Ars Technica
Judge rules against users suing Google and Apple over “annoying” search results
Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)
While the world awaits closing arguments later this year in the US government's antitrust case over Google's search dominance, a California judge has dismissed a lawsuit from 26 Google users who claimed that Google's default search agreement with Apple violates antitrust law and has ruined everyone's search results.
Users had argued that Google struck a deal making its search engine the default on Apple's Safari web browser specifically to keep Apple from competing in the general search market. These payments to Apple, users alleged, have "stunted innovation" and "deprived" users of "quality, service, and privacy that they otherwise would have enjoyed but for Google’s anticompetitive conduct." They also allege that it created a world where users have fewer choices, enabling Google to prefer its own advertisers, which users said caused an "annoying and damaging distortion" of search results.
In an order granting the tech companies' motion to dismiss, US District Judge Rita Lin said that users did not present enough evidence to support claims for relief. Lin dismissed some claims with prejudice but gave leave to amend others, allowing users another chance to keep their case—now twice-dismissed—at least partially alive.
New streaming app from Fox, Disney, WBD is about more than sports
Enlarge / Gleyber Torres, Aaron Judge, and Didi Gregorius playing for the Yankees in 2019, when Yankees games were easier to track down.
Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), and Fox plan to launch an app together this fall, the companies announced Tuesday. The unnamed app will unite the sports offerings of the three media conglomerates, including their reported 85 percent ownership of US sports rights. The app could simplify things for sports fans while signaling a bundled future for streaming services—which could ultimately prove good or bad for subscribers.
The new app will give subscribers access to ESPN+ and various linear channels that show live sports, including ABC, Fox, TNT, TBS, truTV, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPNEWS, FS1, FS2, SECN, ACCN, and BTN. The companies' announcement promised access to "thousands of events" through the app, including from the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, and NHL, as well as PGA, Wimbledon, UFC, and Formula 1 events, the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup, the FIFA World Cup, and college sports. An anonymous person "familiar with the matter" told Variety that the app won't make original content.
People will be able to bundle the sports app with Disney-owned streaming services Disney+ and Hulu, as well as with WBD's Max streaming app. The upcoming app will particularly target "those outside of the traditional pay TV bundle," the announcement said.
Saturn’s tiny moon Mimas seems to have an ocean, too
Enlarge / That is actually a moon. (credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)
The once-exclusive club of Solar System objects that host oceans is getting increasingly crowded. On Wednesday, Nature released a paper providing evidence that Saturn's moon Mimas has a subsurface ocean beneath its heavily cratered crust. The evidence for this ocean comes in the form of orbital oddities that are seemingly impossible to explain by anything other than the presence of an ocean.
Solid looksOf Saturn's seven major moons, Mimas orbits closest to the planet, taking less than a day to complete an orbit. It's also the smallest of the major moons, with a diameter of just under 400 kilometers (about 250 miles). Despite its diminutive size, Mimas hosts the second-largest crater on any moon in the Solar System. The Herschel Crater dominates the surface of the moon, giving it an appearance that evokes the Death Star.
Even outside of Herschel, the moon's surface is heavily pocked by craters, suggesting it has been static for most of the moon's history. That's in sharp contrast to moons like Europa and Enceladus, where the subsurface oceans allow the constant remodeling of their surfaces, leaving them with much sparser crater histories. So Mimas seemed like a very poor candidate for hosting an ocean.
Toyota invests another $1.3 billion for EV production in Kentucky
Enlarge / Toyota Kentucky currently churns out Camry sedans, but from next year it will also make electric vehicles. (credit: Toyota)
Toyota's factory in Georgetown, Kentucky, is getting an additional $1.3 billion investment, the automaker says. Last year it announced that the Georgetown plant would build its forthcoming three-row electric SUV; now it says it's also adding a battery pack assembly line, among other improvements.
"Today's announcement reflects our commitment to vehicle electrification and further reinvesting in our US operations," said Kerry Creech, president of Toyota Kentucky. "Generations of our team members helped prepare for this opportunity, and we will continue leading the charge into the future by remaining true to who we are as a company and putting our people first for generations to come."
