Enlarge / Just some of the inventive character designs included in UFO 50.
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If you’ve spent any time with retro gaming emulators, you’re likely familiar with the joy of browsing through a long list of (legally obtained) ROMs and feeling overwhelmed at a wide range of titles you’ve never even heard of. Picking randomly through such a game list is like wandering through a foreign country, searching for hidden jewels among all the shovelware in the bewildering and wildly imaginative early video game history.
UFO 50 captures that feeling perfectly, combining the freewheeling inventiveness of old-school game design with modern refinements and more consistent baseline quality bred over the ensuing decades. The result is an extremely playable love letter to the gaming history that will charm even the most jaded retro game fan.
A loving homage
UFO 50 presents itself as a collection of 50 dusty game cartridges made by UFO Soft, a fictional developer that operated from 1982 to 1989. Working through the company’s catalog, you’ll see evolution in graphics, music, and gameplay design that mirror the ever-changing gaming market of the real-world ’80s. You’ll also see the same characters, motifs, and credited “developers” appearing over and over again, building a convincing world behind the games themselves.
The individual games in UFO 50 definitely wear their influences on their sleeves, with countless, almost overt homages to specific ’80s arcade and console games. But there isn’t a single title here that I’d consider a simple clone or knock-off of an old gaming concept; each sub-game brings its own twist or novel idea that makes it feel new.
Ah, the joys of marching through a cavern of hallways with perfect 90-degree angles.
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Aw, you always get to be the shirtless muscle guy. Can I be Player 1 this time?
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A giant animal wearing only high-top boots? Sure, why not?
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The real-time positional strategy of Attactics feels like chess mixed with Advance Wars
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The titular “UFO” appears in a lot of different UFO 50 games, naturally
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Bubble Bobble homage Kick Club, for instance, replaces its inspiration’s bubble-blowing dinosaurs with a soccer player that has to constantly chase down his only weapon: a soccer ball. Vainger combines Metroid-style shooting and gated, maze-like exploration with the gravity-flipping of Metal Storm. Magic Garden combines the avoid-your-own-tail gameplay of Snake with items that let you eat up obstacles, Pac-Man-style.
Anyone who remembers playing games in the ’80s will instantly clock plenty of other clear references. A small sampling of ones I noticed includes: Bad Dudes, Blaster Master, Gradius, River City Ransom, Shadowgate, Super Dodge Ball, Smash TV, Space Harrier, and Super Sprint. And, just like any list of ’80s ROMs, you’ll also encounter plenty of grid-based puzzle games and shoot-em-ups, each with their own take on the popular genres.
But other UFO 50 offerings are retro-stylized versions of genres and games that didn’t really exist in the ’80s. If you ever wondered what a caveman-themed tower defense game would look like on the NES, Rock On! Island has the answer. Or if you want to see a positional arena fighter in the style of Super Smash Bros. (complete with original characters that sport their own moves and weapons) then Hyper Contender has you covered. Then there’s Velgress, which combines the retro run-and-gun platforming of the NES with the roguelike procedural generation of a modern classic like Downwell.
Still, other UFO 50 games squeeze completely original concepts (as far as I can tell) into the limited technology of the time period. Lords of Diskonia is a tactical battler that has you flinging units represented by Crokinole-style disks at the other side. Party House asks you to manage a Rolodex of party guests to maximize your money and popularity without attracting unwelcome attention from the cops. Waldorf’s Journey involves flinging the titular walrus on lengthy blind jumps while carefully adjusting his landing with hilarious, energy-consuming flaps of his flippers.
Hot Foot is an incredibly endearing and fun take on the Super Dodge Ball formula.
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Magic Garden combines the addictive qualities of Snake and Pac-Man.
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Each game comes complete with its own title screen, cut scenes, etc.
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There are a lot of shoot-em-ups in UFO 50, as befits the time period.
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It’s not all action. Night Manor is a full-fledged point-and-click adventure title.
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The sheer variety of different gameplay ideas on offer here is incredible. There are real-time strategy games and cooperative two-player brawlers. There’s a full-fledged golf RPG and also a 2D golf game with pinball-style hazards. There’s a Dave the Diver-esque undersea exploration adventure and a couple of Final Fantasy–style RPGs. There’s a game that combines Crazy Taxi and the original, overhead Grand Theft Auto. There’s a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles homage that combines five different genres with five unique, fully realized anthropomorphic human-animal hybrids.
Today is the official release date for the public versions of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS 15 Sequoia, and a scad of other Apple software updates, the foundation that Apple will use for Apple Intelligence and whatever other features it wants to add between now and next year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June. But for those who value stability and reliability over new features, you may not be excited to update to a new operating system with a version number ending in “0.”
