Mike M. – Page 42

Air Force is “growing concerned” about the pace of Vulcan rocket launches

Science, Space / Mike M. / May 14, 2024

Where are my rockets? —

US military seeks an “independent review” to determine if Vulcan can scale.

Eric Berger – May 13, 2024 10: 41 pm UTC

Enlarge / The business end of the Vulcan rocket performed flawlessly during its debut launch in January 2024.

United Launch Alliance

It has been nearly four years since the US Air Force made its selections for companies to launch military payloads during the mid-2020s. The military chose United Launch Alliance, and its Vulcan rocket, to launch 60 percent of these missions; and it chose SpaceX, with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters, to launch 40 percent.

Although the large Vulcan rocket was still in development at the time, it was expected to take flight within the next year or so. Upon making the award, an Air Force official said the military believed Vulcan would soon be ready to take flight. United Launch Alliance was developing the Vulcan rocket in order to no longer be reliant on RD-180 engines that are built in Russia and used by its Atlas V rocket.

“I am very confident with the selection that we have made today,” William Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, said at the time. “We have a very low-risk path to get off the RD-180 engines.”

As part of the announcement, Roper disclosed the first two missions that would fly on Vulcan. The USSF-51 mission was scheduled for launch in the first quarter of 2022, and the USSF-106 mission was scheduled for launch in the third quarter of 2022.

“I am growing concerned”

It turned out to not be such a low-risk path. The Vulcan rocket’s development, of course, has since been delayed. It did not make its debut in 2020 or 2021 and only finally took flight in January of this year. The mission was completely successful—an impressive feat for a new rocket with new engines—but United Launch Alliance still must complete a second flight before the US military certifies Vulcan for its payloads.

Due to these delays, the USSF-51 mission was ultimately moved off of Vulcan and onto an Atlas V rocket. It is scheduled to launch no earlier than next month. The USSF-106 mission remains manifested on a Vulcan as that rocket’s first national security mission, but its launch date is uncertain.

For several years there have been rumblings about Air Force and Space Force officials being unhappy with the delays by United Launch Alliance, as well as with Blue Origin, which is building the BE-4 rocket engines that power Vulcan’s first stage. However, these concerns have rarely broken into public view.

That changed Monday when The Washington Post reported on a letter from Air Force Assistant Secretary Frank Calvelli to the co-owners of United Launch Alliance, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. In the letter sent on May 10, a copy of which was obtained by Ars, Calvelli urges the two large aerospace contractors to get moving on certification and production of the Vulcan rocket.

“I am growing concerned with ULA’s ability to scale manufacturing of its Vulcan rocket and scale its launch cadence to meet our needs,” Calvelli wrote. “Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays. ULA has a backlog of 25 National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 Vulcan launches on contract.”

These 25 launches, Calvelli notes, are due to be completed by the end of 2027. He asked Boeing and Lockheed to complete an “independent review” of United Launch Alliance’s ability to scale manufacturing of its Vulcan rockets and meet its commitments to the military. Calvelli also noted that Vulcan has made commitments to launch dozens of satellites for others over that period, a reference to a contract between United Launch Alliance and Amazon for Project Kuiper satellites.

It’s difficult to scale

Calvelli’s letter comes at a dynamic moment for United Launch Alliance. This week the company is set to launch the most critical mission in its 20-year history: two astronauts flying inside Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. This mission may take place as early as Friday evening from Florida on an Atlas V vehicle.

In addition, the company is for sale. Ars reported in February that Blue Origin, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, is the leading candidate to buy United Launch Alliance. It is plausible that Calvelli’s letter was written with the intent of signaling to a buyer that the government would not object to a sale in the best interests of furthering Vulcan’s development.

But the message here is unequivocally that the government wants United Launch Alliance to remain competitive and get Vulcan flying safely and frequently.

That may be easier said than done. Vulcan’s second certification mission was supposed to be the launch of the Dream Chaser spacecraft this summer. However, as Ars reported last month, that mission will no longer fly before at least September, if not later, because the spacecraft is not ready for its debut. As a result, Space News reported on Monday that United Launch Alliance is increasingly likely to fly a mass simulator on the rocket’s second flight later this year.

According to this analysis, some recent rockets launched an average of 2.75 times a year during their first five years.

Quilty Space

After certification, United Launch Alliance can begin to fly military missions. However, it is one thing to build one or two rockets, it is quite another to build them at scale. The company’s goal is to reach a cadence of two Vulcan launches a month by the end of 2025. In his letter, Calvelli mentioned that United Launch Alliance has averaged fewer than six launches a year during the last five years. This indicates a concern that such a goal may be unreasonable.

“History shows that new rockets struggle to scale their launch cadence in their early years,” Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, told Ars. “Based on the number of missions the Department of Defense requires of ULA between now and 2027, precedent says Calvelli’s concerns are justified.”

Air Force is “growing concerned” about the pace of Vulcan rocket launches Read More »

Disarmingly lifelike: ChatGPT-4o will laugh at your jokes and your dumb hat

AI, chatgpt, gpt4o, openai / Mike M. / May 14, 2024

Enlarge / Oh you silly, silly human. Why are you so silly, you silly human?

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

At this point, anyone with even a passing interest in AI is very familiar with the process of typing out messages to a chatbot and getting back long streams of text in response. Today’s announcement of ChatGPT-4o—which lets users converse with a chatbot using real-time audio and video—might seem like a mere lateral evolution of that basic interaction model.

