Ars Technica
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.
Honda recalls 750,000 vehicles due to airbag seat sensor problem
Enlarge / The passenger airbag in some new Hondas and Acuras is very advanced and designed to prevent brain injuries. But a faulty sensor in the seat of some cars means it might deploy when it's not supposed to. (credit: Honda)
Honda is recalling more than 750,000 vehicles manufactured between 2020 and 2022. Honda says that a weight sensor, which is meant to disable the passenger airbags if the seat is occupied by a child or child seat, might not work properly, allowing the airbags to deploy during a crash.
Exposure to humidity can cause a capacitor in the sensor to crack and leak, making it inoperable. The problem has been traced to a change in the base material for the sensor's printed circuit board—Honda's tier 1 supplier made the change when a natural disaster disrupted production at the tier 2 supplier that normally provided the base material. The changed circuit board was not properly verified and "could allow additional strain to the printed circuit board that can lead to a capacitor cracking and an internal short circuit."
A warranty claim in August 2020 was Honda's first inkling that it had a problem. Initial investigations turned up little, but the automaker kept receiving warranty claims and, in January 2024, decided to issue a recall. In total, it says it has had 3,834 warranty claims for this issue between June 2020 and January 2024.
China close to shipping 5 nm chips, despite Western curbs
Enlarge / The latest Huawei-designed Kirin processor was a 7-nanometer chip made for it by SMIC that appeared in the Mate 60 Pro smartphone in August. (credit: James Park/Bloomberg)
China’s national chip champions expect to make next-generation smartphone processors as early as this year, despite US efforts to restrict their development of advanced technologies.
The country’s biggest chipmaker, SMIC, has put together new semiconductor production lines in Shanghai, according to two people familiar with the move, to mass-produce the chips designed by technology giant Huawei.
That plan supports Beijing’s goals of chip self-sufficiency, with President Joe Biden’s administration tightening export restrictions for advanced chipmaking equipment in October, citing national security concerns. The US has also been working with the Netherlands and Japan to block China’s access to the latest chip tools, such as machines from the Dutch maker ASML.
Mozilla targets scummy data brokers with Monitor Plus removal service
“You may be shocked to find,” the people-search websites pitch, that you or the other person you’re searching for “has a criminal record.” Other sites offer “millions of records that expose” a person for who they “really are.”
These kinds of “people search” sites are myriad. They copy from one another, and removing your information from them, while technically possible in fine-print fashion, could take days or weeks. Mozilla, the Firefox maker expanding into a suite of privacy-minded tools, has an alternative to clicking and hoping.
Mozilla Monitor Plus, just launched today, pledges to automatically monitor such "people search" sites, along with known data breaches, for your information and then take care of the removal process. The "Plus" version costs $14 if you go month by month, or $108 for a year's subscription (about $9 per month). You can still get a free scan on Monitor to see the data breaches and data brokers where Mozilla finds your information (used with Mozilla's fairly human-readable privacy policy).
Daily Telescope: A stunning new image of Io reveals a volcanic plume
Enlarge / Behold: Io (credit: Björn Jónsson)
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.
Good morning. It's February 6, and today's image reveals the Jovian moon Io in a revelatory new light.
Over the weekend the operators of NASA's Juno spacecraft released a new batch of images showcasing a February 3 flyby of Io, the volcanically active moon orbiting Jupiter. Io, if you didn't know, is the most volcanically active world known to humans.
AI can now master your music—and it does shockingly well
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
It was just a stray remark at the end of a guitar lesson last fall.
My teacher is a veteran musician whose band has had both major label and indie record deals, and he loves the analog, the human, the vintage, the imperfect. So it didn't surprise me to learn that he still likes to mix tracks with an old analog board or that he has a long-time "mastering guy" who finalizes the band's albums.
What did surprise me was the comment that he had for some time been testing LANDR, the online music service that offers AI-powered mastering. Pay a monthly fee, upload a well-mixed track, and in a minute, the system spits back a song that hits modern loudness standards and is punched up with additional clarity, EQ, stereo width, and dynamics processing.
As if 2 Ivanti vulnerabilities under exploit weren’t bad enough, now there are 3
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Mass exploitation began over the weekend for yet another critical vulnerability in widely used VPN software sold by Ivanti, as hackers already targeting two previous vulnerabilities diversified, researchers said Monday.
