Enlarge / A mysterious assassin is targeting Jedi masters in The Acolyte. (credit: Disney+)

The Star Wars franchise is creeping up on the 50-year mark for the original 1977 film that started it all, and Disney+ has successfully kept things fresh with its line of live-action Star Wars spinoff series. The Mandalorian and Andor were both unquestionably popular and critical successes, while The Book of Boba Fett ultimately proved disappointing, focusing less on our favorite bounty hunter and more on setting up the third season of The Mandalorian. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka fell somewhere in between, bolstered by strong performances from its leads but often criticized for sluggish pacing.

It's unclear where the latest addition to the TV franchise, The Acolyte, will ultimately fall, but the first five episodes aired thus far bode well for its place in the growing canon. The series eschews the usual Star Wars space-battle fare for a quieter, space Western detective story—who is killing the great Jedi masters of the galaxy?—with highly choreographed fight scenes that draw heavily from the martial arts. And like its predecessors, The Acolyte is recognizably Star Wars. Yet it also boasts a unique aesthetic style that is very much its own.

(Spoilers below for episodes 1 through 5 of The Acolyte.)

Enlarge / Illustration of a brain inside of a light bulb. (credit: Getty Images)

Researchers claim to have developed a new way to run AI language models more efficiently by eliminating matrix multiplication from the process. This fundamentally redesigns neural network operations that are currently accelerated by GPU chips. The findings, detailed in a recent preprint paper from researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz, UC Davis, LuxiTech, and Soochow University, could have deep implications for the environmental impact and operational costs of AI systems.

Matrix multiplication (often abbreviated to "MatMul") is at the center of most neural network computational tasks today, and GPUs are particularly good at executing the math quickly because they can perform large numbers of multiplication operations in parallel. That ability momentarily made Nvidia the most valuable company in the world last week; the company currently holds an estimated 98 percent market share for data center GPUs, which are commonly used to power AI systems like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

In the new paper, titled "Scalable MatMul-free Language Modeling," the researchers describe creating a custom 2.7 billion parameter model without using MatMul that features similar performance to conventional large language models (LLMs). They also demonstrate running a 1.3 billion parameter model at 23.8 tokens per second on a GPU that was accelerated by a custom-programmed FPGA chip that uses about 13 watts of power (not counting the GPU's power draw). The implication is that a more efficient FPGA "paves the way for the development of more efficient and hardware-friendly architectures," they write.

Enlarge / The app lets you invoke ChatGPT from anywhere in the system with a keyboard shortcut, Spotlight-style. (credit: Samuel Axon)

OpenAI's official ChatGPT app for macOS is now available to all users for the first time, provided they're running macOS Sonoma or later.

It was previously being rolled out gradually to paid subscribers to ChatGPT's Plus premium plan.

The ChatGPT Mac app mostly acts as a desktop window version of the web app, allowing you to carry on back-and-forth prompt-and-response conversations. You can select between the GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o models. It also supports the more specialized GPTs available in the web version, including the DALL-E image generator and custom GPTs.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | RJ Sangosti)

After an MDMA therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder dramatically failed to impress Food and Drug Administration advisers earlier this month, researchers are moving forward with another psychedelic—a slow-release oral dose of the hallucinogenic drug ketamine—as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression.

In a mid-stage, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial, researchers tested slow-release ketamine pills, taken twice weekly. The trial, sponsored by New Zealand-based Douglas Pharmaceuticals, found ketamine to be safe compared with placebo. At the trial's highest dose, the treatment showed some efficacy against depression in patients who had previously tried an average of nearly five antidepressants without success, according to the results published Monday in Nature Medicine.

But the Phase II trial, which started with 231 participants, indicated that the pool of patients who may benefit from the treatment could be quite limited. The researchers behind the trial chose an unusual "enrichment" design to test the depression treatment. This was intended to thwart the high failure rates generally seen in trials for depression treatments, even in patients without treatment-resistant cases. But even after selecting patients who initially responded to ketamine, 59.5 percent of the enriched participants still dropped out of the trial before its completion, largely due to a lack of efficacy.

Enlarge / Painting of a gryphon, or griffin, a lion-raptor chimera from ancient folklore. (credit: Mark Witton)

The gryphon, or griffin, is a legendary creature dating back to classical antiquity, sporting the body, legs, and tail of a lion and the wings, head, and front talons of an eagle. Since the 1980s, a popular "geomyth" has spread that the griffin's unique appearance was inspired by the fossilized skeleton of a horned dinosaur known as Protoceratops. It's a fascinating and colorful story, but according to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, there is no hard evidence to support such a connection.

"Everything about griffin origins is consistent with their traditional interpretation as imaginary beasts, just as their appearance is entirely explained by them being [mythological] chimeras of big cats and raptorial birds," said co-author Mark Witton, a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth. "Invoking a role for dinosaurs in griffin lore, especially species from distant lands like Protoceratops, not only introduces unnecessary complexity and inconsistencies to their origins, but also relies on interpretations and proposals that don’t withstand scrutiny.”

There are representations of griffin-like creatures in ancient Egyptian art dated to before 3000 BCE, while in ancient Greek and Roman texts the creatures were associated with gold deposits in Central Asia. By the Middle Ages, griffins were common figures in medieval iconography and in heraldry. The hippogriff named Buckbeak in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a related mythical creature, the product of a griffin and a mare.

Enlarge / NASA astronaut Christina Koch (right) poses for a portrait with fellow Expedition 61 Flight Engineer Jessica Meir, who is inside a US spacesuit for a fit check. (credit: NASA)

Almost exactly two years ago, as it prepared for the next generation of human spaceflight, NASA chose a pair of private companies to design and develop new spacesuits. These were to be new spacesuits that would allow astronauts to both perform spacewalks outside the International Space Station as well as walk on the Moon as part of the Artemis program.

