Author name: Ari B

patent-document-showcases-the-cloud-only-streaming-xbox-console-that-never-was

Patent document showcases the cloud-only streaming Xbox console that never was

cloud gaming, gaming, keystone, microsoft, Tech, xbox, xbox cloud gaming, xbox series s / /

keystone revealed —

Microsoft couldn’t get the price of its streaming Xbox low enough to release it.

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  • The streaming-only Xbox would have looked like a smaller, squarer relative of the Series S.

    Microsoft

  • The console had cutouts on the bottom and back, presumably for air cooling.

    Microsoft

  • Front-mounted Xbox button and USB port, much like the Series S.

    Microsoft

  • Rear-mounted Ethernet, HDMI, and power. The console would likely have worked over Wi-Fi, too, but wired Ethernet does help with latency and consistency when streaming games.

    Microsoft

  • Controller sync button on the side.

    Microsoft

  • There was a logo and a Series S-ish circle on the top of the Keystone Xbox, but there are no cutouts depicted, so this may have been a stylistic choice rather than a place for the console to vent hot air.

    Microsoft

Microsoft’s mid-generation plans for the Xbox Series S and X consoles looked a whole lot different a couple of years ago than it does now. A leaked slide deck from the FTC v. Microsoft case last year outlined detailed plans for a spruced up Series S, an overhauled Series X, and even a redesigned controller. Another part of that roadmap included a streaming-only version of the Xbox, codenamed Keystone, that was designed to connect to Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming servers rather than rendering games locally.

Microsoft has talked openly about this version of the Xbox before. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer told The Verge that the Keystone console was designed and fully functional, but that it wasn’t launched because Microsoft had a hard time getting the price down low enough that it made sense next to the $299 Series S (which already occasionally goes on sale in the $200 to $250 range).

We’ve already seen glimpses of Keystone—once on Spencer’s shelf, and again in the FTC v. Microsoft documents. Both of those depictions were partial, or seen from a distance. But a new design patent document (PDF) unearthed by Windows Central shows even more detailed renderings of what the cloud Xbox would have looked like.

Series S meets Apple TV

Keystone’s styling was strongly reminiscent of the disc-drive-less Series S, with the same boxy white design and front-mounted Xbox button and USB port. There’s also a similar circular cutout on top, though it may not be an air vent as it is in the Series S—all of the holes depicted in the patent are on the back and bottom, and a streaming box certainly wouldn’t have needed the same cooling capacity as the AMD-designed CPU and GPU in the Series S.

The console also would have been square-shaped and considerably smaller than a Series S—not quite as small as a dedicated video-streaming box like an Apple TV or Roku Ultra, but not too far off either (the patent document doesn’t list dimensions, but we’ve done a rough size comparison using the HDMI and Ethernet ports on the Keystone box and an Apple TV 4K). The console’s controller sync button would have been mounted on its side, rather than in front, as it is on the Series S.

The cloud Xbox compared to a current-generation Apple TV 4K, with sizes roughly normalized based on the sizes of the HDMI and Ethernet ports. The Xbox console would have been a bit larger, but not dramatically so.

Enlarge / The cloud Xbox compared to a current-generation Apple TV 4K, with sizes roughly normalized based on the sizes of the HDMI and Ethernet ports. The Xbox console would have been a bit larger, but not dramatically so.

Apple/Microsoft/Andrew Cunningham

In the alternate reality of the FTC v. Microsoft slide deck, all of these new consoles and the new controller would have been announced or launched by now. But as Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said shortly after those documents leaked, the company’s plans have changed substantially in the interim. A disc-less version of the Series X is coming, but it looks exactly like the current version of the console without a disc drive; Microsoft is also pursuing a strategy where it takes more of its internally developed games multi-platform, rather than restricting them to the Xbox and to Windows PCs. These moves are at least partially in response to sliding revenue from Microsoft’s console business, which has seen its revenue decline by double digits year over year for the last couple of years.

Neither Spencer nor Microsoft has ever said never about the Keystone console, leaving the door open to an eventual release if and when the price of manufacturing the console comes down. In the meantime, the streaming-only Xbox lives on as an app for newer Samsung smart TVs.

Listing image by Microsoft

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synthetic-psychedelic-found-in-candies-linked-to-seizures,-intubation

Synthetic psychedelic found in candies linked to seizures, intubation

4-AcO-DMT, candies, CDC, chocolate, diamond shruumz, fda, kava, piper methysticum, psilocybin, psychedelic, Science / /

Toxic trip —

Cases grow to 39, including 23 hospitalizations, across 20 states.

–

A Diamond Shruumz chocolate bar, which comes in a variety of flavors.

Enlarge / A Diamond Shruumz chocolate bar, which comes in a variety of flavors.

The US Food and Drug Administration has identified a synthetic psychedelic compound as well as compounds from a potentially toxic plant in the Diamond Shruumz-brand microdosing candies linked to a growing number of severe illnesses nationwide that have included seizures, intubation, and admissions to intensive care units.

As of June 25, the case total has grown to 39, including 23 hospitalizations, across 20 states, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

It remains unclear what is in the candies and what may be causing the severe illnesses. Diamond Shruumz does not provide a full list of ingredients. The term “microdosing” and other marketing used by Diamond Shruumz suggests the candies contain a psychedelic compound, but the company does not name any. To figure it out, the FDA has been analyzing multiple samples of Diamond Shruumz-brand candies, including chocolates, gummies, and candy cones. On Tuesday, the FDA reported finding the synthetic psychedelic compound 4-AcO-DMT in the company’s Dark Chocolate Bar and its Birthday Cake Chocolate Bar.

