For millions of music fans, the most controversial app ban of the past year was not the brief TikTok outage but the ongoing delisting of Musi from Apple's App Store.
Those users are holding out hope that Musi can defeat Apple in court and soon be reinstated. However, rather than coming to any sort of resolution, that court fight has intensified over the past month, with both sides now seeking sanctions, TorrentFreak reported.
Musi is a free app that lets users stream music from YouTube without interruptions, only playing ads when the app is initially opened. It was removed from the App Store in September 2024 after a YouTube complaint, but it maintains a deeply loyal fan base who swear it's better than alternatives like Spotify. Those fans who still have the app installed on their iPhones can continue to use the service, but if they lose access to the app (by updating their phones) or are first-time users, it is currently unavailable for download, to the dismay of many fans who complain daily on Reddit.
Season 2 of HBO's The Last of Us wrapped up on Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who's played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) are back to talk about the finale like they've talked about every other episode this season. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Kyle: Coming back from last week's Joel flashback, it took me a second to remember what was actually going on in "The Present" of The Last of Us as we enter the season 2 finale. Ellie marvels at how easy it was to torture a hated enemy even though the result was just two words indicating Abby's supposed location: "whale" and "wheel."
I don't think Ellie's turn to "the dark side" is unearned, exactly. But I do think that this single-minded, revenge-obsessed version of Ellie is a lot less interesting than the character we grew to love in season 1. We went into this season in a sort of adolescent family drama, and we are leaving it in post-apocalyptic Breaking Bad.
Andrew: To compare it to Breaking Bad implies some kind of gradual, nuanced transformation has taken place, where my problem with the season so far has been mostly the opposite thing. Everyone's motivations here make sense and are consistent, to some extent, with who we know these characters to be. Ellie is rash and impulsive; Dina is lovestruck; Jesse is loyal and selfless.
It's just that trading the first season's story (an unlikely pairing navigates the breadth of a post-apocalyptic America, driven by the promise of a cure) for the second season's story (Ellie's revenge fantasy) is a huge downgrade! And I say this as someone who has been slightly warmer on the season overall than you have. They killed the most interesting character and, with him, the story's most interesting dynamic. Whatever followed that was probably always going to be a letdown, and I'm sure you can attest to that as a game-player who has already experienced a version of all of this.
The show has spun its wheels a bit in Seattle, even with just seven episodes to fill.
Credit:
HBO
Kyle: Yes, I soured on the second game for pretty much the same reasons. But I also feel the show has been more artlessly blunt with some of its character moments. Like the way Jesse finds out about Dina's pregnancy, and then similarly declares that he "can't die" because he's going to be a father. It felt like an AI trained on the TV Tropes website was writing some of these scenes...
Andrew: Listen, normally I'm all for blaming AI, but to blame AI for this one is to imply that lowest-common-denominator TV storytelling hasn't existed for as long as the medium has. Everyone is just performing the most-predictable version of their respective character archetypes. It's an expensive show with a talented cast and an interesting riff on the zombie apocalypse idea, so at a baseline it remains watchable. But I suppose that's damning with faint praise.
Kyle: Yeah I didn't mean a literal AI. I meant that as a sick burn on the human writers.
Andrew: I am trying to think of things to say to stop this from just being a litany of complaints, but unfortunately complaints are a lot of what I've got about this episode. I liked the visuals of Ellie's nighttime sojourn to the abandoned Ferris wheel. I feel like there is a slightly more interesting TV show happening off to the side of this one, about the conflict between the militarized WLF types and the cultists. But as far as Ellie has been concerned so far, these factions mostly exist to chase the other faction off at the last minute, saving Ellie's bacon again.
Kyle: And to set up contrived philosophical discussions. Like when Jesse makes the perfectly reasonable decision not to mount a doomed attempt to save a cultist when they're outnumbered by WLF members. Then, later, Ellie twists that into Jesse chickening out because the guy "wasn't a member of your community." No... I'm pretty sure the 6-to-2 odds had at least as much to do with it. But Ellie needs to turn the conversation back to how Joel represents "my community... beaten to death." It's not subtle...
