Ars Technica
Modder packs an entire Nintendo Wii into a box the size of a pack of cards
Enlarge / Its creator calls the "Short Stack" the world's smallest scale model replica of the Nintendo Wii (bottom). (credit: James Smith)
The miniaturization of retro tech has always been a major obsession for modders, from the person who fit an original NES into a Game Boy-sized portable to the person who made a mini-er version of Apple's Mac mini.
One mod in this storied genre that caught our eye this week is the "Short Stack," a scale model of the Nintendo Wii that packs the 2006 console's internal hardware into a 3D-printed enclosure roughly the size of a deck of playing cards.
"You could fit 13.5 of these inside an original Wii," writes James Smith (aka loopj), the person behind the project. All the design details, custom boards, and other information about recreating the mod are available on GitHub.
Roku forcing 2-factor authentication after 2 breaches of 600K accounts
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Everyone with a Roku TV or streaming device will eventually be forced to enable two-factor authentication after the company disclosed two separate incidents in which roughly 600,000 customers had their accounts accessed through credential stuffing.
Credential stuffing is an attack in which usernames and passwords exposed in one leak are tried out against other accounts, typically using automated scripts. When people reuse usernames and passwords across services or make small, easily intuited changes between them, actors can gain access to accounts with even more identifying information and access.
In the case of the Roku attacks, that meant access to stored payment methods, which could then be used to buy streaming subscriptions and Roku hardware. Roku wrote on its blog, and in a mandated data breach report, that purchases occurred in "less than 400 cases" and that full credit card numbers and other "sensitive information" was not revealed.
China orders Apple to remove Meta apps after “inflammatory” posts about president
Enlarge / An Apple Store in Shanghai, China, on April 11, 2024. (credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
Apple said it complied with orders from the Chinese government to remove the Meta-owned WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China. Apple also removed Telegram and Signal from China.
"We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree," Apple said in a statement quoted by several news outlets. "The Cyberspace Administration of China ordered the removal of these apps from the China storefront based on their national security concerns. These apps remain available for download on all other storefronts where they appear."
The Wall Street Journal paraphrased a person familiar with the matter as saying that the Chinese cyberspace agency "asked Apple to remove WhatsApp and Threads from the App Store because both contain political content that includes problematic mentions of the Chinese president [Xi Jinping]."
Crypto influencer guilty of $110M scheme that shut down Mango Markets
Enlarge (credit: apomares | E+)
A jury has unanimously convicted Avi Eisenberg in the US Department of Justice's first case involving cryptocurrency open-market manipulation, the DOJ announced Thursday.
The jury found Eisenberg guilty of commodities fraud, commodities market manipulation, and wire fraud in connection with the manipulation on a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange called Mango Markets.
Eisenberg is scheduled to be sentenced on July 29 and is facing "a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison on the commodities fraud count and the commodities manipulation count, and a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on the wire fraud count," the DOJ said.
This AI-controlled jet fighter has now flown against human pilots
Enlarge / The X-62A VISTA Aircraft flying above Edwards Air Force Base, California. (credit: Kyle Brasier, U.S. Air Force)
An AI test pilot has successfully flown a jet fighter in dogfights against human opponents. It's the latest development for DARPA's Air Combat Evaluation program, which is trying to develop aerospace AI agents that can be trusted to perform safely.
Human test pilots have a bit of a reputation thanks to popular culture—from The Right Stuff to Top Gun: Maverick, the profession has been portrayed as a place for loose cannons with a desire to go fast and break the rules. The reality is pretty far from that these days, especially where DARPA is concerned.
The agency instead wants a machine-learning agent that can safely fly a real aircraft autonomously, with no violations of training rules. After all, neural networks have their own reputation—at this point well-earned—for finding ways to exploit situations that hadn't occurred to humans. And the consequences when controlling a real jet fighter can be a lot more severe than just testing in silico.
NASA may alter Artemis III to have Starship and Orion dock in low-Earth orbit
Enlarge / This image taken by NASA's Orion spacecraft shows its view just before the vehicle flew behind the Moon in 2022. (credit: NASA)
Although NASA is unlikely to speak about it publicly any time soon, the space agency is privately considering modifications to its Artemis plan to land astronauts on the surface of the Moon later this decade.
Multiple sources have confirmed that NASA is studying alternatives to the planned Artemis III landing of two astronauts on the Moon, nominally scheduled for September 2026, due to concerns about hardware readiness and mission complexity.
Under one of the options, astronauts would launch into low-Earth orbit inside an Orion spacecraft and rendezvous there with a Starship vehicle, separately launched by SpaceX. During this mission, similar to Apollo 9, a precursor to the Apollo 11 lunar landing, the crew would validate the ability of Orion and Starship to dock and test habitability inside Starship. The crew would then return to Earth. In another option NASA is considering, a crew would launch in Orion and fly to a small space station near the Moon, the Lunar Gateway, and then return to Earth.
Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal cover
Enlarge / The Tesla Cybertruck. (credit: Tesla)
On Monday, we learned that Tesla had suspended customer deliveries of its stainless steel-clad electric pickup truck. Now, the automaker has issued a recall for all the Cybertrucks in customer hands—nearly 4,000 of them—in order to fix a problem with the accelerator pedal. It has come at an inconvenient time for Tesla, which is laying off more than 10 percent of its workforce due to shrinking sales even as CEO Elon Musk asks for an extra $55.8 billion in compensation.
The problem, which affects all 3,878 Cybertrucks delivered so far, has to do with the EV's accelerator pedal. Tesla has fitted this with a metal-finish cover to match the brushed metal appearance of the truck itself—no word on whether the pedals rust, too—but it says that at some point, "an unapproved change introduced lubricant (soap) to aid in the component assembly of the pad onto the accelerator pedal. Residual lubricant reduced the retention of the pad to the pedal."
Thanks to the profile of the Cybertruck's under dash, if the pedal cover becomes partially detached it can slide up and become trapped in place, wedging the pedal down and unleashing all of the Cybertruck's substantial power—the dual-motor truck boasts 600 hp (447 kW) and can reach 60 mph (98 km/h) in just over four seconds.
Password crackdown leads to more income for Netflix
Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg)
Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing helped the streaming service blow past Wall Street’s earnings forecasts, but its shares fell after it said it planned to stop regularly disclosing its subscriber numbers.
The company’s operating income surged 54 percent in the first quarter as it added 9.3 million subscribers worldwide, proving that the efforts to reduce password sharing it launched last year have had more lasting benefits than some investors expected.
However, Netflix said on Thursday that from next year it would stop revealing its total number of subscribers, a metric that has been a crucial benchmark for investors in the streaming era.
Microsoft’s VASA-1 can deepfake a person with one photo and one audio track
Enlarge / A sample image from Microsoft for "VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time." (credit: Microsoft)
On Tuesday, Microsoft Research Asia unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track. In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and don't require video feeds—or allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them appear to say whatever they want.
"It paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors," reads the abstract of the accompanying research paper titled, "VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time." It's the work of Sicheng Xu, Guojun Chen, Yu-Xiao Guo, Jiaolong Yang, Chong Li, Zhenyu Zang, Yizhong Zhang, Xin Tong, and Baining Guo.
The VASA framework (short for "Visual Affective Skills Animator") uses machine learning to analyze a static image along with a speech audio clip. It is then able to generate a realistic video with precise facial expressions, head movements, and lip-syncing to the audio. It does not clone or simulate voices (like other Microsoft research) but relies on an existing audio input that could be specially recorded or spoken for a particular purpose.
Rocket Report: Starship could save Mars Sample Return; BE-4s for second Vulcan
Enlarge / A BE-4 engine is moved into position on ULA's second Vulcan rocket. (credit: United Launch Alliance)
Welcome to Edition 6.40 of the Rocket Report! There was a lot of exciting news this week. For the first time, SpaceX launched a reusable Falcon 9 booster for a 20th flight. A few miles away at Cape Canaveral, Boeing and United Launch Alliance completed one of the final steps before the first crew launch of the Starliner spacecraft. But I think one of the most interesting things that happened was NASA's decision to ask the space industry for more innovative ideas on how to do Mars Sample Return. I have no doubt that space companies will come up with some fascinating concepts, and I can't wait to hear about them.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Going vertical Down Under. Gilmour Space has raised its privately-developed Eris rocket vertical on a launch pad in North Queensland for the first time, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. This milestone marks the start of the next phase of launch preparations for Eris, a three-stage rocket powered by hybrid engines. If successful, Eris would become the first Australian-built rocket to reach orbit. Gilmour says the maiden flight of Eris is scheduled for no earlier than May 4, pending launch permit approvals. This presumably refers to a commercial launch license from the Australian government.
Boeing says it will cut SLS workforce “due to external factors”
Enlarge / The SLS rocket is seen on its launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in August 2022. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)
On Thursday senior Boeing officials leading the Space Launch System program, including David Dutcher and Steve Snell, convened an all-hands meeting for the more than 1,000 employees who work on the rocket.
According to two people familiar with the meeting, the officials announced that there would be a significant number of layoffs and reassignments of people working on the program. They offered a handful of reasons for the cuts, including the fact that timelines for NASA's Artemis lunar missions that will use the SLS rocket are slipping to the right.