Now, that plan appears to be in trouble, with one of the spacesuit providers—Collins Aerospace—expected to back out, Ars has learned. It's a blow for NASA, because the space agency really needs modern spacesuits.

NASA's Apollo-era suits have long been retired. The current suits used for spacewalks in low-Earth orbit are four decades old. "These new capabilities will allow us to continue on the ISS and allows us to do the Artemis program and continue on to Mars," said the director of Johnson Space Center, Vanessa Wyche, during a celebratory news conference in Houston two years ago.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | David Ramos)

Verizon Wireless agreed to pay a $1,050,000 penalty to the US Treasury and implement a compliance plan because of a 911 outage in December 2022 that was caused by a botched update, the Federal Communications Commission announced today.

A consent decree explains that the outage was caused by "the reapplication of a known flawed security policy update file." During the outage, lasting one hour and 44 minutes, Verizon failed to deliver hundreds of 911 calls in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, the FCC said.

"The [FCC] Enforcement Bureau takes any potential violations of the Commission's 911 rules extremely seriously. Sunny day outages, as occurred here, can be especially troubling because they occur when the public and 911 call centers least expect it," Bureau Chief Loyaan Egal said.

Enlarge / Blast away all the guilt you want in PowerWash Simulator, but there's no need to feel dirty in the real world about your backlog. (credit: Getty Images)

Gaming news site PCGamesN has a web tool, SteamIDFinder, that can do a neat trick. If you buy PC games on Steam and have your user profile set to make your gaming details public, you can enter your numeric user ID into it and see a bunch of stats. One set of stats is dedicated to the total value of the games listed as unplayed; you can share this page as an image linking to your "Pile of Shame," which includes the total "Value" of your Steam collection and unplayed games.

Example findings from SteamIDFinder, from someone who likely has hundreds of games from Humble Bundles and other deals in their library. (credit: SteamIDFinder)

Using data from what it claims are the roughly 10 percent of 73 million Steam accounts in its database set to Public, PCGamesN extrapolates $1.9 billion in unplayed games, multiplies it by 10, and casually suggests that there are $19 billion in unplayed games hanging around. That is "more than the gross national product of Nicaragua, Niger, Chad, or Mauritius," the site notes.

That is a very loose “$19 billion”

"Multiply by 10" is already a pretty soft science, but the numbers are worth digging into further. For starters, SteamIDFinder is using the current sale price of every game in your unplayed library, as confirmed by looking at a half-dozen "Pile of Shame" profiles. An informal poll of Ars Technica co-workers and friends with notable Steam libraries suggests that games purchased at full price make up a tiny fraction of the games in our backlogs. Games acquired through package deals, like the Humble Bundle, or during one of Steam's annual or one-time sales, are a big part of most people's Steam catalogs, I'd reckon.

Enlarge / Someone just asked what it would look like if their girlfriend was a Smurf. Better add another rack of servers! (credit: Getty Images)

Late last week, both Bloomberg and The Washington Post published stories focused on the ostensibly disastrous impact artificial intelligence is having on the power grid and on efforts to collectively reduce our use of fossil fuels. The high-profile pieces lean heavily on recent projections from Goldman Sachs and the International Energy Agency (IEA) to cast AI's "insatiable" demand for energy as an almost apocalyptic threat to our power infrastructure. The Post piece even cites anonymous "some [people]" in reporting that "some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet [the power demands] from any source."

Digging into the best available numbers and projections available, though, it's hard to see AI's current and near-future environmental impact in such a dire light. While generative AI models and tools can and will use a significant amount of energy, we shouldn't conflate AI energy usage with the larger and largely pre-existing energy usage of "data centers" as a whole. And just like any technology, whether that AI energy use is worthwhile depends largely on your wider opinion of the value of generative AI in the first place.

Not all data centers

While the headline focus of both Bloomberg and The Washington Post's recent pieces is on artificial intelligence, the actual numbers and projections cited in both pieces overwhelmingly focus on the energy used by Internet "data centers" as a whole. Long before generative AI became the current Silicon Valley buzzword, those data centers were already growing immensely in size and energy usage, powering everything from Amazon Web Services servers to online gaming services, Zoom video calls, and cloud storage and retrieval for billions of documents and photos, to name just a few of the more common uses.

Enlarge / Some of the waste material that ends up part of these bricks. (credit: Seamus Daniel, RMIT University)

Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia have developed special “energy-smart bricks” that can be made by mixing clay with glass waste and coal ash. These bricks can help mitigate the negative effects of traditional brick manufacturing, an energy-intensive process that requires large-scale clay mining, contributes heavily to CO₂ emissions, and generates a lot of air pollution.

According to the RMIT researchers, “Brick kilns worldwide consume 375 million tonnes (~340 million metric tons) of coal in combustion annually, which is equivalent to 675 million tonnes of CO₂ emission (~612 million metric tons).” This exceeds the combined annual carbon dioxide emissions of 130 million passenger vehicles in the US.

The energy-smart bricks rely on a material called RCF waste. It mostly contains fine pieces of glass (92 percent) left over from the recycling process, along with ceramic materials, plastic, paper, and ash. Most of this waste material generally ends up in landfills, where it can cause soil and water degradation. However, the study authors note, “The utilization of RCF waste in fired-clay bricks offers a potential solution to the increasing global waste crisis and reduces the burden on landfills."