For those of you who prefer to wait for a couple of bugfix updates before installing new stuff, Apple is also releasing security-only updates for a bunch of its (now) last-generation operating systems today. The iOS 17.7, iPadOS 17.7, and macOS 14.7 updates are either available now or should be shortly, along with a security update for 2022’s macOS 13 Ventura. An updated version of Safari 18 that runs on both macOS 13 and 14 should be available soon, though as of this writing is doesn’t appear to be available yet.
Apple has historically been pretty good about providing security updates to older macOS releases—you can expect them for about two years after the operating system is replaced by a newer version. But for iOS and iPadOS, the company used to stop updating older versions entirely after releasing a new one. This changed back in 2021, when Apple decided to start providing some security-only updates to older iOS versions to help people who were worried about installing an all-new potentially buggy OS upgrade.
Eventually, iOS and iPadOS users will need to install iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 to keep getting security updates. But for the handful of older iPads that can’t run iPadOS 18, Apple will usually keep supporting those specific devices with security updates for a year or two. Apple was still providing new security updates for 2022’s iOS 16 as recently as August, keeping older devices like the iPhone 8 and the first-generation iPad Pros reasonably secure even though they were incapable of running newer operating systems.
The macOS 15 Sequoia update will inevitably be known as “the AI one” in retrospect, introducing, as it does, the first wave of “Apple Intelligence” features.
That’s funny because none of that stuff is actually ready for the 15.0 release that’s coming out today. A lot of it is coming “later this fall” in the 15.1 update, which Apple has been testing entirely separately from the 15.0 betas for weeks now. Some of it won’t be ready until after that—rumors say image generation won’t be ready until the end of the year—but in any case, none of it is ready for public consumption yet.
But the AI-free 15.0 release does give us a chance to evaluate all of the non-AI additions to macOS this year. Apple Intelligence is sucking up a lot of the media oxygen, but in most other ways, this is a typical 2020s-era macOS release, with one or two headliners, several quality-of-life tweaks, and some sparsely documented under-the-hood stuff that will subtly change how you experience the operating system.
The AI-free version of the operating system is also the one that all users of the remaining Intel Macs will be using, since all of the Apple Intelligence features require Apple Silicon. Most of the Intel Macs that ran last year’s Sonoma release will run Sequoia this year—the first time this has happened since 2019—but the difference between the same macOS version running on different CPUs will be wider than it has been. It’s a clear indicator that the Intel Mac era is drawing to a close, even if support hasn’t totally ended just yet.
Tom Hardy returns for one more round as host of an alien symbiote, in Venom: The Last Dance.
Tom Hardy is back for one last hurrah as investigative journalist Eddie Brock, host of an alien symbiote that imparts superhuman powers to its host, in the final trailer for Venom: The Last Dance. The trailer has all the wise-cracking “buddy cop” vibes and fast-paced action we’ve come to expect from the franchise, including a trip to Vegas where Venom discovers the addictive allure of slot machines. But there are also hints of an inevitable bittersweet farewell—because this time they’ll face off against Knull, god-creator of the symbiotes.
(Spoilers for Venom and Venom: There Will Be Carnage below.)
As previously reported, the first film in the franchise served as an origin story for our antihero. A bioengineering firm called the Life Foundation discovered a comet covered with symbiotic lifeforms and brought four samples back to Earth. Brock’s then-fiancée, Anne Weying (Michelle Williams), showed him classified documents revealing that the foundation was conducting human/symbiote experiments. The symbiotes needed oxygen-breathing hosts to survive, but they invariably ended up killing those hosts.
Brock ended up infected with one of the symbiotes, named Venom. Venom revealed that the symbiotes are intent on taking over Earth by possessing/devouring all humans, but Brock ultimately struck up a bargain with Venom, and they decided to protect Earth instead. Together, they took on Life Foundation CEO Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), infected with a symbiote called Riot. Naturally, they won.
Venom was released in October 2018 and was roundly panned by critics, several of whom specifically bemoaned the lack of a Spider-Man connection. Audiences, however, begged to differ. Venom racked up $856 million globally. Hardy had already committed to two sequels, and a mid-credits sequence featured Harrelson’s Cletus Kasady taunting Brock (who was interviewing Kasady for a story) from his cell. Kasady vowed to escape and bring “carnage,” leaving little doubt as to the villain’s identity in a sequel.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage, directed by Andy Serkis, was released in 2021, also to mixed reviews and a strong box office, grossing $506.9 million worldwide. That film ended with Brock and Venom victorious over Kasady and heading off for a well-deserved vacation while the duo pondered their next steps. In a post-credits scene, Venom told Brock that he and his fellow symbiotes knew about other universes, at which point there was blinding light, and they were transported into the Marvel Cinematic Universe—a direct result of the spell cast by Doctor Strange in Spider-Man: No Way Home.(At the time, there were plans for a future crossover film with Tom Holland’s Spider-Man.)