As Ars reported previously, 4-AcO-DMT (aka 4- acetoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, O-acetylpsilocin, or psilacetin) is a common synthetic tryptamine used in psychedelics and was previously suspected to be in the Diamond Shruumz candies. The psychoactive drug has a chemical structure similar to the most notable mushroom-derived psychedelic, psilocybin, as well as LSD. Though safety data on the compound is scant, it is not known to be linked to some of the severe symptoms seen in the current string of illnesses. People who use 4-Aco-DMT describe it as producing effects similar to psilocybin, but without some of the unpleasant side effects noted with natural mushrooms, such as nausea. Still, according to the CDC, some people who use it could experience nausea, vomiting, fast heart rate, anxiety, agitation, lightheadedness, or tremor.

Additionally, the FDA found three compounds from the Kava plant (Piper methysticum) in the company’s dark chocolate bar, though not the birthday-cake flavored bar. The compounds are kavalactones—desmethoxyyangonin, dihydrokavain, and kavain.

Concerning kava

Kava is a plant found on some Pacific Islands and is used in traditional herbal remedies for the treatment of anxiety, insomnia, stress, and other ailments. But, over the years, it has also occasionally been linked to severe liver toxicity. In the early 2000s, this led to warnings, withdrawals, and even bans in several countries, including Germany, Switzerland, France, Canada, and the UK. In 2002, the FDA issued an advisory of its own over the associated liver injuries, which include hepatitis, cirrhosis, and liver failure. Later that same year, researchers published case reports of 11 people (two in the US and nine in Europe) who developed liver failure after using kava products and needed subsequent liver transplants.

In an update on the illnesses linked to Diamond Shruumz candies, the CDC noted that kava can cause numbness of the mouth and skin, loss of coordination, dizziness, sedation, and gastrointestinal effects, such as nausea and vomiting. Consuming kava products alongside alcohol or drugs like benzodiazepines (e.g. Valium and Xanax) can heighten the sedative effects. But, the CDC seemed to downplay the risk of liver toxicity here, noting that it has only occasionally been associated with chronic or heavy ingestion of kava.

In all, it’s still unclear if the compounds the FDA identified in the Diamond Shruumz chocolate bars so far can explain the illnesses seen in the linked cases. The CDC lists the severe and common symptoms from those cases as including seizures, decreased level of consciousness, respiratory failure, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, hallucinations, uncontrolled movements, abnormal heart rate (e.g., too fast or too slow), high or low blood pressure, excessive sweating or secretions, and flushed skin.

The FDA said testing of other Diamond Shruumz products is still in progress. The agency noted that there can be differences across products and batches. In the meantime, the agency advises consumers not to eat, sell, or serve any of the company’s products and, instead, discard them.

There is still no recall of the candies. Diamond Shruumz has not responded to multiple inquiries from Ars. The FDA said Tuesday that the agency has “been in contact with the firm about a possible voluntary recall,” but to date, Diamond Shruumz has not initiated one.

Synthetic psychedelic found in candies linked to seizures, intubation Read More »

dna-based-bacterial-parasite-uses-completely-new-dna-editing-method

DNA-based bacterial parasite uses completely new DNA-editing method

biochemistry, Biology, DNA, gene editing, molecular biology, RNA, Science / /
Top row: individual steps in the reaction process. Bottom row: cartoon diagram of the top, showing the position of each DNA and RNA strand.

Enlarge / Top row: individual steps in the reaction process. Bottom row: cartoon diagram of the top, showing the position of each DNA and RNA strand.

Hiraizumi, et. al.

While CRISPR is probably the most prominent gene-editing technology, there are a variety of others, some developed before, others since. And people have been developing CRISPR variants to perform more specialized functions, like altering specific bases. In all of these cases, researchers are trying to balance a number of competing factors: convenience; flexibility; specificity and precision for the editing; low error rates; and so on.

So, having additional options for editing can be a good thing, enabling new ways of balancing those different needs. On Wednesday, a pair of papers in Nature describe a DNA-based parasite that moves itself around bacterial genomes through a mechanism that hasn’t been previously described. It’s nowhere near ready for use in humans, but it may have some distinctive features that make it worth further development.

Going mobile

Mobile genetic elements, commonly called transposons, are quite common in many species—they make up nearly half the sequences in the human genome, for example. They are indeed mobile, showing up in new locations throughout the genome, sometimes by cutting themselves out and hopping to new locations, other times by sending a copy out to a new place in the genome. For any of this to work, they need to have an enzyme that cuts DNA and specifically recognizes the right transposon sequence to insert into the cut.

The specificity of that interaction, needed to ensure the system only inserts new copies of itself, and the cutting of DNA, are features we’d like for gene editing, which places a value on better understanding these systems.

Bacterial genomes tend to have very few transposons—the extra DNA isn’t really in keeping with the bacterial reproduction approach of “copy all the DNA as quickly as possible when there’s food around.” Yet bacterial transposons do exist, and a team of scientists based in the US and Japan identified one with a rather unusual feature. As an intermediate step in moving to a new location, the two ends of the transposon (called IS110) are linked together to form a circular piece of DNA.

In its circular form, the DNA sequences at the junction act as a signal that tells the cell to make an RNA copy of nearby DNA (termed a “promoter”). When linear, each of the two bits of DNA on either side of the junction lacks the ability to act as a signal; it only works when the transposon is circular. And the researchers confirmed that there is in fact an RNA produced by the circular form, although the RNA does not encode for any proteins.

So, the research team looked at over 100 different relatives of IS110 and found that they could all produce similar non-protein-coding RNAs, all of which shared some key features. These included stretches where nearby sections of the RNA could base-pair with each other, leaving an unpaired loop of RNA in between. Two of these loops contained sequences that either base-paired with the transposon itself or at the sites in the E. coli genome where it inserted.

That suggests that the RNA produced by the circular form of the transposon helped to act as a guide, ensuring that the transposon’s DNA was specifically used and only inserted into precise locations in the genome.