Toyota has lagged behind industry rivals in its electrification plans; here in the US, its sole battery EV offering is the stolid bZ4x electric crossover. The company's slow-rolling of EVs led to a change of leadership in 2023 as Akio Toyoda was replaced as CEO by former Lexus head Koji Sato.
Large cryptocurrency miners in US now have to report energy use to government
Enlarge / A worker installs a row of new mining machines at the largest bitcoin mining facility in the US, located in Rockdale, Texas, on October 9, 2021. Experts say lax regulation and cheap electricity in the US are a draw for bitcoin miners, whose energy-gulping computers race to unlock units of the currency. (credit: Mark Felix/AFP via Getty)
The Biden administration is now requiring some cryptocurrency producers to report their energy use following rising concerns that the growing industry could pose a threat to the nation’s electricity grids and exacerbate climate change.
The Energy Information Administration announced last week that it would start collecting energy use data from more than 130 “identified commercial cryptocurrency miners” operating in the US. The survey, which started this week, aims to get a sense of how the industry’s energy demand is evolving and where in the country cryptocurrency operations are growing fastest.
“As cryptocurrency mining has increased in the United States, concerns have grown about the energy-intensive nature of the business and its effects on the US electric power industry,” the EIA said in a new report, following the announcement. “Concerns expressed to EIA include strains to the electricity grid during periods of peak demand, the potential for higher electricity prices, as well as effects on energy-related carbon dioxide emissions.”
Ford rethinks EV strategy, is working on a smaller, cheaper EV platform
Enlarge / Americans love pickup trucks, but most pickup-truck loving Americans are not ready to go electric yet. Meanwhile, there's almost nothing to buy if you want a smaller, cheaper EV. (credit: Ford)
For the last two years, a small "skunkworks" at the Ford Motor Company has been working on a low-cost electric vehicle platform, according to Ford CEO Jim Farley. Farley revealed the existence of this new platform during the automaker's quarterly financial results call with investors on Tuesday evening. The company is rethinking its electrification strategy, having now faced up to the reality that the current crop of EVs are too expensive for mass-market adoption to take off.
Ford was early to market with its Mustang Mach-E crossover, itself the product of a skunkworks-style development process: an internal group called Team Edison, formed to add some excitement to what was originally going to be a more boring compliance car. The team also took the bold step of making a fully electric version of the country's bestselling vehicle, the F-150 pickup truck.
Demand for the electric F-150 Lightning appeared strong, but a series of price hikes has resulted in really expensive trucks languishing on dealer forecourts and Ford cutting production shifts to reduce output. The Mustang Mach-E is still selling, although with barely any growth year on year.
Critical vulnerability affecting most Linux distros allows for bootkits
Linux developers are in the process of patching a high-severity vulnerability that, in certain cases, allows the installation of malware that runs at the firmware level, giving infections access to the deepest parts of a device where they’re hard to detect or remove.
The vulnerability resides in shim, which in the context of Linux is a small component that runs in the firmware early in the boot process before the operating system has started. More specifically, the shim accompanying virtually all Linux distributions plays a crucial role in secure boot, a protection built into most modern computing devices to ensure every link in the boot process comes from a verified, trusted supplier. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability allows attackers to neutralize this mechanism by executing malicious firmware at the earliest stages of the boot process before the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface firmware has loaded and handed off control to the operating system.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-40547, is what’s known as a buffer overflow, a coding bug that allows attackers to execute code of their choice. It resides in a part of the shim that processes booting up from a central server on a network using the same HTTP that the Internet is based on. Attackers can exploit the code-execution vulnerability in various scenarios, virtually all following some form of successful compromise of either the targeted device or the server or network the device boots from.
Anti-abortion group’s studies retracted before Supreme Court mifepristone case
Enlarge / Mifepristone (Mifeprex) and misoprostol, the two drugs used in a medication abortion, are seen at the Women's Reproductive Clinic, which provides legal medication abortion services, in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, on June 17, 2022. (credit: Getty | Robyn Beck)
Scientific journal publisher Sage has retracted key abortion studies cited by anti-abortion groups in a legal case aiming to revoke regulatory approval of the abortion and miscarriage medication, mifepristone—a case that has reached the US Supreme Court, with a hearing scheduled for March 26.