Enlarge / Ligeia Mare, the second-largest body of liquid hydrocarbons on Titan. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell)

During its T85 Titan flyby on July 24, 2012, the Cassini spacecraft registered an unexpectedly bright reflection on the surface of the lake Kivu Lacus. Its Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) data was interpreted as a roughness on the methane-ethane lake, which could have been a sign of mudflats, surfacing bubbles, or waves.

“Our landscape evolution models show that the shorelines on Titan are most consistent with Earth lakes that have been eroded by waves,” says Rose Palermo, a coastal geomorphologist at St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center, who led the study investigating signatures of wave erosion on Titan. The evidence of waves is still inconclusive, but future crewed missions to Titan should probably pack some surfboards just in case.

Troubled seas

While waves have been considered the most plausible explanation for reflections visible in Cassini’s VIMS imagery for quite some time, other studies aimed to confirm their presence found no wave activity at all. “Other observations show that the liquid surfaces have been very still in the past, very flat,” Palermo says. “A possible explanation for this is at the time we were observing Titan, the winds were pretty low, so there weren’t many waves at that time. To confirm waves, we would need to have better resolution data,” she adds.

Enlarge / A screen shows a virtual meeting with Microsoft Teams at a conference on January 30, 2024 in Barcelona, Spain. (credit: Cesc Maymo / Contributor | Getty Images News)

Microsoft may be hit with a massive fine in the European Union for "possibly abusively" bundling Teams with its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 software suites for businesses.

On Tuesday, the European Commission (EC) announced preliminary findings of an investigation into whether Microsoft's "suite-centric business model combining multiple types of software in a single offering" unfairly shut out rivals in the "software as a service" (SaaS) market.

"Since at least April 2019," the EC found, Microsoft's practice of "tying Teams with its core SaaS productivity applications" potentially restricted competition in the "market for communication and collaboration products."

Enlarge / Julian Assange in an airplane in a photo posted by WikiLeaks on June 25, 2024. (credit: WikiLeaks)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal charge, ending a long extradition battle with the United States government. Assange will reportedly avoid further jail time and be allowed to return to his home country of Australia.

Assange won't have to travel to the continental United States. He is scheduled to plead guilty tomorrow in US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the western Pacific Ocean.

In a court filing in Saipan, the US government said:

Enlarge (credit: Arkadiusz Warguła via Getty)

Artificial intelligence-generated “deepfakes” that impersonate politicians and celebrities are far more prevalent than efforts to use AI to assist cyber attacks, according to the first research by Google’s DeepMind division into the most common malicious uses of the cutting-edge technology.

The study said the creation of realistic but fake images, video, and audio of people was almost twice as common as the next highest misuse of generative AI tools: the falsifying of information using text-based tools, such as chatbots, to generate misinformation to post online.

The most common goal of actors misusing generative AI was to shape or influence public opinion, the analysis, conducted with the search group’s research and development unit Jigsaw, found. That accounted for 27 percent of uses, feeding into fears over how deepfakes might influence elections globally this year.

Enlarge / This photo taken on June 25, 2024, shows the retrieval site of the return capsule of the Chang'e-6 probe in Siziwang Banner, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. (credit: Xinhua/Lian Zhen)

A small spacecraft landed in Inner Mongolia on Tuesday, bringing samples from the far side of the Moon back to Earth.

This was not China's first robotic mission to return a few pounds of dust and pebbles from the lunar surface—that came with the Chang'e 5 mission in December 2020. However, this was the first time any space program in the world returned material from the Moon's far side.

The successful conclusion of this mission, which launched from Earth nearly two months ago, marked another significant achievement for China's space program as the country sets its sights on landing humans on the Moon by the year 2030.

Enlarge / Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck speaks during the opening of the new Rocket Lab factory on October 12, 2018, in Auckland, New Zealand. (credit: Phil Walter/Getty Images)

Peter Beck has been having a pretty great June. Earlier this month, he was made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Then, Sir Peter Beck presided as Rocket Lab launched its 50th Electron rocket, becoming the fastest company to launch its 50th privately developed booster.

Finally, last week, Rocket Lab revealed that it had signed its largest launch contract ever: 10 flights for the Japanese Earth-observation company Synspective. Ars caught up with Beck while he was in Tokyo for the announcement. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, which touches on a variety of launch-related issues.

Ars Technica: Hi Pete. We've talked about competition in small launch for years. But when I tally up the record of some of your US competitors—Firefly, Astra, Relativity Space, Virgin Orbit, and ABL—they're 7-for-21 on launch attempts. And if you remove the now-retired rockets, it's 1-for-6. Some of these competitors have, or did, exist for a decade. What does this say about the launch business?

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

WordPress plugins running on as many as 36,000 websites have been backdoored in a supply-chain attack with unknown origins, security researchers said on Monday.

So far, five plugins are known to be affected in the campaign, which was active as recently as Monday morning, researchers from security firm Wordfence reported. Over the past week, unknown threat actors have added malicious functions to updates available for the plugins on WordPress.org, the official site for the open source WordPress CMS software. When installed, the updates automatically create an attacker-controlled administrative account that provides full control over the compromised site. The updates also add content designed to goose search results.

Poisoning the well

“The injected malicious code is not very sophisticated or heavily obfuscated and contains comments throughout making it easy to follow,” the researchers wrote. “The earliest injection appears to date back to June 21st, 2024, and the threat actor was still actively making updates to plugins as recently as 5 hours ago.”

Enlarge / The 2024 iPad Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple has added the ability to format external drives in iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, the major software updates for iPhones and iPads due later this year.

While the feature likely won't be tapped by all that many users, its inclusion is fascinating in that it shows just how far Apple has moved away from its original sensibilities with the iPhone and the iPad.

The feature was discovered in the iPadOS 18 beta by artist and developer Kaleb Cadle, who posted about it to his Substack ByteBits a couple of days ago. It was later found in iOS 18 as well.

