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Tag: ars technica

  • US Government Awards Moderna $176 Million for mRNA Bird Flu Vaccine

    US Government Awards Moderna $176 Million for mRNA Bird Flu Vaccine

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    The US government will pay Moderna $176 million to develop an mRNA vaccine against a pandemic influenza—an award given as the highly pathogenic bird flu virus H5N1 continues to spread widely among US dairy cattle.

    The funding flows through BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, as part of a new Rapid Response Partnership Vehicle (RRPV) Consortium. The program is intended to set up partnerships with industry to help the country better prepare for pandemic threats and develop medical countermeasures, the Department of Health and Human Services said in a press announcement Tuesday.

    In its own announcement on Tuesday, Moderna noted that it began a Phase 1/2 trial of a pandemic influenza virus vaccine last year, which included versions targeting H5 and H7 varieties of bird flu viruses. The company said it expects to release the results of that trial this year and that those results will direct the design of a Phase 3 trial, anticipated to begin in 2025.

    The funding deal will support late-stage development of a “prepandemic vaccine against H5 influenza virus,” Moderna said. But the deal also includes options for additional vaccine development in case other public health threats arise.

    “mRNA vaccine technology offers advantages in efficacy, speed of development, and production scalability and reliability in addressing infectious disease outbreaks, as demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in the announcement. “We are pleased to continue our collaboration with BARDA to expedite our development efforts for mRNA-based pandemic influenza vaccines and support the global public health community in preparedness against potential outbreaks.”

    US health officials have said previously that they were in talks with Moderna and Pfizer about the development of a pandemic bird flu vaccine. The future vaccine will be in addition to standard protein-based bird flu vaccines that are already developed. In recent weeks, the health department has said it is working to manufacture 4.8 million vials of H5 influenza vaccine in the coming months. The plans come three months into the H5N1 dairy outbreak, which is very far from the initial hopes of containment.

    Botched Response

    The US is badly fumbling its response to the unprecedented outbreak, drawing criticism from US-based and international experts alike. Genetic analyses suggest that the virus has been spreading among the country’s dairy cattle since late last year. But it wasn’t until months later, on March 25, that the US Department of Agriculture confirmed the first four infected herds in two states (Texas and Kansas). Since then, the outbreak has spread to around 140 herds in 12 states—at least.

    Some farms are refusing to test, and experts expect that there is a significant number of undocumented herd infections, particularly given the widespread detection of inactivated H5N1 in the commercial milk supply. Furthermore, of the 140 herds with documented infections, federal officials do not know how many are still actively infected rather than recovered. It is unclear whether infected cows can become reinfected, and if so, how quickly after an infection.

    While the risk to the general public is considered to be low currently, farm workers are at higher risk of contracting the infection. To date, there have been three confirmed infections among dairy farm workers—one in Texas and two in Michigan, which has had a uniquely robust response to the outbreak. Still, with hundreds to thousands of farm workers at risk of contracting the virus, only 53 people in the country to date have been tested for H5 influenza.

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    Beth Mole, Ars Technica

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  • Each of the Past 12 Months Broke Temperature Records

    Each of the Past 12 Months Broke Temperature Records

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    June 2023 did not seem like an exceptional month at the time. It was the warmest June in the instrumental temperature record, but monthly records haven’t exactly been unusual in a period where the top 10 warmest years on record all occurred in the past 15 years. And monthly records have often occurred in years that are otherwise unexceptional; at the time, the warmest July on record had occurred in 2019, a year that doesn’t stand out much from the rest of the past decade.

    But July 2023 set another monthly record, easily eclipsing 2019’s high temperatures. Then August set yet another monthly record. And so has every single month since—a string of records that propelled 2023 to being the warmest year since tracking started.

    On Wednesday, the European Union’s Earth-monitoring service, Copernicus, announced that it has now been a full year where every month has been the warmest version of that month since there’s been enough instruments in place to track global temperatures.

    The history of monthly temperatures shows just how extreme the temperatures have been over the past year.Courtesy of C3S/ECMWF

    As you can see from this graph, most years feature a mix of temperatures—some higher than average, some lower. Exceptionally high months tend to cluster, but those clusters also tend to be shorter than a full year.

    In the Copernicus data, a similar yearlong streak of records happened once before, in 2015/2016. NASA, which uses slightly different data and methods, doesn’t show a similar streak in that earlier period. NASA hasn’t released its results for May’s temperatures yet—they’re expected in the next few days—but it’s very likely that the results will also show a yearlong streak of records.

    Beyond records, the EU is highlighting the fact that the one-year period ending in May was 1.63 degrees Celsius above the average temperatures of the 1850–1900 period, which is used as a baseline for preindustrial temperatures. That’s notable because many countries have ostensibly pledged to try to keep temperatures from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial conditions by the end of the century. While it’s likely that temperatures will drop below the target again at some point within the next few years, the new records suggest that we have a very limited amount of time before temperatures persistently exceed it.

    Increasing line graph labeled Global surface temperature increase above preindustrial

    For the first time on record, temperatures have held steadily in excess of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average.Courtesy of C3S/ECMWF

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    Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica

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  • Oral-B Sold a $230 Alexa Toothbrush—and Then Pulled the Plug

    Oral-B Sold a $230 Alexa Toothbrush—and Then Pulled the Plug

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    As we’re currently seeing with AI, when a new technology becomes buzzy, companies will do almost anything to cram that tech into their products. Trends fade, however, and corporate priorities shift—resulting in bricked gadgets and buyer’s remorse.

    That’s what’s happening to some who bought Oral-B toothbrushes with Amazon Alexa built in. Oral-B released the Guide for $230 in August 2020 but bricked the ability to set up or reconfigure Alexa on the product this February. As of this writing, the Guide is still available through a third-party Amazon seller.

    The Guide toothbrush’s charging base was able to connect to the internet and work like an Alexa speaker that you could speak to and from which Alexa could respond. Owners could “ask to play music, hear the news, check weather, control smart home devices, and even order more brush heads by saying ‘Alexa, order Oral-B brush head replacements,’” per Procter & Gamble’s 2020 announcement.

    Oral-B also bragged at the time that, in partnering with Alexa, the Guide ushered in “the truly connected bathroom.”

    Oral-B Discontinued App for Setting Up Alexa

    On February 15, Oral-B bricked the Guide’s ability to set up Alexa by discontinuing the Oral-B Connect app required to complete the process. Guide owners can still use the Oral-B App for other features; however, the ability to use the charging base like an Alexa smart speaker—a big draw in the product’s announcement and advertising—is seriously limited.

    The device should still work with Alexa if users set it up before Oral-B shuttered Connect, but setting up a new Wi-Fi connection or reestablishing a lost one doesn’t work without Connect.

    That’s a problem for Patrick Hubley, who learned that Oral-B discontinued Connect when his base inadvertently disconnected from the Wi-Fi and he tried using Connect to fix it. He told Ars Technica that when he tries using the Alexa wake word now, the speaker says, “I’m having trouble connecting to the internet. For help, go to your device’s companion app.”

    Hubley attempted but failed to get a refund or replacement brush through Oral-B’s support avenues. He says he will no longer buy Oral-B or Alexa products.

    I only purchased this toothbrush from Amazon because that was the only way to get the water-resistant Alexa speaker that I wanted for the bathroom … I’m ready to be done with Alexa and Oral-B both.

    Connect no longer works on devices on which it’s already installed. A few users have also stated on Amazon that they can no longer set Guide up to use Alexa. However, the Guide is still available on Amazon as of this writing, with images of its box saying “Alexa built-in” and the product’s title reading “Alexa Built-In” and “Amazon Dash Replenishment Enabled.” The listing is from a third-party seller, but since Oral-B released the Guide exclusively through Amazon, shoppers could easily not realize that Alexa setup is borked.

