Ars Technica
Would Luddites find the gig economy familiar?
Enlarge (credit: Matthieu Spohn)
The term Luddite is usually used as an insult. It suggests someone who is backward-looking, averse to progress, afraid of new technology, and frankly, not that bright. But Brian Merchant claims that that is not who the Luddites were at all. They were organized, articulate in their demands, very much understood how factory owners were using machinery to supplant them, and highly targeted in their destruction of that machinery.
Their pitiable reputation is the result of a deliberate smear campaign by elites in their own time who (successfully, as it turned out) tried to discredit their coherent and justified movement. In his book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, Merchant memorializes the Luddites not as the hapless dolts with their heads in the sand that they’ve become synonymous with, but rather as the first labor organizers. Longing for the halcyon days of yore when we were more in touch with nature isn’t Luddism, Merchant writes; that’s pastoralism—totally different thing.
OG LudditesWeavers used to work at home, using hand-powered looms (i.e., machines). The whole family pitched in to make cloth; they worked on their own schedules and spent their leisure time and meals together. Master weavers apprenticed for seven years to learn their trade. It worked this way in the north of England for hundreds of years.
CDC reports dips in flu, COVID-19, and RSV—though levels still very high
Enlarge / The influenza virus from an image produced from an image taken with transmission electron microscopy. Viral diameter ranges from around 80 to 120 nm. (credit: Getty | BSIP)
Key indicators of seasonal flu activity declined in the first week of the year, signaling a possible reprieve from the high levels of respiratory virus transmission this season—but the dip may only be temporary.
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its latest flu data for the week ending on January 6. Outpatient visits for influenza-like illnesses (ILI) were down that week, the first decline after weeks of rapid increases. Flu test positivity and hospitalizations were also down slightly.
Percent of outpatient visits for respiratory illnesses by week. (credit: CDC)
But transmission is still elevated around the country. Fourteen states have ILI activity at the "very high" level in the current data, down from 22 the week before. And 23 states have "high" activity level, up from 19 the week before. (You can see the week-by-week progression of this year's flu season in the US here.)
Reddit must share IP addresses of piracy-discussing users, film studios say
For the third time in less than a year, film studios with copyright infringement complaints against a cable Internet provider are trying to force Reddit to share information about users who have discussed piracy on the site.
In 2023, film companies lost two attempts to have Reddit unmask its users. In the first instance, US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler ruled in the US District Court for the Northern District of California that the First Amendment right to anonymous speech meant Reddit didn’t have to disclose the names, email addresses, and other account registration information for nine Reddit users. Film companies, including Bodyguard Productions and Millennium Media, had subpoenaed Reddit in relation to a patent infringement lawsuit against Astound Broadband-owned RCN about subscribers allegedly pirating 34 movie titles, including Hellboy (2019), Rambo V: Last Blood, and Tesla.
In the second instance, the same companies sued Astound Broadband-owned ISP Grande, again for alleged patent infringement occurring over the ISP’s network. The studios subpoenaed Reddit for user account information, including "IP address registration and logs from 1/1/2016 to present, name, email address, and other account registration information” for six Reddit users, per a July 2023 court filing.
The Space Force is changing the way it thinks about spaceports
Enlarge / The Morrell Operations Center at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. (credit: Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
A lot goes into a successful rocket launch. It's not just reliable engines, computers, and sophisticated guidance algorithms. There's also the launch pad, and perhaps even more of an afterthought to casual observers, the roads, bridges, pipelines, and electrical infrastructure required to keep a spaceport humming.
Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, commander of the Space Force's Eastern Range at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, calls this the "non-sexy stuff that we can't launch without." Much of the ground infrastructure at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the military's other launch range, is antiquated and needs upgrades or expansion.
“Things like roads, bridges, even just the entry into the base, the gate, communications infrastructure, power, we’re looking at overhauling and modernizing all of that because we really haven’t done a tech refresh on all of that in a very long time, at least 20 years, if not more," said Col. James Horne, deputy director for the Space Force's assured access to space directorate.