Enlarge / A PC running Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)

One of Windows 11's more contentious changes is that, by default, both the Home and Pro editions of the operating system require users to sign in with a Microsoft account during setup. Signing in with an account does get you some benefits, at least if you're a regular user of other Microsoft products like OneDrive, GamePass, or Microsoft 365 (aka Office). But if you don't use those services, a lot of what a Microsoft account gets you in Windows 11 is repeated ads and reminders about signing up for those services. Using Windows with a traditional local account is still extremely possible, but it does require a small amount of know-how beyond just clicking the right buttons.

On the know-how front, Microsoft has taken one more minor, but nevertheless irritating, step away from allowing users to sign in with local accounts. This official Microsoft support page walks users with local accounts through the process of signing in to a Microsoft account. As recently as June 12, that page also included instructions for converting a Microsoft account into a local account. But according to Tom's Hardware and the Internet Wayback Machine, those instructions disappeared on or around June 17 and haven't been seen since.

Despite the documentation change, most of the workarounds for creating a local account still work in both Windows 11 23H2 (the publicly available version of Windows 11 for most PCs) and 24H2 (available now on Copilot+ PCs, later this fall for everyone else). The easiest way to do it on a PC you just took out of the box is to press Shift+F10 during the setup process to bring up a command prompt window, typing OOBE\BYPASSNRO, rebooting, and then clicking the "I don't have Internet" button when asked to connect to a Wi-Fi network.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Linux and its code are made by people, and people are not with us forever. Over the weekend, a brief message on the Linux kernel mailing list reminded everyone of just how much one person can mean to a seemingly gargantuan project like Linux, and how quickly that person can disappear.

Denise Finger, wife of the deceased, wrote to the Linux Wireless list on Friday evening:

This is to notify you that Larry Finger, one of your developers, passed away on June 21st.

LWN.net reckons that Finger, 84, contributed to 94 Linux kernel releases, or 1,464 commits total, at least since kernel 2.6.16 in 2006 (and when the kernel started using git to track changes). Given the sometimes precarious nature of contributing to the kernel, this is on its own an impressive achievement—especially for someone with no formal computer training and who considered himself a scientist.

Enlarge / Michael Jackson in concert, 1986. Sony Music owns a large portion of publishing rights to Jackson's music. (credit: Getty Images)

Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Records have sued AI music-synthesis companies Udio and Suno for allegedly committing mass copyright infringement by using recordings owned by the labels to train music-generating AI models, reports Reuters. Udio and Suno can generate novel song recordings based on text-based descriptions of music (i.e., "a dubstep song about Linus Torvalds").

The lawsuits, filed in federal courts in New York and Massachusetts, claim that the AI companies' use of copyrighted material to train their systems could lead to AI-generated music that directly competes with and potentially devalues the work of human artists.

Like other generative AI models, both Udio and Suno (which we covered separately in April) rely on a broad selection of existing human-created artworks that teach a neural network the relationship between words in a written prompt and styles of music. The record labels correctly note that these companies have been deliberately vague about the sources of their training data.

Enlarge / Enhanced Juno image of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot in 2018. It is likely not the same one observed by Cassini in the 1600s. (credit: Gerald Eichstadt and Sean Doran/CC BY-NC-SA)

The planet Jupiter is particularly known for its so-called Great Red Spot, a swirling vortex in the gas giant's atmosphere that has been around since at least 1831. But how it formed and how old it is remain matters of debate. Astronomers in the 1600s, including Giovanni Cassini, also reported a similar spot in their observations of Jupiter that they dubbed the "Permanent Spot." This prompted scientists to question whether the spot Cassini observed is the same one we see today. We now have an answer to that question: The spots are not the same, according to a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“From the measurements of sizes and movements, we deduced that it is highly unlikely that the current Great Red Spot was the ‘Permanent Spot’ observed by Cassini,” said co-author Agustín Sánchez-Lavega of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain. “The ‘Permanent Spot’ probably disappeared sometime between the mid-18th and 19th centuries, in which case we can now say that the longevity of the Red Spot exceeds 190 years.”

The planet Jupiter was known to Babylonian astronomers in the 7th and 8th centuries BCE, as well as to ancient Chinese astronomers; the latter's observations would eventually give birth to the Chinese zodiac in the 4th century BCE, with its 12-year cycle based on the gas giant's orbit around the Sun. In 1610, aided by the emergence of telescopes, Galileo Galilei famously observed Jupiter's four largest moons, thereby bolstering the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system.

Enlarge / Microsoft's 11th-edition Surface Pro, as exploded by iFixit. Despite adhesive holding in the screen and the fact that you need to remove the heatsink to get at the battery, it's still much more repairable than past Surfaces or competing tablets. (credit: iFixit)

For a long time, Microsoft's Surface hardware was difficult-to-impossible to open and repair, and devices as recent as 2019's Surface Pro 7 still managed a repairability score of just 1 out of 10 on iFixit's scale. 2017's original Surface Laptop needed to be physically sliced apart to access its internals, making it essentially impossible to try to fix the machine without destroying it.

But in recent years, partly due to pressure from shareholders and others, Microsoft has made an earnest effort to improve the repairability of its devices. The company has published detailed repair manuals and videos and has made changes to its hardware designs over the years to make it easier to open them without breaking them and easier to replace parts once you’re inside. Microsoft also sells some first-party parts for repairs, though not every part from every Surface is available, and Microsoft and iFixit have partnered to offer other parts as well.

