Ars Technica
Here’s why a rich guy going to space for a second time actually matters
Enlarge / The crew of Polaris Dawn from L to R: Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, Jared Isaacman, and Sarah Gillis. (credit: John Kraus/Polaris Program)
Over the weekend the crew of the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission shared a wealth of details about the intriguing private mission that will send humans farther than they have flown from Earth in half a century.
Commanded and funded by private astronaut Jared Isaacman, the mission seeks to test new technologies that will further the expansion of humanity into space. Among the objectives are pushing the performance of the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, performing the first commercial spacewalk in a new spacesuit developed by SpaceX, and testing Starlink laser-based communications in space.
"Our first objective is to travel farther from the Earth and the last time humans walked on the Moon with Apollo 17, more than 50 years ago," Isaacman said during an online chat hosted by the social network site X. "So we target an apogee of 1,400 kilometers. That puts us just inside the Van Allen radiation belt. It's an awesome opportunity for us to get some data, but really it's about pushing beyond our comfort zone."
Faulty valve scuttles Starliner’s first crew launch
Enlarge / The Atlas V rocket and Starliner spacecraft on their launch pad Monday. (credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams climbed into their seats inside Boeing's Starliner spacecraft Monday night in Florida, but trouble with the capsule's Atlas V rocket kept the commercial ship's long-delayed crew test flight on the ground.
Around two hours before launch time, shortly after 8:30 pm EDT (00:30 UTC), United Launch Alliance's launch team stopped the countdown. "The engineering team has evaluated, the vehicle is not in a configuration where we can proceed with flight today," said Doug Lebo, ULA's launch conductor.
The culprit was a misbehaving valve on the rocket's Centaur upper stage, which has two RL10 engines fed by super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants.
Hackers discover how to reprogram NES Tetris from within the game
Enlarge / I can see the code that controls the Tetri-verse! (credit: Aurich Lawson)
Earlier this year, we shared the story of how a classic NES Tetris player hit the game's "kill screen" for the first time, activating a crash after an incredible 40-minute, 1,511-line performance. Now, some players are using that kill screen—and some complicated memory manipulation it enables—to code new behaviors into versions of Tetris running on unmodified hardware and cartridges.
We've covered similar "arbitrary code execution" glitches in games like Super Mario World, Paper Mario, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in the past. And the basic method for introducing outside code into NES Tetris has been publicly theorized since at least 2021 when players were investigating the game's decompiled code (HydrantDude, who has gone deep on Tetris crashes in the past, also says the community has long had a privately known method for how to take full control of Tetris' RAM).
Displaced Gamers explains how to reprogram NES Tetris within the game.
But a recent video from Displaced Gamers takes the idea from private theory to public execution, going into painstaking detail on how to get NES Tetris to start reading the game's high score tables as machine code instructions.
Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Researchers have devised an attack against nearly all virtual private network applications that forces them to send and receive some or all traffic outside of the encrypted tunnel designed to protect it from snooping or tampering.
TunnelVision, as the researchers have named their attack, largely negates the entire purpose and selling point of VPNs, which is to encapsulate incoming and outgoing Internet traffic in an encrypted tunnel and to cloak the user’s IP address. The researchers believe it affects all VPN applications when they’re connected to a hostile network and that there are no ways to prevent such attacks except when the user VPN runs on Linux or Android. They also said their attack technique may have been possible since 2002 and may already have been discovered and used in the wild since then.
Reading, dropping, or modifying VPN trafficThe effect of TunnelVision is “the victim's traffic is now decloaked and being routed through the attacker directly,” a video demonstration explained. “The attacker can read, drop or modify the leaked traffic and the victim maintains their connection to both the VPN and the Internet.”
Google Fit APIs get shut down in 2025, might break fitness devices
Enlarge / Google Fit seems like it's on the way out. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Google)
Google is killing off the Google Fit APIs. The platform originally existed to sync health data from third-party fitness devices to your Google account, but now it's being killed off. Deprecation of the APIs happened on May 1, and Google has stopped accepting new sign-ups for the API. The official shutdown date is June 30, 2025.