Ellie's single-minded quest for revenge this season has been less compelling than the first season's unlikely buddy story.
Credit:
HBO
Andrew: Yeah I found that moment frustrating because Ellie is here in direct contravention of what her community decided! And it is her community, as a group of people who have looked out for her and provided for her for years, whether she wants to admit that or not. She only uses this idea of "community" with Joel selectively, as a cudgel, so she can do what she already wants to do.
By letting her have the last word on it, the show tacitly endorses her read of the situation, and it's a variety of vigilante justice that TV audiences have been primed to sympathize with, but man it just falls flat for me.
Kyle: I was also perplexed by Ellie's brief shipwreck storyline, which led to her being put in a noose by angry cultists. Then she gets saved just seconds from death by a deus ex machina problem in "The Village" that requires the cultists to immediately put her execution on hold and run away. And after all that she just... hops in a boat and goes off to the next completely unrelated bit of the story.
I suppose they're probably setting things up to provide more context for that scene in the next season, but in the context of this episode as it stands it was just a baffling way to use up 10 minutes or so.
Andrew: Yes I am assuming all the time spent setting up these cultists is going to pay off somehow, eventually, but it hasn't happened yet.
The episode's other Big Emotional Moment comes when Ellie catches up with a couple of members of Abby's crew (I imagine a Hells Angels-style leather jacket, emblazoned with ABBY'S CREW on the back) and ends up killing them both, including a heavily pregnant woman whose dying breaths are spent trying to talk Ellie into cutting her baby out of her. There's some kind of lesson here, about the ultimate futility of revenge, about the sins of the parents, about what perpetuating the cycle of violence ultimately gets you. We'll see if Ellie ends up absorbing any of this in the end.
In both her response to the underground torture scene and here, Ellie seems continually shocked that her quest for vengeance might involve any kind of collateral damage to anyone other than Abby.
Kyle: Yes, this bit is culled from the game, but there she just discovers the unborn baby after both of Abby's companions are already dead. The whole "cut my baby out of me before I die" thing was seemingly crafted to make this just that much more emotionally scarring for Ellie. But as you said, she doesn't really get to spend any time absorbing any of that, because we're moving right on to the next plot point.
I understand how and why we don't get to have 23 episode seasons of TV shows anymore, but it feels like some of the 17 side stories they introduce in this episode (and many more throughout this season) could have stood to have some more time to breathe.
Andrew: I was astounded—astounded! That this was our season finale, because it feels like such a transitional piece-moving episode, and because we're only seven episodes in. I get that we are stretching one game into two seasons here, but the nine-episode first season was already short, and then this one's even shorter. Can we just agree to return to 13-episode seasons, please?
Anyway, if your main complaint about the Seattle section of the show has been "too much wheel spinning," this episode's big, dramatic cliffhanger is bad news for you. Every day Ellie has spent in Seattle has gotten some big Majora's Mask-esque "DAY ONE, DAY TWO, etc" subtitle, and now we know why. The beginning of next season is going to show us the events of these three days—but from Abby's perspective!
I guess I caused this by saying "what if Abby were a more fully formed antagonist" to my monkey's paw at the start of the season. But I can't say that this has me on the edge of my seat about season 3, this little slip of a teaser at the end of an episode that I didn't know was the season finale until after the fact.
Abby oversees her empire.
Credit:
HBO
Kyle: Yes, this structure also apes the second game, which switches to Abby's backstory halfway through (though there's no "season break" in the middle there). The dramatic reveal of Abby's community being housed in a football stadium is one of the most memorable moments of the game and was a rare highlight of this episode, I felt.
Before that, though, we get the inevitable and deadly confrontation between Ellie/Jesse/Tommy and Abby. After seeing it in the show, I had to go back and rewatch how it plays out in the game because something just felt off in the translation. Sure enough, the TV show production added Ellie screaming "no no no" and the sound of a gunshot before that dramatic cut to black and transition to Abby's earlier POV.