On Monday, Sage announced the retraction of three studies, all published in the journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology. All three were led by James Studnicki, who works for The Charlotte Lozier Institute, a research arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. The publisher said the retractions were based on various problems related to the studies' methods, analyses, and presentation, as well as undisclosed conflicts of interest.
Two of the studies were cited by anti-abortion groups in their lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration (Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA), which claimed the regulator's approval and regulation of mifepristone was unlawful. The two studies were also cited by District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Texas, who issued a preliminary injunction last April to revoke the FDA's 2000 approval of mifepristone. A conservative panel of judges for the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans partially reversed that ruling months later, but the Supreme Court froze the lower court's order until the appeals process had concluded.
Four bolts were missing from Boeing 737 before door plug blew off, NTSB says
Enlarge / Rows 25 and 26 in the Boeing plane that lost a door plug during flight. (credit: NTSB)
Four important bolts were missing from a Boeing 737 Max 9 that lost a passenger door plug during flight, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded in its investigation.
The NTSB's preliminary report issued today is consistent with earlier news reports stating that investigators believed the bolts were missing when the plane left Boeing's factory. The plane used by Alaska Airlines was forced to make an emergency landing on January 5 when the door plug—which is used instead of an emergency exit door—blew off the aircraft in mid-flight.
An absence of markings around the holes where bolts should have been installed was a key piece of evidence cited in the NTSB report:
Robo-dinosaur scares grasshoppers to shed light on why dinos evolved feathers
Enlarge / Grasshoppers, beware! Robopteryx is here to flush you from your hiding place. (credit: Jinseok Park, Piotr Jablonski et al., 2024)
Scientists in South Korea built a robotic dinosaur and used it to startle grasshoppers to learn more about why dinosaurs evolved feathers, according to a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. The results suggest that certain dinosaurs may have employed a hunting strategy in which they flapped their proto-wings to flush out prey, and this behavior may have led to the evolution of larger and stiffer feathers.
As reported previously, feathers are the defining feature of birds, but that wasn't always the case. For millions of years, various species of dinosaurs sported feathers, some of which have left behind fossilized impressions. For the most part, the feathers we've found have been attached to smaller dinosaurs, many of them along the lineage that gave rise to birds—although in 2012, scientists discovered three nearly complete skeletons of a "gigantic" feathered dinosaur species, Yutyrannus huali, related to the ancestors of Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Various types of dino-feathers have been found in the fossil record over the last 30 years, such as so-called pennaceous feathers (present in most modern birds). These were found on distal forelimbs of certain species like Caudipteryx, serving as proto-wings that were too small to use for flight, as well as around the tip of the tail as plumage. Paleontologists remain unsure of the function of pennaceous feathers—what use could there be for half a wing? A broad range of hypotheses have been proposed: foraging or hunting, pouncing or immobilizing prey, brooding, gliding, or wing-assisted incline running, among others.
Bluesky finally gets rid of invite codes, lets everyone join
Enlarge (credit: Darrell Gulin | The Image Bank)
After more than a year as an exclusive invite-only social media platform, Bluesky is now open to the public, so anyone can join without needing a once-coveted invite code.
In a blog, Bluesky said that requiring invite codes helped Bluesky "manage growth" while building features that allow users to control what content they see on the social platform.
When Bluesky debuted, many viewed it as a potential Twitter killer, but limited access to Bluesky may have weakened momentum. As of January 2024, Bluesky has more than 3 million users. That's significantly less than X (formerly Twitter), which estimates suggest currently boasts more than 400 million global users.
Humanity’s most distant space probe jeopardized by computer glitch
Enlarge / An annotated image showing the various parts and instruments of NASA's Voyager spacecraft design. (credit: NASA/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Voyager 1 is still alive out there, barreling into the cosmos more than 15 billion miles away. However, a computer problem has kept the mission's loyal support team in Southern California from knowing much more about the status of one of NASA's longest-lived spacecraft.
The computer glitch cropped up on November 14, and it affected Voyager 1's ability to send back telemetry data, such as measurements from the spacecraft's science instruments or basic engineering information about how the probe was doing. So, there's no insight into key parameters regarding the craft's propulsion, power, or control systems.
"It would be the biggest miracle if we get it back. We certainly haven't given up," said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an interview with Ars. "There are other other things we can try. But this is, by far, the most serious since I’ve been project manager."