Editing without precision

To confirm this was right, the researchers developed a system where the transposon would produce a fluorescent protein when it was properly inserted into the genome. They used this to show that mutations in the loop that recognized the transposon would stop it from being inserted into the genome—and that it was possible to direct it to new locations in the genome by changing the recognition sequences in the second loop.

To show this was potentially useful for gene editing, the researchers blocked the production of the transposon’s own RNA and fed it a replacement RNA that worked. So, you could potentially use this system to insert arbitrary DNA sequences into arbitrary locations in a genome. It could also be used with targeting RNAs that caused specific DNA sequences to be deleted. All of this is potentially very useful for gene editing.

Emphasis on “potentially.” The problem is that the targeting sequences in the loops are quite short, with the insertion site targeted by a recognition sequence that’s only four to seven bases long. At the short end of this range, you’d expect that a random string of bases would have an insertion site about once every 250 bases.

That relatively low specificity showed. At the high end, various experiments could see an insertion accuracy ranging from a close-to-being-useful 94 percent down to a positively threatening 50 percent. For deletion experiments, the low end of the range was a catastrophic 32 percent accuracy. So, while this has some features of an interesting gene-editing system, there’s a lot of work to do before it could fulfill that potential. It’s possible that these recognition loops could be made longer to add the sort of specificity that would be needed for editing vertebrate genomes, but we simply don’t know at this point.

DNA-based bacterial parasite uses completely new DNA-editing method Read More »

some-european-launch-officials-still-have-their-heads-stuck-in-the-sand

Some European launch officials still have their heads stuck in the sand

ariane 6, falcon 9, Science, Space, starship / /

This is fine —

“Starship will not eradicate Ariane 6 at all.”

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The first stage of Ariane 6 rocket Europe's Spaceport in Kourou in the French overseas department of Guiana, on March 26, 2024.

Enlarge / The first stage of Ariane 6 rocket Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou in the French overseas department of Guiana, on March 26, 2024.

LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP via Getty Images

There was a panel discussion at a space conference in Singapore 11 years ago that has since become legendary in certain corners of the space industry for what it reveals about European attitudes toward upstart SpaceX.

The panel included representatives from a handful of launch enterprises, including Europe-based Arianespace, and the US launch company SpaceX. At one point during the discussion, the host asked the Arianespace representative—its chief of sales in Southeast Asia, Richard Bowles—how the institutional European company would respond to SpaceX’s promise of lower launch costs and reuse with the Falcon 9 rocket.

“What I’m discovering in the market is that SpaceX primarily seems to be selling a dream, which is good. We should all dream,” Bowles replied. “I think a $5 million launch or a $15 million launch is a bit of a dream. Personally, I think reusability is a dream. How am I going to respond to a dream? My answer to respond to a dream is, first of all, you don’t wake people up.”

To be fair to Bowles, at the time of his remarks, SpaceX had only launched the Falcon 9 five times by the middle of 2013. But his condescension was nevertheless something to behold.

Later in the discussion, Bowles added that he did not believe launching 100 times a year, something that SpaceX was starting to talk about, was “realistic.” Then, in a moment of high paternalism, he turned to the SpaceX official on the panel and said, “You shouldn’t present things that are not realistic.”

In response, Barry Matsumori, a senior vice president at SpaceX, calmly said he would let his company’s response come through its actions.

Actions do speak louder than words

Eleven years later, of course, SpaceX is launching more than 100 times a year. The company’s internal price for launching a Falcon 9 is significantly less than $20 million. And all of this is possible through the reuse of the rocket’s first stage and payload fairings, each of which have now proven capable of flying 20 or more times.

One might think that, in the decade since, European launch officials would have learned their lesson. After all, last year, the continent had to resort to launching its valuable Euclid Space Telescope on a Falcon 9 rocket. This year, because the new European Ariane 6 rocket was not yet ready after myriad delays, multiple Galileo satellites have been launched and will be launched on the Falcon 9 rocket.

Some officials have taken note. In a candid commentary last year, European Space Agency chief Josef Aschbacher acknowledged that the continent faced an “acute” launcher crisis amid the Ariane 6 delays and the rise of SpaceX as a launch competitor. “SpaceX has undeniably changed the launcher market paradigm as we know it,” Aschbacher wrote. “With the dependable reliability of Falcon 9 and the captivating prospects of Starship, SpaceX continues to totally redefine the world’s access to space, pushing the boundaries of possibility as they go along.”

But not everyone got the message, it seems.

Next month, the Ariane 6 rocket should finally make its debut. It will probably be successful. Europe has excellent technical capabilities in regard to launch. But from day one, the Ariane 6 launch vehicle will cost significantly more than the Falcon 9 rocket, which has similar capabilities, and offer no provision for reuse. Certainly, it will meet Europe’s institutional needs. But it likely will not shake up the market, nor realistically compete with a fully reusable Falcon 9.

Who really needs to be woken up?

And what about Starship? If and when SpaceX can deliver it to the market, the next-generation rocket will offer a fully reusable booster with five times the lift capacity of the Ariane 6 rocket for half its cost or less. How can Europe hope to compete with that? The European Space Agency’s director of space transportation, Toni Tolker-Nielsen—who works for Aschbacher, it should be noted—said he’s not concerned.

“Honestly, I don’t think Starship will be a game-changer or a real competitor,” he said in an interview with Space News. “This huge launcher is designed to fly people to the Moon and Mars. Ariane 6 is perfect for the job if you need to launch a four- or five-ton satellite. Starship will not eradicate Ariane 6 at all.”

In one sense, Tolker-Nielsen is correct. Starship will not change how Europe gets its small and medium-sized satellites into space. Made and launched in Europe, the Ariane 6 rocket will be a workhorse for the continent. Indeed, some European officials are going so far as to press for legislation mandating that European satellites launch on European rockets.