Now, iFixit has torn apart the most recent Snapdragon X-powered Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices and has mostly high praise for both devices in its preliminary teardown video. Both devices earn an 8 out of 10 on iFixit's repairability scale, thanks to Microsoft's first-party service manuals, the relative ease with which both devices can be opened, and clearly labeled internal components.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images )

The European Commission today said it found that Apple is violating the Digital Markets Act (DMA) with App Store rules and fees that "prevent app developers from freely steering consumers to alternative channels for offers and content." The commission "informed Apple of its preliminary view" that the company is violating the law, the regulator announced.

This starts a process in which Apple has the right to examine documents in the commission's investigation file and reply in writing to the findings. There is a March 2025 deadline for the commission to make a final ruling.

The commission noted that it "can impose fines up to 10 percent of the gatekeeper's total worldwide turnover," or up to 20 percent for repeat infringements. For "systematic infringements," the European regulator could respond by requiring "a gatekeeper to sell a business or parts of it, or banning the gatekeeper from acquisitions of additional services related to the systemic non-compliance."

Enlarge (credit: Azaliya via Getty)

For more than a decade, in blog posts and scientific papers and public talks, the psychologist Hal Herzog has questioned whether owning pets makes people happier and healthier.

It is a lonely quest, convincing people that puppies and kittens may not actually be terrific for their physical and mental health. “When I talk to people about this,” Herzog recently said, “nobody believes me.” A prominent professor at a major public university once described him as “a super curmudgeon” who is, in effect, “trying to prove that apple pie causes cancer.”

As a teenager in New Jersey in the 1960s, Herzog kept dogs and cats, as well as an iguana, a duck, and a boa constrictor named Boa. Now a professor emeritus at Western Carolina University, he insists he’s not out to smear anyone’s furry friends. In a blog post questioning the so-called pet effect, in 2012, Herzog included a photo of his cat, Tilly. “She makes my life better,” he wrote. “Please Don’t Blame The Messenger!”

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Id | GDC)

John Romero remembers the moment he realized what the future of gaming would look like.

In late 1991, Romero and his colleagues at id Software had just released Catacomb 3-D, a crude-looking, EGA-colored first-person shooter that was nonetheless revolutionary compared to other first-person games of the time. "When we started making our 3D games, the only 3D games out there were nothing like ours," Romero told Ars in a recent interview. "They were lockstep, going through a maze, do a 90-degree turn, that kind of thing."

Despite Catacomb 3-D's technological advances in first-person perspective, though, Romero remembers the team at id followed its release by going to work on the next entry in the long-running Commander Keen series of 2D platform games. But as that process moved forward, Romero told Ars that something didn't feel right.

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner capsule lifts off aboard United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

In an update released late Friday evening, NASA said it was "adjusting" the date of the Starliner spacecraft's return to Earth from June 26 to an unspecified time in July.

The announcement followed two days of long meetings to review the readiness of the spacecraft, developed by Boeing, to fly NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to Earth. According to sources, these meetings included high-level participation from senior leaders at the agency, including Associate Administrator Jim Free.

This "Crew Flight Test," which launched on June 5 atop an Atlas V rocket, was originally due to undock and return to Earth on June 14. However, as engineers from NASA and Boeing studied data from the vehicle's problematic flight to the International Space Station, they have waved off several return opportunities.

Enlarge (credit: Tim Macpherson | Image Source)

As a result of book publishers successfully suing the Internet Archive (IA) last year, the free online library that strives to keep growing online access to books recently shrank by about 500,000 titles.

IA reported in a blog post this month that publishers abruptly forcing these takedowns triggered a "devastating loss" for readers who depend on IA to access books that are otherwise impossible or difficult to access.

To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court's decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA's controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law. An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library's lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA's lending than by preventing it.

Enlarge / Dr. Peter Marks, Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research within the Food and Drug Administration on March 18, 2021 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Susan Walsh)

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday announced expanded approval for a gene therapy to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD)—despite the fact that it failed a Phase III clinical trial last year and that the approval came over the objections of three of FDA's own expert review teams and two of its directors.

In fact, the decision to expand the approval of the therapy—called Elevidys (delandistrogene moxeparvovec-rokl)—appears to have been decided almost entirely by Peter Marks, Director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

Elevidys initially gained an FDA approval last year, also over objections from staff. The therapy intravenously delivers a transgene that codes for select portions of a protein called dystrophin in healthy muscle cells; the protein is mutated in patients with DMD. Last year's initial approval occurred under an accelerated approval process and was only for use in DMD patients ages 4 and 5 who are able to walk. In the actions Thursday, the FDA granted a traditional approval for the therapy and opened access to DMD patients of all ages, regardless of ambulatory status.

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  The Pocket 386, a new-old laptop that can run MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and (technically) Windows 95. [credit: DZT's Store ]

Of the many oddities you can buy from Aliexpress, some of the weirdest are the recreations of retro computer systems in semi-modern designs. We're most intimately familiar with the Book 8088, a recreation of the original 1981 IBM PC inside a chunky clamshell laptop. The people behind the Book 8088 are also responsible for the Hand386, which is a bit like a late-80s PC stuck inside an old Palm Pilot or Blackberry, and a second revision of the Book 8088 with more built-in ports and a VGA-capable graphics adapter installed instead of a basic CGA adapter.

Whoever is selling these systems is now back with the Pocket 386, which combines Hand386-style internals with a clamshell design similar to the Book 8088. The result is the kind of IBM-compatible system that would have been common during the Windows 3.1 era, when MS-DOS still dominated (especially for games) but Windows was on the upswing.

Enlarge (credit: hrui)

Earlier this week, the US Senate passed what's being called the ADVANCE Act, for Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy. Among a number of other changes, the bill would attempt to streamline permitting for newer reactor technology and offer cash incentives for the first companies that build new plants that rely on one of a handful of different technologies. It enjoyed broad bipartisan support both in the House and Senate and now heads to President Biden for his signature.