“Don’t let them drop us!” Landline users protest AT&T copper retirement plan
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | CalypsoArt)
AT&T's application to end its landline phone obligations in California is drawing protest from residents as state officials consider whether to let AT&T off the hook.
AT&T filed an application to end its Carrier of Last Resort (COLR) obligation in March 2023. The first of several public hearings on the application is being held today by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which is considering AT&T's request. An evidentiary hearing has been scheduled for April, and a proposed decision is expected in September.
AT&T has said it won't cut off phone service immediately, but ending the COLR obligation would make it easier for AT&T to drop its phone lines later on. AT&T's application said it would provide basic phone service in all areas for at least six months and indefinitely in areas without any alternative voice service.
Boston Dynamics’ Atlas tries out inventory work, gets better at lifting
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Boston Dynamics' Atlas research robot. [credit: Boston Dynamics ]
The world's most advanced humanoid robot, Boston Dynamics' Atlas, is back, and it's moving some medium-weight car parts. While the robot has mastered a lot of bipedal tricks like walking, running, jumping, and even backflips, it's still in the early days of picking stuff up. When we last saw the robot, it had sprouted a set of rudimentary hand clamps and was using those to carry heavy objects like a toolbox, barbells, and a plank of wood. The new focus seems to be on "kinetically challenging" work—these things are heavy enough to mess with the robot's balance, so picking them up, carrying them, and putting them down requires all sorts of additional calculations and planning so the robot doesn't fall over.
In the latest video, we're on to what looks like "phase 2" of picking stuff up—being more precise about it. The old clamp hands had a single pivot at the palm and seemed to just apply the maximum grip strength to anything the robot picked up. The most delicate thing Atlas picked up in the last video was a wooden plank, and it was absolutely destroying the wood. Atlas' new hands look a lot more gentle than The Clamps, with each sporting a set of three fingers with two joints. All the fingers share one big pivot point at the palm of the hand, and there's a knuckle joint halfway up the finger. The fingers are all very long and have 360 degrees of motion, so they can flex in both directions, which is probably effective but very creepy. Put two fingers on one side of an item and the "thumb" on the other, and Atlas can wrap its hands around objects instead of just crushing them.
Sadly all we're getting is this blurry 1 minute video with no explanation as to what's going on.
Atlas is picking up a set of car struts—an object with extremely complicated topography that weighs around 30 pounds—so there's a lot to calculate. Atlas does a heavy two-handed lift of a strut from a vertical position on a pallet, walks it over to a shelf, and carefully slides it into place. This is all in Boston Dynamics' lab, but it's close to repetitive factory or shipping work. Everything here seems designed to give the robot a manipulation challenge. The complicated shape of the strut means there are a million ways you could grip it incorrectly. The strut box has tall metal poles around it, so the robot needs to not bang the strut into the obstacle. The shelf is a tight fit, so the strut has to be placed on the edge of the shelf and slid into place, all while making sure the strut's many protrusions won't crash into the shelf.
Data broker allegedly selling de-anonymized info to face FTC lawsuit after all
Enlarge (credit: Malte Mueller | fStop)
The Federal Trade Commission has succeeded in keeping alive its first federal court case against a geolocation data broker that's allegedly unfairly selling large quantities of data in violation of the FTC Act.
On Saturday, US District Judge Lynn Winmill denied Kochava's motion to dismiss an amended FTC complaint, which he said plausibly argued that "Kochava’s data sales invade consumers’ privacy and expose them to risks of secondary harms by third parties."
Winmill's ruling reversed a dismissal of the FTC's initial complaint, which the court previously said failed to adequately allege that Kochava's data sales cause or are likely to cause a "substantial" injury to consumers.
Virgin Galactic and the FAA are investigating a dropped pin on last spaceflight
White Knight Two carries the first SpaceShipTwo during a glide test. (credit: Virgin Galactic)
Virgin Galactic reported an anomaly on its most recent flight, Galactic 06, which took place 12 days ago from a spaceport in New Mexico.
In a statement released Monday, the company said it discovered a dropped pin during a post-flight review of the mission, which carried two pilots and four passengers to an altitude of 55.1 miles (88.7 km).
