Ars Technica
The Fall Guy spotlights its amazing stuntmen in meta marketing video
Ryan Gosling hosts a round of carpool karaoke with his stuntmen for the forthcoming action comedy The Fall Guy.
Universal Studios has been going meta with its marketing for its forthcoming action comedy The Fall Guy. Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are the marquee stars; Gosling plays a Hollywood stuntman trying to make a movie with his estranged ex-girlfriend (Blunt). But it's the actual stuntmen standing in for Gosling during action sequences who get the spotlight in a new promotional video for the film.
As previously reported, The Fall Guy is directed by David Leitch, who also brought us the glorious John Wick (his uncredited directorial debut with Chad Stahelski). It's a loose adaptation of the popular 1980s TV series of the same name starring Lee Majors. Per the official synopsis:
Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling stars as Colt Seavers, a battle-scarred stuntman who, having left the business a year earlier to focus on both his physical and mental health, is drafted back into service when the star of a mega-budget studio movie—being directed by his ex, Jody Moreno, played by Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt—goes missing. While the film’s ruthless producer (Hannah Waddingham), maneuvers to keep the disappearance of star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) a secret from the studio and the media, Colt performs the film’s most outrageous stunts while trying (with limited success) to charm his way back into Jody’s good graces. But as the mystery around the missing star deepens, Colt will find himself ensnared in a sinister, criminal plot that will push him to the edge of a fall more dangerous than any stunt.
In this incarnation, Gosling's Colt Seavers isn't a bounty hunter on the side; he's just a stuntman—a bit past his prime—who stumbles into solving a mystery. Blunt costars as Jody Moreno, Colt's ex-girlfriend and a former camera operator who finally gets the chance to direct her first film. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays movie star Tom Ryder, who goes missing mid-shoot. Stephanie Hsu plays Ryder's personal assistant, and Winston Duke plays Colt's stunt coordinator and BFF. Ted Lasso's Hannah Waddingham appears as Gail, the producer of Jody's film. And OG Fall Guy Lee Majors (now in his 80s) is expected to have a cameo; perhaps he'll perform the theme song, "Unknown Stuntman," that he wrote and recorded for the original series.
US bans TikTok owner ByteDance, will prohibit app in US unless it is sold
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Chesnot )
The Senate last night approved a bill that orders TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the company within 270 days or lose access to the US market. The House had already passed the bill, and President Biden signed it into law today.
The "Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" was approved as part of a larger appropriations bill that provides aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. It passed in a 79-18 vote. Biden last night issued a statement saying he will sign the appropriations bill into law "as soon as it reaches my desk." He signed the bill into law today, the White House announced.
The bill classifies TikTok as a "foreign adversary controlled application" and gives the Chinese company ByteDance 270 days to sell it to another entity. Biden can extend the deadline by up to 90 days if a sale is in progress.
Elite: Dangerous’s real-money ship sales spark “pay-to-win” outrage
Enlarge / Players will be able to throw down a few bucks to get the Python Mk 2 starting next month. (credit: Frontier Developments)
Elite: Dangerous players will soon be able to pay real money for access to in-game ships for the first time, a major change that already has some long-time players raging about a "pay-to-win" shift for the long-running game.
Since Elite Dangerous launched over nine years ago, the game has sold ships in exchange for in-game credits earned through gameplay. The separate ARX currency, which can be purchased with real money, has been reserved for cosmetic upgrades such as paint jobs.
That's all set to change next month, though, when owners of the Odyssey expansion will be able to purchase early access to the Python Mk II variant ship for 16,250 ARX (the equivalent of about $11 to $13, depending on how much ARX is purchased in bulk). Non-Odyssey owners won't be able to purchase the Python Mk II with regular credits until three months later, on August 7. At that point, the ship will also be available as an ARX-denominated "pre-built ship package" that "allow[s] you to kickstart your career in the latest ship, including a brand-new paintjob and ship kit."