As usual, it feels like the show has a need to just crank up the drama at every turn in an effort to make sure people tune in next week (or next season).
Andrew: Let's return to that divide between me as a show-watcher and you as a game-player as we wrap up.
I find myself with more gripes than praise here at the end of the season. There are still a lot of things I like here—like I said, the fictional universe is compelling enough to keep it watchable, and for all my complaints about Ellie the character, Bella Ramsey as a performer is doing the best work they can with sort of underwhelming material (predictably, some corners of the Internet have decided to harangue Ramsey relentlessly, partly because they're a non-binary person who has decided to exist in public).
But my impression is that my biggest problems with this season, from the killing of Joel to the single-minded vengeance arc, are all downstream of story decisions made years ago during the development of The Last of Us Part 2. Normally the complaint with an adaptation is that the show or film's creators are ruining the story somehow by being insufficiently faithful to the source material and losing something in the process. But it feels like the show's problems are mostly inherited from the game—in other words, that the show is being too faithful to underwhelming source material. Is this a fair assessment, or am I missing something?
Kyle: I'd say that the structural problems of the show are mostly derived from the game's decision to transition from "buddy adventure" to "revenge saga" as we've discussed ad nauseam. But a lot of the nitty-gritty problems of this season—stuff like pacing, flow, character development, etc.—actually come off a little worse because of decisions to add or change things for the show.
After season 1, I was hopeful that some light-touch changes could help redeem a game that I did not enjoy much. Instead, I think they somehow made it worse.
Andrew: Oops!
Well, there’s always next season. Maybe all of our complaints will be substantively addressed and then some. The only thing we can say for sure is: We haven’t seen the last of The Last of Us.
Kyle: In the end, the real Last of Us was all the people we killed along the way.
European regulators have opened formal proceedings into Pornhub and three other adult platforms for suspected violations of the Digital Services Act (DSA), the European Commission announced yesterday. Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX, and XVideos are accused of failing to prevent minors from accessing adult content.
"The Commission preliminarily found that the platforms do not comply with putting in place appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure a high level of privacy, safety and security for minors, in particular with age verification tools to safeguard minors from adult content," the EC said.
The regulatory body said preventing minors from accessing adult content with age verification tools is needed to prevent "negative effects on the rights of the child" and "the mental and physical well-being of users."
Anti-vaccine advocate and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has unilaterally revoked federal recommendations for healthy children and pregnant people to get COVID-19 booster shots.
The abrupt change, announced on social media, could make it yet more difficult, if not impossible, for healthy children and pregnant people to have access to the seasonal vaccines, which have proven safe and effective at protecting both of those groups from severe illness.
In a regulatory meeting last week, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist Ruth Link-Gelles presented 2023–2024 data showing that COVID-19 boosters effectively protected children and teens from needing urgent or emergency care due to COVID-19 (slide 36). In children 9 months to 4 years old in that season, the boosters provided 52 percent added effectiveness over background immunity from past vaccination and illness. The boosters were 64 percent effective in kids ages 5 to 17.
The Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara, California, serves military space launch missions as well as launches for NASA and commercial entities like SpaceX. But how do all those launches affect residents living along the Central Coast? People might marvel at the spectacular visual display, but as launch activity at the base has ramped up, so have the noise complaints, particularly about the sonic booms produced by Falcon 9 launches, which can reach as far south as Ventura County. The booms rattle windows, frighten pets, and have raised concerns about threats to the structural integrity of private homes.
There have been rockets launching from Vandenberg for decades, so why are the Falcon 9 launches of such concern? "Because of the Starlink satellites, the orbital mechanics for where they're trying to place these in orbit is bringing [the trajectories] closer to the coast," said Brigham Young University's Kent Gee, who described his research into sonic boom effects on neighboring communities in a press briefing at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in New Orleans. And the launches are occurring much more frequently, from two to three launches per year in the 1980s to between five and seven launches each month today. There were 46 Falcon 9 launches out of the Vandenberg base in 2024 alone, per Gee.
