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In the face of bans, ByteDance tightens grip over US TikTok operations
Enlarge (credit: FT/Getty Images)
TikTok’s Beijing-based owner ByteDance tightened its grip over its US operations over the past two years, according to company insiders, even as momentum to ban the short-video app grew in Washington.
The US government passed legislation this week aimed at forcing TikTok to divest from its parent or face a countrywide ban, but prising the viral video app from its $268 billion parent company would present a formidable challenge.
More than two dozen current and former employees told the Financial Times that TikTok has only become more deeply interwoven with ByteDance as tensions over the app’s ownership escalated.
If Starship is real, we’re going to need big cargo movers on the Moon and Mars
Enlarge / The author tries not to crash a lunar rover. (credit: Eric Berger)
As a SpaceX engineer working on the Starship program about five years ago, Jaret Matthews could see the future of spaceflight quite clearly and began to imagine the possibilities.
For decades everything that went to space had to be carefully measured, optimized for mass, and serve an extremely specialized purpose. But Starship, Matthews believed, held the potential to change all that. With full reusability, a barn-size payload fairing, and capability to loft 100 or more metric tons to orbit in a single throw, Starship offered the tantalizing prospect of a world in which flying into space was not crazy expensive. He envisioned Starships delivering truckloads of cargo to the Moon or Mars.
Matthews spent a decade working on robots and rovers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory before coming to SpaceX in 2012. He began to suggest that the company work on a system that could unload and distribute cargo from Starship, like the cranes and trucks that offload cargo from large container ships in port. However, he didn't get far, as SpaceX was focused on developing the Starship transportation system.
Qualcomm says lower-end Snapdragon X Plus chips can still outrun Apple’s M3
Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series of chips promises to be the company’s first that can go toe-to-toe with Apple Silicon, and the PC ecosystem is reacting accordingly. Microsoft reportedly plans for the Arm version of its next Surface tablet to be the flagship, and major apps like Chrome and Dropbox have recently released Arm-native Windows versions for the first time.
Ahead of the chips' launch late this year, Qualcomm announced a new lower-end model destined for cheaper devices. Dubbed the Snapdragon X Plus, it shares a lot in common with the flagship Snapdragon X Elite.
The Snapdragon X Plus includes 10 CPU cores instead of the Elite’s 12, though the more noticeable change is its lack of support for clock-speed boosting; the chip’s 3.4 GHz base frequency is as fast as it goes, where the Elite chips can boost two cores to 4.2 GHz and one core up to 4.3 GHz, depending on the specific model. Qualcomm also rates the X Plus’ integrated GPU at 3.8 TFLOPs, down from the X Elite’s maximum of 4.6 TFLOPs. Aside from those high-level FLOP numbers, we still know very little about how the GPU will be configured; we also don’t know the ratio of “big” and “little” CPU cores.
SSI is UP (https://superiorsystems.info/html/hood/Neighbors.htm)
SSI is DOWN (https://superiorsystems.info/html/hood/Neighbors.htm)
Palm OS and the devices that ran it: An Ars retrospective
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)
“Gadgets aren’t fun anymore,” sighed my wife, watching me tap away on my Palm Zire 72 as she sat on the couch with her MacBook Air, an iPhone, and an Apple Watch.
And it’s true: The smartphone has all but eliminated entire classes of gadgets, from point-and-shoot cameras to MP3 players, GPS maps, and even flashlights. But arguably no style of gadget has been so thoroughly superseded as the personal digital assistant, the handheld computer that dominated the late '90s and early 2000s. The PDA even set the template for how its smartphone successors would render it obsolete, moving from simple personal information management to encompass games, messaging, music, and photos.
But just as smartphones would do, PDAs offered a dizzying array of operating systems and applications, and a great many of them ran Palm OS. (I bought my first Palm, an m505, new in 2001, upgrading from an HP 95LX.) Naturally, there’s no way we could enumerate every single such device in this article. So in this Ars retrospective, we’ll look back at some notable examples of the technical evolution of the Palm operating system and the devices that ran it—and how they paved the way for what we use now.
It’s National Volunteer Week — here’s what the Peace Corps was really like for volunteers from KC.
Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed
Reddit has made it clear that it’s an ad-first business. Today, it expanded on that practice with a new ad format that looks to sell things to Reddit users. Simultaneously, Reddit has marketers who are interested in pushing products to users through seemingly legitimate accounts.