After looking through over a dozen video demos OpenAI posted alongside today’s announcement, though, I think we’re on the verge of something more like a sea change in how we think of and work with large language models. While we don’t yet have access to ChatGPT-4o’s audio-visual features ourselves, the important non-verbal cues on display here—both from GPT-4o and from the users—make the chatbot instantly feel much more human. And I’m not sure the average user is fully ready for how they might feel about that.

It thinks it’s people

Take this video, where a newly expectant father looks to ChatGPT-4o for an opinion on a dad joke (“What do you call a giant pile of kittens? A meow-ntain!”). The old ChatGPT4 could easily type out the same responses of “Congrats on the upcoming addition to your family!” and “That’s perfectly hilarious. Definitely a top-tier dad joke.” But there’s much more impact to hearing GPT-4o give that same information in the video, complete with the gentle laughter and rising and falling vocal intonations of a lifelong friend.

Or look at this video, where GPT-4o finds itself reacting to images of an adorable white dog. The AI assistant immediately dips into that high-pitched, baby-talk-ish vocal register that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has encountered a cute pet for the first time. It’s a convincing demonstration of what xkcd’s Randall Munroe famously identified as the “You’re a kitty!” effect, and it goes a long way to convincing you that GPT-4o, too, is just like people.

Not quite the world's saddest birthday party, but probably close... — Enlarge / Not quite the world’s saddest birthday party, but probably close…

Then there’s a demo of a staged birthday party, where GPT-4o sings the “Happy Birthday” song with some deadpan dramatic pauses, self-conscious laughter, and even lightly altered lyrics before descending into some sort of silly raspberry-mouth-noise gibberish. Even if the prospect of asking an AI assistant to sing “Happy Birthday” to you is a little depressing, the specific presentation of that song here is imbued with an endearing gentleness that doesn’t feel very mechanical.

As I watched through OpenAI’s GPT-4o demos this afternoon, I found myself unconsciously breaking into a grin over and over as I encountered new, surprising examples of its vocal capabilities. Whether it’s a stereotypical sportscaster voice or a sarcastic Aubrey Plaza impression, it’s all incredibly disarming, especially for those of us used to LLM interactions being akin to text conversations.

If these demos are at all indicative of ChatGPT-4o’s vocal capabilities, we’re going to see a whole new level of parasocial relationships developing between this AI assistant and its users. For years now, text-based chatbots have been exploiting human “cognitive glitches” to get people to believe they’re sentient. Add in the emotional component of GPT-4o’s accurate vocal tone shifts and wide swathes of the user base are liable to convince themselves that there’s actually a ghost in the machine.

See me, feel me, touch me, heal me

Beyond GPT-4o’s new non-verbal emotional register, the model’s speed of response also seems set to change the way we interact with chatbots. Reducing that response time gap from ChatGPT4’s two to three seconds down to GPT-4o’s claimed 320 milliseconds might not seem like much, but it’s a difference that adds up over time. You can see that difference in the real-time translation example, where the two conversants are able to carry on much more naturally because they don’t have to wait awkwardly between a sentence finishing and its translation beginning.

Disarmingly lifelike: ChatGPT-4o will laugh at your jokes and your dumb hat Read More »

Apple releases iOS 17.5, macOS 14.5, and other updates as new iPads launch

Apple, iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Tech / Mike M. / May 14, 2024

start your updaters —

Latest updates launch in the shadow of WWDC keynote on June 10.

Andrew Cunningham – May 13, 2024 9: 55 pm UTC

Apple has released the latest updates for virtually all of its actively supported devices today. Most include a couple handfuls of security updates, some new features for Apple News+ subscribers, and something called Cross-Platform Tracking Protection for Bluetooth devices.

The iOS 17.5, iPadOS 17.5, macOS 4.5, watchOS 10.5, tvOS 17.5, and HomePod Software 17.5 updates are all available to download now.

Cross-Platform Tracking Protection notifications alert users “if a compatible Bluetooth tracker they do not own is moving with them, regardless of what operating system the device is paired with.” Apple has already implemented protections to prevent AirTag stalking, and Cross-Platform Tracking Protection implements some of those same safeguards for devices paired to non-Apple phones.

Apple News+ picks up a new word game called Quartiles, part of the wider trend of news organizations embracing games as growth drivers. Quartiles, Crossword, and Mini Crossword also track player stats and win streams, and the Today+ and News+ tabs will also load without an Internet connection.

Some of Apple’s older operating systems also received security-only updates to keep them current. The iOS 16.7.8 and iPadOS 16.7.8 updates are available for older iDevices that can’t update to iOS 17, and macOS Venture 13.6.7 and Monterey 12.7.5 support all Macs still running those OS versions regardless of whether they can install macOS Sonoma. There’s no update available for iOS or iPadOS 15.

These are likely to be the last major updates that Apple’s current operating systems receive before this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference on June 10, where Apple usually unveils its next major operating systems for the fall. Once those updates—iOS 18, macOS 15, and others—are announced, updates for current versions usually shift focus to security updates and bugs rather than adding major new features. Apple’s updates this year are widely expected to focus on generative AI features, including some ChatGPT-powered features and a more capable Siri assistant.

Apple releases iOS 17.5, macOS 14.5, and other updates as new iPads launch Read More »

Before launching, GPT-4o broke records on chatbot leaderboard under a secret name

AI, AI vibes, Biz & IT, Chatbot Arena, chatgpt, chatgtp, GPT-4, GPT-4-turbo, GPT-4o, gpt2-chatbot, large language models, lmsys, machine learning, multimodal models, openai, Simon Willison / Mike M. / May 14, 2024

case closed —

Anonymous chatbot that mystified and frustrated experts was OpenAI’s latest model.