“With you to the end”
Serkis was unable to return as director for The Last Dance, but Kelly Marcel, who wrote the screenplay for Carnage, stepped in to make her directorial debut. Per the official premise:
In Venom: The Last Dance, Tom Hardy returns as Venom, one of Marvel’s greatest and most complex characters, for the final film in the trilogy. Eddie and Venom are on the run. Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo are forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddie’s last dance.
In addition to Hardy, Peggy Lu is back as convenience store owner Mrs. Chen, who befriended Eddie and Venom early on. Also returning is Stephen Graham as Detective Patrick Mulligan, who figured prominently in There Will Be Carnage and is now infected with his own symbiote named Toxin.
Cristo Fernández will reprise his role as the bartender in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man. Rhys Ifans played Curt Connors/Lizard in that film but will play a man named Martin in The Last Dance. Is there a secret connection? We’ll have to wait and see. (It seems after two outings, Williams won’t be reprising her role as Anne in the third and final film.) The cast also includes Chiwetel Ejiofor as a soldier intent on capturing Venom; and Alanna Ubach and Clark Backo in as-yet-undisclosed roles.
Venom: The Last Dance hits theaters on October 25, 2024.
On Thursday, Google made Gemini Live, its voice-based AI chatbot feature, available for free to all Android users. The feature allows users to interact with Gemini through voice commands on their Android devices. That’s notable because competitor OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode feature of ChatGPT, which is similar to Gemini Live, has not yet fully shipped.
Google unveiled Gemini Live during its Pixel 9 launch event last month. Initially, the feature was exclusive to Gemini Advanced subscribers, but now it’s accessible to anyone using the Gemini app or its overlay on Android.
Gemini Live enables users to ask questions aloud and even interrupt the AI’s responses mid-sentence. Users can choose from several voice options for Gemini’s responses, adding a level of customization to the interaction.
Gemini suggests the following uses of the voice mode in its official help documents:
Talk back and forth: Talk to Gemini without typing, and Gemini will respond back verbally. Brainstorm ideas out loud: Ask for a gift idea, to plan an event, or to make a business plan. Explore: Uncover more details about topics that interest you. Practice aloud: Rehearse for important moments in a more natural and conversational way.
Interestingly, while OpenAI originally demoed its Advanced Voice Mode in May with the launch of GPT-4o, it has only shipped the feature to a limited number of users starting in late July. Some AI experts speculate that a wider rollout has been hampered by a lack of available computer power since the voice feature is presumably very compute-intensive.
To access Gemini Live, users can reportedly tap a new waveform icon in the bottom-right corner of the app or overlay. This action activates the microphone, allowing users to pose questions verbally. The interface includes options to “hold” Gemini’s answer or “end” the conversation, giving users control over the flow of the interaction.
Currently, Gemini Live supports only English, but Google has announced plans to expand language support in the future. The company also intends to bring the feature to iOS devices, though no specific timeline has been provided for this expansion.
Enlarge/ Harvard Business School was targeted by a faculty member’s lawsuit.
Earlier this year, we got a look at something unusual: the results of an internal investigation conducted by Harvard Business School that concluded one of its star faculty members had committed research misconduct. Normally, these reports are kept confidential, leaving questions regarding the methods and extent of data manipulations.
But in this case, the report became public because the researcher had filed a lawsuit that alleged defamation on the part of the team of data detectives that had first identified potential cases of fabricated data, as well as Harvard Business School itself. Now, the court has ruled on motions to dismiss the case. While the suit against Harvard will go on, the court has ruled that evidence-backed conclusions regarding fabricated data cannot constitute defamation—which is probably a very good thing for science.
Data and defamation
The researchers who had been sued, Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson, and Joe Simmons, run a blog called Data Colada where, among other things, they note cases of suspicious-looking data in the behavioral sciences. As we detailed in our earlier coverage, they published a series of blog posts describing an apparent case of fabricated data in four different papers published by the high-profile researcher Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School.
The researchers also submitted the evidence to Harvard, which ran its own investigation that included interviewing the researchers involved and examining many of the original data files behind the paper. In the end, Harvard determined that research misconduct had been committed, placed Gino on administrative leave and considered revoking her tenure. Harvard contacted the journals where the papers were published to inform them that the underlying data was unreliable.
Gino then filed suit alleging that Harvard had breached their contract with her, defamed her, and interfered with her relationship with the publisher of her books. She also added defamation accusations against the Data Colada team. Both Harvard and the Data Colada collective filed a motion to have all the actions dismissed, which brings us to this new decision.
Harvard got a mixed outcome. This appears to largely be the result that the Harvard Business School adopted a new and temporary policy for addressing research misconduct when the accusations against Gino came in. This, according to the court, leaves questions regarding whether the university had breached its contract with her.