Later on Thursday, in a statement provided to Ars, a Boeing spokesperson confirmed the cuts to Ars: "Due to external factors unrelated to our program performance, Boeing is reviewing and adjusting current staffing levels on the Space Launch System program."
Hospital prices for the same emergency care vary up to 16X, study finds
Enlarge / Miami Beach, Fire Rescue ambulance at Mt. Sinai Medical Center hospital. ] (credit: Getty | Jeffrey Greenberg/)
Since 2021, federal law has required hospitals to publicly post their prices, allowing Americans to easily anticipate costs and shop around for affordable care—as they would for any other marketed service or product. But hospitals have mostly failed miserably at complying with the law.
A 2023 KFF analysis on compliance found that the pricing information hospitals provided is "messy, inconsistent, and confusing, making it challenging, if not impossible, for patients or researchers to use them for their intended purpose." A February 2024 report from the nonprofit organization Patient Rights Advocate found that only 35 percent of 2,000 US hospitals surveyed were in full compliance with the 2021 rule.
But even if hospitals dramatically improved their price transparency, it likely wouldn't help when patients need emergency trauma care. After an unexpected, major injury, people are sent to the closest hospital and aren't likely to be shopping around for the best price from the back of an ambulance. If they did, though, they might also need to be treated for shock.
Prime Video looking to fix “extremely sloppy mistakes” in library, report says
Enlarge / Morfydd Clark is Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. (credit: Amazon Studios)
Subscribers lodged thousands of complaints related to inaccuracies in Amazon's Prime Video catalog, including incorrect content and missing episodes, according to a Business Insider report this week. While Prime Video users aren't the only streaming users dealing with these problems, Insider's examination of leaked "internal documents" brings more perspective into the impact of mislabeling and similar errors on streaming platforms.
Insider didn't publish the documents but said they show that "60 percent of all content-related customer-experience complaints for Prime Video last year were about catalogue errors," such as movies or shows labeled with wrong or missing titles.
Specific examples reportedly named in the document include Season 1, Episode 2 of The Rings of Power being available before Season 1, Episode 1; character names being mistranslated; Continuum displaying the wrong age rating; and the Spanish-audio version of Die Hard With a Vengeance missing a chunk of audio.
Elon Musk’s Grok keeps making up fake news based on X users’ jokes
Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)
X's chatbot Grok is supposed to be an AI engine crunching the platform's posts to surface and summarize breaking news, but this week, Grok's flaws were once again exposed when the chatbot got confused and falsely accused an NBA star of criminal vandalism.
"Klay Thompson Accused in Bizarre Brick-Vandalism Spree," Grok's headline read in an AI-powered trending-tab post that has remained on X (formerly Twitter) for days. Beneath the headline, Grok went into even more detail to support its fake reporting:
In a bizarre turn of events, NBA star Klay Thompson has been accused of vandalizing multiple houses with bricks in Sacramento. Authorities are investigating the claims after several individuals reported their houses being damaged, with windows shattered by bricks. Klay Thompson has not yet issued a statement regarding the accusations. The incidents have left the community shaken, but no injuries were reported. The motive behind the alleged vandalism remains unclear.
Grok appears to be confusing a common basketball term, where players are said to be throwing "bricks" when they take an airball shot that doesn't hit the rim. According to SF Gate, which was one of the first outlets to report the Grok error, Thompson had an "all-time rough shooting" night, hitting none of his shots on what was his emotional last game with the Golden State Warriors before becoming an unrestricted free agent.
Renovation relic: Man finds hominin jawbone in parents’ travertine kitchen tile
Enlarge / Reddit user Kidipadeli75 spotted a fossilized hominin jawbone in his parents' new travertine kitchen tile. (credit: Reddit user Kidipadeli75)
Ah, Reddit! It's a constant source of amazing stories that sound too good to be true... and yet! The latest example comes to us from a user named Kidipadeli75, a dentist who visited his parents after the latter's kitchen renovation and noticed what appeared to be a human-like jawbone embedded in the new travertine tile. Naturally, he posted a photograph to Reddit seeking advice and input. And Reddit was happy to oblige.
User MAJOR_Blarg, for instance, is a dentist "with forensic odontology training" and offered the following:
While all old-world monkeys, apes, and hominids share the same dental formula, 2-1-2-3, and the individual molars and premolars can look similar, the specific spacing in the mandible itself is very specifically and characteristically human, or at least related and very recent hominid relative/ancestor. Most likely human given the success of the proliferation of H.s. and the (relatively) rapid formation of travertine.
Against modern Homo sapiens, which may not be entirely relevant, the morphology of the mandible is likely not northern European, but more similar to African, middle Eastern, mainland Asian.