The new vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-21893, is what’s known as a server-side request forgery. Ivanti disclosed it on January 22, along with a separate vulnerability that so far has shown no signs of being exploited. Last Wednesday, nine days later, Ivanti said CVE-2024-21893 was under active exploitation, aggravating an already chaotic few weeks. All of the vulnerabilities affect Ivanti’s Connect Secure and Policy Secure VPN products.
A tarnished reputation and battered security professionalsThe new vulnerability came to light as two other vulnerabilities were already under mass exploitation, mostly by a hacking group researchers have said is backed by the Chinese government. Ivanti provided mitigation guidance for the two vulnerabilities on January 11 and released a proper patch last week. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, meanwhile, mandated all federal agencies under its authority disconnect Ivanti VPN products from the Internet until they are rebuilt from scratch and running the latest software version.
Trio wins $700K Vesuvius Challenge grand prize for deciphering ancient scroll
Enlarge / Text from one of the Herculaneum scrolls has been deciphered. Roughly 95 percent of the scroll remains to be read. (credit: Vesuvius Challenge)
Last fall we reported on the use of machine learning to decipher the first letters from a previously unreadable ancient scroll found in an ancient Roman villa at Herculaneum—part of the 2023 Vesuvius Challenge. Tech entrepreneur and challenge co-founder Nat Friedman has now announced via X (formerly Twitter) that they have awarded the grand prize of $700,000 for producing the first readable text. The three winning team members are Luke Farritor, Yousef Nader, and Julian Schilliger.
As previously reported, the ancient Roman resort town Pompeii wasn't the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas called pyroclastic pulses and flows. But still, some remnants of Roman wealth survived. One palatial residence in Herculaneum—believed to have once belonged to a man named Piso—contained hundreds of priceless written scrolls made from papyrus, singed into carbon by volcanic gas.
The scrolls stayed buried under volcanic mud until they were excavated in the 1700s from a single room that archaeologists believe held the personal working library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. There may be even more scrolls still buried on the as-yet-unexcavated lower floors of the villa. The few opened fragments helped scholars identify a variety of Greek philosophical texts, including On Nature by Epicurus and several by Philodemus himself, as well as a handful of Latin works. But the more than 600 rolled-up scrolls were so fragile that it was long believed they would never be readable since even touching them could cause them to crumble.
Hermit crabs find new homes in plastic waste: Shell shortage or clever choice?
Enlarge / Scientists have found that hermit crabs are increasingly using plastic and other litter as makeshift shell homes. (credit: Luis Diaz Devesa/Getty)
Land hermit crabs have been using bottle tops, parts of old light bulbs and broken glass bottles, instead of shells.
New research by Polish researchers studied 386 images of hermit crabs occupying these artificial shells. The photos had been uploaded by users to online platforms, then analyzed by scientists using a research approach known as iEcology. Of the 386 photos, the vast majority, 326 cases, featured hermit crabs using plastic items as shelters.
At first glance, this is a striking example of how human activities can alter the behavior of wild animals and potentially the ways that populations and ecosystems function as a result. But there are lots of factors at play and, while it’s easy to jump to conclusions, it’s important to consider exactly what might be driving this particular change.
The 2024 Rolex 24 at Daytona put on very close racing for a record crowd
Enlarge / The current crop of GTP hybrid prototypes look wonderful, thanks to rules that cap the amount of downforce they can generate in favor of more dramatic styling. (credit: Porsche Motorsport)
Porsche provided flights from Washington to Daytona and accommodation so we could attend the Rolex 24. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—Near-summer temperatures greeted a record crowd at the Daytona International Speedway in Florida last weekend. At the end of each January, the track hosts the Rolex 24, an around-the-clock endurance race that's now as high-profile as it has ever been during the event's 62-year history.
Between the packed crowd and the 59-car grid, there's proof that sports car racing is in good shape. Some of that might be attributable to Drive to Survive's rising tide lifting a bunch of non-F1 boats, but there's more to the story than just a resurgent interest in motorsport. The dramatic-looking GTP prototypes have a lot to do with it—powerful hybrid racing cars from Acura, BMW, Cadillac, and Porsche are bringing in the fans and, in some cases, some pretty famous drivers with F1 or IndyCar wins on their resumes.