SpaceX has now landed more boosters than most other rockets ever launch
Enlarge / SpaceX landed its 300th booster on Tuesday. (credit: SpaceX webcast)
SpaceX launches have become extremely routine. On Tuesday evening, SpaceX launched its 42nd rocket of the year, carrying yet another passel of Starlink satellites into orbit. Chances are, you didn't even notice.
All the same, the cumulative numbers are mind-boggling. SpaceX is now launching at a rate of one mission every 2.7 days this year. Consider that, from the mid-1980s through the 2010s, the record for the total number of launches worldwide in any given year was 129. This year alone, SpaceX is on pace for between 130 and 140 total launches.
But with Tuesday evening's mission, there was a singular number that stood out: 300. The Falcon family, which includes the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters, recorded its 300th successful first-stage landing.
Mercedes’ electric G-Wagon is more capable than the gas version
Enlarge / Electric power has not robbed the G-Wagon of its off-road skills. If anything, it has enhanced them. (credit: Mercedes-Benz)
Mercedes-Benz provided flights from San Francisco to Los Angeles and accommodation so Ars could attend the G-Wagon event. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.
The Mercedes G-Wagon, a very capable off-roader typically purchased by people who never intend to take it anywhere near dirt, is getting an electric upgrade.
Unveiled in Beverly Hills—the most fitting of locations—the 2025 G 580 with EQ Technology spun its way onto the scene. The all-electric G-Wagon sports a 116 kWh capacity battery pack, four motors (one for each wheel), and a new sound system to replace the gas motor, called the G-Roar. Sadly, there's no word on price, delivery date, or range. But on paper, its impressive specs make it better than the ICE version off-road.
For serious off-roaders likely not residing in Beverly Hills, the luxury off-roader's four independent motors offer true torque vectoring and electronic differential locks. Each motor is coupled with a two-speed transmission for a reduced gear low range. The ideal use for this is rock crawling. In fact, there's an actual "Rock" crawling mode in the G 580. Mercedes is not playing.
Hackers are using developing countries for ransomware practice
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Cyber attackers are experimenting with their latest ransomware on businesses in Africa, Asia, and South America before targeting richer countries that have more sophisticated security methods.
Hackers have adopted a “strategy” of infiltrating systems in the developing world before moving to higher-value targets such as in North America and Europe, according to a report published on Wednesday by cyber security firm Performanta.
“Adversaries are using developing countries as a platform where they can test their malicious programs before the more resourceful countries are targeted,” the company told Banking Risk and Regulation, a service from FT Specialist.
Tesla profits drop 55% as Elon Musk dodges cheap car questions
Enlarge / Tesla shares rose by almost 11 percent in premarket trading despite the disastrous financial results. (credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
Tesla had a terrible first quarter of 2024, according to its financial results, posted yesterday. We already knew that it was a bad three months in terms of delivering cars—the automaker built tens of thousands of cars it couldn't sell as deliveries dropped by 8.5 percent, year on year. If anything, the quarterly results paint an even worse picture.
The company has been engaged in a series of heavy price cuts, and that's showing up on the balance sheet. For all of Tesla CEO Elon Musk's statements about artificial intelligence being the future of the company, the vast majority of its income is still derived from automotive sales. These amounted to $16.5 billion in Q1, nearly $2.5 billion less than for Q1 2023. (Regulatory credits remain pretty steady at $442 million for the quarter.)
Total revenues were down by 9 percent, year on year, with gross profits down 18 percent. But the net profit, once generally accepted accounting measures were applied, fell by 55 percent to $1.1 billion. (Non-GAAP net profit was down 48 percent.)
Is the Arm version of Windows ready for its close-up?
Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)
Signs point to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processors showing up in actual, real-world, human-purchasable computers in the next couple of months after years of speculation and another year or so of hype.