The Google Fit API was launched in 2014, just a few weeks after Apple announced Healthkit in iOS 8. The goal of both platforms is to be a central repository for health data from various apps and services. Instead of seeing steps in one app and weight in another, it could all be mushed together into a one-stop-shop for health metrics. Google had a lot of big-name partners at launch, like Nike+, Adidas, Withings, Asus, HTC, Intel, LG, and app makers like Runtastic and RunKeeper.
Fast-forward to 2024, and we get the familiar story of Google being unable to throw its weight behind a single solution. Today, Google has three competing fitness APIs. There is a "Comparison Guide" on the Android Developer site detailing the differences between the "Health Connect" API, the "Fitbit Web API" and the "Google Fit REST API."
New Microsoft AI model may challenge GPT-4 and Google Gemini
Enlarge / Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Inflection AI UK Ltd., during a town hall on day two of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024. Suleyman joined Microsoft in March. (credit: Getty Images)
Microsoft is working on a new large-scale AI language model called MAI-1, which could potentially rival state-of-the-art models from Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI, according to a report by The Information. This marks the first time Microsoft has developed an in-house AI model of this magnitude since investing over $10 billion in OpenAI for the rights to reuse the startup's AI models. OpenAI's GPT-4 powers not only ChatGPT but also Microsoft Copilot.
The development of MAI-1 is being led by Mustafa Suleyman, the former Google AI leader who recently served as CEO of the AI startup Inflection before Microsoft acquired the majority of the startup's staff and intellectual property for $650 million in March. Although MAI-1 may build on techniques brought over by former Inflection staff, it is reportedly an entirely new large language model (LLM), as confirmed by two Microsoft employees familiar with the project.
With approximately 500 billion parameters, MAI-1 will be significantly larger than Microsoft's previous open source models (such as Phi-3, which we covered last month), requiring more computing power and training data. This reportedly places MAI-1 in a similar league as OpenAI's GPT-4, which is rumored to have over 1 trillion parameters (in a mixture-of-experts configuration) and well above smaller models like Meta and Mistral's 70 billion parameter models.
SpaceX got the fanfare, but Boeing’s first crew flight is still historic
Enlarge / Astronauts Suni Williams (left) and Butch Wilmore (right) inside a Starliner simulator at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. (credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz)
If you want to know what it's like to take a new spacecraft on its first test run in orbit, there are only three people in the Western world you can call.
That fact should drive home the rarity of debuting a new human-rated spaceship. When Boeing's Starliner capsule lifts off Monday night, this group of three will grow to five. Veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, both former US Navy test pilots, will be at the controls of Starliner for the ride into low-Earth orbit atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.
"The first crewed flight of a new spacecraft is an absolutely critical milestone," said Jim Free, NASA's associate administrator. "The lives of our crew members, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, are at stake. We don’t take that lightly at all."
Telcos keep using “insecure” Chinese gear because of congressional inaction
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )
The US government has pressured telcos to rip out network gear made by Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE but has allocated only about 38 percent of the money needed to replace equipment with non-Chinese hardware, the Federal Communications Commission said.
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel wrote to Congress Thursday, urging lawmakers to fully fund the program. Congress allocated $1.9 billion for replacements of Chinese gear that must be removed as early as this month, but the needed reimbursements add up to nearly $5 billion, Rosenworcel wrote.
"I am writing... to emphasize again the urgent need for full funding of the Reimbursement Program," she wrote. Rural mobile carriers could have to withdraw from the reimbursement program or even shut down networks if the funding shortfall isn't closed, the letter said.
SEC crypto crackdown continues with Robinhood as lawsuit looms
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
Continuing its crackdown on cryptocurrency exchanges, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may potentially sue Robinhood Markets over securities violations alleged in the popular investing app's crypto unit, Robinhood Crypto said Monday.
In a recent SEC filing, Robinhood Markets Chief Financial Officer Jason Warnick confirmed that Robinhood Crypto has received investigative subpoenas from the SEC regarding its "cryptocurrency listings, custody of cryptocurrencies, and platform operations."