Gee joined a project called ECOBOOM (Environmental and Community Observation of Sonic Booms) to study the factors that can impact just how jarring those sonic booms might be, conducted jointly by BYU and California State University, Bakersfield, with cooperation from the Space Force. "Space Force is interested in this because they feel a sense of stewardship," said Gee. "These rockets from SpaceX and other providers are launched from the base for a variety of missions and they want to understand the effects both on and off base, trying to understand how they can complete the mission while minimizing [negative] impacts."
OnePlus thrives on trends—if other smartphone makers are doing something, you can bet OnePlus is going to have a take. The company recently confirmed it's ditching the storied alert slider in favor of an Apple-like shortcut button called the Plus Key, and that's not the only trend it'll chase with its latest phones. OnePlus has also announced an expanded collection of AI features for translation, photography, screen capture, and more. OnePlus isn't breaking new ground here, but it is cherry-picking some of the more useful AI features we've seen on other phones.
The OnePlus approach covers most of the established AI use cases. There will be AI VoiceScribe, a feature that records and summarizes calls in popular messaging and video chat apps. Similarly, AI Call Assistant will record and summarize phone calls, a bit like Google's Pixel phones. However, these two features are India-only for now.
Globally, OnePlus users will get AI Translation, which pulls together text, voice, camera, and screen translation into a single AI-powered app. AI Search, meanwhile, allows you to search for content on your phone and in OnePlus system apps in a "conversational" way. That suggests to us it's basically another chatbot on your phone, like Motorola's Ask and Search feature, which we didn't love.
A man who made global headlines after he continued sharing deepfake porn in defiance of an Australian court order is now facing one of the biggest fines ever threatened over the artificial intelligence-fueled abuse.
Australia's eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has recommended a fine between $400,000 and $450,000, The Guardian reported, suggesting that it's warranted to deter other repeat offenders.
Fifty-three-year-old Anthony Rotondo, who divides his time between the Philippines and Australia, was ordered to take down AI-generated sexualized images of high-profile Australian women that Rotondo posted on the now-defunct Mr. Deepfakes site.
The principality of Monaco is perhaps the least suitable place on the Formula 1 calendar to hold a Grand Prix. A pirate cove turned tax haven nestled between France and Italy at the foot of the Alps-Maritimes, it has also been home to Grand Prix racing since 1929, predating the actual Formula 1 world championship by two decades. The track is short, tight, and perhaps best described as riding a bicycle around your living room. It doesn’t even race well, for the barrier-lined streets are too narrow for the too-big, too-heavy cars of the 21st century. And yet, it’s F1’s crown jewel.
Despite the location's many drawbacks, there’s something magical about racing in Monaco that almost defies explanation. The real magic happens on Saturday, when the drivers compete against each other to set the fastest lap. With overtaking as difficult as it is here, qualifying is everything, determining the order everyone lines up in, and more than likely, finishes.
Coverage of the Monaco Grand Prix is now filmed in vivid 4K, and it has never looked better. I’m a big fan of the static top-down camera that’s like a real-time Apple TV screensaver.
Egg drop competitions are a staple of high school and college physics classes. The goal is for students to build a device using bubble wrap, straws, or various other materials designed to hold an egg and keep it intact after being dropped from a substantial height—say, 10 meters (nearly 33 feet). There's even a "naked egg" version in which a raw egg is dropped into a container below. The competition is intended to teach students about structural mechanics and impact physics, and it is not an easy feat; most of the dropped eggs break.
MIT engineering professor Tal Cohen decided to investigate why the failure rate was so high and reported her team's findings in a paper published in the journal Communications Physics. "The universal convention is that the egg should be in a vertical orientation when it hits the ground," Cohen told Physics Magazine. But their results from controlled trials simulating the egg drop challenge in the lab calls this conventional wisdom into question.