In a blog post today, Reddit announced that its Dynamic Product Ads are entering public beta globally. The ad format uses "shopping signals," aka discussions with people looking to try a product or brand, machine learning, and advertiser product catalogs in order to post relevant ads. Reddit shared an image in the blog post that shows ads, including with products and pricing, that seem to relate to a posted question. User responses to the Reddit post appear under the ad.
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A somewhat blurry depiction of the new type of ads Reddit is testing. [credit: Reddit ]
Reddit's Dynamic Product Ads can automatically show users ads "based on the products they’ve previously engaged with on the advertiser’s site" and/or "based on what people engage with on Reddit or advertiser sites," per the blog.
Comics, improvisers and sketch artists to feature in Kansas City’s first Black Comedy Festival
A Polestar Phone now inexplicably exists
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The Polestar Phone. Someday it will unlock your Polestar car. [credit: Polestar ]
Polestar, the Volvo offshoot EV company, has made a smartphone. It's called, predictably, the Polestar Phone, and it's only available in China. There have been a lot of car-brand smartphones out there (it's often Lamborghini), but usually, these are licensing deals that the car company ignores. Polestar seems to be proud of this phone, though, making it a bit more involved than the usual car-brand licensing deal. Just look at the new navigation drawer on the polestar.cn site, which has four main items: "Polestar 2", "Polestar 3", "Polestar 4" and now "Polestar Phone."
Why would a niche EV brand make a phone? Maybe all that work on the Android Automotive OS made Polestar's engineers really enthusiastic about Android device development. The website, through machine translation, promises the phone was "jointly designed by the Polestar global design team and the Xingji Meizu team in Gothenburg, Sweden, and is decorated with Swedish gold details that symbolize high performance." "Decorated" is probably the best way you could describe Polestar's contributions to this phone since it seems to be a bog standard Meizu 21 Pro with some Polestar branding. It does look beautiful, with a no-nonsense minimal rectangular design and all-screen front, but the same can be said for the Meizu phone this is based on.
So, how exactly is the Polestar Phone related to a Polestar car? Well, both run Android and have all-electric power systems. The phone has a slightly smaller battery than the EV, at only 5,050 mAh (that's something like 18 Wh) compared to the 100 kWh battery of something like a Polestar 4. The car also has the phone beat on-screen size, with the phone packing a pocketable 120 Hz 6.79-inch, 3192×1368 OLED, and the Polestars all sporting big tablet screens.
Meet the Press NOW — April 24
We may have spotted the first magnetar flare outside our galaxy
Enlarge / M82, the site of what's likely to be a giant flare from a magnetar. (credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team)
Gamma rays are a broad category of high-energy photons, including everything with more energy than an X-ray. While they are often created by processes like radioactive decay, few astronomical events produce them in sufficient quantities that they can be detected when the radiation originates in another galaxy.
That said, the list is larger than one, which means detecting gamma rays doesn't mean we know what event produced them. At lower energies, they can be produced in the areas around black holes and by neutron stars. Supernovae can also produce a sudden burst of gamma rays, as can the merger of compact objects like neutron stars.
And then there are magnetars. These are neutron stars that, at least temporarily, have extreme magnetic fields—over 1012 times stronger than the Sun's magnetic field. Magnetars can experience flares and even giant flares where they send out copious amounts of energy, including gamma rays. These can be difficult to distinguish from gamma-ray bursts generated by the merger of compact objects, so the only confirmed magnetar giant bursts have happened in our own galaxy or its satellites. Until now, apparently.
Nation-state hackers exploit Cisco firewall 0-days to backdoor government networks
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Hackers backed by a powerful nation-state have been exploiting two zero-day vulnerabilities in Cisco firewalls in a five-month-long campaign that breaks into government networks around the world, researchers reported Wednesday.
The attacks against Cisco’s Adaptive Security Appliances firewalls are the latest in a rash of network compromises that target firewalls, VPNs, and network-perimeter devices, which are designed to provide a moated gate of sorts that keeps remote hackers out. Over the past 18 months, threat actors—mainly backed by the Chinese government—have turned this security paradigm on its head in attacks that exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities in security appliances from the likes of Ivanti, Atlassian, Citrix, and Progress. These devices are ideal targets because they sit at the edge of a network, provide a direct pipeline to its most sensitive resources, and interact with virtually all incoming communications.