However, most of the rest of the suit was dismissed. The judge ruled that the university informing Gino’s colleagues that Gino had been placed on administrative leave does not constitute defamation. Nor do the notices requesting retractions sent to the journals where the papers were published. “I find the Retraction Notices amount ‘only to a statement of [Harvard Business School]’s evolving, subjective view or interpretation of its investigation into inaccuracies in certain [data] contained in the articles,’ rather than defamation,” the judge decided.
Colada in the clear
More critically, the researchers had every allegation against them thrown out. Here, the fact that the accusations involved evidence-based conclusions, and were presented with typical scientific caution, ended up protecting the researchers.
The court cites precedent to note that “[s]cientific controversies must be settled by the methods of science rather than by the methods of litigation” and concludes that the material sent to Harvard “constitutes the Data Colada Defendants’ subjective interpretation of the facts available to them.” Since it had already been determined that Gino was a public figure due to her high-profile academic career, this does not rise to the standard of defamation.
And, while the Data Colada team was pretty definitive in determining that data manipulation had taken place, its members were cautious about acknowledging that the evidence they had did not clearly indicate Gino was the one who had performed the manipulation.
Finally, it was striking that the researchers had protected themselves by providing links to the data sources they’d used to draw their conclusions. The decision cites a precedent that indicates “by providing hyperlinks to the relevant information, the articles enable readers to review the underlying information for themselves and reach their own conclusions.”
So, overall, it appears that, by couching their accusations in the cautious language typical of scientific writing, the researchers ended up protecting themselves from accusations of defamation.
That’s an important message for scientists in general. One of the striking developments of the last few years has been the development of online communities where scientists identify and discuss instances of image and data manipulation, some of which have ultimately resulted in retractions and other career consequences. Every now and again, these activities have resulted in threats of lawsuits against these researchers or journalists who report on the issue. Occasionally, suits get filed.
Ultimately, it’s probably good for the scientific record that these suits are unlikely to succeed.
Enlarge/ Emojipedia sample images of the new Unicode 16.0 emoji.
The Unicode Consortium has finalized and released version 16.0 of the Unicode standard, the elaborate character set that ensures that our phones, tablets, PCs, and other devices can all communicate and interoperate with each other. The update adds 5,185 new characters to the standard, bringing the total up to a whopping 154,998.
Of those 5,185 characters, the ones that will get the most attention are the eight new emoji characters, including a shovel, a fingerprint, a leafless tree, a radish (formally classified as “root vegetable”), a harp, a purple splat that evokes the ’90s Nickelodeon logo, and a flag for the island of Sark. The standout, of course, is “face with bags under eyes,” whose long-suffering thousand-yard stare perfectly encapsulates the era it has been born into. Per usual, Emojipedia has sample images that give you some idea of what these will look like when they’re implemented by various operating systems, apps, and services.
We last got new emoji in 2023’s Unicode 15.1 update, though all of these designs were technically modifications of existing emoji rather than new characters—many emoji, most notably for skin and hair color variants, use a base emoji plus a modifier emoji, combined together with a “zero-width joiner” (ZWJ) character that makes them display as one character instead. The lime emoji in Unicode 15.1 was actually a lemon emoji combined with the color green; the phoenix was a regular bird joined to the fire emoji. This was likely because 15.1 was only intended as a minor update to 2022’s Unicode 15.0 standard.
Most of the Unicode 16.0 emoji, by contrast, are their own unique characters. The one exception is the Sark flag emoji; flag sequences are created by placing two “regional indicator letters” directly next to each other and don’t require a ZWJ character between them.
Incorporation into the Unicode standard is only the first step that new emoji and other characters take on their journey from someone’s mind to your phone or computer; software makers like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and others need to design iterations that fit with their existing spin on the emoji characters, they need to release software updates that use the new characters, and people need to download and install them.
We’ve seen a few people share on social media that the Unicode 16.0 release includes a “greenwashing” emoji designed by Shepard Fairey, an artist best known for the 2008 Barack Obama “Hope” poster. This emoji, and an attempt to gin up controversy around it, is all an elaborate hoax: there’s a fake Unicode website announcing it, a fake lawsuit threat that purports to be from a real natural gas industry group, and a fake Cory Doctorow article about the entire “controversy” published in a fake version of Wired. These were all published to websites with convincing-looking but fake domains, all registered within a couple of weeks of each other in August 2024. The face-with-bags-under-eyes emoji feels like an appropriate response.
Enlarge/ Hard drives, unfortunately, tend to die not with a spectacular and sparkly bang, but with a head-is-stuck whimper.
Getty Images
One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry’s vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.
Music industry publication Mix spoke with the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting tale is part explainer on how music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone’s data stored on spinning disks.
“In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know,” Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. “It may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not; it’s a call for action.”
Hard drives gained popularity over spooled magnetic tape as digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and the perceived downsides of tape, including deterioration from substrate separation and fire. But hard drives present their own archival problems. Standard hard drives were also not designed for long-term archival use. You can almost never decouple the magnetic disks from the reading hardware inside, so that if either fails, the whole drive dies.