It is not an unreasonable assumption to make. Another popular physics party trick is to walk on several cartons of eggs without breaking them. Typically it only takes about five and a half pounds of force to crack a single eggshell, much less than the average adult human. As I wrote for Slate back in 2012, "The key is to align the eggs so that the narrow pole is pointing upward, and step in such a way to distribute your weight over the entire surface area, to avoid overloading any one eggshell." (Being barefoot also helps.)
Eric Ingebretsen, chief commercial officer at SK TES, an IT asset disposition provider, tells me this early on during a tour of a 128,000-square-foot facility in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He will restate this a few times.
A big part of this site's pitch to its clients, including the "hyperscale" customers with gigantic data centers nearby, is that each device is labeled, tracked, and inventoried for its drives—both obvious and hidden—and is either securely wiped or destroyed. The process, commonly called ITAD (for "IT Asset Disposition") is used by larger businesses, especially when they upgrade fleets of servers or workers' devices. ITAD providers ensure all the old gear is wiped clean, then resold, repurposed, recycled, or destroyed.
James Gentz has seen birds aplenty on his East Texas rice-and-crawfish farm: snow geese and pintails, spoonbills and teal. The whooping crane couple, though, he found “magnificent.” These endangered, long-necked behemoths arrived in 2021 and set to building a nest amid his flooded fields. “I just loved to see them,” Gentz says.
Not every farmer is thrilled to host birds. Some worry about the spread of avian flu, others are concerned that the birds will eat too much of their valuable crops. But as an unstable climate delivers too little water, careening temperatures and chaotic storms, the fates of human food production and birds are ever more linked—with the same climate anomalies that harm birds hurting agriculture too.
In some places, farmer cooperation is critical to the continued existence of whooping cranes and other wetland-dependent waterbird species, close to one-third of which are experiencing declines. Numbers of waterfowl (think ducks and geese) have crashed by 20 percent since 2014, and long-legged wading shorebirds like sandpipers have suffered steep population losses. Conservation-minded biologists, nonprofits, government agencies, and farmers themselves are amping up efforts to ensure that each species survives and thrives. With federal support in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, their work is more important (and threatened) than ever.
Their collaborations, be they domestic or international, are highly specific, because different regions support different kinds of agriculture—grasslands, or deep or shallow wetlands, for example, favored by different kinds of birds. Key to the efforts is making it financially worthwhile for farmers to keep—or tweak—practices to meet bird forage and habitat needs.
Traditional crawfish-and-rice farms in Louisiana, as well as in Gentz’s corner of Texas, mimic natural freshwaterwetlands that are being lost to saltwater intrusion from sea level rise. Rice grows in fields that are flooded to keep weeds down; fields are drained for harvest by fall. They are then re-flooded to cover crawfish burrowed in the mud; these are harvested in early spring—and the cycle begins again.
That second flooding coincides with fall migration—a genetic and learned behavior that determines where birds fly and when—and it lures massive numbers of egrets, herons, bitterns, and storks that dine on the crustaceans as well as on tadpoles, fish, and insects in the water.
On a biodiverse crawfish-and-rice farm, “you can see 30, 40, 50 species of birds, amphibians, reptiles, everything,” says Elijah Wojohn, a shorebird conservation biologist at nonprofit Manomet Conservation Sciences in Massachusetts. In contrast, if farmers switch to less water-intensive corn and soybean production in response to climate pressures, “you’ll see raccoons, deer, crows, that’s about it.” Wojohn often relies on word-of-mouth to hook farmers on conservation; one learned to spot whimbrel, with their large, curved bills, got “fired up” about them and told all his farmer friends. Such farmer-to-farmer dialogue is how you change things among this sometimes change-averse group, Wojohn says.
In the Mississippi Delta and in California, where rice is generally grown without crustaceans, conservation organizations like Ducks Unlimited have long boosted farmers’ income and staying power by helping them get paid to flood fields in winter for hunters. This attracts overwintering ducks and geese—considered an extra “crop”—that gobble leftover rice and pond plants; the birds also help to decompose rice stalks so farmers don’t have to remove them. Ducks Unlimited’s goal is simple, says director of conservation innovation Scott Manley: Keep rice farmers farming rice. This is especially important as a changing climate makes that harder. 2024 saw a huge push, with the organization conserving 1 million acres for waterfowl.