But IMSA and the Rolex 24 is about more than just the top class of cars; in addition to the GTP hybrids, the field also comprised the very competitive pro-am LMP2 prototype class and a pair of classes (one for professional teams, another for pro-ams) for production-based machines built to a global set of rules, called GT3. (To be slightly confusing, in IMSA, those classes are known as GTD-Pro and GTD. More on sports car racing being needlessly confusing later.)
Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead
Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)
Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet. Google Search's "cached" links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is killing them off. Google "Search Liaison" Danny Sullivan confirmed the feature removal in an X post, saying the feature "was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it."
The feature has been appearing and disappearing for some people since December, and currently, we don't see any cache links in Google Search. For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to "https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:" plus a website URL, or by typing "cache:" plus a URL into Google Search. For now, the cached version of Ars Technica seems to still work. All of Google's support pages about cached sites have been taken down.
Cached links used to live under the drop-down menu next to every search result on Google's page. As the Google web crawler scoured the Internet for new and updated webpages, it would also save a copy of whatever it was seeing. That quickly led to Google having a backup of basically the entire Internet, using what was probably an uncountable number of petabytes of data. Google is in the era of cost savings now, so assuming Google can just start deleting cache data, it can probably free up a lot of resources.
Our oldest microbial ancestors were way ahead of their time
Enlarge / The Golgi apparatus, shown here in light green, may have been involved in building internal structures in cells. (credit: ARTUR PLAWGO / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)
Before Neanderthals and Denisovans, before vaguely humanoid primates, proto-mammals, or fish that crawled out of the ocean to become the first terrestrial animals, our earliest ancestors were microbes.
More complex organisms like ourselves descend from eukaryotes, which have a nuclear membrane around their DNA (as opposed to prokaryotes, which don’t). Eukaryotes were thought to have evolved a few billion years ago, during the late Palaeoproterozoic period, and started diversifying by around 800 million years ago. Their diversification was not well understood. Now, a team of researchers led by UC Santa Barbara paleontologist Leigh Ann Riedman discovered eukaryote microfossils that are 1.64 billion years old, yet had already diversified and had surprisingly sophisticated features.
“High levels of eukaryotic species richness and morphological disparity suggest that although late Palaeoproterozoic [fossils] preserve our oldest record of eukaryotes, the eukaryotic clade has a much deeper history,” Riedman and her team said in a study recently published in Papers in Paleontology.
“Rasti Computer” is a detailed GRiD Compass tribute made from Framework innards
Enlarge / Penk Chen's Rasti Computer, built with 3D printing, Framework laptop internals, and a deep love for the first laptop that went to space. (credit: Penk Chen)
If I had to figure out what to do with the insides of a Framework 13 laptop I had lying around after today, I might not turn it into a strange but compelling "Slabtop" this time.
No, I think that, having seen Penk Chen's remarkable project to fit Framework parts into a kind of modern restyling of the Grid Compass laptop, I would have to wait until Chen posts detailed build instructions for this project... and until I had a 3D printer... and could gather the custom mechanical keyboard parts. Sure, that's a lot harder, but it's hard to put a price on drawing unnecessary attention to yourself while you chonk away on your faux-used future laptop.
The Rasti Computer, which Chen writes is "derived from the German compound word 'Rasterrahmen' (grid + framework)," has at its core the mainboard, battery, and antennae from the highly modular and repairable first-generation Framework laptop. It takes input from the custom keyboard Chen designed for the chassis, with custom PCB and 3D-printed keycaps and case. It sends images to a 10.4-inch QLED 1600×720 display, and it all fits inside a bevy of 3D-printed pieces with some fairly standard hex-head bolts. Oh, and the hinges from a 2012 13-inch MacBook pro, though that's possibly negotiable.
Republicans in Congress try to kill FCC’s broadband discrimination rules
Enlarge / US Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) speaks to the press on June 13, 2023, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Michael McCoy)
More than 65 Republican lawmakers this week introduced legislation to nullify rules that prohibit discrimination in access to broadband services.
The Federal Communications Commission approved the rules in November despite opposition from broadband providers. The FCC's two Republicans dissented in the 3-2 vote. While the FCC was required by Congress to issue anti-discrimination rules, Republicans argue that the agency's Democratic majority wrote rules that are too broad.