Despite Robinhood cooperating with these investigations, the SEC sent a "Wells Notice" on Monday, the filing said. The notice alerted Robinhood that SEC staff had made a "preliminary determination" recommending that the SEC "file an enforcement action" alleging that Robinhood Crypto had violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
Tesla announces fourth round of layoffs in four weeks
Enlarge (credit: Karol Serewis/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
On Sunday night, even more Tesla workers learned they were no longer employed by the company as it engaged in yet another round of layoffs. Multiple former employees posted on LinkedIn and other sites to relay the news that they were no longer with the company.
"Well, tonight I have learned that my nearly 8 year journey leading and designing Service products at Tesla has come to an end," wrote one former employee.
"For the past Month, most Tesla Employees have had the ritual of keeping a close eye on one's personal email on Sundays and to check it before heading into work on Monday, as layoffs have been increasing. I was spared last October when we had layoffs and also for the last 3 weeks of layoffs. However, I too received the dreaded 'Tesla Employment Update' email today," wrote another.
Pokémon Go players are altering public map data to catch rare Pokémon
Enlarge / Rather than going to beaches to catch Wigletts, some Pokémon Go players are trying to bring the beaches to themselves. (credit: Niantic)
Ah, Pokémon Go. The hottest mobile game of 2016 remains a potent force to this day, pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from tens of millions of monthly active players.
Part of what keeps the game fresh is a continuous trickle of new Pokémon. The game began with just the original 151 monsters back in 2016 and has gradually caught up to the current generation of Switch games in bits and pieces over the last eight years. The game is currently in the process of adding monsters from Scarlet and Violet, and that's where this story begins.
Two of the latest additions to the Pokémon Go roster are Wiglett and Wugtrio, riffs on the designs of Diglett and Dugtrio, who live on beaches and look kind of like garden eels. Pokémon Go uses a biome system that restricts certain Pokémon to certain types of real-world terrain, like forests, mountains, and beaches. As aquatic Pokémon, Wiglett and Wugtrio show up in the beach biome.
Sony backs down, won’t enforce PSN accounts for Helldivers 2 PC players on Steam
Enlarge / Aiming a single rifle sight into an earth-moving explosion feels like some kind of metaphor for the Helldivers 2 delayed PSN requirement saga. (credit: PlayStation/Arrowhead)
Helldivers 2 PC players can continue doing their part for Super Earth, sans Sony logins.
Sony's plan for its surprise hit co-op squad shooter—now the most successful launch in Sony's nascent PC catalog—Helldivers 2, was to make its players sign in with PlayStation Network (PSN) accounts before it launched in early February, even if they purchased the game through the Steam store.
Sony and developer Arrowhead didn't enforce PSN logins during its frenetic launch and then announced late last week that PSN accounts would soon be mandatory. Many players did not like that at all, seeing in it a sudden desire by Sony to capitalize on its unexpected smash hit. Some were not eager to engage with a network that had a notable hack in its history, others were concerned about countries where PSN was not offered, and many didn't take Sony at its word that this was about griefing, banning, and other moderation.
Doctor Who’s sparkling new season feels like a fresh return to form
Enlarge / Ncuti Gatwa is the Fifteenth Doctor, and Millie Gibson is his new companion, Ruby Sunday, in new season of Doctor Who. (credit: Disney+)
A new season of Doctor Who is almost upon us, featuring Ncuti Gatwa's first full run as the 15th Doctor, with a shiny new companion. It's also the first time Doctor Who will stream on Disney+, after the platform acquired the international broadcasting rights. That could translate into a whole new generation of fans for this beloved British sci-fi series.
(Spoilers for "The Power of the Doctor," "The Giggle," and "The Church on Ruby Road" below.)
Here's a brief summation for the benefit of those who may not have kept up with the more recent seasons. Russell T. Davies—who revived the series in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor—has returned as showrunner. Davies lost no time introducing a few new twists. When it came time for Jodie Whittaker's Thirteenth Doctor to regenerate, fans had expected Gatwa to be introduced. Instead, the new Fourteenth Doctor was played by former Tenth Doctor David Tennant, reuniting with former companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) for three specials.
The surprise is not that Boeing lost commercial crew but that it finished at all
Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is lifted to be placed atop an Atlas V rocket for its first crewed launch. (credit: United Launch Alliance)
NASA's senior leaders in human spaceflight gathered for a momentous meeting at the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC, almost exactly ten years ago.