Given Biden's penchant for promoting his bipartisan credentials, it's likely to be signed into law. But the biggest hurdles nuclear power faces are all economic, rather than regulatory, and the bill provides very little in the way of direct funding that could help overcome those barriers.

Incentives

For reasons that will be clear only to congressional staffers, the Senate version of the bill was attached to an amendment to the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act. Nevertheless, it passed by a margin of 88-2, indicating widespread (and potentially veto-proof) support. Having passed the House already, there's nothing left but the president's signature.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Often times, when I am researching something about computers or coding that has been around a very long while, I will come across a document on a university website that tells me more about that thing than any Wikipedia page or archive ever could.

It's usually a PDF, though sometimes a plaintext file, on a .edu subdirectory that starts with a username preceded by a tilde (~) character. This is typically a document that a professor, faced with the same questions semester after semester, has put together to save the most time possible and get back to their work. I recently found such a document inside Princeton University's astrophysics department: "An Introduction to the X Window System," written by Robert Lupton.

X Window System, which turned 40 years old earlier this week, was something you had to know how to use to work with space-facing instruments back in the early 1980s, when VT100s, VAX-11/750s, and Sun Microsystems boxes would share space at college computer labs. As the member of the AstroPhysical Sciences Department at Princeton who knew the most about computers back then, it fell to Lupton to fix things and take questions.

Enlarge / Features like Image Playground won't arrive in Europe at the same time as other regions. (credit: Apple)

Three major features in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia will not be available to European users this fall, Apple says. They include iPhone screen mirroring on the Mac, SharePlay screen sharing, and the entire Apple Intelligence suite of generative AI features.

In a statement sent to Financial Times, The Verge, and others, Apple says this decision is related to the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA). Here's the full statement, which was attributed to Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz:

Two weeks ago, Apple unveiled hundreds of new features that we are excited to bring to our users around the world. We are highly motivated to make these technologies accessible to all users. However, due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act (DMA), we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.

Specifically, we are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security. We are committed to collaborating with the European Commission in an attempt to find a solution that would enable us to deliver these features to our EU customers without compromising their safety.

It is unclear from Apple's statement precisely which aspects of the DMA may have led to this decision. It could be that Apple is concerned that it would be required to give competitors like Microsoft or Google access to user data collected for Apple Intelligence features and beyond, but we're not sure.

Enlarge / A rendering of the Copilot button. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is all-in on its Copilot+ PC push right now, but the fact is that they'll be an extremely small minority among the PC install base for the foreseeable future. The program's stringent hardware requirements—16GB of RAM, at least 256GB of storage, and a fast neural processing unit (NPU)—disqualify all but new PCs, keeping features like Recall from running on all current Windows 11 PCs.

But the Copilot chatbot remains supported on all Windows 11 PCs (and most Windows 10 PCs), and a change Microsoft has made to recent Windows 11 Insider Preview builds is actually making the feature less useful and accessible than it is in the current publicly available versions of Windows. Copilot is being changed from a persistent sidebar into an app window that can be resized, minimized, and pinned and unpinned from the taskbar, just like any other app. But at least as of this writing, this version of Copilot can no longer adjust Windows' settings, and it's no longer possible to call it up with the Windows+C keyboard shortcut. Only newer keyboards with the dedicated Copilot key will have an easy built-in keyboard shortcut for summoning Copilot.

If Microsoft keeps these changes intact, they'll hit Windows 11 PCs when the 24H2 update is released to the general public later this year; the changes are already present on Copilot+ PCs, which are running a version of Window 11 24H2 out of the box.

Enlarge / New research lends further credence to the "population crash" theory about Easter Island being just a myth. (credit: Arian Zwegers/CC BY 2.0)

For centuries, Western scholars have touted the fate of the native population on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) as a case study in the devastating cost of environmentally unsustainable living. The story goes that the people on the remote island chopped down all the trees to build massive stone statues, triggering a population collapse. Their numbers were further depleted when Europeans discovered the island and brought foreign diseases, among other factors. But an alternative narrative began to emerge in the 21st century that the earliest inhabitants actually lived quite sustainably until that point. A new paper published in the journal Science Advances offers another key piece of evidence in support of that alternative hypothesis.

As previously reported, Easter Island is famous for its giant monumental statues, called moai, built some 800 years ago and typically mounted on platforms called ahu. Scholars have puzzled over the moai on Easter Island for decades, pondering their cultural significance, as well as how a Stone Age culture managed to carve and transport statues weighing as much as 92 tons. The first Europeans arrived in the 17th century and found only a few thousand inhabitants on a tiny island (just 14 by 7 miles across) thousands of miles away from any other land. Since then, in order to explain the presence of so many moai, the assumption has been that the island was once home to tens of thousands of people.

But perhaps they didn't need tens of thousands of people to accomplish that feat. Back in 2012, Carl Lipo of Binghamton University and Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona showed that you could transport a 10-foot, 5-ton moai a few hundred yards with just 18 people and three strong ropes by employing a rocking motion. [UPDATE: An eagle-eyed reader alerted us to the 1980s work of Czech experimental archaeologist Pavel Pavel, who conducted similar practical experiments on Easter Island after being inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki. Pavel concluded that just 16 men and one leader were sufficient to transport the statues.]

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Joe Raedle )

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) yesterday rejected AT&T's request to end its landline phone obligations. The state agency also urged AT&T to upgrade copper facilities to fiber instead of trying to shut down the outdated portions of its network.

AT&T asked the state to eliminate its Carrier of Last Resort (COLR) obligation, which requires it to provide landline telephone service to any potential customer in its service territory. A CPUC administrative law judge recommended rejection of the application last month, and the commission voted to dismiss AT&T's application with prejudice on Thursday.