For those who haven’t been following along, this will allegedly be Qualcomm’s first Arm processor for Windows PCs that does for PCs what Apple’s M-series chips did for Macs, promising both better battery life and better performance than equivalent Intel chips. This would be a departure from past Snapdragon chips for PCs, which have performed worse than (or, at best, similarly to) existing Intel options, barely improved battery life, and come with a bunch of software incompatibility problems to boot.
Early benchmarks that have trickled out look promising for the Snapdragon X. And there are other reasons to be optimistic—the Snapdragon X Elite’s design team is headed up by some of the same people who made Apple Silicon so successful in the first place.
Fragments of bird flu virus genome found in pasteurized milk, FDA says
Enlarge / Cows being milked (credit: Getty | Edwin Remsberg)
The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday announced that genetic fragments from the highly-pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 have been detected in the pasteurized, commercial milk supply. However, the testing completed so far—using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR)—only detects the presence of viral genetic material and cannot tell whether the genetic material is from live and infectious viral particles or merely remnants of dead ones killed by the pasteurization process.
Testing is now ongoing to see if viable, infectious H5N1 can be identified in milk samples.
So far, the FDA still believes that the milk supply is safe. "To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe," the agency said in a lengthy explanation of the finding and ongoing testing.
The spam came from inside the house: How a smart TV can choke a Windows PC
Enlarge / I have hundreds of UUIDs and I must scream. (credit: Getty Images)
The modern "smart" TV asks a lot of us. In exchange for connecting you to a few streaming services you use, a TV will collect data, show ads, and serve as another vector for bad actors. In a few reported cases, though, a modern connected TV has been blamed for attacks not on privacy, eyeballs, or passwords but on an entirely different computer.
The TV in question is a Hisense TV, and the computer is a Windows PC, specifically one belonging to Priscilla Snow, a musician and audio designer in Montréal, Quebec. Her post about her Hisense experience reads like a mystery. Of course, because you already know the crime and the culprit, it's more like a Columbo episode. Either way, it's thrilling in a very specific I-can't-believe-that-fixed-it kind of thrill.
Disappearing Settings, keyboards, remote desktops, and eventually taskbarsSnow's Windows PC had "a few hiccups over the past couple of years," Snow wrote on April 19. She couldn't open display settings, for one. A MIDI keyboard interface stopped working. Task manager would start to hang until force-closed. Video capture cards had trouble connecting. As Snow notes, any veteran of a Windows computer that has had lots of stuff installed on it can mentally write off most of these things, or at least stash them away until the next reinstall.
Why canned wine can smell like rotten eggs while beer and Coke are fine
Enlarge (credit: BackyardProduction/Getty Images)
True wine aficionados might turn up their noses, but canned wines are growing in popularity, particularly among younger crowds during the summer months, when style often takes a back seat to convenience. Yet these same wines can go bad rather quickly, taking on distinctly displeasing notes of rotten eggs or dirty socks. Scientists at Cornell University conducted a study of all the relevant compounds and came up with a few helpful tips for frustrated winemakers to keep canned wines from spoiling. The researchers outlined their findings in a recent paper published in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture.
“The current generation of wine consumers coming of age now, they want a beverage that’s portable and they can bring with them to drink at a concert or take to the pool,” said Gavin Sacks, a food chemist at Cornell. “That doesn’t really describe a cork-finished, glass-packaged wine. However, it describes a can very nicely.”
According to a 2004 article in Wine & Vines magazine, canned beer first appeared in the US in 1935, and three US wineries tried to follow suit for the next three years. Those efforts failed because it proved to be unusually challenging to produce a stable canned wine. One batch was tainted by "Fresno mold"; another batch resulted in cloudy wine within just two months; and the third batch of wine had a disastrous combination of low pH and high oxygen content, causing the wine to eat tiny holes in the cans. Nonetheless, wineries sporadically kept trying to can their product over the ensuing decades, with failed attempts in the 1950s and 1970s. United and Delta Airlines briefly had a short-lived partnership with wineries for canned wine in the early 1980s, but passengers balked at the notion.