There are also general computer storage issues, including the separation of samples and finished tracks, or proprietary file formats requiring archival versions of software. Still, Iron Mountain tells Mix that “If the disk platters spin and aren’t damaged,” it can access the content.
But “if it spins” is becoming a big question mark. Musicians and studios now digging into their archives to remaster tracks often find that drives, even when stored at industry-standard temperature and humidity, have failed in some way, with no partial recovery option available.
“It’s so sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand-new case with the wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still in there,” Koszela says. “Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything’s in order. And both of them are bricks.”
Entropy wins
Mix’s passing along of Iron Mountain’s warning hit Hacker News earlier this week, which spurred other tales of faith in the wrong formats. The gist of it: You cannot trust any medium, so you copy important things over and over, into fresh storage. “Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc.,” writes user abracadaniel. “Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you’d expect.”
There is discussion of how SSDs are not archival at all; how floppy disk quality varied greatly between the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s; how Linear Tape-Open, a format specifically designed for long-term tape storage, loses compatibility over successive generations; how the binder sleeves we put our CD-Rs and DVD-Rs in have allowed them to bend too much and stop being readable.
Knowing that hard drives will eventually fail is nothing new. Ars wrote about the five stages of hard drive death, including denial, back in 2005. Last year, backup company Backblaze shared failure data on specific drives, showing that drives that fail tend to fail within three years, that no drive was totally exempt, and that time does, generally, wear down all drives. Google’s server drive data showed in 2007 that HDD failure was mostly unpredictable, and that temperatures were not really the deciding factor.
So Iron Mountain’s admonition to music companies is yet another warning about something we’ve already heard. But it’s always good to get some new data about just how fragile a good archive really is.
Enlarge/ Are you getting gas station vibes? Because I’m getting gas station vibes.
GM
Several years ago, General Motors and EVgo teamed up to build out a network of fast chargers for electric vehicles. As Tesla proved, giving your customers confidence that they won’t be stranded on a long drive with a dead battery really helps sell EVs, and GM’s sometimes-shifting target currently stands at deploying 2,850 chargers. Today, the two partners showed off their concept for an improved charging experience, which they say will come to a number of flagship charger locations around the US.
The most obvious thing to notice is the large canopy, co-branded with EVgo and GM Energy, similar to those found at virtually every gas station across the country. The gas station vibes don’t end there, either. Ample lighting and security cameras are meant to combat the sometimes sketchy vibes that can be found at other banks of (often dimly lit) fast chargers after dark, located as they often are in the far reaches of a mall parking lot.
And the chargers are sited between the charging bays the same way gas pumps are located, allowing a driver to pull through. Most fast chargers require a driver to pull in or back into the space even when the chargers are located to one side, a fact that complicates long-distance towing with an EV.
The chargers will be rated for 350 kW so that 800 V EVs can minimize their charge times. And while the announcement did not mention charging plugs, given GM’s adoption of the J3400 (originally NACS) plug from the next model year and EVgo’s embrace of the new connnector, it seems likely to expect both J3400 and CCS1 plugs on each charger.
“The future of EV charging is larger stall count locations, high-power charging, and designing around features that customers love—such as pull-through access, canopies, and convenient amenities. Through this next evolution of EVgo and GM’s esteemed collaboration, the future of EV charging is here,” said Dennis Kish, EVgo’s president.
“Ensuring that our customers have seamless access to convenient and reliable charging is imperative, and this effort will take it to the next level,” said GM Energy VP Wade Sheffer. “Through our collaborations with industry leaders like EVgo, we continue to innovate and expand customer-centric charging solutions that will meet the evolving needs of EV drivers across the country.”
The first site opens next year
There won’t be a fixed number of chargers at each location—the companies say most sites will have “up to 20 stalls,” with some locations featuring significantly more. We also don’t know where the sites will be—GM and EVgo say “coast to coast, including in metropolitan areas in states such as Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New York, and Texas” and that the first location should open in 2025.
2025 was the original time frame for the full deployment of the GM Energy/EVgo fast charging network, which was also supposed to total 3,250 plugs by then—at least, that was the goal when Ars wrote about it in 2022. It appears as if the reduction in plugs freed up funds to pay for these fancier flagships.
That said, the network is not vaporware. EVgo and GM Energy deployed their 1,000th charger last summer and say they’ll reach the 2,000th by the end of this year. Additionally, the two are working together with Pilot Travel Centers to deploy another 2,000 chargers across the US at Pilot and Flying J travel centers—by the end of 2023, the first 17 of these were operational, with the goal of 200 sites by the end of this year.
Enlarge/ It’s never explained what this collection of app icons quite represents. A disorganized app you tossed together by sideloading? A face that’s frowning because it’s rolling down a bar held up by app icons? It’s weird, but not quite evocative.