This alignment pin, according to Virgin Galactic, helps ensure the VSS Unity spaceship is aligned to its carrier aircraft when mating the vehicles on the ground during pre-flight procedures. The company said the alignment pin and a shear pin fitting assembly performed as designed during the mated portion of the flight, and only the alignment pin detached after the spaceship was released from the mothership.
Elden Ring is Tencent’s next target for mobile loot boxes and microtransactions
Enlarge / Artist's rendition of two Elden Ring teams, The Medium and The Message, battling it out in a colosseum constructed from micro-transactions and overseen by mystical creatures known as Whales. (credit: Bandai Namco)
To its fans, Elden Ring is a noble struggle, where the effort you put into memorizing boss patterns, improving your build, and fine-tuning your reactions offsets your near-constant deaths in a grim, unforgiving landscape.
To Tencent, it seems, Elden Ring is an opportunity to create another free-to-play game, one flush with in-app purchases and booster packs that may not mesh at all with the game's nature or setting.
Reuters reports that Tencent, the Chinese firm that owns a 16 percent stake in Elden Ring and Dark Souls-maker FromSoftware, has a mobile version of Elden Ring in development. Progress "has been slow," according to three people familiar with the project cited by Reuters. But it will be free-to-play, will have in-app purchases, and may resemble miHoYo's Genshin Impact in its play/pay flow, according to Reuters.
Searching in infrared finds a big collection of black hole star destruction
Enlarge (credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF/NASA)
Virtually anything in space could be a potential meal for a supermassive black hole, and that includes entire stars. Even stars much bigger than our Sun can fall victim to the black hole’s extreme gravity and be pulled in toward its gaping maw. It is a terrifying phenomenon, but how often does it really happen?
Tidal disruption events (TDEs)—when the tidal forces of a black hole overwhelm a star’s gravity and tear it apart—are thought to occur once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in any given galaxy. TDEs can be detected by the immense amounts of energy they give off. While observations of them are still pretty rare, an international team of researchers has now discovered a whopping 18 of them that previous searches had missed. Why?
Many TDEs can be found in dusty galaxies. Dust obscures many wavelengths of radiation, from optical to X-rays, but long infrared wavelengths are much less susceptible to scattering and absorption. When the team checked galaxies in the infrared, they found 18 TDEs that had eluded astronomers before.
Meta will label AI-generated content from OpenAI and Google on Facebook, Instagram
Enlarge (credit: Meta / Getty Images)
On Tuesday, Meta announced its plan to start labeling AI-generated images from other companies like OpenAI and Google, as reported by Reuters. The move aims to enhance transparency on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Threads by informing users when the content they see is digitally synthesized media rather than an authentic photo or video.
Coming during a US election year that is expected to be contentious, Meta's decision is part of a larger effort within the tech industry to establish standards for labeling content created using generative AI models, which are capable of producing fake but realistic audio, images, and video from written prompts. (Even non-AI-generated fake content can potentially confuse social media users, as we covered yesterday.)
Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg made the announcement in a blog post on Meta's website. "We’re taking this approach through the next year, during which a number of important elections are taking place around the world," wrote Clegg. "During this time, we expect to learn much more about how people are creating and sharing AI content, what sort of transparency people find most valuable, and how these technologies evolve."
New paper explains why females are prone to autoimmune diseases
Eighty percent of patients with autoimmune diseases are female. These diseases are one of the top 10 leading causes of death for women under 65, and cases are increasing annually worldwide. There is evidence suggesting that it's females’ double complement of X chromosomes that puts them at such heightened risk for autoimmune diseases. Female cells have two X chromosomes, whereas males have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome (at least in mammals).
Shutting down an XDifferent animals compensate for this sort of disparity in different ways. Male fly cells churn out twice the amount of the proteins encoded by their single X chromosome, so they end up with the same amount as female cells. Worm hermaphrodite cells reduce production of the proteins encoded by each of their X chromosomes by half, so they end up with the same amount as male cells.
Mammals use X inactivation, in which each female cell shuts off one of its X chromosomes and only uses the other. Which X chromosome is shut off (the paternally inherited one or the maternally inherited one) is random and independent within each cell. So women are all genetic mosaics: Their cells are not all making the same proteins since some of their cells use one of their X chromosomes and some of their cells use the other.