Some strategies can backfire. In Central New York, where dwindling winter ice has seen waterfowl lingering past their habitual migration times, wildlife managers and land trusts are buying less productive farmland to plant with native grasses; these give migratory fuel to ducks when not much else is growing. But there’s potential for this to produce too many birds for the land available back in their breeding areas, says Andrew Dixon, director of science and conservation at the Mohamed Bin Zayed Raptor Conservation Fund in Abu Dhabi, and coauthor of an article about the genetics of bird migration in the 2024 Annual Review of Animal Biosciences. This can damage ecosystems meant to serve them.
Recently, conservation efforts spanning continents and thousands of miles have sprung up. One seeks to protect buff-breasted sandpipers. As they migrate 18,000 miles to and from the High Arctic where they nest, the birds experience extreme hunger—hyperphagia—that compels them to voraciously devour insects in short grasses where the bugs proliferate. But many stops along the birds’ round-trip route are threatened. There are water shortages affecting agriculture in Texas, where the birds forage at turf grass farms; grassland loss and degradation in Paraguay; and in Colombia, conversion of forage lands to exotic grasses and rice paddies these birds cannot use.
Conservationists say it’s critical to protect habitat for “buffies” all along their route, and to ensure that the winters these small shorebirds spend around Uruguay’s coastal lagoons are a food fiesta. To that end, Manomet conservation specialist Joaquín Aldabe, in partnership with Uruguay’s agriculture ministry, has so far taught 40 local ranchers how to improve their cattle grazing practices. Rotationally moving the animals from pasture to pasture means grasses stay the right length for insects to flourish.
One treacherous leg of the northwest migration route is the parched Klamath Basin of Oregon and California. For three recent years, “we saw no migrating birds. I mean, the peak count was zero,” says John Vradenburg, supervisory biologist of the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge Complex. He and myriad private, public, and Indigenous partners are working to conjure more water for the basin’s human and avian denizens, as perennial wetlands become seasonal wetlands, seasonal wetlands transition to temporary wetlands, and temporary wetlands turn to arid lands.
Taking down four power dams and one levee has stretched the Klamath River’s water across the landscape, creating new streams and connecting farm fields to long-separated wetlands. But making the most of this requires expansive thinking. Wetland restoration—now endangered by loss of funding from the current administration—would help drought-afflicted farmers by keeping water tables high. But what if farmers could also receive extra money for their businesses via eco-credits, akin to carbon credits, for the work those wetlands do to filter-clean farm runoff? And what if wetlands could function as aquaculture incubators for juvenile fish, before stocking rivers? Klamath tribes are invested in restoring endangered c’waam and koptu sucker fish, and this could help them achieve that goal.
As birds’ traditional resting and nesting spots become inhospitable, a more sobering question is whether improvements can happen rapidly enough. The blistering pace of climate change gives little chance for species to genetically adapt, although some are changing their behaviors. That means that the work of conservationists to find and secure adequate, supportive farmland and rangeland as the birds seek out new routes has become a sprint against time.
This coming weekend is a special one for most motorsport fans. There are Formula 1 races in Monaco and NASCAR races in Charlotte. And arguably towering over them both is the Indianapolis 500, being held this year for the 109th time. America's oldest race is also one of its toughest: The track may have just four turns, but the cars negotiate them going three times faster than you drive on the highway, inches from the wall. For hours. At least at Le Mans, you have more than one driver per car.
This year's race promises to be an exciting one. The track is sold out for the first time since the centenary race in 2016. A rookie driver and a team new to the series took pole position. Two very fast cars are starting at the back thanks to another conflict-of-interest scandal involving Team Penske, the second in two years for a team whose owner also owns the track and the series. And the cars are trickier to drive than they have been for many years, thanks to a new supercapacitor-based hybrid system that has added more than 100 lbs to the rear of the car, shifting the weight distribution further back.