    I reached out to Amazon about this, and spokesperson Connor Rice told me:

    The Oral-B Guide still has Alexa built-in and customers can keep using the Alexa experience on devices that were set up through the Oral-B Connect app. The Oral-B Guide is currently sold by an independent seller on Amazon.com. Please contact Oral-B for any further questions about their app.

    Oral-B’s Response

    Oral-B discontinued the Guide about two years ago and now only has one mobile app, called Oral-B. If a toothbrush brand is going to have any apps at all, one seems like the maximum reasonable number. It’s unclear why Alexa capabilities weren’t integrated into the still-standing Oral-B app.

    When I reached out to Procter & Gamble, a company spokesperson said:

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    Scharon Harding, Ars Technica

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  • How a Samsung Washing Machine Chime Triggered a YouTube Copyright Fiasco

    How a Samsung Washing Machine Chime Triggered a YouTube Copyright Fiasco

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    To address this, YouTube did not expedite the dispute process, which still allows up to 30 days for rights holders to respond. Instead, it expedited the appeals process, which happens after a rights holder rejects a disputed claim and arguably is the moment when the YouTuber’s account is most in danger of being terminated.

    “Now, the claimant will have 7 days instead of 30 to review the appeal before deciding whether to request a takedown of the video, release the claim, or let it expire,” YouTube wrote in 2022. “We hope shortening the timespan of the appeals process helps you get claims resolved much faster!”

    This update would only help YouTubers intent on disputing claims, like Albino was, but not the majority of YouTubers, whom the EFF reported were seemingly so intimidated by disputing Content ID claims that they more commonly just accepted “whatever punishment the system has levied against them.” The EFF summarized the predicament that many YouTubers remain stuck in today:

    There is a terrible, circular logic that traps creators on YouTube. They cannot afford to dispute Content ID matches because that could lead to DMCA notices. They cannot afford DMCA notices because those lead to copyright strikes. They cannot afford copyright strikes because that could lead to a loss of their account. They cannot afford to lose their account because they cannot afford to lose access to YouTube’s giant audience. And they cannot afford to lose access to that audience because they cannot count on making money from YouTube’s ads alone, partially because Content ID often diverts advertising money to rights holders when there is Content ID match. Which they cannot afford to dispute.

    For Albino, who said he has fought back against many Content ID claims, the Samsung washing machine chime triggering demonetization seemed to be the final straw, breaking his patience with YouTube’s dispute process.

    “It’s completely out of hand,” Albino wrote on X.

    Katharine Trendacosta, a YouTube researcher and the EFF’s director of policy and advocacy, agreed with Albino, telling Ars that YouTube’s Content ID system has not gotten any better over the years: “It’s worse, and it’s intentionally opaque and made to be incredibly difficult to navigate” for creators.

    “I don’t know any YouTube creator who’s happy with the way Content ID works,” Trendacosta told Ars.

    But while many people think that YouTube’s system isn’t great, Trendacosta also said that she “can’t think of a way to build the match technology” to improve it, because “machines cannot tell context.” Perhaps if YouTube’s matching technology triggered a human review each time, “that might be tenable,” but “they would have to hire so many more people to do it.”

    What YouTube could be doing is updating its policies to make the dispute process less intimidating to content creators, though, Trendacosta told Ars. Right now, the bigger problem for creators, Trendacosta said her research has shown, is not how long it takes for YouTube to work out the dispute process but “the way YouTube phrases the dispute process to discourage you from disputing.”

    “The system is so discouraging,” Trendacosta told Ars, with YouTube warning YouTubers that initiating a dispute could result in a copyright strike that terminates their accounts. “What it ends up doing is making them go, ‘You know what, I’ll eat it, whatever.’”

    YouTube, which has previously dismissed complaints about the Content ID tool by saying “no system is perfect,” did not respond to Ars’ request for comment on whether any updates to the tool might be coming that might benefit creators. Instead, YouTube’s plan seems to be to commiserate with users who likely can’t afford to leave the platform over their concerns.

    “Totally understand your frustration,” Team YouTube told Albino on X.

    This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

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    Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica

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  • You Can Buy a Used Tesla for Cheap. Just Be Careful If You Do

    You Can Buy a Used Tesla for Cheap. Just Be Careful If You Do

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    The launch of a new electric vehicle these days is invariably met with a chorus of “this car is too expensive”—and rightfully so. But for used EVs, particularly used Teslas, it’s quite another story, thanks to a glut of former fleet and rental cars that are now ready for their second owner.

    “Due to a variety of reasons, Tesla resale values have plummeted, making many Tesla models very affordable now. Plus, for some consumers, an additional $4,000 federal tax credit on used EVs may apply, sweetening the deal even further. Buying a used Tesla can be a great deal for the savvy shopper, but there are significant things to look out for,” says Ed Kim, president and chief analyst at AutoPacific.

    Indeed, a quick search on the topic easily reveals some horror stories of ex-rental Teslas, so here are some things to consider if you’re in search of a cheap Model 3 or Model Y.

    For more than a year, Tesla has been engaged in an EV price war, mostly driven by its attempt to maintain sales in China. Heavily cutting the price of your new cars is a good way to devalue the used ones, and Hertz’s decision to sell at least 20,000 of its Teslas was in part a response to the lower residual values.

    What to Watch For

    “The prices are very appealing, but shoppers must keep in mind that rental cars can and do get abused, and some of these ex-rental units may have nasty surprises stemming from their hard lives. Be sure to have yours checked out thoroughly by a mechanic before buying,” Kim says.

    Mismatched tires and minor dents, scrapes, and rock chips are fairly common minor issues. Many of the Teslas that Hertz is selling have been used as Ubers—you can tell it’s one of these if the odometer is approaching 100,000 miles. Battery degradation could be an issue, although most cars will not have lost more than 4 to 5 percent of capacity, and Long Range Teslas should have a powertrain warranty for up to 120,000 miles (or eight years).

    “One side effect of Tesla’s widespread and reliable DC fast-charging network is that many owners end up relying on it to keep their cars charged rather than dealing with the often considerable expense of installing a home charger and associated home electrical upgrades,” Kim told Ars. As such, you should make sure to check the battery’s health (which can be done on the touchscreen or as part of the inspection) before you buy.

    Rental cars can suffer from an excess of slammed doors and trunks—slamming the latter can mess up the powered strut. In the interior, you should expect high signs of wear on some touchpoints, especially the steering wheel and the rear door cards, which can bubble or flake, particularly if the Tesla was used as a ride-hailing vehicle.

    Other Potential Headaches

    Teslas are very connected cars, and many of their convenience features are accessed via smartphone apps. But that requires that Tesla’s database shows you as the car’s owner, and there are plenty of reports online that transferring ownership from Hertz can take time.

    Unfortunately, this also leaves the car stuck in Chill driving mode (which restricts power, acceleration, and top speed) and places some car settings outside of the new owner’s level of access. You also won’t be able to use Tesla Superchargers while the car still shows up as belonging to Hertz. Based on forum reports, contacting Tesla directly is the way to resolve this, but it can take several days to process, or longer if there’s a paperwork mismatch.

    Once you’ve transferred ownership to Tesla’s satisfaction, it’s time to do a software reset on the car to remove the fleet version.

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    Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica

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  • You, Too, Can Own a Short King Humanoid Robot

    You, Too, Can Own a Short King Humanoid Robot

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    Does anyone want to buy a humanoid robot for $16,000? The latest product from Unitree hopes that you will: Meet the Unitree G1, a “Humanoid agent AI avatar,” aka a robot. If you haven’t heard of Unitree, it’s sort of the go-to “budget Chinese option” in the robot space. You’re going to have to deal with company promotional materials that are just barely written in English, but you get some impressive bang-for-your-buck robots. You may have seen the Spot knockoff Unitree Go2, a $1,600 robot dog that various resellers have equipped with a flamethrower or just straight-up military rifles.