You might sideload an Android app, or manually install its APK package, if you’re using a custom version of Android that doesn’t include Google’s Play Store. Alternately, the app might be experimental, under development, or perhaps no longer maintained and offered by its developer. Until now, the existence of sideload-ready APKs on the web was something that seemed to be tolerated, if warned against, by Google.
This quiet standstill is being shaken up by a new feature in Google’s Play Integrity API. As reported by Android Authority, developer tools to push “remediation” dialogs during sideloading debuted at Google’s I/O conference in May, have begun showing up on users’ phones. Sideloaders of apps from the British shop Tesco, fandom app BeyBlade X, and ChatGPT have reported “Get this app from Play” prompts, which cannot be worked around. An Android gaming handheld user encountered a similarly worded prompt from Diablo Immortal on their device three months ago.
Google’s Play Integrity API is how apps have previously blocked access when loaded onto phones that are in some way modified from a stock OS with all Google Play integrations intact. Recently, a popular two-factor authentication app blocked access on rooted phones, including the security-minded GrapheneOS. Apps can call the Play Integrity API and get back an “integrity verdict,” relaying if the phone has a “trustworthy” software environment, has Google Play Protect enabled, and passes other software checks.
Graphene has questioned the veracity of Google’s Integrity API and SafetyNet Attestation systems, recommending instead standard Android hardware attestation. Rahman notes that apps do not have to take an all-or-nothing approach to integrity checking. Rather than block installation entirely, apps could call on the API only during sensitive actions, issuing a warning there. But not having a Play Store connection can also deprive developers of metrics, allow for installation on incompatible devices (and resulting bad reviews), and, of course, open the door to paid app piracy.
Google
“Unknown distribution channels” blocked
Google’s developer video about “Automatic integrity protection” (at the 12-minute, 24-second mark on YouTube) notes that “select” apps have access to automatic protection. This adds an automatic checking tool to your app and the “strongest version of Google Play’s anti-tamper protection.” “If users get your protected app from an unknown distribution channel,” a slide in the presentation reads, “they’ll be prompted to get it from Google Play,” available to “select Play Partners.”
Enlarge/ A woman holds a placard saying “No Forced Births” as abortion rights activists gather at the Monroe County Courthouse for a protest vigil a few hours before Indianas near total abortion ban goes into effect on September 15, 2022.
The more abortion access is jeopardized, the more women turn to sterilization, according to a new report in JAMA that drew on health insurance claims of nearly 4.8 million women in the US.
In states that enacted total or near-total abortion bans following the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in June 2022, the rate of sterilizations among reproductive-age women that July spiked 19 percent. A similar initial spike was seen across the nation, with states that either limited or protected access to abortions seeing a 17 percent increase.
But, after that, states with bans saw a divergent trend. The states that limited or protected abortion access saw sterilization procedures largely level off after July 2022. In contrast, states with bans continued to see increases. From July 2022 to December 2022, use of sterilization procedures increased by 3 percent each month.
The study adds to previous data finding that overturning Roe v. Wade and limiting legal access to abortion spurred reproductive-age people to seek permanent contraception. A study published in JAMA Health Forum in April, for instance, found an abrupt increase in tubal ligation and vasectomies in people aged 18 to 30 shortly after the Dobbs decision. The current study furthers the finding by assessing trends of sterilization procedures in the context of state abortion laws and policies.
The surge in sterilization is just one of the many ways reproductive healthcare in the US has been rocked or upended by the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision. In June, a study in JAMA Network Open found that states with the most restrictive abortion policies saw declines in prescriptions filled for birth control pills and emergency contraception. The finding suggests that the abortion bans and limitations have disrupted and created barriers to contraception access in restrictive states.
On Tuesday, meanwhile, the March of Dimes released a report painting a bleak picture for Americans who become pregnant. The analysis found that over half of US counties do not have a hospital that provides obstetric care. In the last two years, 1 in 25 obstetric units shut down. Further, 35 percent of counties in the US are considered maternity deserts, meaning that 1,104 counties in the US do not have a birthing facility or even a single obstetric clinician. Living in a maternity desert is associated with receiving less prenatal care and higher rates of preterm birth. Those 1,104 counties are home to 2.3 million women of reproductive age who gave birth to over 150,000 babies in 2022.
On a Friday evening last November, police chased a silver sedan across the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The fleeing vehicle entered San Francisco and went careening through the city’s crowded streets. At the intersection of 11th and Folsom streets, it sideswiped the fronts of two other vehicles, veered onto a sidewalk, and hit two pedestrians.
According to a local news story, both pedestrians were taken to the hospital with one suffering major injuries. The driver of the silver sedan was injured, as was a passenger in one of the other vehicles.
No one was injured in the third car, a driverless Waymo robotaxi. Still, Waymo was required to report the crash to government agencies. It was one of 20 crashes with injuries that Waymo has reported through June. And it’s the only crash Waymo has classified as causing a serious injury.