Ahead of Sunday's race, I spoke with a couple of IndyCar drivers and some engineers to get a better sense of how they prepare and what to expect.
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
New research shows that penguin guano in Antarctica is an important source of ammonia aerosol particles that help drive the formation and persistence of low clouds, which cool the climate by reflecting some incoming sunlight back to space.
The findings reinforce the growing awareness that Earth’s intricate web of life plays a significant role in shaping the planetary climate. Even at the small levels measured, the ammonia particles from the guano interact with sulfur-based aerosols from ocean algae to start a chemical chain reaction that forms billions of tiny particles that serve as nuclei for water vapor droplets.
The hacker ecosystem in Russia, more than perhaps anywhere else in the world, has long blurred the lines between cybercrime, state-sponsored cyberwarfare, and espionage. Now an indictment of a group of Russian nationals and the takedown of their sprawling botnet offers the clearest example in years of how a single malware operation allegedly enabled hacking operations as varied as ransomware, wartime cyberattacks in Ukraine, and spying against foreign governments.
The US Department of Justice today announced criminal charges today against 16 individuals law enforcement authorities have linked to a malware operation known as DanaBot, which according to a complaint infected at least 300,000 machines around the world. The DOJ’s announcement of the charges describes the group as “Russia-based,” and names two of the suspects, Aleksandr Stepanov and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, as living in Novosibirsk, Russia. Five other suspects are named in the indictment, while another nine are identified only by their pseudonyms. In addition to those charges, the Justice Department says the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS)—a criminal investigation arm of the Department of Defense—carried out seizures of DanaBot infrastructure around the world, including in the US.
Aside from alleging how DanaBot was used in for-profit criminal hacking, the indictment also makes a rarer claim—it describes how a second variant of the malware it says was used in espionage against military, government, and NGO targets. “Pervasive malware like DanaBot harms hundreds of thousands of victims around the world, including sensitive military, diplomatic, and government entities, and causes many millions of dollars in losses,” US attorney Bill Essayli wrote in a statement.
Don't worry about the "mission-driven not-for-profit" College Board—it's drowning in cash. The US group, which administers the SAT and AP tests to college-bound students, paid its CEO $2.38 million in total compensation in 2023 (the most recent year data is available). The senior VP in charge of AP programs made $694,662 in total compensation, while the senior VP for Technology Strategy made $765,267 in total compensation.
Given such eye-popping numbers, one would have expected the College Board's transition to digital exams to go smoothly, but it continues to have issues.
Just last week, the group's AP Psychology exam was disrupted nationally when the required "Bluebook" testing app couldn't be accessed by many students. Because the College Board shifted to digital-only exams for 28 of its 36 AP courses beginning this year, no paper-based backup options were available. The only "solution" was to wait quietly in a freezing gymnasium, surrounded by a hundred other stressed-out students, to see if College Board could get its digital act together.
Marketers promote AI-assisted developer tools as workhorses that are essential for today’s software engineer. Developer platform GitLab, for instance, claims its Duo chatbot can “instantly generate a to-do list” that eliminates the burden of “wading through weeks of commits.” What these companies don’t say is that these tools are, by temperament if not default, easily tricked by malicious actors into performing hostile actions against their users.
Researchers from security firm Legit on Thursday demonstrated an attack that induced Duo into inserting malicious code into a script it had been instructed to write. The attack could also leak private code and confidential issue data, such as zero-day vulnerability details. All that’s required is for the user to instruct the chatbot to interact with a merge request or similar content from an outside source.
AI assistants’ double-edged blade
The mechanism for triggering the attacks is, of course, prompt injections. Among the most common forms of chatbot exploits, prompt injections are embedded into content a chatbot is asked to work with, such as an email to be answered, a calendar to consult, or a webpage to summarize. Large language model-based assistants are so eager to follow instructions that they’ll take orders from just about anywhere, including sources that can be controlled by malicious actors.