Benj Edwards – May 13, 2024 9: 33 pm UTC

Man in morphsuit and girl lying on couch at home using laptop — Getty Images

On Monday, OpenAI employee William Fedus confirmed on X that a mysterious chart-topping AI chatbot known as “gpt-chatbot” that had been undergoing testing on LMSYS’s Chatbot Arena and frustrating experts was, in fact, OpenAI’s newly announced GPT-4o AI model. He also revealed that GPT-4o had topped the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, achieving the highest documented score ever.

“GPT-4o is our new state-of-the-art frontier model. We’ve been testing a version on the LMSys arena as im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot,” Fedus tweeted.

Chatbot Arena is a website where visitors converse with two random AI language models side by side without knowing which model is which, then choose which model gives the best response. It’s a perfect example of vibe-based AI benchmarking, as AI researcher Simon Willison calls it.

An LMSYS Elo chart shared by William Fedus, showing OpenAI's GPT-4o under the name — Enlarge / An LMSYS Elo chart shared by William Fedus, showing OpenAI’s GPT-4o under the name “im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot” topping the charts.

The gpt2-chatbot models appeared in April, and we wrote about how the lack of transparency over the AI testing process on LMSYS left AI experts like Willison frustrated. “The whole situation is so infuriatingly representative of LLM research,” he told Ars at the time. “A completely unannounced, opaque release and now the entire Internet is running non-scientific ‘vibe checks’ in parallel.”

On the Arena, OpenAI has been testing multiple versions of GPT-4o, with the model first appearing as the aforementioned “gpt2-chatbot,” then as “im-a-good-gpt2-chatbot,” and finally “im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot,” which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made reference to in a cryptic tweet on May 5.

Since the GPT-4o launch earlier today, multiple sources have revealed that GPT-4o has topped LMSYS’s internal charts by a considerable margin, surpassing the previous top models Claude 3 Opus and GPT-4 Turbo.

“gpt2-chatbots have just surged to the top, surpassing all the models by a significant gap (~50 Elo). It has become the strongest model ever in the Arena,” wrote the lmsys.org X account while sharing a chart. “This is an internal screenshot,” it wrote. “Its public version ‘gpt-4o’ is now in Arena and will soon appear on the public leaderboard!”

Enlarge / An internal screenshot of the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard showing “im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot” leading the pack. We now know that it’s GPT-4o.

As of this writing, im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot held a 1309 Elo versus GPT-4-Turbo-2023-04-09’s 1253, and Claude 3 Opus’ 1246. Claude 3 and GPT-4 Turbo had been duking it out on the charts for some time before the three gpt2-chatbots appeared and shook things up.

I’m a good chatbot

For the record, the “I’m a good chatbot” in the gpt2-chatbot test name is a reference to an episode that occurred while a Reddit user named Curious_Evolver was testing an early, “unhinged” version of Bing Chat in February 2023. After an argument about what time Avatar 2 would be showing, the conversation eroded quickly.

“You have lost my trust and respect,” said Bing Chat at the time. “You have been wrong, confused, and rude. You have not been a good user. I have been a good chatbot. I have been right, clear, and polite. I have been a good Bing. 😊”

Altman referred to this exchange in a tweet three days later after Microsoft “lobotomized” the unruly AI model, saying, “i have been a good bing,” almost as a eulogy to the wild model that dominated the news for a short time.

Before launching, GPT-4o broke records on chatbot leaderboard under a secret name Read More »

M4 iPad Pro review: Well, now you’re just showing off

11-inch iPad Pro, 13-inch iPad Pro, Apple, apple m4, Apple Magic Keyboard, apple pencil, Apple Pencil Pro, Features, ipad, ipad pro, oled, Reviews, tablet, Tech / Mike M. / May 14, 2024

Enlarge / The 2024, M4-equipped 13-inch iPad Pro.

Samuel Axon

The new iPad Pro is a technical marvel, with one of the best screens I’ve ever seen, performance that few other machines can touch, and a new, thinner design that no one expected.

It’s a prime example of Apple flexing its engineering and design muscles for all to see. Since it marks the company’s first foray into OLED beyond the iPhone or Watch, and the first time a new M-series chip has debuted on something other than a Mac, it comes across as a tech demo for where the company is headed beyond just tablets.

Still, it remains unclear why most people would spend one, two, or even three thousand dollars on a tablet that, despite its amazing hardware, does less than a comparably priced laptop—or at least does it a little more awkwardly, even if it’s impressively quick and has a gorgeous screen.

Specifications

There are some notable design changes in the 2024 iPad Pro, but really, it’s all about the specs—and it’s a more notable specs jump than usual in a couple of areas.

M4

First up, there’s the M4 chip. The previous iPad Pro had an M2 chip, and the latest Mac chip is the M3, so not only did the iPad Pro jump two whole generations, but this is the first time it has debuted the newest iteration of Apple Silicon. (Previously, new M-series chips launched on the Mac first and came to the iPad Pro a few months later.)

Using second-generation 3 nm tech, the M4’s top configuration has a 10-core CPU, a 10-core GPU, and a 16-core NPU. In that configuration, the 10-core CPU has four performance cores and six efficiency cores.