But to say Starship will not be a game-changer represents the same head-in-the-sand attitude displayed by Bowles a decade ago with his jokes about not waking the deluded dreamers up. In hindsight, it’s clear that the dreamers were not SpaceX or its customers. Rather, they were European officials who had lulled themselves into thinking their dominance in commercial launch would persist without innovation.

While they slumbered, these officials ignored the rise of reusability. They decided the Ariane 6 rocket should look like its expendable predecessors, with solid rocket boosters. Meanwhile, following the rise of the Falcon 9, nearly all new rocket projects have incorporated a significant reusability component. It’s no longer just SpaceX founder Elon Musk saying companies need to pursue reuse or perish. Almost everyone is.

Perhaps someone should wake Tolker-Nielsen up.

Some European launch officials still have their heads stuck in the sand Read More »

the-mythical-gryphon-was-not-inspired-by-a-horned-dinosaur,-study-concludes

The mythical gryphon was not inspired by a horned dinosaur, study concludes

cryptology, Folklore, geomyths, gryphon, mythbusting, mythical creatures, mythology, paleontology, Science / /

Fantastic beasts and where not to find them —

The mythological creatures are instead “chimeras of big cats and raptorial birds.”

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Painting of a griffin, a lion-raptor chimaera

Enlarge / Painting of a gryphon, or griffin, a lion-raptor chimera from ancient folklore.

Mark Witton

The gryphon, or griffin, is a legendary creature dating back to classical antiquity, sporting the body, legs, and tail of a lion and the wings, head, and front talons of an eagle. Since the 1980s, a popular “geomyth” has spread that the griffin’s unique appearance was inspired by the fossilized skeleton of a horned dinosaur known as Protoceratops. It’s a fascinating and colorful story, but according to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, there is no hard evidence to support such a connection.

“Everything about griffin origins is consistent with their traditional interpretation as imaginary beasts, just as their appearance is entirely explained by them being [mythological] chimeras of big cats and raptorial birds,” said co-author Mark Witton, a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth. “Invoking a role for dinosaurs in griffin lore, especially species from distant lands like Protoceratops, not only introduces unnecessary complexity and inconsistencies to their origins, but also relies on interpretations and proposals that don’t withstand scrutiny.”

There are representations of griffin-like creatures in ancient Egyptian art dated to before 3000 BCE, while in ancient Greek and Roman texts the creatures were associated with gold deposits in Central Asia. By the Middle Ages, griffins were common figures in medieval iconography and in heraldry. The hippogriff named Buckbeak in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a related mythical creature, the product of a griffin and a mare.

It was the legendary link to Central Asian gold deposits that intrigued classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor in the 1980s. Drawing on Greek and Latin texts and related artworks, she suggested (beginning with a 1989 paper in Cryptozoology) that nomadic prospectors stumbled across fossilized skeletons of Protoceratops and brought tales of strange beaked quadrupeds to other regions as they traveled southeast along ancient trade routes. The dinosaur’s bony neck frill might have been interpreted in early illustrations as mammal-like external ears, with its beak indicating a creature that was part-bird, leading to the eventual addition of wings.

This 9th century BCE relief depicts a griffin-like monster being pursued by a deity.

Enlarge / This 9th century BCE relief depicts a griffin-like monster being pursued by a deity.

L. Gruner/Layard (1853)

Over the last 30 years, Mayor’s hypothesis has gained traction in the popular media and within certain academic circles; it’s now one of the most famous and widely touted examples of geomythology. It’s not an entirely crazy idea, even if its origins lie in the pseudoscientific field of cryptozoology. After all, people as far back as Paleolithic times certainly used fossils as decorative ornaments or talismans, and there are bona fide cases of such “geomyths”: For example, British ammonites were modified into “snake stones”; shark teeth were interpreted as snake tongues; and “winged” brachiopods became “stone swallows” in historic China.

The case for skepticism

But Witton and fellow Portsmouth paleontologist Richard Hing were skeptical because of the lack of any material evidence to support the connection between the griffin and Protoceratops. And they weren’t alone. Paleontologist Paul Sereno once dismissed Mayor’s claims as “sophomoric” and questioned her understanding of how fossils are found, identified, and interpreted, per the authors. So they set out to conduct the first detailed assessment of Mayor’s claims, re-examining historical fossil records—including the distribution of sites where Protoceratops fossils have been found—and classical sources, as well as consulting with historians and archaeologists about the supposed link.

“It is important to distinguish between fossil folklore with a factual basis—that is, connections between fossils and myth evidenced by archaeological discoveries or compelling references in literature and artwork—and speculated connections based on intuition,” said Hing. “There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea that ancient peoples found dinosaur bones and incorporated them into their mythology, but we need to root such proposals in realities of history, geography, and palaeontology. Otherwise, they are just speculation.”

The mythical gryphon was not inspired by a horned dinosaur, study concludes Read More »

political-deepfakes-are-the-most-popular-way-to-misuse-ai

Political deepfakes are the most popular way to misuse AI

AI, Deepfakes, deepmind, Google, syndication / /

This is not going well —

Study from Google’s DeepMind lays out nefarious ways AI is being used.

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Political deepfakes are the most popular way to misuse AI

Artificial intelligence-generated “deepfakes” that impersonate politicians and celebrities are far more prevalent than efforts to use AI to assist cyber attacks, according to the first research by Google’s DeepMind division into the most common malicious uses of the cutting-edge technology.

The study said the creation of realistic but fake images, video, and audio of people was almost twice as common as the next highest misuse of generative AI tools: the falsifying of information using text-based tools, such as chatbots, to generate misinformation to post online.

The most common goal of actors misusing generative AI was to shape or influence public opinion, the analysis, conducted with the search group’s research and development unit Jigsaw, found. That accounted for 27 percent of uses, feeding into fears over how deepfakes might influence elections globally this year.