As Google moves the last remaining Nest devices into the Home app, it's also looking at ways to make this smart home hub easier to use. Naturally, Google is doing that by ramping up Gemini integration. The company has announced new automation capabilities with generative AI, as well as better support for third-party devices via the Home API. Google AI will also plug into a new Android widget that can keep you updated on what the smart parts of your home are up to.
The Google Home app is where you interact with all of Google's smart home gadgets, like cameras, thermostats, and smoke detectors—some of which have been discontinued, but that's another story. It also accommodates smart home devices from other companies, which can make managing a mixed setup feasible if not exactly intuitive. A dash of AI might actually help here.
Google began testing Gemini integrations in Home last year, and now it's opening that up to third-party devices via the Home API. Google has worked with a few partners on API integrations before general availability. The previously announced First Alert smoke/carbon monoxide detector and Yale smart lock that are replacing Google's Nest devices are among the first, along with Cync lighting, Motorola Tags, and iRobot vacuums.
NASA's Apollo missions brought back moon rock samples for scientists to study. We've learned a great deal over the ensuing decades, but one enduring mystery remains. Many of those lunar samples show signs of exposure to strong magnetic fields comparable to Earth's, yet the Moon doesn't have such a field today. So, how did the moon rocks get their magnetism?
There have been many attempts to explain this anomaly. The latest comes from MIT scientists, who argue in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances that a large asteroid impact briefly boosted the Moon's early weak magnetic field—and that this spike is what is recorded in some lunar samples.
Evidence gleaned from orbiting spacecraft observations, as well as results announced earlier this year from China's Chang'e 5 and Chang'e 6 missions, is largely consistent with the existence of at least a weak magnetic field on the early Moon. But where did this field come from? These usually form in planetary bodies as a result of a dynamo, in which molten metals in the core start to convect thanks to slowly dissipating heat. The problem is that the early Moon's small core had a mantle that wasn't much cooler than its core, so there would not have been significant convection to produce a sufficiently strong dynamo.
On Tuesday, Google launched Veo 3, a new AI video synthesis model that can do something no major AI video generator has been able to do before: create a synchronized audio track. While from 2022 to 2024, we saw early steps in AI video generation, each video was silent and usually very short in duration. Now you can hear voices, dialog, and sound effects in eight-second high-definition video clips.
Shortly after the new launch, people began asking the most obvious benchmarking question: How good is Veo 3 at faking Oscar-winning actor Will Smith at eating spaghetti?
First, a brief recap. The spaghetti benchmark in AI video traces its origins back to March 2023, when we first covered an early example of horrific AI-generated video using an open source video synthesis model called ModelScope. The spaghetti example later became well-known enough that Smith parodied it almost a year later in February 2024.
Is it weird to have nostalgia for an operating system? I don't mean missing a particular feature that's been removed from modern versions or a specific productivity setting that's no longer supported. I mean a sense of longing for the vibes of the computer interface you grew up with, an ache for the aesthetics of user interfaces past.
I would have thought I was immune to this particular brand of nostalgia. Then I happened upon Desktop Survivors 98, a new Vampire Survivors-style "bullet heaven" autoshooter that leans hard into the aesthetics of the late '90s Windows machines I grew up with. And while that low-res, 256-color presentation is what drew me in, it was the intriguing mouse-controlled gameplay underneath that has kept me coming back for more retro-styled action all week.
Start me up
When it comes to capturing the feel of the '90s computer environment, Desktop Survivors 98 gets everything just right. This is in large part due to rampant theft of familiar old-school icons; items like My Computer, Calculator, Minesweeper, Search, and more look like they were taken directly from a classic Microsoft tile set. The game's low-res desktop backgrounds and Windows also look like they came out of a years-old Microsoft style book.
The show has spun its wheels a bit in Seattle, even with just seven episodes to fill.
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HBO
Ellie's single-minded quest for revenge this season has been less compelling than the first season's unlikely buddy story.
Credit:
HBO
Abby oversees her empire.
Credit:
HBO