COVID shots protect against COVID-related strokes, heart attacks, study finds
Enlarge / A vial of the updated 2023-2024 formula of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine at a CVS Pharmacy in Eagle Rock, California, on September 14, 2023. (credit: Getty | Irfan Khan)
Staying up to date on COVID-19 vaccines can cut the risk of COVID-related strokes, blood clots, and heart attacks by around 50 percent in people ages 65 years or older and in those with a condition that makes them more vulnerable to those events, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The finding, published this week in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, should help ease concerns that the shots may conversely increase the risk of those events—collectively called thromboembolic events. In January 2023, the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration jointly reported a preliminary safety signal from their vaccine-monitoring systems that indicated mRNA COVID-19 vaccines may increase the risk of strokes in the 21 days after vaccination of people ages 65 and older. Since that initial report, that signal decreased, becoming statistically insignificant. Other vaccine monitoring systems, including international systems, have not picked up such a signal. Further studies (summarized here) have not produced clear or consistent data pointing to a link to strokes.
In May, the FDA concluded that the evidence does not support any safety concern and reported that "scientists believe factors other than vaccination might have contributed to the initial finding."
Lazy use of AI leads to Amazon products called “I cannot fulfill that request”
Enlarge / I know naming new products can be hard, but these Amazon sellers made some particularly odd naming choices. (credit: Amazon)
Amazon users are at this point used to search results filled with products that are fraudulent, scams, or quite literally garbage. These days, though, they also may have to pick through obviously shady products, with names like "I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy."
As of press time, some version of that telltale OpenAI error message appears in Amazon products ranging from lawn chairs to office furniture to Chinese religious tracts. A few similarly named products that were available as of this morning have been taken down as word of the listings spreads across social media (one such example is Archived here).
Other Amazon product names don't mention OpenAI specifically but feature apparent AI-related error messages, such as "Sorry but I can't generate a response to that request" or "Sorry but I can't provide the information you're looking for," (available in a variety of colors). Sometimes, the product names even highlight the specific reason why the apparent AI-generation request failed, noting that OpenAI can't provide content that "requires using trademarked brand names" or "promotes a specific religious institution" or in one case "encourage unethical behavior."
EPA expands “high priority” probe into AT&T, Verizon lead-contaminated cables
Enlarge (credit: Ronald Martinez / Staff | Getty Images News)
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expanding its investigation into potential risks posed by lead-covered cables installed nationwide by major telecommunications companies, The Wall Street Journal revealed in an exclusive report Thursday.
After finding "more than 100 readings with elevated lead near cables," the EPA sent letters to AT&T and Verizon in December, requesting a meeting later this month, the Journal revealed. On the agenda, the EPA expects the companies to share internal data on their own testing of the cables, as well as details from any "technical reports related to the companies’ testing and sampling," the WSJ reported.
The EPA's investigation was prompted by a WSJ report published last July, alleging that AT&T, Verizon, and other companies were aware that thousands of miles of cables could be contaminating soils throughout the US, "where Americans live, work and play," but did nothing to intervene despite the many public health risks associated with lead exposure.
Valve request takes down Portal 64 due to concerns over Nintendo involvement
Enlarge / Valve took a look inside Portal 64, saw itself inside near something involving Nintendo, and decided to shut down the experiment. (credit: Valve/James Lambert)
Any great effort to generate appreciation for Nintendo's classic platforms, done outside Nintendo's blessing, has a markedly high chance of incurring Nintendo's wrath. This seems to apply even when Nintendo has not actually moved to block something, but merely seems like it might.
That's why, one week after announcing that his years-long "demake" of Valve's classic Portal to the Nintendo 64 platform had its "First Slice" ready for players, James Lambert has taken down Portal 64. There's no DMCA takedown letter or even a cease-and-desist from Nintendo. There is, as Lambert told PC Gamer, "communication with Valve" that "because the project depends on Nintendo's proprietary libraries, [Valve] have asked me to take the project down."
Ars contacted Valve and Nintendo for comment and will update the post with any new information. Lambert could not be reached for comment.