On Tuesday this week, US House Republications submitted a resolution of disapproval that would use Congressional Review Act authority to kill the anti-discrimination rules. "Under the guise of 'equity,' the Biden administration is attempting to radically expand the federal government's control of all Internet services and infrastructure," lead sponsor Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) said.
New 6GB version of the RTX 3050 may be Nvidia’s first sub-$200 GPU in over 4 years
Enlarge (credit: Gigabyte)
Nvidia launched three new GPUs last month, part of a Super overhaul of the RTX 40-series designed to improve the value of the company's $600-and-up graphics cards.
But today, the company is quietly doing something that it hasn't done in over four years: launching a sub-$200 graphics card. As spotted by TechPowerUp, Nvidia partners like Gigabyte have begun officially announcing a 6GB version of the old RTX 3050 graphics card, albeit with less memory and memory bandwidth, fewer CUDA cores, and lower power requirements.
The announcement follows a few days of leaked retail listings, which generally point to an MSRP of roughly $179 for the new-old card. This would make it Nvidia's first sub-$200 graphics card launch since the GeForce GTX 1650 Super came out in late 2019, a four-year gap caused partially by a cryptocurrency- and pandemic-fueled GPU shortage that lasted from late 2020 into mid-to-late 2022.
A startup allegedly “hacked the world.” Then came the censorship—and now the backlash.
Enlarge (credit: WIRED staff/Getty Images)
Hacker-for-hire firms like NSO Group and Hacking Team have become notorious for enabling their customers to spy on vulnerable members of civil society. But as far back as a decade ago in India, a startup called Appin Technology and its subsidiaries allegedly played a similar cyber-mercenary role while attracting far less attention. Over the past two years, a collection of people with direct and indirect links to that company have been working to keep it that way, using a campaign of legal threats to silence publishers and anyone else reporting on Appin Technology’s alleged hacking past. Now, a loose coalition of anti-censorship voices is working to make that strategy backfire.
For months, lawyers and executives with ties to Appin Technology and to a newer organization that shares part of its name, called the Association of Appin Training Centers, have used lawsuits and legal threats to carry out an aggressive censorship campaign across the globe. These efforts have demanded that more than a dozen publications amend or fully remove references to the original Appin Technology’s alleged illegal hacking or, in some cases, mentions of that company’s co-founder, Rajat Khare. Most prominently, a lawsuit against Reuters brought by the Association of Appin Training Centers resulted in a stunning order from a Delhi court: It demanded that Reuters take down its article based on a blockbuster investigation into Appin Technology that had detailed its alleged targeting and spying on opposition leaders, corporate competitors, lawyers, and wealthy individuals on behalf of customers worldwide. Reuters “temporarily” removed its article in compliance with that injunction and is fighting the order in Indian court.As Appin Training Centers has sought to enforce that same order against a slew of other news outlets, however, resistance is building. Earlier this week, the digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sent a response—published here—pushing back against Appin Training Centers’ legal threats on behalf of media organizations caught in this crossfire, including the tech blog Techdirt and the investigative news nonprofit MuckRock.
Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin
Enlarge / It takes a lot of energy to keep pumping out more bitcoins. (credit: Andriy Onufriyenko)
What exactly is bitcoin mining doing to the electric grid? In the last few years, the US has seen a boom in cryptocurrency mining, and the government is now trying to track exactly what that means for the consumption of electricity. While its analysis is preliminary, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimates that large-scale cryptocurrency operations are now consuming over 2 percent of the US's electricity. That's roughly the equivalent of having added an additional state to the grid over just the last three years.
Follow the megawattsWhile there is some small-scale mining that goes on with personal computers and small rigs, most cryptocurrency mining has moved to large collections of specialized hardware. While this hardware can be pricy compared to personal computers, the main cost for these operations is electricity use, so the miners will tend to move to places with low electricity rates. The EIA report notes that, in the wake of a crackdown on cryptocurrency in China, a lot of that movement has involved relocation to the US, where keeping electricity prices low has generally been a policy priority.
One independent estimate made by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance had the US as the home of just over 3 percent of the global bitcoin mining at the start of 2020. By the start of 2022, that figure was nearly 38 percent.