Cisco ASA likely one of several targetsOn Wednesday, it was Cisco’s turn to warn that its ASA products have received such treatment. Since November, a previously unknown actor tracked as UAT4356 by Cisco and STORM-1849 by Microsoft has been exploiting two zero-days in attacks that go on to install two pieces of never-before-seen malware, researchers with Cisco’s Talos security team said. Notable traits in the attacks include:
Deepfakes in the courtroom: US judicial panel debates new AI evidence rules
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On Friday, a federal judicial panel convened in Washington, DC, to discuss the challenges of policing AI-generated evidence in court trials, according to a Reuters report. The US Judicial Conference's Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules, an eight-member panel responsible for drafting evidence-related amendments to the Federal Rules of Evidence, heard from computer scientists and academics about the potential risks of AI being used to manipulate images and videos or create deepfakes that could disrupt a trial.
The meeting took place amid broader efforts by federal and state courts nationwide to address the rise of generative AI models (such as those that power OpenAI's ChatGPT or Stability AI's Stable Diffusion), which can be trained on large datasets with the aim of producing realistic text, images, audio, or videos.
In the published 358-page agenda for the meeting, the committee offers up this definition of a deepfake and the problems AI-generated media may pose in legal trials:
A new walkable neighborhood is coming to the Berkley Riverfront next to KC Current's stadium
.NET-Centric Uno Platform Debuts 'Single Project' for 9 Targets
Chamber of Commerce sues FTC in Texas, asks court to block ban on noncompetes
(credit: Getty Images | eccolo74)
The US Chamber of Commerce and other business groups sued the Federal Trade Commission and FTC Chair Lina Khan today in an attempt to block a newly issued ban on noncompete clauses.
The lawsuit was filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The US Chamber of Commerce was joined in the suit by Business Roundtable, the Texas Association of Business, and the Longview Chamber of Commerce. The suit seeks a court order that would vacate the rule in its entirety.
The lawsuit claimed that noncompete clauses "benefit employers and workers alike—the employer protects its workforce investments and sensitive information, and the worker benefits from increased training, access to more information, and an opportunity to bargain for higher pay."
No more refunds after 100 hours: Steam closes Early Access playtime loophole
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
"Early Access" was once a novel, quirky thing, giving a select set of Steam PC games a way to involve enthusiastic fans in pre-alpha-level play-testing and feedback. Now loads of games launch in various forms of Early Access, in a wide variety of readiness. It's been a boon for games like Baldur's Gate 3, which came a long way across years of Early Access.
Early Access, and the "Advanced Access" provided for complete games by major publishers for "Deluxe Editions" and the like, has also been a boon to freeloaders. Craven types could play a game for hours and hours, then demand a refund within the standard two hours of play, 14 days after the purchase window of the game's "official" release. Steam-maker Valve has noticed and, as of Tuesday night, updated its refund policy.
"Playtime acquired during the Advanced Access period will now count towards the Steam refund period," reads the update. In other words: Playtime is playtime now, so if you've played more than two hours of a game in any state, you don't get a refund. That closes at least one way that people could, with time-crunched effort, play and enjoy games for free in either Early or Advanced access.
Google can’t quit third-party cookies—delays shut down for a third time
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Will Chrome, the world's most popular browser, ever kill third-party cookies? Apple and Mozilla both killed off the user-tracking technology in 2020. Google, the world's largest advertising company, originally said it wouldn't kill third-party cookies until 2022. Then in 2021, it delayed the change until 2023. In 2022, it delayed everything again, until 2024. It's 2024 now, and guess what? Another delay. Now Google says it won't turn off third-party cookies until 2025, five years after the competition.
A new blog post cites UK regulations as the reason for the delay, saying, "We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem." The post comes as part of the quarterly reports the company is producing with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
Interestingly, the UK’s CMA isn't concerned about user privacy but instead is worried about other web advertisers that compete with Google. The UK wants to make sure that Google isn't making changes to Chrome to prop up its advertising business at the expense of competitors. While other browser vendors shut down third-party cookies without a second thought, Google said it wouldn't turn off the user-tracking feature until it built an alternative advertising feature directly into Chrome, so it can track user interests to serve them relevant ads. The new advertising system, called the Topics API and "Privacy Sandbox," launched in Chrome in 2023. Google AdSense is already compatible.
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