    Unitree’s promo video shows some impressive capabilities for such a cheap robot. It can stand up on its own from a flat-on-the-floor position. Just like the recent Boston Dynamics Atlas video, the G1 stands up in probably the strangest way possible. While lying face-up on the floor, the G1 brings its knees up, puts its feet flat on the floor, and then pushes up on the feet to form a tripod with the head still on the ground. From there, it uses a limbo-like move to lean its knees forward, bringing up its head and torso with all core strength.

    Photograph: Unitree

    The G1 is a budget robot, so the walk cycle is kind of primitive. It walks, stands, and “runs” in a permanent half-squat with its legs forward and knees bent all the time. The balance looks great though—at one point a person shows up and roughs up the robot a bit, kicking it in the back and punching it in the chest. In both cases, it absorbs the abuse with just a step back or two and keeps on trucking.

    So, is this humanoid robot … useful? Is it a toy? A big limitation in the real world is its height, a diminutive 4’2″ tall, which will make many tasks difficult. If you ask the usual “Can it do the dishes?” question (assuming the water won’t be an issue), you’re going to first have to hope it can reach the bottom of the sink. It’s going to struggle to reach the bottom shelf of a kitchen cabinet. Maybe you can teach it to use a stool. The small size is key to getting the price down, though. Unitree’s other humanoid robot, the H1, is adult-sized, but it’s also $90,000.

    As for other specs in the confusing and poorly put-together spec sheet, it has a 9,000-mAh battery that lasts two hours. The weight is listed as both 35 kg and 47 kg depending on where you look, so it’s somewhere in the 77- to 104-pound range. We do get real component model numbers for the vision system: an Intel RealSense D435 depth camera and a Livox-MID360 lidar puck. The lidar puck location is interesting. The face of the robot is clear glass, and the head is hollow aside from a, uh, “brain” part at the top of the head. The lidar puck is mounted to the underside of the brain and peers through the front of the face glass to see forward. Robot design is weird.

    The robot can run at 2 meters per second or 4.4 miles per hour. That’s around a slow jog. If “Arm Maximum Load” on the spec sheet is how much it can lift, it can lift 2 kg, or a paltry 4.4 pounds. The joints are all in a 160-  to 310-degree range. You’re going to have to do a lot of programming to make this do anything useful, but Unitree is not very forthcoming about how you’re supposed to do that. Presumably you’ll be using the same Unitree SDK the robot dogs use. You can also poke around the developer documentation for the Unitree H1 to get an idea of what you’ll be in for.

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    Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica

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  • Spotify Will Brick Every ‘Car Thing’ It Ever Sold

    Spotify Will Brick Every ‘Car Thing’ It Ever Sold

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    Owners of Spotify’s soon-to-be-bricked Car Thing device are begging the company to open source the gadgets to save some the landfill. Spotify hasn’t responded to pleas to salvage the hardware, which was originally intended to connect to car dashboards and auxiliary outlets to enable drivers to listen to and navigate Spotify.

    Spotify announced this week that it’s bricking all purchased Car Things on December 9 and not offering refunds or trade-in options. On a support page, Spotify says:

    We’re discontinuing Car Thing as part of our ongoing efforts to streamline our product offerings. We understand it may be disappointing, but this decision allows us to focus on developing new features and enhancements that will ultimately provide a better experience to all Spotify users.

    Spotify has no further guidance for device owners beyond asking them to reset the device to factory settings and “safely” get rid of the bricked gadget by “following local electronic waste guidelines.”

    The company also said that it doesn’t plan to release a follow-up to the Car Thing.

    Early Demise

    Car Thing came out to limited subscribers in October 2021 before releasing to the general public in February 2022.

    In its Q2 2022 earnings report released in July, Spotify revealed that it stopped making Car Things. In a chat with TechCrunch, it cited “several factors, including product demand and supply chain issues.” A Spotify rep also told the publication that the devices would continue to “perform as intended,” but that was apparently a temporary situation.

    Halted production was a warning sign that Car Thing was in peril. However, at that time, Spotify also cut the device’s price from $90 to $50, which could have encouraged people to buy a device that would be useless a few years later.

    Car Thing’s usefulness was always dubious, though. The device has a 4-inch touchscreen and knob for easy navigation, as well as support for Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, and voice control. But it also required users to subscribe to Spotify Premium, which starts at $11 per month. Worse, Car Thing requires a phone using data or Wi-Fi connected via Bluetooth in order to work, making the Thing seem redundant.

    In its Q1 2022 report, Spotify said that quitting Car Thing hurt gross margins and that it took a 31 million euro (about $31.4 million at the time) hit on the venture.

    Open Source Pleas

    Spotify’s announcement has sent some Car Thing owners to online forums to share their disappointment with Spotify and beg the company to open source the device instead of dooming it for recycling centers at best. As of this writing, there are more than 50 posts on the Spotify Community forums showing concern about the discontinuation, with many demanding a refund and/or calling for open sourcing. There are similar discussions happening elsewhere online, like on Reddit, where users have used phrases like “entirely unacceptable” to describe the news.

    A Spotify Community member going by AaronMickDee, for example, said:

    I’d rather not just dispose of the device. I think there is a community that would love the idea of having a device we can customize and use for other uses other than a song playback device.

    Would Spotify be willing to maybe unlock the system and allow users to write/flash 3rd party firmware to the device?

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    Scharon Harding, Ars Technica

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  • A Warp Drive Breakthrough Inches a Tiny Bit Closer to ‘Star Trek’

    A Warp Drive Breakthrough Inches a Tiny Bit Closer to ‘Star Trek’

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    A team of physicists has discovered that it’s possible to build a real, actual, physical warp drive and not break any known rules of physics. One caveat: The vessel doing the warping can’t exceed the speed of light, so you’re not going to get anywhere interesting anytime soon. But this research still represents an important advance in our understanding of gravity.

    Moving Without Motion

    Einstein’s general theory of relativity is a tool kit for solving problems involving gravity that connects mass and energy with deformations in spacetime. In turn, those spacetime deformations instruct the mass and energy how to move. In almost all cases, physicists use the equations of relativity to figure out how a particular combination of objects will move. They have some physical scenario, like a planet orbiting a star or two black holes colliding, and they ask how those objects deform spacetime and what the subsequent evolution of the system should be.

    But it’s also possible to run Einstein’s math in reverse by imagining some desired motion and asking what kind of spacetime deformation can make it possible. This is how the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre discovered the physical basis for a warp drive—long a staple of the Star Trek franchise.

    The goal of a warp drive is to get from A to B in the time between commercial breaks, which typically involves faster-than-light motion. But special relativity expressly forbids speeds faster than light. While this never bothered the writers of Star Trek, it did irritate Alcubierre. He discovered that it was possible to build a warp drive through a clever manipulation of spacetime, arranging it so that space in front of a vessel gets scrunched up and the space behind the vessel stretched out. This generates motion without, strictly speaking, movement.

    It sounds like a contradiction, but that’s just one of the many wonderful aspects of general relativity. Alcubierre’s warp drive avoids violations of the speed-of-light limit because it never moves through space; instead space itself is manipulated to, in essence, bring the spacecraft’s destination closer to it.

    While tantalizing, Alcubierre’s design has a fatal flaw. To provide the necessary distortions of spacetime, the spacecraft must contain some form of exotic matter, typically regarded as matter with negative mass. Negative mass has some conceptual problems that seem to defy our understanding of physics, like the possibility that if you kick a ball that weighs negative 5 kilograms, it will go flying backwards, violating conservation of momentum. Plus, nobody has ever seen any object with negative mass existing in the real universe, ever.