Deepfakes of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, as well as other global leaders, have appeared on TikTok, X, and Instagram in recent months. UK voters go to the polls next week in a general election.

Concern is widespread that, despite social media platforms’ efforts to label or remove such content, audiences may not recognize these as fake, and dissemination of the content could sway voters.

Ardi Janjeva, research associate at The Alan Turing Institute, called “especially pertinent” the paper’s finding that the contamination of publicly accessible information with AI-generated content could “distort our collective understanding of sociopolitical reality.”

Janjeva added: “Even if we are uncertain about the impact that deepfakes have on voting behavior, this distortion may be harder to spot in the immediate term and poses long-term risks to our democracies.”

The study is the first of its kind by DeepMind, Google’s AI unit led by Sir Demis Hassabis, and is an attempt to quantify the risks from the use of generative AI tools, which the world’s biggest technology companies have rushed out to the public in search of huge profits.

As generative products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini become more widely used, AI companies are beginning to monitor the flood of misinformation and other potentially harmful or unethical content created by their tools.

In May, OpenAI released research revealing operations linked to Russia, China, Iran, and Israel had been using its tools to create and spread disinformation.

“There had been a lot of understandable concern around quite sophisticated cyber attacks facilitated by these tools,” said Nahema Marchal, lead author of the study and researcher at Google DeepMind. “Whereas what we saw were fairly common misuses of GenAI [such as deepfakes that] might go under the radar a little bit more.”

Google DeepMind and Jigsaw’s researchers analyzed around 200 observed incidents of misuse between January 2023 and March 2024, taken from social media platforms X and Reddit, as well as online blogs and media reports of misuse.

Ars Technica

The second most common motivation behind misuse was to make money, whether offering services to create deepfakes, including generating naked depictions of real people, or using generative AI to create swaths of content, such as fake news articles.

The research found that most incidents use easily accessible tools, “requiring minimal technical expertise,” meaning more bad actors can misuse generative AI.

Google DeepMind’s research will influence how it improves its evaluations to test models for safety, and it hopes it will also affect how its competitors and other stakeholders view how “harms are manifesting.”

© 2024 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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microsoft-removes-documentation-for-switching-to-a-local-account-in-windows-11

Microsoft removes documentation for switching to a local account in Windows 11

microsoft, Tech, Windows 10, Windows 11, windows 11 23h2, windows 11 24h2 / /

you’re *sureyou don’t want to use a Microsoft account?? —

But most Microsoft account sign-in workarounds for Windows 11 continue to work.

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A laptop PC running Windows 11 sitting next to a coffee mug.

Enlarge / A PC running Windows 11.

Microsoft

One of Windows 11’s more contentious changes is that, by default, both the Home and Pro editions of the operating system require users to sign in with a Microsoft account during setup. Signing in with an account does get you some benefits, at least if you’re a regular user of other Microsoft products like OneDrive, GamePass, or Microsoft 365 (aka Office). But if you don’t use those services, a lot of what a Microsoft account gets you in Windows 11 is repeated ads and reminders about signing up for those services. Using Windows with a traditional local account is still extremely possible, but it does require a small amount of know-how beyond just clicking the right buttons.

On the know-how front, Microsoft has taken one more minor, but nevertheless irritating, step away from allowing users to sign in with local accounts. This official Microsoft support page walks users with local accounts through the process of signing in to a Microsoft account. As recently as June 12, that page also included instructions for converting a Microsoft account into a local account. But according to Tom’s Hardware and the Internet Wayback Machine, those instructions disappeared on or around June 17 and haven’t been seen since.

Despite the documentation change, most of the workarounds for creating a local account still work in both Windows 11 23H2 (the publicly available version of Windows 11 for most PCs) and 24H2 (available now on Copilot+ PCs, later this fall for everyone else). The easiest way to do it on a PC you just took out of the box is to press Shift+F10 during the setup process to bring up a command prompt window, typing OOBEBYPASSNRO, rebooting, and then clicking the “I don’t have Internet” button when asked to connect to a Wi-Fi network.

Other workarounds include using the Rufus tool to create a USB installer that will automatically bypass the Microsoft account sign-in requirement, or (for Windows 11 Pro users) indicating that you want to join the PC to a corporate domain and then not actually joining it to a domain. Setting the PC up with a Microsoft account and then signing out afterward is also still an option.

There is one workaround that has allegedly stopped working—it used to be that trying to “sign in” with a nonexistent email account would get you a local sign-in option. But as of earlier this month, according to Windows Central editor Zac Bowden, it looks like the Windows 11 setup screen will just ask you to try another email address instead.

To be fair to Microsoft, all the big tech companies want you to sign in with an account before you can use all the features of the software, but neither Apple nor Google goes as far as to mandate account sign-in to access basic functionality. Macs, iPhones, and iPads will all let you complete the setup process without signing in, though you do have to know which buttons to click. Google will allow you to use Chromebooks in guest mode, and Android phones and tablets are still usable without signing in (though this does make it more difficult to find and install apps). Microsoft’s pushiness remains unique; there’s definitely a difference between a company that would really prefer that you sign in, and one that forces you to.

Microsoft removes documentation for switching to a local account in Windows 11 Read More »

larry-finger-made-linux-wireless-work-and-brought-others-along-to-learn

Larry Finger made Linux wireless work and brought others along to learn

larry finger, Linux, Linux kernel, linux kernel mailing list, Tech, wi-fi, wireless / /

Linux kernel —

Remembering Finger, 84, who learned as he went and left his mark on many.

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Laptop showing a Wi-Fi signal icon amidst an outdoor scene with a coffee cup nearby.

