advantage for animals that would otherwise have to lay eggs in environments that aren't favorable for their survival.

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Here’s a first look at United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket

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  United Launch Alliance's first Vulcan rocket prepares to emerge from the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. [credit: United Launch Alliance ]

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—United Launch Alliance's first Vulcan rocket emerged from its hangar Friday for a 30-minute trek to its launch pad in Florida, finally moving into the starting blocks after a decade of development and testing.

This was the first time anyone had seen the full-size 202-foot-tall (61.6-meter) Vulcan rocket in its full form. Since ULA finished assembling the rocket last month, it has been cocooned inside the scaffolding of the company's vertical hangar at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

On Friday, ULA's ground crew rolled the Vulcan rocket and its mobile launch platform to its seaside launch pad. It was one of the last steps before the Vulcan rocket is cleared for liftoff Monday at 2:18 am EST (07:18 UTC). On Sunday afternoon, ULA engineers will gather inside a control center at Cape Canaveral to oversee an 11-hour countdown, when the Vulcan rocket will be loaded with methane, liquid hydrogen, and liquid oxygen propellants.

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Elon Musk: SpaceX needs to build Starships as often as Boeing builds 737s

Enlarge / Ship 28, the Starship for SpaceX's next full-scale test flight, fires up one of its engines on December 29 in Texas. (credit: SpaceX)

It's no secret that Elon Musk has big ambitions for SpaceX's Starship mega-rocket. This is the vehicle that, with plenty of permutations and upgrades, Musk says will ferry cargo and people across the Solar System to build a settlement on Mars, making humanity a multi-planetary species and achieving the billionaire's long-standing dream.

Of course, that is a long way off. SpaceX is still working on getting Starship into orbit or close to it, an achievement that appears to be possible this year. Then, the company will start launching Starlink satellites on Starship missions while testing in-space refueling technology needed to turn Starship into a human-rated Moon lander for NASA.

SpaceX's South Texas team is progressing toward the third full-scale Starship test flight. On December 20, the Starship's upper stage slated for the next test flight completed a test-firing of its Raptor engines at the Starbase launch site on the Texas Gulf Coast. Nine days later, the 33-engine Super Heavy booster fired up on the launch pad for its own static fire test. On the same day, SpaceX hot-fired the Starship upper stage once again on a test stand next to the launch pad.

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1D Pac-Man is the best game I’ve played in 2024 (so far)

Enlarge / I didn't write this story just to share that high score in the corner, but I won't say it had nothing to do with the choice. (credit: ABA Games)

When looking back at the short history of video game design, the '90s and '00s transition from primarily 2D games to primarily 3D games is rightly seen as one of the biggest revolutions in the industry. But my discovery this week of the one-dimensional, Pac-Man-inspired Paku Paku makes me wish that the game industry had some sort of pre-history where clever 1D games like this were the norm. It also makes me wish I had been quicker to discover more of the work of extremely prolific and clever game designer Kenta Cho, who made the game.

In Paku Paku, Pac-Man's 2D maze of 240 dots has been replaced with 16 dots arranged in a single line. Your six-pixel tall dot-muncher (the graphics are 2D, even as the gameplay uses only one dimension) is forced to forever travel either left or right along this line, trying to eat all the dots while avoiding a single red ghost (who moves just a bit faster than the player). To do this, the player can use a single power pellet (which makes the ghost edible for a short while) or the screen-wrapping tunnels on either side of the line (which the ghost can't use).

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Mandiant, the security firm Google bought for $5.4 billion, gets its X account hacked

Enlarge

Google-owned security firm Mandiant spent several hours trying to regain control of its account on X (formerly known as Twitter) on Wednesday after an unknown scammer hijacked it and used it to spread a link that attempted to steal cryptocurrency from people who clicked on it.

“We are aware of the incident impacting the Mandiant X account and are working to resolve the issue,” company officials wrote in a statement. “We've since regained control over the account and are currently working on restoring it.” The statement didn’t answer questions asking if the company had determined how the account was compromised.

The hacked Mandiant account was initially used to masquerade as one belonging to Phantom, a company that offers a wallet for storing cryptocurrency. Posts on X encouraged people to visit a malicious website to see if their wallet was one of 250,000 that were eligible for an award of tokens. Over several hours, X employees played tug-of-war with the unknown scammer, with scam posts being removed only to reappear, according to people who followed the events.

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Forget the proverbial wisdom: Opposites don’t really attract, study finds

What draws us to choose romantic partners? A sweeping new meta-analysis suggests we gravitate toward certain shared traits. (credit: Muramasa)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: a broad meta-analysis spanning over a century of studies finds that opposites don't really attract when it comes to choosing a mate.

We've all heard the common folk wisdom that when it comes to forming romantic partnerships, opposites attract. Researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, contend that this proverbial wisdom is largely false, based on the findings of their sweeping September study, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior. The saying, "birds of a feather flock together," is a more apt summation of how we choose our partners.

“These findings suggest that even in situations where we feel like we have a choice about our relationships, there may be mechanisms happening behind the scenes of which we aren't fully aware,” said co-author Tanya Horwitz, a psychology and neuroscience graduate student at UCB. “We’re hoping people can use this data to do their own analyses and learn more about how and why people end up in the relationships they do.”

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