These were the people who, for decades, had developed and flown the Space Shuttle. They oversaw the construction of the International Space Station. Now, with the shuttle's retirement, these princely figures in the human spaceflight community were tasked with selecting a replacement vehicle to send astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.
Boeing was the easy favorite. The majority of engineers and other participants in the meeting argued that Boeing alone should win a contract worth billions of dollars to develop a crew capsule. Only toward the end did a few voices speak up in favor of a second contender, SpaceX. At the meeting's conclusion, NASA's chief of human spaceflight at the time, William Gerstenmaier, decided to hold off on making a final decision.
Here are all the F1 cars designed by the legendary Adrian Newey
Enlarge / When you're a legendary F1 designer like Adrian Newey, it's easy to persuade the team to let you have a go in one of your own creations. (credit: Andrew Hone/Getty Images for Red Bull)
In Formula 1, the car isn't quite everything, but ultimately, how well the team's designers did their job creating a racing car is a more important factor in a team's success on track than how good their drivers are. It's not that F1 drivers don't matter, but even the best driver on the grid will struggle to earn points if they're not in a competitive car.
One designer has been responsible for creating competitive cars more than any other, penning 12 championship-winning cars in 32 years. His name is Adrian Newey, and this week, we discovered he's looking for a new job.
As in other sports, F1's "silly season" is what they call that time period when contracts are up and people are switching to new teams; it's named as such because it's what happens when there's no real news to report but you need a story anyway.
The Boys S4 trailer brings us more bloody mayhem and “Homelander on Ice”
The long-awaited fourth season of the Prime Video series, The Boys, premieres on June 13, 2024
Last summer's Hollywood strikes delayed a number of releases, among them the fourth season of Prime Video's The Boys. We're longtime fans of this incredibly violent, darkly funny anti-homage to superheroes, and thus are thrilled to see there's finally an official trailer for S4. It's filled with the bloody mayhem we've come to expect from the show, as well as a tantalizing glimpse of the chief villain, Homelander (Antony Starr), performing in what appears to be an ice skating extravaganza.
(Spoilers for prior seasons below, especially S3.)
As I've written previously, the show is based on the comic book series of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. The Boys is set in a fictional universe where superheroes are real but are corrupted by corporate interests and a toxic celebrity-obsessed culture. The most elite superhero group is called the Seven, operated by the Vought Corporation, which created the supes with a substance called Compound V. The Seven is headed up by Homelander, a violent and unstable psychopath disguised as the All-American hero. Homelander's counterpart as the head of the titular "Boys" is Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), a self-appointed vigilante intent on checking the bad behavior of the Seven—especially Homelander, who brutally raped Butcher's wife, Becca (Shantel VanSanten), unknowingly fathering a son, Ryan, in the process..
It’s Star Wars Day and we have a new trailer for The Acolyte to celebrate
"No one is safe from the truth" in new trailer for The Acolyte.
It's Star Wars Day, and to mark the occasion, Disney+ has dropped a new trailer for Star Wars: The Acolyte. As previously reported, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Galactic Republic and its Jedi masters symbolized the epitome of enlightenment and peace. Then came the inevitable downfall and outbreak of war as the Sith, who embraced the Dark Side of the Force, came to power. Star Wars: The Acolyte will explore those final days of the Republic as the seeds of its destruction were sown.
The eight-episode series was created by Leslye Headland. It's set at the end of the High Republic Era, about a century before the events of The Phantom Menace. Apparently Headland rather cheekily pitched The Acolyte as "Frozen meets Kill Bill." She drew on wuxia martial arts films for inspiration, much like George Lucas was originally inspired by Westerns and the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. Per the official premise:
In Star Wars: The Acolyte, an investigation into a shocking crime spree pits a respected Jedi Master (Lee Jung-jae) against a dangerous warrior from his past (Amandla Stenberg). As more clues emerge, they travel down a dark path where sinister forces reveal all is not what it seems…
In addition to Lee (best known from Squid Game) and Stenberg (Rue in The Hunger Games), the cast includes Manny Jacinto (Jason on The Good Place) as a former smuggler named Qimir; Dafne Keen (Logan, His Dark Materials) as a young Jedi named Jecki Lon; Carrie-Ann Moss (Trinity in The Matrix trilogy) as a Jedi master named Indara; Jodie Turner-Smith (After Yang) as Mother Aniseya, who leads a coven of witches; Rebecca Henderson (Russian Doll) as a Jedi knight named Vernestra Rwoh; and Charlie Bennet (Russian Doll) as a Jedi named Yord Fandar.