Another user, deamatrona, who claims to hold an anthropology degree, also thought the dentition looked Asiatic, "which could be a significant find." The thread also drew the attention of John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and longtime science blogger who provided some valuable context on his own website. (Hawks has been involved with the team that discovered Homo naledi at the Rising Star cave system in 2013.)
LLMs keep leaping with Llama 3, Meta’s newest open-weights AI model
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Benj Edwards)
On Thursday, Meta unveiled early versions of its Llama 3 open-weights AI model that can be used to power text composition, code generation, or chatbots. It also announced that its Meta AI Assistant is now available on a website and is going to be integrated into its major social media apps, intensifying the company's efforts to position its products against other AI assistants like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, and Google's Gemini.
Like its predecessor, Llama 2, Llama 3 is notable for being a freely available, open-weights large language model (LLM) provided by a major AI company. Llama 3 technically does not quality as "open source" because that term has a specific meaning in software (as we have mentioned in other coverage), and the industry has not yet settled on terminology for AI model releases that ship either code or weights with restrictions (you can read Llama 3's license here) or that ship without providing training data. We typically call these releases "open weights" instead.
At the moment, Llama 3 is available in two parameter sizes: 8 billion (8B) and 70 billion (70B), both of which are available as free downloads through Meta's website with a sign-up. Llama 3 comes in two versions: pre-trained (basically the raw, next-token-prediction model) and instruction-tuned (fine-tuned to follow user instructions). Each has a 8,192 token context limit.
Meta’s new $199 Quest 2 price is a steal for the VR-curious
Enlarge / For just $199, you could be having as much fun as this paid model.
Meta has announced it's permanently lowering the price of its aging Quest 2 headset to $199 for a 128GB base model, representing the company's lowest price yet for a full-featured untethered VR headset.
The Quest 2, which launched in 2020 at $299, famously defied tech product convention by increasing its MSRP to $399 amid inflation and supply chain issues in mid-2022. Actual prices for the headset at retail have fallen since then, though; Best Buy offered new units for $299 as of last October and for $250 by the 2023 post-Thanksgiving shopping season, for instance.
And the Quest 2 is far from the company's state-of-the-art headset at this point. Meta launched the surprisingly expensive Quest Pro in late 2022 before dropping that headset's price from $1,499 to $999 less than five months later. And last year's launch of the Quest 3 at a $499 starting price brought some significant improvements in resolution, processing power, thickness, and full-color passthrough images over the Quest 2.
Google merges the Android, Chrome, and hardware divisions
Enlarge / Google HQ. (credit: Getty Images)
Google is doing a major re-org of Android, Chrome, and the Google hardware division: They're merging! Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh will lead the new "Platforms and Devices” division. Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's previous head of software platforms like Android and ChromeOS, will be headed to "some new projects" at Google.
"Having a unified team across Platforms & Devices will help us deliver higher quality products and experiences for our users and partners," writes Google CEO Sundar Pichai. "It will help us turbocharge the Android and Chrome ecosystems, and bring the best innovations to partners faster — as we did with Circle to Search with Samsung. And internally, it will also speed up decision-making."
Google also justifies the decision the same way it does most decisions nowadays: by saying it's AI-related. The announcement is a few paragraphs in a wide-ranging post by Pichai, titled, "Building for our AI future," and the new division is taking a chunk of Google Research along with it, specifically the group that has been working on computational photography. Pichai wants the team to live in "the intersection of hardware, software, and AI."
SpaceX and Northrop are working on a constellation of spy satellites
Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches a Starlink mission in January 2020. (credit: SpaceX)
SpaceX is reportedly working with at least one major US defense contractor, Northrop Grumman, on a constellation of spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office.
According to Reuters, development of the network of hundreds of spy satellites by SpaceX is being coordinated with multiple contractors to avoid putting too much control of a highly sensitive intelligence program in the hands of one company.
"It is in the government's interest to not be totally invested in one company run by one person," one of the news agency's sources said, most likely referring to SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
Cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint, US court rules
The US Constitution's Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination does not prohibit police officers from forcing a suspect to unlock a phone with a thumbprint scan, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. The ruling does not apply to all cases in which biometrics are used to unlock an electronic device but is a significant decision in an unsettled area of the law.
The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had to grapple with the question of "whether the compelled use of Payne's thumb to unlock his phone was testimonial," the ruling in United States v. Jeremy Travis Payne said. "To date, neither the Supreme Court nor any of our sister circuits have addressed whether the compelled use of a biometric to unlock an electronic device is testimonial."
A three-judge panel at the 9th Circuit ruled unanimously against Payne, affirming a US District Court's denial of Payne's motion to suppress evidence. Payne was a California parolee who was arrested by California Highway Patrol (CHP) after a 2021 traffic stop and charged with possession with intent to distribute fentanyl, fluorofentanyl, and cocaine.