"Our vote to dismiss AT&T's application made clear that we will protect customer access to basic telephone service... Our rules were designed to provide that assurance, and AT&T's application did not follow our rules," Commissioner John Reynolds said in a CPUC announcement.

The piece of debris that fell through Alejandro Otero's roof (right) came from a support bracket jettisoned from the International Space Station. (credit: NASA)

The owner of a home in southwestern Florida has formally submitted a claim to NASA for damages caused by a chunk of space debris that fell through his roof in March.

The legal case is unprecedented—no one has evidently made such a claim against NASA before. How the space agency responds will set a precedent, and that may be important in a world where there is ever more activity in orbit, with space debris and vehicles increasingly making uncontrolled reentries through Earth's atmosphere.

Alejandro Otero, owner of the Naples, Florida, home struck by the debris, was not home when part of a battery pack from the International Space Station crashed through his home on March 8. His son Daniel, 19, was home but escaped injury. NASA has confirmed the 1.6-pound object, made of the metal alloy Inconel, was part of a battery pack jettisoned from the space station in 2021.

Enlarge / An up-close view of LEAP 71's autonomously designed keralox rocket engine. (credit: LEAP 71)

Welcome to Edition 6.49 of the Rocket Report! I want to open this week's report with a hearty congratulations to Rocket Lab for the company's 50th launch since Electron's debut in 2017. This is a fine achievement for a company founded in New Zealand, a country with virtually no space program.

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 and a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Electron celebrates its 50th. On Thursday, Rocket Lab launched its 50th Electron mission, "No Time Toulouse."  The mission successfully deployed five Internet-of-Things satellites for the French company Kinéis. This is a nice milestone for the company founded by Peter Beck in New Zealand. With this mission, Rocket Lab becomes the fastest company to go from one launch to 50 launches of a privately developed rocket, surpassing even SpaceX. The company's first Electron mission came about seven years ago.

Enlarge / Pharma interest and investment in radiotherapy drugs is heating up. (credit: Knowable Magazine)

On a Wednesday morning in late January 1896 at a small light bulb factory in Chicago, a middle-aged woman named Rose Lee found herself at the heart of a groundbreaking medical endeavor. With an X-ray tube positioned above the tumor in her left breast, Lee was treated with a torrent of high-energy particles that penetrated into the malignant mass.

“And so,” as her treating clinician later wrote, “without the blaring of trumpets or the beating of drums, X-ray therapy was born.”

Radiation therapy has come a long way since those early beginnings. The discovery of radium and other radioactive metals opened the doors to administering higher doses of radiation to target cancers located deeper within the body. The introduction of proton therapy later made it possible to precisely guide radiation beams to tumors, thus reducing damage to surrounding healthy tissues—a degree of accuracy that was further refined through improvements in medical physics, computer technologies and state-of-the-art imaging techniques.

Enlarge / The Tourbillon is recognizable as a modern Bugatti, but it's very different under the skin. (credit: Bradley Iger)

Since the launch of the hypercar-defining Veyron back in 2005, modern Bugattis have served as benchmarks for straight-line performance and no-expense-spared automotive engineering. At a time when a 300 horsepower Mustang GT was something to crow about, the quad-turbocharged, W16-powered Veyron offered more than a thousand, metric (987 hp/736 kW).

Perhaps more importantly, and in contrast to most other world-beating performance cars, the Veyron wasn't presented as some skunkworks project that had been pushed to the ragged edge. Instead, it was a wholly realized ultra-luxury performance machine, replete with the sort of grand touring appointments you'd expect to find in a Bentley rather than a top-speed record holder.

Still, it was the numbers that instantly captivated enthusiasts and casual onlookers alike, and Bugatti would go on to reset the bar with the introduction of the 1,479 hp (1,102 kW) Chiron in 2016.

Enlarge (credit: Kaspersky Lab)

The Biden administration will ban all sales of Kaspersky antivirus software in the US starting in July, according to reporting from Reuters and a filing from the US Department of Commerce (PDF).

The US believes that security software made by Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab represents a national security risk and that the Russian government could use Kaspersky's software to install malware, block other security updates, and "collect and weaponize the personal information of Americans," said US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

“When you think about national security, you may think about guns and tanks and missiles,” said Raimondo during a press briefing, as reported by Wired. “But the truth is, increasingly, it's about technology, and it's about dual-use technology, and it's about data.”

Enlarge (credit: Anthropic / Benj Edwards)

On Thursday, Anthropic announced Claude 3.5 Sonnet, its latest AI language model and the first in a new series of "3.5" models that build upon Claude 3, launched in March. Claude 3.5 can compose text, analyze data, and write code. It features a 200,000 token context window and is available now on the Claude website and through an API. Anthropic also introduced Artifacts, a new feature in the Claude interface that shows related work documents in a dedicated window.

So far, people outside of Anthropic seem impressed. "This model is really, really good," wrote independent AI researcher Simon Willison on X. "I think this is the new best overall model (and both faster and half the price of Opus, similar to the GPT-4 Turbo to GPT-4o jump)."

As we've written before, benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are troublesome because they can be cherry-picked and often do not capture the feel and nuance of using a machine to generate outputs on almost any conceivable topic. But according to Anthropic, Claude 3.5 Sonnet matches or outperforms competitor models like GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro on certain benchmarks like MMLU (undergraduate level knowledge), GSM8K (grade school math), and HumanEval (coding).

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Pornhub will soon be blocked in five more states as the adult site continues to fight what it considers privacy-infringing age-verification laws that require Internet users to provide an ID to access pornography.