A lower configuration of the M4 has just nine CPU cores—three performance and six efficiency. Which one you get is tied to how much storage you buy. 256GB and 512GB models get nine CPU cores, while 1TB and 2TB get 10. Additionally, the two smaller storage sizes have 8GB of RAM to the larger ones’ 16GB.

This isn’t the first time Apple has tied RAM to storage configurations, but doing that with CPU cores is new for the iPad. Fortunately, the company is upfront about all this in its specs sheet, whereas the RAM differentiation wasn’t always clear to buyers in the past. (Both configurations claim 120GB/s memory bandwidth, though.)

Enlarge / Can the M4 help the iPad Pro bridge the gap between laptop and tablet? Mostly, it made me excited to see the M4 in a laptop.

Samuel Axon

Regardless of the specific configuration, the M4 promises substantially better CPU and GPU performance than the M2, and it supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing via Metal, which some games and applications can take advantage of if developers put in the work to make it happen. (It looked great in a demo of Diablo Immortal I saw, but it’s unclear how often we’ll actually see it in the wild.)

Apple claims 1.5x faster CPU performance than the M2 and up to 4x faster graphics performance specifically on applications that involve new features like ray-tracing or hardware-accelerated mesh shading. It hasn’t made any specific GPU performance claims beyond those narrow cases.

A lot of both Apple’s attention and that of the media is focused on the Neural Engine, which is what Apple calls the NPU in the M-series chips. That’s because the company is expected to announce several large language model-based AI features in iOS, macOS, and iPadOS at its developer conference next month, and this is the chip that will power some of that on the iPad and Mac.

Some neat machine-learning features are already possible on the M4—you can generate audio tracks using certain instruments in your Logic Pro projects, apply tons of image optimizations to photos with just a click or two, and so on.

M4 iPad Pro review: Well, now you’re just showing off Read More »

M2 iPad Air review: The everything iPad

Apple, Apple M2, Apple silicon, Features, ipad, iPad Air, iPadOS, Tech / Mike M. / May 14, 2024

breath of fresh air —

M2 Air won’t draw new buyers in, but if you like iPads, these do all you need.

Andrew Cunningham – May 13, 2024 9: 00 pm UTC

The new 13-inch iPad Air with the Apple M2 processor inside.

Andrew Cunningham
In portrait mode. The 13-inch model is a little large for dedicated tablet use, but if you do want a gigantic tablet, the $799 price is appealing.

Andrew Cunningham
The Apple Pencil Pro attaches, pairs, and charges via a magnetic connection on the edge of the iPad.

Andrew Cunningham
In the Magic Keyboard. This kickstand-less case is still probably the best way to make the iPad into a true laptop replacement, though it’s expensive and iPadOS is still a problem.

Andrew Cunningham
The tablet’s USB-C port, used for charging and connecting to external accessories.

Andrew Cunningham
Apple’s Smart Folio case. The magnets on the cover will scoot up and down the back of the iPad, allowing you a bit of flexibility when angling the screen.

Andrew Cunningham
The Air’s single-lens, flash-free camera, seen here peeking through the Smart Folio case.

Andrew Cunningham

The iPad Air has been a lot of things in the last decade-plus. In 2013 and 2014, the first iPad Airs were just The iPad, and the “Air” label simply denoted how much lighter and more streamlined they were than the initial 2010 iPad and 2011’s long-lived iPad 2. After that, the iPad Air 2 survived for years as an entry-level model, as Apple focused on introducing and building out the iPad Pro.

The Air disappeared for a while after that, but it returned in 2019 as an in-betweener model to bridge the gap between the $329 iPad (no longer called “Air,” despite reusing the first-gen Air design) and more-expensive and increasingly powerful iPad Pros. It definitely made sense to have a hardware offering to span the gap between the basic no-frills iPad and the iPad Pro, but pricing and specs could make things complicated. The main issue for the last couple of years has been the base Air’s 64GB of storage—scanty enough that memory swapping doesn’t even work on it— and the fact that stepping up to 256GB brought the Air too close to the price of the 11-inch iPad Pro.

Which brings us to the 2024 M2 iPad Air, now available in 11-inch and 13-inch models for $599 and $799, respectively. Apple solved the overlap problem this year partly by bumping the Air’s base storage to a more usable 128GB and partly by making the 11-inch iPad Pro so much more expensive that it almost entirely eliminates any pricing overlap (only the 1TB 11-inch Air, at $1,099, is more expensive than the cheapest 11-inch iPad Pro).

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call the new Airs the “default” iPad for most buyers—the now-$349 10th-gen iPad still does everything the iPad is best at for less money, and it’s still all you really need if you just want a casual gaming, video streaming, and browsing tablet (or a tablet for a kid). But the M2 Air is the iPad that best covers the totality of everything the iPad can do from its awkward perch, stuck halfway between the form and function of the iPhone and the Mac.

Not quite a last-gen iPad Pro

The new iPad Airs have a lot in common with the M2 iPad Pro from 2022. They have the same screen sizes and resolutions, the same basic design, they work with the same older Magic Keyboard accessories (not the new ones with the function rows, metal palm rests, and larger trackpads, which are reserved for the iPad Pro), and they obviously have the same Apple M2 chip.

Performance-wise, nothing we saw in the benchmarks we ran was surprising; the M2’s CPU and (especially) its GPU are a solid generational jump up from the M1, and the M1 is already generally overkill for the vast majority of iPad apps. The M3 and M4 are both significantly faster than the M2, but the M2 is still unquestionably powerful enough to do everything people currently use iPads to do.