Android 15 might bring back lock screen widgets
Enlarge / Jelly Bean is back! (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
It sure looks like Android 15 is going to have lock screen widgets. The Android 14 QPR2 beta landed the other day, and Mishaal Rahman over at Android Authority found a hidden unfinished feature that brings back lock screen widgets. We've expected this to happen since Apple's big lock screen widget release with iOS 16.
Rahman found a new "communal" space feature that resembles lock screen widgets. After enabling the feature and swiping in from the right of the lock screen, a pencil icon will pop up. Tapping the icon opens up a widget list, allowing you to move some widgets to the lock screen. Right now, in this unfinished state, the default lock screen clock and notification panel UI don't know how to get out of the way yet, so you get a pile of widgets with the usual lock screen UI on top. It's a mess.
Lock screen widgets... sort of. It's early. (credit: Android Authority)
Any time one smartphone operating system does something, the other tends to copy it, and iOS added lock screen widgets in 2022. Two years later is plenty of time for Google to adjust and copy the feature. The thing is, Android added lock screen widgets in 2012 with Android 4.2. Google removed the feature two years later in Android 5.0, so really, this is Android copying iOS copying Android. Some of this code is apparently making a comeback, as all the widgets available to the lock screen were ones that still had the 10-year-old "keyguard" flag set for Android 4.2.
NASA scientist on 2023 temperatures: “We’re frankly astonished.”
Enlarge / Warming in 2023 was widespread. (credit: NOAA NCEI)
Earlier this week, the EU's Earth science team came out with its analysis of 2023's global temperatures, finding it was the warmest year on record to date. In an era of global warming, that's not especially surprising. What was unusual was the way 2023 set its record—every month from June on coming in far above any equivalent month in the past—and the size of the gap between 2023 and any previous year on record.
The Copernicus dataset used for that analysis isn't the only one of the sort, and on Friday, Berkeley Earth, NASA, and NOAA all released equivalent reports. And all of them largely agree with the EU's: 2023 was a record, and an unusual one at that. So unusual that NASA's chief climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt, introduced his look at 2023 by saying, "We're frankly astonished."
Despite the overlaps with the earlier analysis, each of the three new ones add some details that flesh out what made last year so unusual.
Compression Attached Memory Modules may make upgradable laptops a thing again
Enlarge / Samsung shared this rendering of a CAMM ahead of the publishing of the CAMM2 standard in September. (credit: Samsung)
Of all the PC-related things to come out of CES this year, my favorite wasn't Nvidia's graphics cards or AMD's newest Ryzens or Intel's iterative processor refreshes or any one of the oddball PC concept designs or anything to do with the mad dash to cram generative AI into everything.
No, of all things, the thing that I liked the most was this Crucial-branded memory module spotted by Tom's Hardware. If it looks a little strange to you, it's because it uses the Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM) standard—rather than being a standard stick of RAM that you insert into a slot on your motherboard, it lies flat against the board where metal contacts on the board and the CAMM module can make contact with one another.
CAMM memory has been on my radar for a while, since it first cropped up in a handful of Dell laptops. Mistakenly identified at the time as a proprietary type of RAM that would give Dell an excuse to charge more for it, Dell has been pushing for the standardization of CAMM modules for a couple of years now, and JEDEC (the organization that handles all current computer memory standards) formally finalized the spec last month.
Lucid delivered just 6,001 electric sedans in 2023
Enlarge / Lucid has dropped the Air's drag coefficient to just 0.197, making it the most aerodynamic car on sale. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)
When we saw our first Lucid Air prototype in 2017, we came away extremely impressed. This alpha build appeared far more realized than some prototypes, complete with functioning infotainment software as opposed to the pre-rendered demos that are often more common in such cases. But the startup automaker has had anything but an easy time since then. Yesterday, it announced its Q4 2023 deliveries ahead of an investor call in late February, and the numbers are bad.
Lucid originally planned to launch the Air sedan in 2019. Designed by Tesla's former VP and Chief Vehicle Engineer Peter Rawlinson, together with designer Derek Jenkins, the Air aimed for Mercedes-Benz S-Class levels of space and luxury on the interior but with the footprint of the smaller Mercedes E-Class. Under its ultra-low-drag body was a highly advanced electric vehicle powertrain capable of extremely rapid acceleration, a high top speed, and class-leading range.