In addition, Abigail Thorn plays Ensign Eurus, while Joonas Suotamo plays a Wookiee Jedi master named Kelnacca. Suotamo portrayed Chewbacca in the sequel trilogy of films (Episodes VII-IX) and in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Also appearing in as-yet-undisclosed roles are Dean-Charles Chapman, Amy Tsang, and Margarita Levieva.
The first trailer dropped in March, in which we saw young padawans in training; Indara battling a mysterious masked figure; learned that somebody is out there killing Jedi; and were told that there is a growing sense of darkness. This latest trailer reinforces those themes. The assassin, Mae (Stenberg), once trained with Master Sol (Lee), and he thinks he should be the one to bring her in—although Master Vernestra correctly suspects Mae's killings are a small part a larger plan, i.e, the eventual return of the Sith.
These dangerous scammers don’t even bother to hide their crimes
Enlarge (credit: Kuzmik_A/Getty Images)
Most scammers and cybercriminals operate in the digital shadows and don’t want you to know how they make money. But that’s not the case for the Yahoo Boys, a loose collective of young men in West Africa who are some of the web’s most prolific—and increasingly dangerous—scammers.
Thousands of people are members of dozens of Yahoo Boy groups operating across Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram, a WIRED analysis has found. The scammers, who deal in types of fraud that total hundreds of millions of dollars each year, also have dozens of accounts on TikTok, YouTube, and the document-sharing service Scribd that are getting thousands of views.
Glow of an exoplanet may be from starlight reflecting off liquid iron
Enlarge / Artist impression of a glory on exoplanet WASP-76b. (credit: ESA)
Do rainbows exist on distant worlds? Many phenomena that happen on Earth—such as rain, hurricanes, and auroras—also occur on other planets in our Solar System if the conditions are right. Now we have evidence from outside our Solar System that one particularly strange exoplanet might even be displaying something close to a rainbow.
Appearing in the sky as a halo of colors, a phenomenon called a "glory" occurs when light hits clouds made up of a homogeneous substance in the form of spherical droplets. It might be the explanation for a mystery regarding observations of exoplanet WASP-76B. This planet, a scorching gas giant that experiences molten iron rain, has also been observed to have more light on its eastern terminator (a line used to separate the day side from the night side) than its western terminator. Why was there more light on one side of the planet?
After observing it with the CHEOPS space telescope, then combining that with previous observations from Hubble, Spitzer, and TESS, a team of researchers from ESA and the University of Bern in Switzerland now think that the most likely reason for the extra light is a glory.
Microsoft plans to lock down Windows DNS like never before. Here’s how.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Translating human-readable domain names into numerical IP addresses has long been fraught with gaping security risks. After all, lookups are rarely end-to-end encrypted. The servers providing domain name lookups provide translations for virtually any IP address—even when they’re known to be malicious. And many end-user devices can easily be configured to stop using authorized lookup servers and instead use malicious ones.
Microsoft on Friday provided a peek at a comprehensive framework that aims to sort out the Domain Name System (DNS) mess so that it’s better locked down inside Windows networks. It’s called ZTDNS (zero trust DNS). Its two main features are (1) encrypted and cryptographically authenticated connections between end-user clients and DNS servers and (2) the ability for administrators to tightly restrict the domains these servers will resolve.
Clearing the minefieldOne of the reasons DNS has been such a security minefield is that these two features can be mutually exclusive. Adding cryptographic authentication and encryption to DNS often obscures the visibility admins need to prevent user devices from connecting to malicious domains or detect anomalous behavior inside a network. As a result, DNS traffic is either sent in clear text or it's encrypted in a way that allows admins to decrypt it in transit through what is essentially an adversary-in-the-middle attack.