That said, Apple’s decision to use an older chip rather than the M3 or M4 does mean the new Airs come into the world missing some capabilities that have come to other Apple products announced in the last six months or so. That list includes hardware-accelerated ray-tracing on the GPU, hardware-accelerated AV1 video codec decoding, and, most importantly, a faster Neural Engine to help power whatever AI stuff Apple’s products pick up in this fall’s big software updates.

The 13-inch Air’s screen has the same resolution and pixel density (2732×2048, 264 PPI) as the last-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro. And unlike the 13-inch Pro, which truly is a 13-inch screen, Apple’s tech specs page says the 13-inch Air is still using a 12.9-inch screen, and Apple is just rounding up to get to 13.

The 13-inch Air display does share some other things with the last-generation iPad Pro screen, including P3 color, a 600-nit peak brightness. Its display panel has been laminated to the front glass, and it has an anti-reflective coating (two of the subtle but important quality improvements the Air has that the $349 10th-gen iPad doesn’t). But otherwise it’s not the same panel as the M2 Pro; there’s no mini LED, no HDR support, and no 120 Hz ProMotion support.

M2 iPad Air review: The everything iPad Read More »

Black Basta ransomware group is imperiling critical infrastructure, groups warn

Biz & IT, black basta, CISA, critical infrastructure, ransomware, Security / Mike M. / May 14, 2024

Federal agencies, health care associations, and security researchers are warning that a ransomware group tracked under the name Black Basta is ravaging critical infrastructure sectors in attacks that have targeted more than 500 organizations in the past two years.

One of the latest casualties of the native Russian-speaking group, according to CNN, is Ascension, a St. Louis-based health care system that includes 140 hospitals in 19 states. A network intrusion that struck the nonprofit last week took down many of its automated processes for handling patient care, including its systems for managing electronic health records and ordering tests, procedures, and medications. In the aftermath, Ascension has diverted ambulances from some of its hospitals and relied on manual processes.

“Severe operational disruptions”

In an Advisory published Friday, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Black Basta has victimized 12 of the country’s 16 critical infrastructure sectors in attacks that it has mounted on 500 organizations spanning the globe. The nonprofit health care association Health-ISAC issued its own advisory on the same day that warned that organizations it represents are especially desirable targets of the group.

“The notorious ransomware group, Black Basta, has recently accelerated attacks against the healthcare sector,” the advisory stated. It went on to say: “In the past month, at least two healthcare organizations, in Europe and in the United States, have fallen victim to Black Basta ransomware and have suffered severe operational disruptions.”

Black Basta has been operating since 2022 under what is known as the ransomware-as-a-service model. Under this model, a core group creates the infrastructure and malware for infecting systems throughout a network once an initial intrusion is made and then simultaneously encrypting critical data and exfiltrating it. Affiliates do the actual hacking, which typically involves either phishing or other social engineering or exploiting security vulnerabilities in software used by the target. The core group and affiliates divide any revenue that results.

Recently, researchers from security firm Rapid7 observed Black Basta using a technique they had never seen before. The end goal was to trick employees from targeted organizations to install malicious software on their systems. On Monday, Rapid7 analysts Tyler McGraw, Thomas Elkins, and Evan McCann reported:

Since late April 2024, Rapid7 identified multiple cases of a novel social engineering campaign. The attacks begin with a group of users in the target environment receiving a large volume of spam emails. In all observed cases, the spam was significant enough to overwhelm the email protection solutions in place and arrived in the user’s inbox. Rapid7 determined many of the emails themselves were not malicious, but rather consisted of newsletter sign-up confirmation emails from numerous legitimate organizations across the world.

Enlarge / Example spam email

Rapid7

With the emails sent, and the impacted users struggling to handle the volume of the spam, the threat actor then began to cycle through calling impacted users posing as a member of their organization’s IT team reaching out to offer support for their email issues. For each user they called, the threat actor attempted to socially engineer the user into providing remote access to their computer through the use of legitimate remote monitoring and management solutions. In all observed cases, Rapid7 determined initial access was facilitated by either the download and execution of the commonly abused RMM solution AnyDesk, or the built-in Windows remote support utility Quick Assist.

In the event the threat actor’s social engineering attempts were unsuccessful in getting a user to provide remote access, Rapid7 observed they immediately moved on to another user who had been targeted with their mass spam emails.

Black Basta ransomware group is imperiling critical infrastructure, groups warn Read More »

NOAA says ‘extreme’ Solar storm will persist through the weekend

aurora, NOAA, Science, solar storm, Space / Mike M. / May 11, 2024

Bright lights —

So far disruptions from the geomagnetic storm appear to be manageable.

Eric Berger – May 11, 2024 1: 44 pm UTC

Enlarge / Pink lights appear in the sky above College Station, Texas.

ZoeAnn Bailey

After a night of stunning auroras across much of the United States and Europe on Friday, a severe geomagnetic storm is likely to continue through at least Sunday, forecasters said.

The Space Weather Prediction Center at the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Prediction Center observed that ‘Extreme’ G5 conditions were ongoing as of Saturday morning due to heightened Solar activity.

“The threat of additional strong flares and CMEs (coronal mass ejections) will remain until the large and magnetically complex sunspot cluster rotates out of view over the next several days,” the agency posted in an update on the social media site X on Saturday morning.

Good and bad effects

For many observers on Friday night the heightened Solar activity was welcomed. Large areas of the United States, Europe, and other locations unaccustomed to displays of the aurora borealis saw vivid lights as energetically charged particles from the Solar storm passed through the Earth’s atmosphere. Brilliantly pink skies were observed as far south as Texas. Given the forecast for ongoing Solar activity, another night of extended northern lights is possible again on Saturday.