But starting a new car company is neither easy nor cheap. Lucid struggled to obtain funding until Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund invested a billion dollars in the company in 2018, allowing Lucid to complete work on its factory in Arizona and push on with developing the Air.
Apple AirDrop leaks user data like a sieve. Chinese authorities say they’re scooping it up.
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
Chinese authorities recently said they're using an advanced encryption attack to de-anonymize users of AirDrop in an effort to crack down on citizens who use the Apple file-sharing feature to mass-distribute content that's illegal in that country.
According to a 2022 report from The New York Times, activists have used AirDrop to distribute scathing critiques of the Chinese Communist Party to nearby iPhone users in subway trains and stations and other public venues. A document one protester sent in October of that year called General Secretary Xi Jinping a “despotic traitor.” A few months later, with the release of iOS 16.1.1, the AirDrop users in China found that the "everyone" configuration, the setting that makes files available to all other users nearby, automatically reset to the more contacts-only setting. Apple has yet to acknowledge the move. Critics continue to see it as a concession Apple CEO Tim Cook made to Chinese authorities.
The rainbow connectionOn Monday, eight months after the half-measure was put in place, officials with the local government in Beijing said some people have continued mass-sending illegal content. As a result, the officials said, they were now using an advanced technique publicly disclosed in 2021 to fight back.
eBay hit with $3M fine, admits to “terrorizing innocent people”
Enlarge (credit: picture alliance / Contributor | picture alliance)
eBay has agreed to pay $3 million—the maximum criminal penalty possible—after employees harassed, intimidated, and stalked a Massachusetts couple in retaliation for their critical reporting of the online marketplace in 2019.
“Today’s settlement holds eBay criminally and financially responsible for emotionally, psychologically, and physically terrorizing the publishers of an online newsletter out of fear that bad publicity would adversely impact their Fortune 500 company," Jodi Cohen, the special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Boston Division, said in a Justice Department press release Thursday.
eBay's harassment campaign against the couple, David and Ina Steiner, stretched for 18 days in August 2019 and was led by the company's former senior director of safety and security, Jim Baugh. It started when then-CEO Devin Wenig and then-chief communications officer Steven Wymer decided to "take down" the Steiners after growing frustrated with their coverage of eBay in a newsletter called EcommerceBytes.
I parked a BMW from across the parking lot at CES 2024
Enlarge / Until now, remote parking systems have mostly required the parking lot or garage to fit expensive sensors and equipment. BMW's approach is different, requiring nothing that isn't already on the car. (credit: Tim Stevens)
If I had a dollar for every automated self-parking demo I've seen over the years, many of which happened at CES, I'd probably have enough money to tip a Las Vegas valet, folks whose jobs are still very secure.
But that might actually be changing soon. Given all those earlier demos that went nowhere, I wasn't particularly enthused when I heard that BMW and Valeo were demonstrating yet another implementation of a car parking itself for the 2024 CES in Las Vegas.
However, after a quick chat with the folks behind the technology and getting a chance to try it myself, I realized I was wrong. Remote Valet is impressive not only for what it can do but because it does it without any technology more advanced than what's already found in today's production cars.
Child abusers are covering their tracks with better use of crypto
Enlarge (credit: Naufal MQ via Getty Images)
For those who trade in child sexual exploitation images and videos in the darkest recesses of the Internet, cryptocurrency has been both a powerful tool and a treacherous one. Bitcoin, for instance, has allowed denizens of that criminal underground to buy and sell their wares with no involvement from a bank or payment processor that might reveal their activities to law enforcement. But the public and surprisingly traceable transactions recorded in Bitcoin's blockchain have sometimes led financial investigators directly to pedophiles’ doorsteps.
Now, after years of evolution in that grim cat-and-mouse game, new evidence suggests that online vendors of what was once commonly called “child porn” are learning to use cryptocurrency with significantly more skill and stealth—and that it's helping them survive longer in the Internet's most abusive industry.