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Linux and its code are made by people, and people are not with us forever. Over the weekend, a brief message on the Linux kernel mailing list reminded people of just how much one person can mean to a seemingly gargantuan project like Linux, and how quickly they can disappear:

Denise Finger, wife of the deceased, wrote to the Linux Wireless list on Friday evening:

This is to notify you that Larry Finger, one of your developers, passed away on June 21st.

LWN.net reckons that Finger, 84, contributed to 94 Linux kernel releases, or 1,464 commits total, at least since kernel 2.6.16 in 2006 (and when the kernel started using git to track changes). Given the sometimes precarious nature of contributing to the kernel, this is on its own an impressive achievement—especially for someone with no formal computer training, and who considered himself a scientist.

The deepest of trenches: Linux Wi-Fi in the 2000s

That kind of effort is worth celebrating, regardless. But it’s the space that Finger devoted himself to that makes him a notably patient, productive contributor.

Getting Wi-Fi to work on a device running Linux back when Finger started contributing was awful. The chances of your hardware being recognized, activated, and working properly right after install was akin to getting a straight flush in poker. If nobody had gotten around to your wireless chipset yet, you used NDISwrapper, a Windows-interfacing kludge tool that simultaneously made your Linux install less open and yet still painful to install and maintain.

Finger started fixing this with work on Broadcom’s BCM43XX drivers. Broadcom provided no code for its gear, so Finger helped reverse-engineer the necessary specs by manually dumping and reading hardware registers. Along with Broadcom drivers, Finger also provided Realtek drivers. Many commenters across blogs and message boards are noting that their systems are still using pieces of Finger’s code today.

Fixing mainframes, science gear, and RV resorts

Larry Finger, and fish, from his Quora profile.

Larry Finger, and fish, from his Quora profile.

Quora

Finger doesn’t have a large footprint on the web, outside of his hundreds of kernel commits. He has a page for DRAWxtl, for producing crystal-structure drawings, on his personal domain, but not a general personal page. He sometimes answered Quora questions. He had a GitHub profile, showing more than 100 contributions to projects in 2024.

Perhaps the biggest insight into Finger found in one place is a three-part series for Linux Journal, “Linux in a Windows Workstation Environment,” written in 2005, when he was roughly 65. He summarizes his background: Fortran programmer in 1963, PDP-11 interfaces to scientific instruments in the 1970s, VAX-11/780 work in the early 1980s, and then Unix/Linux systems, until retiring from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, in 1999. The mineral Fingerite is named for Finger, whose work in crystallography took him on a fellowship to northern Bavaria, as noted in one Quora answer about the Autobahn.

“At that time, I became a full-time RV resident, dedicated to the avoidance of cold weather,” Finger writes. He and his wife Denise arrived that year at a 55-plus RV community in Mesa, Arizona. He joined the computer club, which had a growing number of Windows PCs sharing a DSL connection through one of the systems running WinGate. A new RV resort owner wanted to expand to 22 workstations, but WinGate licenses for that many would have been expensive for the club. Finger, who was “highly distrustful of using Windows 98 in a mission-critical role,” set to work.

Finger goes on across the series to describe the various ways he upgraded the routing and server capacity of the network, which grew to 38 user stations, Samba shares, a membership database, VPN tunnels, several free RJ-45 ports, and “free Wi-Fi access… throughout the park.”

Passing it along

Larry Finger, from his obituary page.

Enlarge / Larry Finger, from his obituary page.

Hixson-Klein Funeral Home

Lots of people have commented on the broad work Finger did to make Linux usable for more people. A few mention that Finger also mentored people, the kind of work that has exponential effects. “MB” wrote on LWN.net that Finger “mentored other people to get the Broadcom Open Source code into kernel. And I think it was a huge success. And that was only a small part of Larry’s success story.”

In a 2023 Quora response to someone asking if someone without “any formal training in computer science” can “contribute something substantial” to Linux, Finger writes, “I think that I have.” Finger links to the stats for the 6.4 kernel, showing 172,346 lines of his code in it, roughly 0.5% of the total.

I have never taken any courses in Computer Science; however, I have considerable experience in coding, much of which happened when computers were a lot less powerful than today, and it was critical to write code that ran efficiently.

Finger suggests in his response small patches, deep reading of the guidelines, and always using git’s send-email to send patches: “Nothing will get shot down more quickly than a patch submitted from a mailer such as Thunderbird.” Finding typos and errors in comments and text strings can help, especially after translation. Finger advises being patient, expecting criticism about following rules and formats, and to keep plugging away at it.

In another Quora response about kernel driver development, Finger says, “This activity can be highly rewarding, and also equally frustrating!” You should learn C, Finger suggested, and maybe start with analyzing USB drivers, and take your time learning about DMA.

“Do not lose hope,” Finger wrote. “It took me about 2 years before I could do anything more than tell the experts where my system was generating a fault.”

Larry Finger made Linux wireless work and brought others along to learn Read More »

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iFixit says new Arm Surface hardware “puts repair front and center”

copilot+ PC, microsoft, Microsoft Surface, qualcomm, snapdragon x elite, Tech, Windows 11, windows 11 24h2, windows on arm / /

how things have changed —

Both devices make it relatively easy to get at the battery and SSD.

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Microsoft's 11th-edition Surface Pro, as exploded by iFixit. Despite adhesive holding in the screen and the fact that you need to remove the heatsink to get at the battery, it's still much more repairable than past Surfaces or competing tablets.

Enlarge / Microsoft’s 11th-edition Surface Pro, as exploded by iFixit. Despite adhesive holding in the screen and the fact that you need to remove the heatsink to get at the battery, it’s still much more repairable than past Surfaces or competing tablets.

For a long time, Microsoft’s Surface hardware was difficult-to-impossible to open and repair, and devices as recent as 2019’s Surface Pro 7 still managed a repairability score of just 1 out of 10 on iFixit’s scale. 2017’s original Surface Laptop needed to be physically sliced apart to access its internals, making it essentially impossible to try to fix the machine without destroying it.