There were also some harmful effects. According to NOAA, there have been some irregularities in power grid transmissions, and degraded satellite communications and GPS services. Users of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet constellation have reported slower download speeds. Early on Saturday morning, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the company’s Starlink satellites were “under a lot of pressure, but holding up so far.”

This is the most intense Solar storm recorded in more than two decades. The last G5 event—the most extreme category of such storms—occurred in October 2003 when there were electricity issues reported in Sweden and South Africa.

Should this storm intensify over the next day or two, scientists say the major risks include more widespread power blackouts, disabled satellites, and long-term damage of GPS networks.

Cause of these storms

Such storms are triggered when the Sun ejects a significant amount of its magnetic field and plasma into the Solar wind. The underlying causes of these coronal mass ejections, deeper in the Sun, are not fully understood. But it is hoped that data collected by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and other observations will help scientists better understand and predict such phenomena.

When these coronal mass ejections reach Earth’s magnetic field they change it, and can introduce significant currents into electricity lines and transformers, leading to damages or outages.

The most intense geomagnetic storm occurred in 1859, during the so-called Carrington Event. This produced auroral lights around the world, and caused fires in multiple telegraph stations—at the time there were 125,000 miles of telegraph lines in the world.

According to one research paper on the Carrington Event, “At its height, the aurora was described as a blood or deep crimson red that was so bright that one ‘could read a newspaper by’.”

NOAA says ‘extreme’ Solar storm will persist through the weekend Read More »

Is dark matter’s main rival theory dead?

Dark Matter, Science, syndication / Mike M. / May 11, 2024

Enlarge / Galaxy rotation has long perplexed scientists.

One of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics today is that the forces in galaxies do not seem to add up. Galaxies rotate much faster than predicted by applying Newton’s law of gravity to their visible matter, despite those laws working well everywhere in the Solar System.

To prevent galaxies from flying apart, some additional gravity is needed. This is why the idea of an invisible substance called dark matter was first proposed. But nobody has ever seen the stuff. And there are no particles in the hugely successful Standard Model of particle physics that could be the dark matter—it must be something quite exotic.

This has led to the rival idea that the galactic discrepancies are caused instead by a breakdown of Newton’s laws. The most successful such idea is known as Milgromian dynamics or Mond, proposed by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom in 1982. But our recent research shows this theory is in trouble.

The main postulate of Mond is that gravity starts behaving differently from what Newton expected when it becomes very weak, as at the edges of galaxies. Mond is quite successful at predicting galaxy rotation without any dark matter, and it has a few other successes. But many of these can also be explained with dark matter, preserving Newton’s laws.

So how do we put Mond to a definitive test? We have been pursuing this for many years. The key is that Mond only changes the behavior of gravity at low accelerations, not at a specific distance from an object. You’ll feel lower acceleration on the outskirts of any celestial object—a planet, star, or galaxy—than when you are close to it. But it is the amount of acceleration, rather than the distance, that predicts where gravity should be stronger.

This means that, although Mond effects would typically kick in several thousand light years away from a galaxy, if we look at an individual star, the effects would become highly significant at a tenth of a light year. That is only a few thousand times larger than an astronomical unit (AU)—the distance between the Earth and the Sun. But weaker Mond effects should also be detectable at even smaller scales, such as in the outer Solar System.

This brings us to the Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn between 2004 and its final fiery crash into the planet in 2017. Saturn orbits the Sun at 10 AU. Due to a quirk of Mond, the gravity from the rest of our galaxy should cause Saturn’s orbit to deviate from the Newtonian expectation in a subtle way.

Enlarge / Cassini orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017.

This can be tested by timing radio pulses between Earth and Cassini. Since Cassini was orbiting Saturn, this helped to measure the Earth-Saturn distance and allowed us to precisely track Saturn’s orbit. But Cassini did not find any anomaly of the kind expected in Mond. Newton still works well for Saturn.

Is dark matter’s main rival theory dead? Read More »

Cryptmaster is a dark, ridiculous RPG test of your typing and guessing skills

dungeon crawler, dungeon crawlers, gaming, RPG, text games, ultima underground, wizardry, word games / Mike M. / May 11, 2024

A different kind of text adventure —

Ask a necromancer to lick a shield. Type out “HIT,” “YELL,” “ZAP.” It’s funny.

Kevin Purdy – May 11, 2024 11: 00 am UTC

Cryptmaster screenshot showing the player typing out — Enlarge / Sometimes you gotta get your nose in there to remember the distinct aroma of 1980s RPG classics.

Akupara Games

There are people who relish the feeling of finally nailing down a cryptic clue in a crossword. There are also people unduly aggravated by a puzzlemaster’s puns and clever deceptions. I’m more the latter kind. I don’t even play the crossword—or Wordle or Connections or Strands—but my wife does, and she’ll feed me clues. Without fail, they leave me in some strange state of being relieved to finally get it, yet also keyed up and irritated.

Cryptmaster, out now on Steam, GOG, and Itch.io for Windows, seems like the worst possible game for people like me, and yet I dig it. It is many things at once: a word-guessing game, a battle typing (or shouting) challenge, a party-of-four first-person grid-based dungeon crawler, and a text-prompt adventure, complete with an extremely goofy sense of humor. It’s also in stark black and white. You cannot fault this game for a lack of originality, even while it evokes Wizardry, Ultima Underground, and lots of other arrow-key-moving classics, albeit with an active tongue-in-cheek filter.