    These problems with negative mass have led physicists to propose various versions of “energy conditions” as supplements to general relativity. These aren’t baked into relativity itself, but add-ons needed because general relativity allows things like negative mass that don’t appear to exist in our universe—these energy conditions keep them out of relativity’s equations. They’re scientists’ response to the unsettling fact that vanilla GR allows for things like superluminal motion, but the rest of the universe doesn’t seem to agree.

    Warp Factor Zero

    The energy conditions aren’t experimentally or observationally proven, but they are statements that concord with all observations of the universe, so most physicists take them rather seriously. And until recently, physicists have viewed those energy conditions as making it absolutely 100 percent clear that you can’t build a warp drive, even if you really wanted to.

    But there is a way around it, discovered by an international team of physicists led by Jared Fuchs at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. (The team is also affiliated with the Applied Propulsion Laboratory of Applied Physics, a virtual think tank dedicated to the research of, among many other things, warp drives.) In a paper accepted for publication in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, the researchers dug deep into relativity to explore if any version of a warp drive could work.

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    Paul Sutter, Ars Technica

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  • Stack Overflow Users Are Revolting Against an OpenAI Deal

    Stack Overflow Users Are Revolting Against an OpenAI Deal

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    On Monday, Stack Overflow and OpenAI announced a new API partnership that will integrate Stack Overflow’s technical content with OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI assistant. The deal has sparked controversy among Stack Overflow’s user community, with many expressing anger and protest over the use of their contributed content to support and train AI models.

    “I hate this. I’m just going to delete/deface my answers one by one,” wrote one user on sister site Stack Exchange. “I don’t care if this is against your silly policies, because as this announcement shows, your policies can change at a whim without prior consultation of your stakeholders. You don’t care about your users, I don’t care about you.”

    Stack Overflow is a popular question-and-answer site for software developers that allows users to ask and answer technical questions related to coding. The site has a large community of developers who contribute knowledge and expertise to help others solve programming problems. Over the past decade, Stack Overflow has become a heavily utilized resource for many developers seeking solutions to common coding challenges.

    Under the announced partnership, OpenAI will utilize Stack Overflow’s OverflowAPI product to improve its AI models using content from the Stack Overflow community—officially incorporating information that many believe it had previously scraped without a license. OpenAI will also “surface validated technical knowledge from Stack Overflow directly into ChatGPT, giving users easy access to trusted, attributed, accurate, and highly technical knowledge and code backed by the millions of developers that have contributed to the Stack Overflow platform for 15 years,” according to Stack Overflow.

    In return, OpenAI plans to provide attribution to the Stack Overflow community within ChatGPT, but how the company will do that exactly is unclear. Stack Overflow will also use OpenAI technology in its development of OverflowAI, an AI model announced in July 2023 that uses an LLM to provide answers to developer questions.

    While the companies tout the collaboration’s benefits, many Stack Overflow users have expressed their displeasure with the deal. This is especially true considering that until very recently, Stack Overflow seemed to take a negative stance toward generative AI in general, banning answers written using ChatGPT. It was also widely reported last year that ChatGPT’s popularity had severely reduced Stack Overflow’s traffic, though the company seemed to later refute that, claiming faulty analysis by outsiders.

    Since the announcement, some users have attempted to alter or delete their Stack Overflow posts in protest, arguing that the move steals the labor of those who contributed to the platform without a way to opt out. In retaliation, Stack Overflow staff have reportedly been banning those users while erasing or reverting the protest posts. On Monday, a Stack Overflow user named Ben took to Mastodon to share his experience of getting suspended after posting a protest message:

    Stack Overflow announced that they are partnering with OpenAI, so I tried to delete my highest-rated answers.

    Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community.

    So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message.

    Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days.

    Stack Overflow moderators have stated that once posts are made, they become “part of the collective efforts” of other contributors and should only be removed under extraordinary circumstances, according to The Verge. Stack Overflow’s terms of service also state that users cannot revoke permission for Stack Overflow to use their contributed content.

    While Stack Overflow owns user posts, the site uses a Creative Commons 4.0 license that requires attribution. We’ll see if the ChatGPT integrations, which have not rolled out yet, will honor that license to the satisfaction of disgruntled Stack Overflow users. For now, the battle continues.

    This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

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    Benj Edwards, Ars Technica

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  • ‘TunnelVision’ Attack Leaves Nearly All VPNs Vulnerable to Spying

    ‘TunnelVision’ Attack Leaves Nearly All VPNs Vulnerable to Spying

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    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’s 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 Traffic

    The effect of TunnelVision is that “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.”

    The attack works by manipulating the DHCP server that allocates IP addresses to devices trying to connect to the local network. A setting known as option 121 allows the DHCP server to override default routing rules that send VPN traffic through a local IP address that initiates the encrypted tunnel. By using option 121 to route VPN traffic through the DHCP server, the attack diverts the data to the DHCP server itself. Researchers from Leviathan Security explained:

    Our technique is to run a DHCP server on the same network as a targeted VPN user and to also set our DHCP configuration to use itself as a gateway. When the traffic hits our gateway, we use traffic forwarding rules on the DHCP server to pass traffic through to a legitimate gateway while we snoop on it.

    We use DHCP option 121 to set a route on the VPN user’s routing table. The route we set is arbitrary and we can also set multiple routes if needed. By pushing routes that are more specific than a /0 CIDR range that most VPNs use, we can make routing rules that have a higher priority than the routes for the virtual interface the VPN creates. We can set multiple /1 routes to recreate the 0.0.0.0/0 all traffic rule set by most VPNs.

    Pushing a route also means that the network traffic will be sent over the same interface as the DHCP server instead of the virtual network interface. This is intended functionality that isn’t clearly stated in the RFC. Therefore, for the routes we push, it is never encrypted by the VPN’s virtual interface but instead transmitted by the network interface that is talking to the DHCP server. As an attacker, we can select which IP addresses go over the tunnel and which addresses go over the network interface talking to our DHCP server.

    We now have traffic being transmitted outside the VPN’s encrypted tunnel. This technique can also be used against an already established VPN connection once the VPN user’s host needs to renew a lease from our DHCP server. We can artificially create that scenario by setting a short lease time in the DHCP lease, so the user updates their routing table more frequently. In addition, the VPN control channel is still intact because it already uses the physical interface for its communication. In our testing, the VPN always continued to report as connected, and the kill switch was never engaged to drop our VPN connection.

    The attack can most effectively be carried out by a person who has administrative control over the network the target is connecting to. In that scenario, the attacker configures the DHCP server to use option 121. It’s also possible for people who can connect to the network as an unprivileged user to perform the attack by setting up their own rogue DHCP server.

    The attack allows some or all traffic to be routed through the unencrypted tunnel. In either case, the VPN application will report that all data is being sent through the protected connection. Any traffic that’s diverted away from this tunnel will not be encrypted by the VPN and the internet IP address viewable by the remote user will belong to the network the VPN user is connected to, rather than one designated by the VPN app.

    Interestingly, Android is the only operating system that fully immunizes VPN apps from the attack because it doesn’t implement option 121. For all other OSes, there are no complete fixes. When apps run on Linux there’s a setting that minimizes the effects, but even then TunnelVision can be used to exploit a side channel that can be used to de-anonymize destination traffic and perform targeted denial-of-service attacks. Network firewalls can also be configured to deny inbound and outbound traffic to and from the physical interface. This remedy is problematic for two reasons: (1) A VPN user connecting to an untrusted network has no ability to control the firewall, and (2) it opens the same side channel present with the Linux mitigation.