But in recent years, partly due to pressure from shareholders and others, Microsoft has made an earnest effort to improve the repairability of its devices. The company has published detailed repair manuals and videos and has made changes to its hardware designs over the years to make it easier to open them without breaking them and easier to replace parts once you’re inside. Microsoft also sells some first-party parts for repairs, though not every part from every Surface is available, and Microsoft and iFixit have partnered to offer other parts as well.

Now, iFixit has torn apart the most recent Snapdragon X-powered Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices and has mostly high praise for both devices in its preliminary teardown video. Both devices earn an 8 out of 10 on iFixit’s repairability scale, thanks to Microsoft’s first-party service manuals, the relative ease with which both devices can be opened, and clearly labeled internal components.

Beneath the Surface

To open the Surface Laptop, iFixit says you only need to undo four screws, hidden beneath the laptop’s rubber feet; at that point, the bottom of the machine is only attached by magnets, rather than breakable retention clips. Opening the bottom of the laptop provides easy access to the battery and an M.2 2232 SSD. Labels inside the device indicate which screws need to be removed to replace which parts, and what kind of screwdriver you’ll need to do the job; scannable barcodes also make it easier to find repair manuals and parts on Microsoft’s site. Most other parts are easy to remove and replace once the bottom of the laptop is off.

The Surface Pro’s best repairability feature remains its easily accessible M.2 2232 SSD, present under a pop-off cover on the back of the tablet. From there, things get more difficult—accessing the battery and other components requires removing the screen, which is still held in place with adhesive rather than screws or magnets. This adhesive needs to be removed—iFixit cut it away with a thin plastic tool, and closing the tablet back up securely would likely require new adhesive to be applied. Once inside, the parts and screws are still labeled clearly, but you do need to remove the entire heatsink before you can replace the battery.

iFixit uses slightly different criteria for evaluating the repairability of laptops and tablets since tablets are more tightly integrated devices. So despite the identical repairability scores, the Surface Pro remains slightly more difficult to open and fix than the laptop; iFixit is just comparing it to devices like the iPad Air and Pro rather than other PC laptops, and the Surface Pro still looks better than other tablets by comparison despite the use of adhesive.

The teardown video didn’t detail exactly why iFixit knocked points off of each device’s repairability score, though iFixit took note of the soldered-down non-upgradeable RAM and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth modules. Both devices also use way more screws and clips than something like the Framework Laptop, which could also be a factor.

We’ve been using the new Snapdragon-powered Surface devices for a few days now, and we’ll have more thoughts to share about the hardware and its performance in the coming days.

iFixit says new Arm Surface hardware “puts repair front and center” Read More »

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Is having a pet good for you? The fuzzy science of pet ownership

Cats, Dogs, pets, Science, syndication / /

Who’s a good dog? —

It turns out the pet care industry has funded a lot of studies.

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A picture of a bull terrier on a park bench

For more than a decade, in blog posts and scientific papers and public talks, the psychologist Hal Herzog has questioned whether owning pets makes people happier and healthier.

It is a lonely quest, convincing people that puppies and kittens may not actually be terrific for their physical and mental health. “When I talk to people about this,” Herzog recently said, “nobody believes me.” A prominent professor at a major public university once described him as “a super curmudgeon” who is, in effect, “trying to prove that apple pie causes cancer.”

As a teenager in New Jersey in the 1960s, Herzog kept dogs and cats, as well as an iguana, a duck, and a boa constrictor named Boa. Now a professor emeritus at Western Carolina University, he insists he’s not out to smear anyone’s furry friends. In a blog post questioning the so-called pet effect, in 2012, Herzog included a photo of his cat, Tilly. “She makes my life better,” he wrote. “Please Don’t Blame The Messenger!”

Plenty of people believe there’s something salubrious about caring for a pet, similar to eating veggies or exercising regularly. But, Herzog argues, the scientific evidence that pets can consistently make people healthier is, at best, inconclusive—and, at worst, has been used to mislead the American public.

Few, if any, experts say Herzog is exactly wrong—at least about the science. Over the past 30 or so years, researchers have published hundreds of studies exploring a link between pet ownership and a range of hypothesized benefits, including improved heart health, longer lifespans, and lower rates of anxiety and depression.

The results have been mixed. Studies often fail to find any robust link between pets and human well-being; some even find evidence of harms. In many cases, the studies simply can’t determine whether pets cause the observed effect or are simply correlated with it.

Where Herzog and some other experts have concerns is with the way those mixed results have been packaged and sold to the public. Tied up in that critique are pointed questions about the role of industry money on the development of a small field—a trend that happens across scientific endeavors, particularly those that don’t garner much attention from federal agencies, philanthropies, and other funding sources.

The pet care industry has invested millions of dollars in human-animal interaction research, mostly since the late 2000s. Feel-good findings have been trumpeted by industry press releases and, in turn, dominated news coverage, with headlines like “How Dogs Help Us Lead Longer, Healthier Lives.”

At times, industry figures have even framed pet ownership as a kind of public health intervention. “Everybody should quit smoking. Everybody should go to the gym. Everybody should eat more fruits and vegetables. And everyone should own a pet,” said Steven Feldman, president of the industry-funded Human Animal Bond Research Institute, in a 2015 podcast interview.

The problem with that kind of argument, Herzog and other experts say, is that it gets out ahead of the evidence (and that not every person is equipped to care for a pet). “Most studies,” said Herzog, “do not show the pattern of results that the pet products industry claims.”

Is having a pet good for you? The fuzzy science of pet ownership Read More »

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Decades later, John Romero looks back at the birth of the first-person shooter

Doom, Features, gaming, id, id Software, john romero, romero, Wolfenstein, wolfenstein 3d / /

Daikatana didn’t come up —

Id Software co-founder talks to Ars about everything from Catacomb 3-D to “boomer shooters.”