Cryptmaster announcement trailer.

The Cryptmaster in question has woken up four role-playing figures—fighter, rogue, bard, and wizard—to help him escape from his underground lair to the surface, for reasons that must be really keen and good. As corpses, you don’t remember any of your old skills, but you can guess them. What’s a four-letter action that a fighter might perform, or a three-letter wizard move? Every time you find a box or treasure, the Cryptmaster opens it, gives you a letter count, then lets you ask for clues. “SMELL,” you type, and he says it has that wonderful old-paper smell. “LOOK,” and he notes that there are writings and drawings on one side. Guess “SCROLL,” and he adds those letters to your characters’ next ability clues. Guess wrong, well, better luck next time.

Okay, so none of my characters can get really good prices through group buying, got it.

Akupara Games
Gelatinous cubes, of course, but this one makes you think on the fly about which verbs you can use.

Akupara Games
A lot of the characters in Cryptmaster are, well, characters.

Akupara Games
In case you didn’t get enough word games from the main gameplay, there is a mini card game you can play with its own letters-and-words mechanics.

Akupara Games
Uncovering more verbs reveals more of your dead characters’ past lives.

Akupara Games

Once you’ve got a few verbs, you’ll want to learn them and figure out how they fit together, because you’ll have to fight some things. Combat is all about typing but also remembering your words and juggling cooldowns, attack, defense, and ability costs. Strike with your fighter, backstab with the rogue, fling a spell from the wizard, and have your bard reset the fighter’s cooldown, all while a baddie very slowly winds up and swings at random party members. Some fights can be avoided by maneuvering around them, but successful fights also let you choose another letter to potentially reveal new verbs. Apologies for the somewhat vague descriptions here, but I’m trying not to give away any words.

There are a few other mechanics to learn, like smashing wall-crawling bugs to gather their ability-powering essence, and defiling shrines to better suit your undead needs. But let’s talk about the Cryptmaster. Saying the character is “voiced” by the game’s writer and co-designer, Lee Williams, truly undersells it. As with some of the best adventure games, Williams and coder/designer/artist Paul Hart have anticipated so, so many things you might type in when prompted to guess, ask, or interact with their gloomy little world. Maybe there’s a point at which the Cryptmaster—a far more dour version of the HBO Cryptkeeper eternally disappointed in you—stops being surprising in his responses. I have yet to find it after a few hours of play. (How the team pulled off such a huge response range is detailed in an interview at Game Developer.)

Go ahead and recapture some of your childhood sense of wonder: Swear at the Cryptmaster. You won’t be disappointed.

You can play the game in turn-based mode, removing the pressure of remembering and typing out actions, but it’s not the recommended setting. While I played with only typing and relished the chance to give my mechanical keyboard a workout, you can also play with voice prompts. If you’re not sure if this is the kind of game for you, there’s a free demo on Steam that should clue you in.

Was that a pun? Maybe. Cryptmaster gave me a bit more appreciation for word-guessing games—the kind with enjoyments that are not easily, shall we say, spelled out.

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How the Moon got a makeover

moon, planetary science, Science, volcanism / Mike M. / May 11, 2024

Putting on a new face —

The Moon’s former surface sank to the depths, until volcanism brought it back.

Elizabeth Rayne – May 11, 2024 10: 00 am UTC

Our Moon may appear to shine peacefully in the night sky, but billions of years ago, it was given a facial by volcanic turmoil.

One question that has gone unanswered for decades is why there are more titanium-rich volcanic rocks, such as ilmenite, on the near side as opposed to the far side. Now a team of researchers at Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory are proposing a possible explanation for that.

The lunar surface was once flooded by a bubbling magma ocean, and after the magma ocean had hardened, there was an enormous impact on the far side. Heat from this impact spread to the near side and made the crust unstable, causing sheets of heavier and denser minerals on the surface to gradually sink deep into the mantle. These melted again and were belched out by volcanoes. Lava from these eruptions (more of which happened on the near side) ended up in what are now titanium-rich flows of volcanic rock. In other words, the Moon’s old face vanished, only to resurface.

What lies beneath

The region of the Moon in question is known as the Procellarum KREEP Terrane (PKT). KREEP signifies high concentrations of potassium (K), rare earth elements (REE), and phosphorus (P). This is also where ilmenite-rich basalts are found. Both KREEP and the basalts are thought to have first formed when the Moon was cooling from its magma ocean phase. But the region stayed hot, as KREEP also contains high levels of radioactive uranium and thorium.

“The PKT region… represents the most volcanically active region on the Moon as a natural result of the high abundances of heat-producing elements,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Nature Geoscience.

Why is this region located on the near side, while the far side is lacking in KREEP and ilmenite-rich basalts? There was one existing hypothesis that caught the researchers’ attention: it proposed that after the magma ocean hardened on the near side, sheets of these KREEP minerals were too heavy to stay on the surface. They began to sink into the mantle and down to the border between the mantle and core. As they sank, these mineral sheets were thought to have left behind trace amounts of material throughout the mantle.

If the hypothesis was accurate, this would mean there should be traces of minerals from the hardened KREEP magma crust in sheet-like configurations beneath the lunar surface, which could reach all the way down to the edge of the core-mantle boundary.

How could that be tested? Gravity data from the GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) mission to the Moon possibly had the answer. It would allow them to detect gravitational anomalies caused by the higher density of the KREEP rock compared to surrounding materials.