On July 1, according to a blog post on the adult site announcing the impending block, Pornhub visitors in Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, and Nebraska will be "greeted by a video featuring" adult entertainer Cherie Deville, "who explains why we had to make the difficult decision to block them from accessing Pornhub."

Pornhub explained that—similar to blocks in Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, and Mississippi—the site refuses to comply with soon-to-be-enforceable age-verification laws in this new batch of states that allegedly put users at "substantial risk" of identity theft, phishing, and other harms.

Enlarge / Signage outside a Dell campus. (credit: Getty)

Big tech companies are still trying to rally workers back into physical offices, and many workers are still not having it. Based on a recent report, computer-maker Dell has stumbled even more than most.

Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.

Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

It's one of the world's worst-kept secrets that large language models give blatantly false answers to queries and do so with a confidence that's indistinguishable from when they get things right. There are a number of reasons for this. The AI could have been trained on misinformation; the answer could require some extrapolation from facts that the LLM isn't capable of; or some aspect of the LLM's training might have incentivized a falsehood.

But perhaps the simplest explanation is that an LLM doesn't recognize what constitutes a correct answer but is compelled to provide one. So it simply makes something up, a habit that has been termed confabulation.

Figuring out when an LLM is making something up would obviously have tremendous value, given how quickly people have started relying on them for everything from college essays to job applications. Now, researchers from the University of Oxford say they've found a relatively simple way to determine when LLMs appear to be confabulating that works with all popular models and across a broad range of subjects. And, in doing so, they develop evidence that most of the alternative facts LLMs provide are a product of confabulation.

Enlarge (credit: Diamond Shruumz)

Cases of illnesses linked to microdosing candies have more than doubled, with reports of seizures and the need for intubation, mechanical ventilation, and intensive care stays. But, there remains no recall of the products—microdosing chocolates, gummies, and candy cones by Diamond Shruumz—linked to the severe and life-threatening illnesses. In the latest update from the Food and Drug Administration late Tuesday, the agency said that it "has been in contact with the firm about a possible voluntary recall, but these discussions are still ongoing."

In the update, the FDA reported 26 cases across 16 states, up from 12 cases in eight states last week. Of the 26 reported cases, 25 sought medical care and 16 were hospitalized. No deaths have been reported.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a health alert about the candies. The agency noted that as of June 11, the people sickened after eating Diamond Shruumz candies presented to health care providers with a host of severe symptoms. Those include: central nervous system depression with sedation, seizures, muscle rigidity, clonus (abnormal reflex responses), tremor, abnormal heart rate (bradycardia or tachycardia), abnormal blood pressure (hypotension or hypertension), gastrointestinal effects (nausea, vomiting, or abdominal pain), skin flushing, diaphoresis (excessive sweating), and metabolic acidosis with increased anion gap (an acid-based disorder linked to poisonings).

Enlarge / What could have been. (credit: No Mutants Allowed)

PC gamers of a certain vintage will remember tales of Project Van Buren, a title that early '00s Interplay intended as the sequel to 1998's hit Fallout 2. Now, original Fallout producer Timothy Cain is sharing some behind-the-scenes details about how he contributed to the project's cancellation during a particularly difficult time for publisher Interplay.

Cain famously left Interplay during Fallout 2's development in the late '90s to help form short-lived RPG house Troika Games. After his departure, though, he was still in touch with some people from his former employer, including an unnamed Interplay vice president looking for some outside opinions on the troubled Van Buren project.

"Would you mind coming over and playing one of my game prototypes?" Cain recalls this vice president asking him sometime in mid-2003. "We're making a Fallout game and I'm going to have to cancel it. I don't think they can get it done... but if you could come over and look at it and give me an estimate, there's a chance I wouldn't cancel it."

Enlarge (credit: Tony C. French/Getty)

In the urgent quest for a more sustainable global food system, livestock are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, by converting fibrous plants that people can’t eat into protein-rich meat and milk, grazing animals like cows and sheep are an important source of human food. And for many of the world’s poorest, raising a cow or two—or a few sheep or goats—can be a key source of wealth.

But those benefits come with an immense environmental cost. A study in 2013 showed that globally, livestock account for about 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the world’s cars and trucks combined. And about 40 percent of livestock’s global warming potential comes in the form of methane, a potent greenhouse gas formed as they digest their fibrous diet.

That dilemma is driving an intense research effort to reduce methane emissions from grazers. Existing approaches, including improved animal husbandry practices and recently developed feed additives, can help, but not at the scale needed to make a significant global impact. So scientists are investigating other potential solutions, such as breeding low-methane livestock and tinkering with the microbes that produce the methane in grazing animals’ stomachs. While much more research is needed before those approaches come to fruition, they could be relatively easy to implement widely and could eventually have a considerable impact.

Enlarge / Ford Mustang Mach E electric vehicles are offered for sale at a dealership on June 5, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois. (credit: Scott Olson / Getty Images)

CDK Global touts itself as an all-in-one software-as-a-service solution that is "trusted by nearly 15,000 dealer locations." One connection, over an always-on VPN to CDK's data centers, gives a dealership customer relationship management (CRM) software, financing, inventory, and more back-office tools.

That all-in-one nature explains why people trying to buy cars, and especially those trying to sell them, have had a rough couple of days. CDK's services have been down, due to what the firm describes as a "cyber incident." CDK shut down most of its systems Wednesday, June 19, then told dealerships that afternoon that it restored some services. CDK told dealers today, June 20, that it had "experienced an additional cyber incident late in the evening on June 19," and shut down systems again.

"At this time, we do not have an estimated time frame for resolution and therefore our dealers' systems will not be available at a minimum on Thursday, June 20th," CDK told customers.