    The most effective fixes are to run the VPN inside of a virtual machine whose network adapter isn’t in bridged mode or to connect the VPN to the internet through the Wi-Fi network of a cellular device. The research, from Leviathan Security researchers Lizzie Moratti and Dani Cronce, is available here.

    This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

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    Dan Goodin, Ars Technica

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  • Automakers Want AM Radios Out of Cars. Congress Is About to Require Them

    Automakers Want AM Radios Out of Cars. Congress Is About to Require Them

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    A controversial bill that would require all new cars to be fitted with AM radios looks set to become a law in the near future. Yesterday, Senator Edward Markey revealed that the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act now has the support of 60 US Senators, as well as 246 cosponsors in the House of Representatives, making its passage an almost sure thing. Should that happen, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would be required to ensure that all new cars sold in the US have AM radios at no extra cost.

    “Democrats and Republicans are tuning in to the millions of listeners, thousands of broadcasters, and countless emergency management officials who depend on AM radio in their vehicles. AM radio is a lifeline for people in every corner of the United States to get news, sports, and local updates in times of emergencies. Our commonsense bill makes sure this fundamental, essential tool doesn’t get lost on the dial. With a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate, Congress should quickly take it up and pass it,” said Markey and his cosponsor, Senator Ted Cruz.

    About 82 million people still listen to AM radio, according to the National Association of Broadcasters, which, as you can imagine, was rather pleased with the congressional support for its industry.

    “Broadcasters are grateful for the overwhelming bipartisan support for the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act in both chambers of Congress,” said NAB president and CEO Curtis LeGeyt. “This majority endorsement reaffirms lawmakers’ recognition of the essential service AM radio provides to the American people, particularly in emergency situations. NAB thanks the 307 members of Congress who are reinforcing the importance of maintaining universal access to this crucial public communications medium.”

    Why Are They Dropping AM, Anyway?

    The reason there’s even a bill in Congress to mandate AM radios in all new vehicles is that some automakers have begun to drop the option, particularly in electric vehicles. A big reason for that is electromagnetic interference from electric motors—rather than risk customer complaints from poor-quality audio, some automakers decided to remove it.

    But it’s not exclusively an EV issue; last year we learned the revised Ford Mustang coupe would also arrive sans AM radio, which Ford told us was because radio stations were modernizing “by offering internet streaming through mobile apps, FM, digital, and satellite radio options,” and that it would continue to offer those other audio options in its vehicles.

    In response to congressional questioning, eight automakers told a Senate committee that they were quitting AM: BMW, Ford, Mazda, Polestar, Rivian, Tesla, Volkswagen, and Volvo. This “undermined the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s system for delivering critical public safety information to the public,” said Senator Markey’s office last year, and AM radio’s role as a platform for delivering emergency alerts to the public is given by supporters of the legislation as perhaps the key reason for its necessity.

    Tech and Auto Industries Aren’t Happy

    But critics of the bill—including the Consumer Technology Association—don’t buy that argument. In October 2023, FEMA and the Federal Communications Commission conducted a nationwide test of the emergency alert system. According to the CTA, which surveyed 800 US adults, of the 95 percent of US adults that heard the test, only 6 percent did so via radio, and just 1 percent on AM radio specifically. Instead, 92 percent received the alert pushed to their smartphone.

    “Requiring the installation of analog AM radios in automobiles is an unnecessary action that would impact EV range, efficiency, and affordability at a critical moment of accelerating adoption,” said Albert Gore, executive director of ZETA, a clean vehicle advocacy group that opposes the AM radio requirement. “Mandating AM radio would do little to expand drivers’ ability to receive emergency alerts. At a time when we are more connected than ever, we encourage Congress to allow manufacturers to innovate and produce designs that meet consumer preference, rather than pushing a specific communications technology,” Gore said in a statement.

    This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

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    Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica

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  • Want to Buy a Decommissioned Supercomputer? Here’s Your Chance

    Want to Buy a Decommissioned Supercomputer? Here’s Your Chance

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    On Tuesday, the US General Services Administration began an auction for the decommissioned Cheyenne supercomputer, located in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The 5.34-petaflop supercomputer ranked as the 20th most powerful in the world at the time of its installation in 2016. Bidding started at $2,500, but its price is currently $270,085.

    The supercomputer, which officially operated between January 12, 2017, and December 31, 2023, at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center, was a powerful (and once considered energy-efficient) system that significantly advanced atmospheric and Earth system sciences research.

    “In its lifetime, Cheyenne delivered over 7 billion core-hours, served over 4,400 users, and supported nearly 1,300 NSF awards,” writes the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) on its official Cheyenne information page. “It played a key role in education, supporting more than 80 university courses and training events. Nearly 1,000 projects were awarded for early-career graduate students and postdocs. Perhaps most tellingly, Cheyenne-powered research generated over 4,500 peer-review publications, dissertations and theses, and other works.”

    UCAR says that Cheynne was originally slated to be replaced after five years, but the COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted supply chains, and it clocked in two extra years in its tour of duty. The auction page says that Cheyenne recently experienced maintenance limitations due to faulty quick disconnects in its cooling system. As a result, approximately 1 percent of the compute nodes have failed, primarily due to ECC errors in the DIMMs. Given the expense and downtime associated with repairs, the decision was made to auction off the components.

    With a peak performance of 5,340 teraflops (4,788 Linpack teraflops), this SGI ICE XA system was capable of performing over 3 billion calculations per second for every watt of energy consumed, making it three times more energy-efficient than its predecessor, Yellowstone. The system featured 4,032 dual-socket nodes, each with two 18-core, 2.3-GHz Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 processors, for a total of 145,152 CPU cores. It also included 313 terabytes of memory and 40 petabytes of storage. The entire system in operation consumed about 1.7 megawatts of power.

    Just to compare, the world’s top-rated supercomputer at the moment—Frontier at Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee—features a theoretical peak performance of 1,679.82 petaflops, includes 8,699,904 CPU cores, and uses 22.7 megawatts of power.

    The GSA notes that potential buyers of Cheyenne should be aware that professional movers with appropriate equipment will be required to handle the heavy racks and components. The auction includes seven E-Cell pairs (14 total), each with a cooling distribution unit (CDU). Each E-Cell weighs approximately 1,500 lbs. Additionally, the auction features two air-cooled Cheyenne Management Racks, each weighing 2,500 lbs, that contain servers, switches, and power units.

    As of this writing, 23 potential buyers have bid on this computing monster so far. The auction closes on May 3 at 6:11 pm Central Time if you’re interested in bidding. But don’t get too excited by photos of the extensive cabling: As the auction site notes, “fiber optic and CAT5/6 cabling are excluded from the resale package.”

    This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

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    Benj Edwards, Ars Technica

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  • Somehow This $10,000 Flame-Thrower Robot Dog Is Completely Legal in 48 States

    Somehow This $10,000 Flame-Thrower Robot Dog Is Completely Legal in 48 States

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    If you’ve been wondering when you’ll be able to order the flame-throwing robot that Ohio-based Throwflame first announced last summer, that day has finally arrived. The Thermonator, what Throwflame bills as “the first-ever flamethrower-wielding robot dog” is now available for purchase. The price? $9,420.

    Thermonator is a quadruped robot with an ARC flamethrower mounted to its back, fueled by gasoline or napalm. It features a one-hour battery, a 30-foot flame-throwing range, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity for remote control through a smartphone.

    It also includes a LIDAR sensor for mapping and obstacle avoidance, laser sighting, and first-person view (FPV) navigation through an onboard camera. The product appears to integrate a version of the Unitree Go2 robot quadruped that retails alone for $1,600 in its base configuration.

    Photograph: Xmatter

    The company lists possible applications of the new robot as “wildfire control and prevention,” “agricultural management,” “ecological conservation,” “snow and ice removal,” and “entertainment and SFX.” But most of all, it sets things on fire in a variety of real-world scenarios.