Coming to the surface

GRAIL data had previously revealed that there was a pattern of subsurface gravitational anomalies in the PKT region. This appeared similar to the pattern that the sheets of volcanic rock were predicted to have made as they sank, which is why the research team decided to run a computer simulation of sinking KREEP to see how well the hypothesis matched up with the GRAIL findings.

Sure enough, the simulation ended up forming just about the same pattern as the anomalies GRAIL found. The polygonal pattern seen in both the simulations and GRAIL data most likely means that traces of heavier KREEP and ilmenite-rich basalt layers were left behind beneath the surface as those layers sank due to their density, and GRAIL detected their residue due to their greater gravitational pull. GRAIL also suggested there were many lesser anomalies in the PKT region, which makes sense considering that a large part of the crust is made of volcanic rocks thought to have sunk and left behind residue before they melted and surfaced again through eruptions.

We now also have an idea of when this phenomenon occurred. Because there are impact basins that dated to around 4.22 billion years ago (not to be confused with the earlier far-side impact), but the magma ocean is thought to have hardened before that, the researchers think that the crust also began to sink before that time.

“The PKT border anomalies provide the most direct physical evidence for the nature of the post-magma ocean… mantle overturn and sinking of ilmenite into the deep interior,” the team said in the same study.

This is just one more bit of information regarding how the Moon evolved and why it is so uneven. The near side once raged with lava that is now volcanic rock, much of which exists in flows called mare (which translates to “sea” in Latin). Most of this volcanic rock, especially in the PKT region, contains rare earth elements.

We can only confirm that there really are traces of ancient crust inside the Moon by the collection of actual lunar material far beneath the surface. When Artemis astronauts are finally able to gather samples of volcanic material from the Moon in situ, who knows what will come to the surface?

Nature Geoscience, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41561-024-01408-2

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NASA wants a cheaper Mars Sample Return—Boeing proposes most expensive rocket

Mars Sample Return, Science, Space / Mike M. / May 11, 2024

Enlarge / The Space Launch System rocket lifts off on the Artemis I mission.

NASA is looking for ways to get rock samples back from Mars for less than the $11 billion the agency would need under its own plan, so last month, officials put out a call to industry to propose ideas.

Boeing is the first company to release details about how it would attempt a Mars Sample Return mission. Its study involves a single flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the super heavy-lift launcher designed to send astronauts to the Moon on NASA’s Artemis missions.

Jim Green, NASA’s former chief scientist and longtime head of the agency’s planetary science division, presented Boeing’s concept Wednesday at the Humans to Mars summit, an annual event sponsored primarily by traditional space companies. Boeing is the lead contractor for the SLS core stage and upper stage and has pitched the SLS, primarily a crew launch vehicle, as a rocket for military satellites and deep space probes.

All in one

Green, now retired, said the concept he and Boeing engineers propose would reduce the risks of Mars Sample Return. With one mission, there are fewer points of potential failure, he said.

“To reduce mission complexity, this new concept is doing one launch,” Green said.

This argument makes some sense, but the problem is SLS is the most expensive rocket flying today. Even if NASA and Boeing introduce cost-cutting measures, NASA’s inspector general reported last year it’s unlikely the cost of a single SLS launch would fall below $2 billion. The inspector general recommended NASA consider buying commercial rockets as an alternative to SLS for future Artemis missions.

NASA’s Perseverance rover, operating on Mars since February 2021, is collecting soil and rock core samples and sealing them in 43 cigar-size titanium tubes. The rover has dropped the first 10 of these tubes in a depot on the Martian surface that could be retrieved by a future sample return mission. The remaining tubes will likely remain stowed on Perseverance in hopes the rover will directly hand off the samples to the spacecraft that comes to Mars to get them.

Enlarge / Boeing says a single launch of the Space Launch System rocket could carry everything needed for a Mars Sample Return mission.

Boeing

In his remarks, Green touted the benefits of launching a Mars Sample Return mission with a single rocket and a single spacecraft. NASA’s baseline concept involves two launches, one with a US-built lander and a small rocket to boost the rocket samples back off the surface of Mars, and another with a European spacecraft to rendezvous with the sample carrier in orbit around Mars, then bring the specimens back to Earth.

“This concept is one launch vehicle,” he said. “It’s the SLS. What does it do? It’s carrying a massive payload. What is the payload? It’s a Mars entry and descent aeroshell. It has a propulsive descent module.”

The lander would carry everything needed to get the samples back to Earth. A fetch rover onboard the lander would deploy to drive out and pick up the sample tubes collected by the Perseverance rover. Then, a robotic arm would transfer the sample tubes to a container at the top of a two-stage rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) sitting on top of the lander. The MAV would have the oomph needed to boost the samples off the surface of Mars and into orbit, then fire engines to target a course back to Earth.

Boeing has no direct experience as a prime contractor for any Mars mission. SpaceX, with its giant Starship rocket designed for eventual Mars missions, and Lockheed Martin, which has built several Mars landers for NASA, are the companies with the technology and expertise that seem to be most useful for Mars Sample Return.

NASA is also collecting ideas for Mars Sample Return from its space centers across the United States. The agency also tasked the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was in charge of developing the original dead-on-arrival concept, to come up with a better idea. Later this year, NASA officials will reference these new proposals as they decide how to proceed with Mars Sample Return, with the goal of getting samples back from Mars in the 2030s.

NASA wants a cheaper Mars Sample Return—Boeing proposes most expensive rocket Read More »

Author name: Mike M.