Nestlé baby foods loaded with unhealthy sugars—but only in poorer countries
Enlarge / Night view of company logos in Nestlé Avanca Dairy Products Plant on January 21, 2019, in Avanca, Portugal. This plant produces Cerelac, Nestum, Mokambo, Pensal, Chocapic and Estrelitas, among others. (credit: Getty | Horacio Villalobos)
In high-income countries, Nestlé brand baby foods have no added sugars them, in line with recommendations from major health organizations around the world and consumer pressure. But in low- and middle-income countries, Nestlé adds sugar to those same baby products, sometimes at high levels, which could lead children to prefer sugary diets and unhealthy eating habits, according to an investigation released recently by nonprofit groups.
The investigation, conducted by Public Eye and the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN), says the addition of added sugars to baby foods in poorer countries, against expert recommendations, creates an "unjustifiable double standard." The groups quote Rodrigo Vianna, an epidemiologist and professor at the Department of Nutrition of the Federal University of Paraíba in Brazil, who calls added sugars in baby foods "unnecessary and highly addictive."
"Children get used to the sweet taste and start looking for more sugary foods, starting a negative cycle that increases the risk of nutrition-based disorders in adult life," Vianna told the organizations for their investigation. "These include obesity and other chronic non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes or high blood-pressure."
You can now buy a flame-throwing robot dog for under $10,000
Enlarge / The Thermonator robot flamethrower dog. (credit: Throwflame)
If you've been wondering when you'll be able to order the flame-throwing robot that Ohio-based Throwflame first announced last summer, that day has finally arrived. The Thermonator, what Throwflame bills as "the first-ever flamethrower-wielding robot dog" is now available for purchase. The price? $9,420.
Thermonator is a quadruped robot with an ARC flamethrower mounted to its back, fueled by gasoline or napalm. It features a one-hour battery, a 30-foot flame-throwing range, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity for remote control through a smartphone.
It also includes a LIDAR sensor for mapping and obstacle avoidance, laser sighting, and first-person view (FPV) navigation through an onboard camera. The product appears to integrate a version of the Unitree Go2 robot quadruped that retails alone for $1,600 in its base configuration.
FTC bans noncompete clauses, declares vast majority unenforceable
Enlarge / Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan talks with guests during an event in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 03, 2024 (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today announced that it has issued a final rule banning noncompete clauses. The rule will render the vast majority of current noncompete clauses unenforceable, according to the agency.
"In the final rule, the Commission has determined that it is an unfair method of competition and therefore a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, for employers to enter into noncompetes with workers and to enforce certain noncompetes," the FTC said.
The US Chamber of Commerce said it will sue the FTC in an effort to block the rule, claiming the ban is "a blatant power grab that will undermine American businesses' ability to remain competitive."
Hackers infect users of antivirus service that delivered updates over HTTP
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Hackers abused an antivirus service for five years in order to infect end users with malware. The attack worked because the service delivered updates over HTTP, a protocol vulnerable to attacks that corrupt or tamper with data as it travels over the Internet.
The unknown hackers, who may have ties to the North Korean government, pulled off this feat by performing a man-in-the-middle (MiitM) attack that replaced the genuine update with a file that installed an advanced backdoor instead, said researchers from security firm Avast today.
eScan, an AV service headquartered in India, has delivered updates over HTTP since at least 2019, Avast researchers reported. This protocol presented a valuable opportunity for installing the malware, which is tracked in security circles under the name GuptiMiner.
Microsoft’s Phi-3 shows the surprising power of small, locally run AI language models
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a new, freely available lightweight AI language model named Phi-3-mini, which is simpler and less expensive to operate than traditional large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo. Its small size is ideal for running locally, which could bring an AI model of similar capability to the free version of ChatGPT to a smartphone without needing an Internet connection to run it.
The AI field typically measures AI language model size by parameter count. Parameters are numerical values in a neural network that determine how the language model processes and generates text. They are learned during training on large datasets and essentially encode the model's knowledge into quantified form. More parameters generally allow the model to capture more nuanced and complex language-generation capabilities but also require more computational resources to train and run.