    Back in 2018, Elon Musk made the news for offering an official Boring Company flamethrower that reportedly sold 10,000 units in 48 hours. It sparked some controversy because flamethrowers can also double as weapons or potentially start wildfires.

    Flamethrowers are not specifically regulated in 48 US states, although general product liability and criminal laws may still apply to their use and sale. They are not considered firearms by federal agencies. Specific restrictions exist in Maryland, where flamethrowers require a Federal Firearms License to own, and California, where the range of flamethrowers cannot exceed 10 feet.

    Thermonator spewing flames

    Photograph: Xmatter

    Even so, to state the obvious, flamethrowers can easily burn both things and people, starting fires and wreaking havoc if not used safely. Accordingly, the Thermonator might be one Christmas present you should skip for little Johnny this year.

    This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

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    Benj Edwards, Ars Technica

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  • How NASA Repaired Voyager 1 From 15 Billion Miles Away

    How NASA Repaired Voyager 1 From 15 Billion Miles Away

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    Throughout the five months of troubleshooting, Voyager’s ground team continued to receive signals indicating the spacecraft was still alive. But until Saturday, they lacked insight into specific details about the status of Voyager 1.

    “It’s pretty much just the way we left it,” Spilker said. “We’re still in the initial phases of analyzing all of the channels and looking at their trends. Some of the temperatures went down a little bit with this period of time that’s gone on, but we’re pretty much seeing everything we had hoped for. And that’s always good news.”

    Relocating Code

    Through their investigation, Voyager’s ground team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory had stopped working, probably due to either a cosmic ray hit or a failure of aging hardware. This affected some of the computer’s software code.

    “That took out a section of memory,” Spilker said. “What they have to do is relocate that code into a different portion of the memory, and then make sure that anything that uses those codes, those subroutines, know to go to the new location of memory, for access and to run it.”

    Only about 3 percent of the FDS memory was corrupted by the bad chip, so engineers needed to transplant that code into another part of the memory bank. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety, NASA said.

    So the Voyager team divided the code into sections for storage in different places in the FDS. This wasn’t just a copy-and-paste job. Engineers needed to modify some of the code to make sure it will all work together. “Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well,” NASA said in a statement.

    Newer NASA missions have hardware and software simulators on the ground, where engineers can test new procedures to make sure they do no harm when they uplink commands to the real spacecraft. Due to its age, Voyager doesn’t have any ground simulators, and much of the mission’s original design documentation remains in paper form and hasn’t been digitized.

    “It was really eyes-only to look at the code,” Spilker said. “So we had to triple check. Everybody was looking through and making sure we had all of the links coming together.”

    This was just the first step in restoring Voyager 1 to full functionality. “We were pretty sure it would work, but until it actually happened, we didn’t know 100 percent for sure,” Spilker said.

    “The reason we didn’t do everything in one step is that there was a very limited amount of memory we could find quickly, so we prioritized one data mode (the engineering data mode), and relocated only the code to restore that mode,” said Jeff Mellstrom, a JPL engineer who leads the Voyager 1 “tiger team” tasked with overcoming this problem.

    “The next step, to relocate the remaining three actively used science data modes, is essentially the same,” Mellstrom said in a written response to Ars. “The main difference is the available memory constraint is now even tighter. We have ideas where we could relocate the code, but we haven’t yet fully assessed the options or made a decision. These are the first steps we will start this week.”

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    Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

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  • Environmental Damage Could Cost You a Fifth of Your Income Over the Next 25 Years

    Environmental Damage Could Cost You a Fifth of Your Income Over the Next 25 Years

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    Kotz, Levermann, and Wenz suggest that this is an indication of warming we’re already committed to, in part because the effect of past emissions hasn’t been felt in its entirety and partly because the global economy is a boat that turns slowly, so it will take time to implement significant changes in emissions. “Such a focus on the near term limits the large uncertainties about diverging future emission trajectories, the resulting long-term climate response and the validity of applying historically observed climate–economic relations over long timescales during which socio-technical conditions may change considerably,” they argue.

    Uneven Costs

    So, what happens by 2050? The researchers’ model suggests that “committed damages comprise a permanent income reduction of 19 percent on average globally,” compared to where growth would have gotten us. Uncertainties mean the likely range is between 11 and 29 percent. Using a middle-of-the-road scenario for economic growth, this translates to an economic hit of $38 trillion (a figure measured in international dollars).

    The authors contrast that with an estimate the IPCC made about the costs of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius: $6 trillion dollars. So, even the short-term impacts of climate change will vastly outweigh the costs of action.

    This hit isn’t evenly distributed. Wealthy areas in the US and Europe will see incomes drop by only about 11 percent, while Africa and South Asia take a hit of 22 percent. This is likely because wealthy countries already have a larger capacity to adjust to climate-related problems than those in the Global South. But it’s also striking, as the pace of change is much larger outside the tropics, so these countries are also going to be facing more extreme changes. The researchers do see areas that experience economic benefits, but those are limited to the high latitudes nearer the poles.

    Kotz, Levermann, and Wenz note that the areas with the highest costs tend to have the lowest cumulative emissions. In other words, the problems are felt most keenly in the countries that made the smallest contributions to them.

    There are also some effects that are beneficial. Areas that experience increased average rainfall see incomes rise due to that effect (though drier areas see the opposite). But these same areas see added costs from increases in the average number of rainy days that largely offset this effect. And the impact of more extreme precipitation is a negative everywhere.

    It Could Be Worse

    There are a couple of ways that this could end up being an underestimate of future costs. Over the long term, a continued warming climate will start to produce more events with no historical precedent, meaning there’s no way to project their economic impact. By limiting the analysis to about 25 years, the researchers make it less likely to be a major factor. But unprecedented events are already occurring, so we’re already at the point where some problems are being undercounted.

    There are also a large number of climate events that aren’t considered at all, including heat waves, severe tropical storms, and sea level rise. Individually, it’s unlikely that any of these events will show dramatic changes in the next 25 years, but the cumulative impact of gradual changes isn’t going to be included. Plus, there’s always the chance of reaching a tipping point where there’s a sudden change in frequency for one or more of these events.

    Finally, the researchers don’t really consider nonlocal impacts, such as where extreme weather in one location can ripple through supply chains to produce impacts elsewhere. Think about cases where large urban centers import much of their food from relatively distant locales.

    Kotz, Levermann, and Wenz acknowledge all of these issues but suggest that their more conservative, empirical approach provides a bit of clarity that’s difficult to achieve otherwise.

    One aspect they don’t consider, however, pertains to their comparison between the costs of our committed damages and the cost of decarbonizing the economy. The past 20 years have seen the price of mitigating climate change through renewable energy and efficiency plunge dramatically, and the price of other key technologies, such as batteries, is following a similar trajectory. By 2050, these could make the difference between the cost of acting and the cost of doing nothing even more dramatic.

    This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

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    John Timmer, Ars Technica

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  • NASA Confirms Where the Space Junk That Hit a Florida House Came From

    NASA Confirms Where the Space Junk That Hit a Florida House Came From

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    NASA has confirmed that the object that fell into a Florida home last month was part of a battery pack released from the International Space Station.

    This extraordinary incident opens a new frontier in space law. NASA, the homeowner, and attorneys are navigating little-used legal codes and intergovernmental agreements to determine who should pay for the damages.

    Alejandro Otero, owner of the Naples, Florida, home struck by the debris, told Ars he is fairly certain the object came from the space station, even before NASA’s confirmation. The circumstances strongly suggested that was the case. The cylindrical piece of metal tore through Otero’s roof on March 8, a few minutes after the time US Space Command reported the reentry of a space station cargo pallet and nine decommissioned batteries over the Gulf of Mexico on a trajectory heading torward the coast of southwest Florida.