Twenty injuries might sound like a lot, but Waymo’s driverless cars have traveled more than 22 million miles. So driverless Waymo taxis have been involved in fewer than one injury-causing crash for every million miles of driving—a much better rate than a typical human driver.
Last week Waymo released a new website to help the public put statistics like this in perspective. Waymo estimates that typical drivers in San Francisco and Phoenix—Waymo’s two biggest markets—would have caused 64 crashes over those 22 million miles. So Waymo vehicles get into injury-causing crashes less than one-third as often, per mile, as human-driven vehicles.
Waymo claims an even more dramatic improvement for crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag. Driverless Waymos have experienced just five crashes like that, and Waymo estimates that typical human drivers in Phoenix and San Francisco would have experienced 31 airbag crashes over 22 million miles. That implies driverless Waymos are one-sixth as likely as human drivers to experience this type of crash.
The new data comes at a critical time for Waymo, which is rapidly scaling up its robotaxi service. A year ago, Waymo was providing 10,000 rides per week. Last month, Waymo announced it was providing 100,000 rides per week. We can expect more growth in the coming months.
So it really matters whether Waymo is making our roads safer or more dangerous. And all the evidence so far suggests that it’s making them safer.
It’s not just the small number of crashes Waymo vehicles experience—it’s also the nature of those crashes. Out of the 23 most serious Waymo crashes, 16 involved a human driver rear-ending a Waymo. Three others involved a human-driven car running a red light before hitting a Waymo. There were no serious crashes where a Waymo ran a red light, rear-ended another car, or engaged in other clear-cut misbehavior.
Digging into Waymo’s crashes
In total, Waymo has reported nearly 200 crashes through June 2024, which works out to about one crash every 100,000 miles. Waymo says 43 percent of crashes across San Francisco and Phoenix had a delta-V of less than 1 mph—in other words, they were very minor fender-benders.
But let’s focus on the 23 most severe crashes: those that either caused an injury, caused an airbag to deploy, or both. These are good crashes to focus on not only because they do the most damage but because human drivers are more likely to report these types of crashes, making it easier to compare Waymo’s software to human drivers.
Most of these—16 crashes in total—involved another car rear-ending a Waymo. Some were quite severe: three triggered airbag deployments, and one caused a “moderate” injury. One vehicle rammed the Waymo a second time as it fled the scene, prompting Waymo to sue the driver.
There were three crashes where a human-driven car ran a red light before crashing into a Waymo:
One was the crash I mentioned at the top of this article. A car fleeing the police ran a red light and slammed into a Waymo, another car, and two pedestrians, causing several injuries.
In San Francisco, a pair of robbery suspects fleeing police in a stolen car ran a red light “at a high rate of speed” and slammed into the driver’s side door of a Waymo, triggering an airbag. The suspects were uninjured and fled on foot. The Waymo was thankfully empty.
In Phoenix, a car ran a red light and then “made contact with the SUV in front of the Waymo AV, and both of the other vehicles spun.” The Waymo vehicle was hit in the process, and someone in one of the other vehicles suffered an injury Waymo described as minor.
There were two crashes where a Waymo got sideswiped by a vehicle in an adjacent lane:
In San Francisco, Waymo was stopped at a stop sign in the right lane when another car hit the Waymo while passing it on the left.
In Tempe, Arizona, an SUV “overtook the Waymo AV on the left” and then “initiated a right turn,” cutting the Waymo off and causing a crash. A passenger in the SUV said they suffered moderate injuries.
Finally, there were two crashes where another vehicle turned left across the path of a Waymo vehicle:
In San Francisco, a Waymo and a large truck were approaching an intersection from opposite directions when a bicycle behind the truck made a sudden left in front of the Waymo. Waymo says the truck blocked Waymo’s vehicle from seeing the bicycle until the last second. The Waymo slammed on its brakes but wasn’t able to stop in time. The San Francisco Fire Department told local media that the bicyclist suffered only minor injuries and was able to leave the scene on their own.
A Waymo in Phoenix was traveling in the right lane. A row of stopped cars was in the lane to its left. As Waymo approached an intersection, a car coming from the opposite direction made a left turn through a gap in the row of stopped cars. Again, Waymo says the row of stopped cars blocked it from seeing the turning car until it was too late. A passenger in the turning vehicle reported minor injuries.
It’s conceivable that Waymo was at fault in these last two cases—it’s impossible to say without more details. It’s also possible that Waymo’s erratic braking contributed to a few of those rear-end crashes. Still, it seems clear that a non-Waymo vehicle bore primary responsibility for most, and possibly all, of these crashes.
“About as good as you can do”
One should always be skeptical when a company publishes a self-congratulatory report about its own safety record. So I called Noah Goodall, a civil engineer with many years of experience studying roadway safety, to see what he made of Waymo’s analysis.