Rocket Report: A Chinese launch you must see; Vulcan’s stunning debut
Enlarge / Vulcan launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Monday. (credit: United Launch Alliance)
Welcome to Edition 6.26 of the Rocket Report! We're just 11 days into the new year, and we've already had two stunning rocket debuts. Vulcan soared into space on Monday morning, and then a medium-lift rocket from China, Gravity-1, made a picture-perfect launch from a mobile pad in the Yellow Sea. It feels like this could be a great year for lift.
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.
Vega C return-to-flight mission gets a date. The European Space Agency said it is targeting November 15 for the return to flight of the grounded Avio-built Vega C launch vehicle, European Spaceflight reports. I'll be honest. I had to double-check the calendar to make sure that it is in fact January, because that's an oddly specific date for a launch 10 months from now. But it appears there is some, ahem, flexibility in that date. ESA director of space transportation Toni Tolker-Nielsen says: “The nominal date is 15 November. There is a very detailed plan that is leading to this.”
Those Games turns crappy mobile game ads into actually good puzzles
Enlarge / Can you master the ornate physics and inscrutable game theory necessary to overcome this challenge? (credit: D3Publisher)
You've seen them. If you've tried to read almost anything on the Internet, especially on a social media site, you know these mobile game advertisements.
"Many failed before! Think you can do better?" one reads, positioned over an auto-playing video of a simple puzzle played by an unseen, incredibly stupid hand. It pulls the wrong pin, melting the gold and drowning the king. Or it can't do elementary math, so it sends a "10" fighter to its death against a "13" creature, ignoring the "8" it could have picked to add up to 18. Sometimes, there are colored liquids in tubes to be poured, and they are selected with an almost elegant idiocy.
They're infuriating, but you know they work, because these ads keep showing up. If you actually downloaded these games, you'd discover they were stuffed with pop-up ads, relentlessly barking micro-transactions, or they're some unrelated and cynically monetized game entirely. What if you could actually play the original bait games, for a reasonable one-time fee, crafted by a developer who was in on the joke?
Report: Deepfake porn consistently found atop Google, Bing search results
Enlarge (credit: GeorgePeters | iStock / Getty Images Plus)
Popular search engines like Google and Bing are making it easy to surface nonconsensual deepfake pornography by placing it at the top of search results, NBC News reported Thursday.
These controversial deepfakes superimpose faces of real women, often celebrities, onto the bodies of adult entertainers to make them appear to be engaging in real sex. Thanks in part to advances in generative AI, there is now a burgeoning black market for deepfake porn that could be discovered through a Google search, NBC News previously reported.
NBC News uncovered the problem by turning off safe search, then combining the names of 36 female celebrities with obvious search terms like "deepfakes," "deepfake porn," and "fake nudes." Bing generated links to deepfake videos in top results 35 times, while Google did so 34 times. Bing also surfaced "fake nude photos of former teen Disney Channel female actors" using images where actors appear to be underaged.
Astronomers found ultra-hot, Earth-sized exoplanet with a lava hemisphere
Enlarge / Like Kepler-10 b, illustrated above, newly discovered exoplanet HD 63433 d is a small, rocky planet in a tight orbit of its star. (credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)
Astronomers have discovered an unusual Earth-sized exoplanet they believe has a hemisphere of molten lava, with its other hemisphere tidally locked in perpetual darkness. Co-authors and study leaders Benjamin Capistrant (University of Florida) and Melinda Soares-Furtado (University of Wisconsin-Madison) presented the details yesterday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans. An associated paper has just been published in The Astronomical Journal. Another paper published today in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics by a different group described the discovery of a rare small, cold exoplanet with a massive outer companion 100 times the mass of Jupiter.
As previously reported, thanks to the massive trove of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler mission, we now have a good idea of what kinds of planets are out there, where they orbit, and how common the different types are. What we lack is a good sense of what that implies in terms of the conditions on the planets themselves. Kepler can tell us how big a planet is, but it doesn't know what the planet is made of. And planets in the "habitable zone" around stars could be consistent with anything from a blazing hell to a frozen rock.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched with the intention of helping us figure out what exoplanets are actually like. TESS is designed to identify planets orbiting bright stars relatively close to Earth, conditions that should allow follow-up observations to figure out their compositions and potentially those of their atmospheres.