    On Monday, NASA confirmed the object’s origin after retrieving it from Otero. The agency released a statement saying the object is made of the metal alloy Inconel, weighs 1.6 pounds, and is 4 inches in height and 1.6 inches in diameter.

    “As part of the analysis, NASA completed an assessment of the object’s dimensions and features compared to the released hardware and performed a materials analysis,” the agency said. “Based on the examination, the agency determined the debris to be a stanchion from the NASA flight support equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet.”

    A Jolt From the sky

    Otero was out of the country when his house came under the crosshairs, but his 19-year-old son was home. The impact sounded like fireworks going off, Otero said in an interview Tuesday. A recording from Otero’s Nest camera captured the noise.

    The son “was sitting in front of his computer doing homework with his earphones listening to music, and he was jolted out of his chair with a very loud sound,” Otero said.

    After surveying the damage when he got home, Otero filed a police report, and first responders helped pull the object out of the subfloor between the first and second stories of his house. It penetrated the roof and ceiling of an unoccupied second-floor bedroom, hit the floor between the bed and a bathroom, and struck a piece of air conditioning ductwork. It hit so hard that it created a bump on the ceiling of the first floor but didn’t penetrate it, according to Otero.

    Something the size and mass of this battery support stanchion would have probably struck the house with a terminal velocity of more than 200 mph. At that speed, the results could have been deadly.

    “Luckily, nobody got hurt,” Otero said.

    A quick glance at the object indicated to Otero that it probably came from space. “It’s super dense, a very strong alloy, a very interesting metal,” he said. “When I saw that it was half-charred and that it had a cylindrical shape that had taken a concave shape from traveling through the atmosphere, I knew it had to be coming from outer space.

    “I knew it was manmade,” Otero continued. “I just didn’t know where it was from until I started googling.”

    Otero said he found Ars’ original article on the reentry on March 8, along with posts about the event on X. That’s when he contacted a local news outlet. WINK News, the CBS affiliate for southwest Florida, was first to report on the damage to Otero’s home. After Otero tried several times to contact NASA officials, an attorney from Kennedy Space Center called him to hear his story. NASA then dispatched someone to pick up the object from Naples.

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    Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

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  • Space Force Is Planning a Military Exercise in Orbit

    Space Force Is Planning a Military Exercise in Orbit

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    The Victus Haze mission is more complicated than Victus Nox, involving two prime contractors, two spacecraft, and two rocket launches from different spaceports, all timed to occur with short timelines “to keep the demonstration as realistic as possible,” a Space Force spokesperson told Ars.

    “This demonstration will ultimately prepare the United States Space Force to provide future forces to combatant commands to conduct rapid operations in response to adversary on-orbit aggression,” Space Systems Command said in a statement.

    Faith in Commercial Space

    “This is a really significant operational demonstration that is really pushing the envelope on technology and demonstrates a lot of faith in the US industrial base,” Rogers said.

    “Fundamentally, this is about characterizing an unknown capability for the first time in low-Earth orbit,” Rogers said in an interview with Ars. “There are a whole host of challenges that come with that, consistent coverage with communications, how do you track a maneuvering object in low-Earth orbit with limited space domain awareness capabilities, what’s the right level of autonomy and human interaction?”

    True Anomaly’s first two Jackal satellites launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission last month, but the company announced a few weeks later that the two satellites would be unable to complete their planned rendezvous demonstration. This would have been a precursor to the type of activity True Anomaly and Rocket Lab will demonstrate on Victus Haze.

    Rogers said his company is working on two more demonstration missions that will fly before Victus Haze.

    The military’s Defense Innovation Unit awarded $32 million to Rocket Lab for its part of the Victus Haze mission. True Anomaly’s contract with SpaceWERX, the innovation arm of the Space Force, is valued at $30 million. True Anomaly is contributing $30 million in private capital to help pay for the mission, bringing the total cost of Victus Haze to approximately $92 million. Space Safari, a division of Space Systems Command, oversees the entire project.

    “We recognize the significant opportunity to leverage the commercial space industry’s innovations to counter China as America’s pacing threat,” said Colonel Bryon McClain, Space Systems Command’s program executive officer for space domain awareness and combat power. “The United States has the most innovative space industry in the world. Victus Haze will demonstrate, under operationally realistic conditions, our ability to respond to irresponsible behavior on orbit.”

    “Once the build phase is completed the mission will enter several successive phases to include hot standby, activation, alert, and launch phases,” the Space Force said. “While this is a coordinated demonstration, each vendor will be given unique launch and mission profiles.”

    True Anomaly’s Jackal satellite, nearly as large as a refrigerator, will launch on a “rapid rideshare” mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida or Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Space Systems command said. This will most likely be a rideshare launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Launching on a rideshare flight comes with different challenges than launching on a dedicated rocket, as the Victus Nox mission did last year.

    True Anomaly says it could get its satellite out of storage and integrate it with a rocket in 12 to 84 hours, depending on the flight cadence of the launch provider. After the launch of True Anomaly’s Jackal, the Space Force will give Rocket Lab a 24-hour call-up to launch its satellite, similar in size to True Anomaly’s spacecraft, on an Electron rocket from New Zealand or from Virginia. Rocket Lab’s launch must be precisely timed to allow its satellite to rendezvous with True Anomaly’s spacecraft in orbit.

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    Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

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  • Elon Musk’s Latest Mars Pitch Has Potential

    Elon Musk’s Latest Mars Pitch Has Potential

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    Elon Musk has been talking publicly about his sweeping vision for Mars settlement for nearly eight years now, dating to a speech in Guadalajara, Mexico, in September 2016.

    This weekend, at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, Musk once again took up the mantle of his “making life multiplanetary” cause. Addressing employees at the location of the company’s Starship factory, Musk spoke about the “high urgency” needed to extend the “light of consciousness” beyond Earth. That is not because humanity’s home planet is a lost cause or should not be preserved. Rather, Musk said, he does not want humanity to remain a one-planet civilization that will, inevitably, face some calamity that will end the species.

    All of this is fairly familiar territory for spaceflight enthusiasts—and observers of Musk. But during the past eight years he has become an increasingly controversial and polarizing figure. Based on his behavior, many people will dismiss Musk’s Mars comments as those of a megalomaniac. At least in regard to spaceflight, however, that would be wrong. Musk’s multiplanetary ambitions today are more credible because SpaceX has taken steps toward doing what he said the company would do.

    SpaceX has real hardware today and has completed three test flights. A fourth is possible next month.

    “It’s surreal, but it’s real,” Musk said this weekend, describing the audacious Mars vision.

    The Booster and Ship

    As part of his 45-minute speech, Musk spoke about the booster for Starship, the upper stage, and the company’s plans to ultimately deliver millions of tons of cargo to Mars for a self-sustaining civilization.

    If thousands of launches seem impossible, Musk noted that SpaceX has completed 327 successful Falcon launches and that 80 percent of those have involved used boosters. This year, he said, SpaceX will launch about 90 percent of the mass sent into orbit from the planet. China will launch about 6 percent, he added, with the remainder of the world accounting for the other 4 percent.

    This kind of performance has given Musk confidence that reusability can be achieved with the Super Heavy booster that powers Starship. On the vehicle’s next test flight, possibly in May, the company will attempt to land the booster on a virtual tower in the Gulf of Mexico. If that landing is precise enough, SpaceX will try to catch the booster on the fifth test flight with the chopstick-like mechanisms on Starship’s massive launch tower.

    “That’s very much a success-oriented schedule, but it is within the realm of possibility,” Musk said. With multiple test flights occurring this year, Musk said the odds of catching the booster with the launch tower this year are 80 to 90 percent.