“They’ve been the best of the companies doing this,” Goodall told me. He noted that Waymo has a team of full-time safety researchers who publish their work in reputable journals.
Waymo knows precisely how often its own vehicles crash because its vehicles are bristling with sensors. The harder problem is calculating an appropriate baseline for human-caused crashes.
That’s partly because human drivers don’t always report their own crashes to the police, insurance companies, or anyone else. But it’s also because crash rates differ from one area to another. For example, there are far more crashes per mile in downtown San Francisco than in the suburbs of Phoenix.
Waymo tried to account for these factors as it calculated crash rates for human drivers in both Phoenix and San Francisco. To ensure an apples-to-apples comparison, Waymo’s analysis excludes freeway crashes from its human-driven benchmark, since Waymo’s commercial fleet doesn’t use freeways yet.
Waymo estimates that human drivers fail to report 32 percent of injury crashes; the company raised its benchmark for human crashes to account for that. But even without this under-reporting adjustment, Waymo’s injury crash rate would still be roughly 60 percent below that of human drivers. The true number is probably somewhere between the adjusted number (70 percent fewer crashes) and the unadjusted one (60 percent fewer crashes). It’s an impressive figure either way.
Waymo says it doesn’t apply an under-reporting adjustment to its human benchmark for airbag crashes, since humans almost always report crashes that are severe enough to trigger an airbag. So it’s easier to take Waymo’s figure here—an 84 percent decline in airbag crashes—at face value.
Waymo’s benchmarks for human drivers are “about as good as you can do,” Goodall told me. “It’s very hard to get this kind of data.”
When I talked to other safety experts, they were equally positive about the quality of Waymo’s analysis. For example, last year, I asked Phil Koopman, a professor of computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon, about a previous Waymo study that used insurance data to show its cars were significantly safer than human drivers. Koopman told me Waymo’s findings were statistically credible, with some minor caveats.
Similarly, David Zuby, the chief research officer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, had mostly positive things to say about a December study analyzing Waymo’s first 7.1 million miles of driverless operations.
I found a few errors in Waymo’s data
If you look closely, you’ll see that one of the numbers in this article differs slightly from Waymo’s safety website. Specifically, Waymo says that its vehicles get into crashes that cause injury 73 percent less often than human drivers, while the figure I use in this article is 70 percent.
This is because I spotted a couple of apparent classification mistakes in the raw data Waymo used to generate its statistics.
Each time Waymo reports a crash to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, it records the severity of injuries caused by the crash. This can be fatal, serious, moderate, minor, none, or unknown.
When Waymo shared an embargoed copy of its numbers with me early last week, it said that there had been 16 injury crashes. However, when I looked at the data Waymo had submitted to federal regulators, it showed 15 minor injuries, two moderate injuries, and one serious injury, for a total of 18.
When I asked Waymo about this discrepancy, the company said it found a programming error. Waymo had recently started using a moderate injury category and had not updated the code that generated its crash statistics to count these crashes. Waymo fixed the error quickly enough that the official version Waymo published on Thursday of last week showed 18 injury crashes.
However, as I continued looking at the data, I noticed another apparent mistake: Two crashes had been put in the “unknown” injury category, yet the narrative for each crash indicated an injury had occurred. One report said “the passenger in the Waymo AV reported an unspecified injury.” The other stated that “an individual involved was transported from the scene to a hospital for medical treatment.”
I notified Waymo about this apparent mistake on Friday and they said they are looking into it. As I write this, the website still claims a 73 percent reduction in injury crashes. But I think it’s clear that these two “unknown” crashes were actually injury crashes. So, all of the statistics in this article are based on the full list of 20 injury crashes.
I think this illustrates that I come by my generally positive outlook on Waymo honestly: I probably scrutinize Waymo’s data releases more carefully than any other journalist, and I’m not afraid to point out when the numbers don’t add up.
Based on my conversations with Waymo, I’m convinced these were honest mistakes rather than deliberate efforts to cover up crashes. I could only identify these mistakes because Waymo went out of its way to make its findings reproducible. It would make no sense to do that if the company simultaneously tried to fake its statistics.
Could there be other injury or airbag-triggering crashes that Waymo isn’t counting? It’s certainly possible, but I doubt there have been very many. You might have noticed that I linked to local media reporting for some of Waymo’s most significant crashes. If Waymo deliberately covered up a severe crash, there would be a big risk that a crash would get reported in the media and then Waymo would have to explain to federal regulators why it wasn’t reporting all legally required crashes.
So, despite the screwups, I find Waymo’s data to be fairly credible, and those data show that Waymo’s vehicles crash far less often than human drivers on public roads.
Tim Lee was on staff at Ars from 2017 to 2021. Last year, he launched a newsletter, Understanding AI, that explores how AI works and how it’s changing our world. You can subscribe here.