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Decades later, John Romero looks back at the birth of the first-person shooter

John Romero remembers the moment he realized what the future of gaming would look like.

In late 1991, Romero and his colleagues at id Software had just released Catacomb 3-D, a crude-looking, EGA-colored first-person shooter that was nonetheless revolutionary compared to other first-person games of the time. “When we started making our 3D games, the only 3D games out there were nothing like ours,” Romero told Ars in a recent interview. “They were lockstep, going through a maze, do a 90-degree turn, that kind of thing.”

Despite Catacomb 3-D‘s technological advances in first-person perspective, though, Romero remembers the team at id followed its release by going to work on the next entry in the long-running Commander Keen series of 2D platform games. But as that process moved forward, Romero told Ars that something didn’t feel right.

Catacombs 3-D is less widely remembered than its successor, Wolfenstein 3D.

“Within two weeks, [I was up] at one in the morning and I’m just like, ‘Guys we need to not make this game [Keen],'” he said. “‘This is not the future. The future is getting better at what we just did with Catacomb.’ … And everyone was immediately was like, ‘Yeah, you know, you’re right. That is the new thing, and we haven’t seen it, and we can do it, so why aren’t we doing it?'”

The team started working on Wolfenstein 3D that very night, Romero said. And the rest is history.

Going for speed

What set Catacomb 3-D and its successors apart from other first-person gaming experiments of the time, Romero said, “was our speed—the speed of the game was critical to us having that massive differentiation. Everyone else was trying to do a world that was proper 3D—six degrees of freedom or representation that was really detailed. And for us, the way that we were going to go was a simple rendering at a high speed with good gameplay. Those were our pillars, and we stuck with them, and that’s what really differentiated them from everyone else.”

That focus on speed extended to id’s development process, which Romero said was unrecognizable compared to even low-budget indie games of today. The team didn’t bother writing out design documents laying out crucial ideas beforehand, for instance, because Romero said “the design doc was next to us; it was the creative director… The games weren’t that big back then, so it was easy for us to say, ‘this is what we’re making’ and ‘things are going to be like this.’ And then we all just work on our own thing.”

John Carmack (left) and John Romero (second from right) pose with their id Software colleagues in the early '90s.

Enlarge / John Carmack (left) and John Romero (second from right) pose with their id Software colleagues in the early ’90s.

The early id designers didn’t even use basic development tools like version control systems, Romero said. Instead, development was highly compartmentalized between different developers; “the files that I’m going to work on, he doesn’t touch, and I don’t touch his files,” Romero remembered of programming games alongside John Carmack. “I only put the files on my transfer floppy disk that he needs, and it’s OK for him to copy everything off of there and overwrite what he has because it’s only my files, and vice versa. If for some reason the hard drive crashed, we could rebuild the source from anyone’s copies of what they’ve got.”

Decades later, John Romero looks back at the birth of the first-person shooter Read More »

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Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win

controlled digital lending, copyright law, fair use, Features, internat archive, Open Library, Policy, Uncategorized / /
Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win

As a result of book publishers successfully suing the Internet Archive (IA) last year, the free online library that strives to keep growing online access to books recently shrank by about 500,000 titles.

IA reported in a blog post this month that publishers abruptly forcing these takedowns triggered a “devastating loss” for readers who depend on IA to access books that are otherwise impossible or difficult to access.

To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court’s decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA’s controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law. An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library’s lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA’s lending than by preventing it.

“We use industry-standard technology to prevent our books from being downloaded and redistributed—the same technology used by corporate publishers,” Chris Freeland, IA’s director of library services, wrote in the blog. “But the publishers suing our library say we shouldn’t be allowed to lend the books we own. They have forced us to remove more than half a million books from our library, and that’s why we are appealing.”

IA will have an opportunity to defend its practices when oral arguments start in its appeal on June 28.

“Our position is straightforward; we just want to let our library patrons borrow and read the books we own, like any other library,” Freeland wrote, while arguing that the “potential repercussions of this lawsuit extend far beyond the Internet Archive” and publishers should just “let readers read.”

“This is a fight for the preservation of all libraries and the fundamental right to access information, a cornerstone of any democratic society,” Freeland wrote. “We believe in the right of authors to benefit from their work; and we believe that libraries must be permitted to fulfill their mission of providing access to knowledge, regardless of whether it takes physical or digital form. Doing so upholds the principle that knowledge should be equally and equitably accessible to everyone, regardless of where they live or where they learn.”

Internet Archive fans beg publishers to end takedowns

After publishers won an injunction stopping IA’s digital lending, which “limits what we can do with our digitized books,” IA’s help page said, the open library started shrinking. While “removed books are still available to patrons with print disabilities,” everyone else has been cut off, causing many books in IA’s collection to show up as “Borrow Unavailable.”

Ever since, IA has been “inundated” with inquiries from readers all over the world searching for the removed books, Freeland said. And “we get tagged in social media every day where people are like, ‘why are there so many books gone from our library’?” Freeland told Ars.

In an open letter to publishers signed by nearly 19,000 supporters, IA fans begged publishers to reconsider forcing takedowns and quickly restore access to the lost books.

Among the “far-reaching implications” of the takedowns, IA fans counted the negative educational impact of academics, students, and educators—”particularly in underserved communities where access is limited—who were suddenly cut off from “research materials and literature that support their learning and academic growth.”

They also argued that the takedowns dealt “a serious blow to lower-income families, people with disabilities, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people, among many others,” who may not have access to a local library or feel “safe accessing the information they need in public.”

“Your removal of these books impedes academic progress and innovation, as well as imperiling the preservation of our cultural and historical knowledge,” the letter said.

“This isn’t happening in the abstract,” Freeland told Ars. “This is real. People no longer have access to a half a million books.”

Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win Read More »