Some of the largest language models today, like Google's PaLM 2, have hundreds of billions of parameters. OpenAI's GPT-4 is rumored to have over a trillion parameters but spread over eight 220-billion parameter models in a mixture-of-experts configuration. Both models require heavy-duty data center GPUs (and supporting systems) to run properly.
Grindr users seek payouts after dating app shared HIV status with vendors
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Thomas Trutschel)
Grindr is facing a class action lawsuit from hundreds of users over the sharing of HIV statuses and other sensitive personal information with third-party firms.
UK law firm Austen Hays filed the claim in the High Court in London yesterday, the firm announced. The class action "alleges the misuse of private information of thousands of affected UK Grindr users, including highly sensitive information about their HIV status and latest tested date," the law firm said.
The law firm said it has signed up over 670 potential class members and "is in discussions with thousands of other individuals who are interested in joining the claim." Austen Hays said that "claimants could receive thousands in damages" from Grindr, a gay dating app, if the case is successful.
iPadOS 18 could ship with built-in Calculator app, after 14 Calculator-less years
Enlarge (credit: Apple/Andrew Cunningham)
Last year, Apple introduced the ability to set multiple timers at once in the Clock app on its various platforms.
“We truly live in an age of wonders,” deadpanned Apple’s Craig Federighi in the company’s official presentation, tacitly acknowledging the gap between the apparent simplicity of the feature and the amount of time that Apple took to implement it.
The next version of iPadOS may contain another of these "age of wonders" features, an apparently simple thing that Apple has chosen never to do for reasons that the company can't or won't explain. According to MacRumors, iPadOS 18 may finally be the update that brings a version of Apple's first-party Calculator app to the iPad.
Tiny rubber spheres used to make a programmable fluid
Enlarge / At critical pressures, the fluid's spheres become a mixture of different states. (credit: Adel Djellouli/Harvard SEAS)
Building a robot that could pick up delicate objects like eggs or blueberries without crushing them took lots of control algorithms that process feeds from advanced vision systems or sensors that emulate the human sense of touch. The other way was to take a plunge into the realm of soft robotics, which usually means a robot with limited strength and durability.
Now, a team of researchers at Harvard University published a study where they used a simple hydraulic gripper with no sensors and no control systems at all. All they needed was silicon oil and lots of tiny rubber balls. In the process, they’ve developed a metafluid with a programmable response to pressure.
Swimming rubber spheres“I did my PhD in France on making a spherical shell swim. To make it swim, we were making it collapse. It moved like a [inverted] jellyfish,” says Adel Djellouli, a researcher at Bertoldi Group, Harvard University, and the lead author of the study. “I told my boss, 'hey, what if I put this sphere in a syringe and increase the pressure?' He said it was not an interesting idea and that this wouldn’t do anything,” Djellouli claims. But a few years and a couple of rejections later, Djellouli met Benjamin Gorissen, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Leuven, Belgium, who shared his interests. “I could do the experiments, he could do the simulations, so we thought we could propose something together,” Djellouli says. Thus, Djellouli’s rubber sphere finally got into the syringe. And results were quite unexpected.
Recoding Voyager 1—NASA’s interstellar explorer is finally making sense again
Engineers have partially restored a 1970s-era computer on NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft after five months of long-distance troubleshooting, building confidence that humanity's first interstellar probe can eventually resume normal operations.
Several dozen scientists and engineers gathered Saturday in a conference room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or connected virtually, to wait for a new signal from Voyager 1. The ground team sent a command up to Voyager 1 on Thursday to recode part of the memory of the spacecraft's Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), one of the probe's three computers.
“In the minutes leading up to when we were going to see a signal, you could have heard a pin drop in the room," said Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA's two Voyager spacecraft at JPL. "It was quiet. People were looking very serious. They were looking at their computer screens. Each of the subsystem (engineers) had pages up that they were looking at, to watch as they would be populated."