    It will take longer to land and begin reusing Starship’s upper stage, which must survive the fiery reentry through Earth’s atmosphere. This vehicle broke apart and burned up during its attempt to return through the atmosphere during a flight test in March. On the next flight, Musk said, the goal for Starship’s upper stage is to survive this heating and make a controlled landing in the ocean. At some point this year, he expects SpaceX to achieve this milestone and then begin landing Starships back in Texas next year.

    Building More, Building Bigger

    SpaceX is also building additional ground-based infrastructure and making design upgrades to Starship.

    Musk said the company will construct a second launch tower in Texas to facilitate additional developmental test flights. And by the end of 2025 it intends to have two Starship launch towers in Florida to begin supporting operational launches. Initially, these are likely to support Artemis lunar landing missions for NASA.

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    Eric Berger, Ars Technica

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  • International Space Station Trash May Have Hit This Florida House

    International Space Station Trash May Have Hit This Florida House

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    A few weeks ago, something from the heavens came crashing through the roof of Alejandro Otero’s home, and NASA is on the case.

    In all likelihood, this nearly 2-pound object came from the International Space Station. Otero said it tore through the roof and both floors of his two-story house in Naples, Florida.

    Otero wasn’t home at the time, but his son was there. A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC) on March 8. That’s an important piece of information because it is a close match for the time—2:29 pm EST (19:29 UTC)—that US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris from the space station. At that time, the object was on a path over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida.

    This space junk consisted of depleted batteries from the ISS, attached to a cargo pallet that was originally supposed to come back to Earth in a controlled manner. But a series of delays meant this cargo pallet missed its ride back to Earth, so NASA jettisoned the batteries from the space station in 2021 to head for an unguided reentry.

    Otero’s likely encounter with space debris was first reported by WINK News, the CBS affiliate for southwest Florida. Since then, NASA has recovered the debris from the homeowner, according to Josh Finch, an agency spokesperson.

    Engineers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center will analyze the object “as soon as possible to determine its origin,” Finch told Ars. “More information will be available once the analysis is complete.”

    Ars reported on this reentry when it happened on March 8, noting that most of the material from the batteries and the cargo carrier would have likely burned up as they plunged through the atmosphere. Temperatures would have reached several thousand degrees, vaporizing most of the material before it could reach the ground.

    The entire pallet, including the nine disused batteries from the space station’s power system, had a mass of more than 2.6 metric tons (5,800 pounds), according to NASA. Size-wise, it was about twice as tall as a standard kitchen refrigerator. It’s important to note that objects of this mass, or larger, regularly fall to Earth on guided trajectories, but they’re usually failed satellites or spent rocket stages left in orbit after completing their missions.

    In a post on X, Otero said he is waiting for communication from “the responsible agencies” to resolve the cost of damages to his home.

    If the object is owned by NASA, Otero or his insurance company could make a claim against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, according to Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi.

    “It gets more interesting if this material is discovered to be not originally from the United States,” she told Ars. “If it is a human-made space object which was launched into space by another country, which caused damage on Earth, that country would be absolutely liable to the homeowner for the damage caused.”

    This could be an issue in this case. The batteries were owned by NASA, but they were attached to a pallet structure launched by Japan’s space agency.

    How This Happened

    At the time of the March 8 reentry, a NASA spokesperson at the Johnson Space Center in Houston said the space agency “conducted a thorough debris analysis assessment on the pallet and has determined it will harmlessly reenter the Earth’s atmosphere.” This was, by far, the most massive object ever tossed overboard from the International Space Station. “We do not expect any portion to have survived reentry,” NASA said.

    Research from other space experts, however, did not match NASA’s statement. The Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center, says a “general rule of thumb” is that 20 to 40 percent of the mass of a large object will reach the ground. The exact percentage depends on the design of the object, but these nickel-hydrogen batteries were made of metals with relatively high density.

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    Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

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  • The XZ Backdoor: Everything You Need to Know

    The XZ Backdoor: Everything You Need to Know

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    On Friday, a lone Microsoft developer rocked the world when he revealed a backdoor had been intentionally planted in XZ Utils, an open source data compression utility available on almost all installations of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The person or people behind this project likely spent years on it. They were likely very close to seeing the backdoor update merged into Debian and Red Hat, the two biggest distributions of Linux, when an eagle-eyed software developer spotted something fishy.

    “This might be the best-executed supply chain attack we’ve seen described in the open, and it’s a nightmare scenario: malicious, competent, authorized upstream in a widely used library,” software and cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda said of the effort, which came frightfully close to succeeding.

    Researchers have spent the weekend gathering clues. Here’s what we know so far.

    What Is XZ Utils?

    XZ Utils is nearly ubiquitous in Linux. It provides lossless data compression on virtually all Unix-like operating systems, including Linux. XZ Utils provides critical functions for compressing and decompressing data during all kinds of operations. XZ Utils also supports the legacy .lzma format, making this component even more crucial.

    What Happened?

    Andres Freund, a developer and engineer working on Microsoft’s PostgreSQL offerings, was recently troubleshooting performance problems a Debian system was experiencing with SSH, the most widely used protocol for remotely logging in to devices over the Internet. Specifically, SSH logins were consuming too many CPU cycles and were generating errors with valgrind, a utility for monitoring computer memory.

    Through sheer luck and Freund’s careful eye, he eventually discovered the problems were the result of updates that had been made to XZ Utils. On Friday, Freund took to the Open Source Security List to disclose the updates were the result of someone intentionally planting a backdoor in the compression software.

    What Does the Backdoor Do?

    Malicious code added to XZ Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 modified the way the software functions when performing operations related to .lzma compression or decompression. When these functions involved SSH, they allowed for malicious code to be executed with root privileges. This code allowed someone in possession of a predetermined encryption key to log in to the backdoored system over SSH. From then on, that person would have the same level of control as any authorized administrator.

    How Did This Backdoor Come to Be?

    It would appear that this backdoor was years in the making. In 2021, someone with the username JiaT75 made their first known commit to an open source project. In retrospect, the change to the libarchive project is suspicious, because it replaced the safe_fprint funcion with a variant that has long been recognized as less secure. No one noticed at the time.

    The following year, JiaT75 submitted a patch over the XZ Utils mailing list, and, almost immediately, a never-before-seen participant named Jigar Kumar joined the discussion and argued that Lasse Collin, the longtime maintainer of XZ Utils, hadn’t been updating the software often or fast enough. Kumar, with the support of Dennis Ens and several other people who had never had a presence on the list, pressured Collin to bring on an additional developer to maintain the project.

    In January 2023, JiaT75 made their first commit to XZ Utils. In the months following, JiaT75, who used the name Jia Tan, became increasingly involved in XZ Utils affairs. For instance, Tan replaced Collins’ contact information with their own on oss-fuzz, a project that scans open source software for vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Tan also requested that oss-fuzz disable the ifunc function during testing, a change that prevented it from detecting the malicious changes Tan would soon make to XZ Utils.

    In February of this year, Tan issued commits for versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 of XZ Utils. The updates implemented the backdoor. In the following weeks, Tan or others appealed to developers of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian to merge the updates into their OSes. Eventually, one of the two updates made its way into several releases, according to security firm Tenable. There’s more about Tan and the timeline here.

    Can You Say More About What This Backdoor Does?

    In a nutshell, it allows someone with the right private key to hijack sshd, the executable file responsible for making SSH connections, and from there to execute malicious commands. The backdoor is implemented through a five-stage loader that uses a series of simple but clever techniques to hide itself. It also provides the means for new payloads to be delivered without major changes being required.

    Multiple people who have reverse-engineered the updates have much more to say about the backdoor. Developer Sam James provided an overview here.

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    Dan Goodin, Ars Technica

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