Enlarge / Android 6.0 Marshmallow is getting a spiffy new feature. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Auto-resetting app permissions were introduced in Android 11 as part of a continually expanding Android feature set aiming to automatically limit apps you don’t use. When you don’t use an app for a set period of time, Android will automatically strip the app of any permissions it has been granted, limiting it from tracking you in the background or accessing data. It’s a nice feature for less tech-savvy people who aren’t interested in manually organizing the inner workings of their phones. If you open the app again, it can ask for all of those permissions again.

Like most new Android features, auto-resetting permissions were exclusive to Android 11 when it came out last year—making up a very small number of Android’s 3 billion active devices. Google’s official Android Studio stats have Android 11 at 0 percent market share, but that chart hasn’t been updated since Android 11 came out (update your chart, Google!). The last update we got said OEMs were pushing out Android 11 about as quickly as they rolled out Android 10, so today, version 11 might be cracking 10 percent of Android devices.

Enlarge (credit: Chesnot | Getty Images)

But years later, Facebook’s own internal research teams revealed that troll farms were still reaching massive audiences, even if they didn’t have large direct followings. The company’s own algorithms pushed the troll content onto users who had not expressed interest in the pages, expanding the trolls’ reach exponentially. A report detailing the research was leaked to MIT Technology Review by a former employee.

When the report was published in 2019, troll farms were reaching 100 million Americans and 360 million people worldwide every week. In any given month, Facebook was showing troll farm posts to 140 million Americans. Most of the users never followed any of the pages. Rather, Facebook’s content-recommendation algorithms had forced the content on over 100 million Americans weekly. “A big majority of their ability to reach our users comes from the structure of our platform and our ranking algorithms rather than user choice,” the report said.

Enlarge / Some of the massive volcanic deposits that are part of the Siberian Traps. (credit: MIT)

Over the years, there have been numerous efforts to look into this massive, world-changing event. The end-Permian mass extinction was coincident with mass eruptions in the Siberian Traps, and some potential scenarios include volcanism driving acid rain, volcanism triggering the burning of coal (which released greenhouses gases into the atmosphere), and a reduction in the availability of oxygen in the ocean, among others. However, a new paper relies on previously unused data and modeling to dig into the matter.

In all, the study found that 36,000 gigatons of carbon—mostly from volcanic sources—were released into the atmosphere over a relatively short span of 15,000 years. This period also saw the global average temperature rise a staggering amount, from 25ºC to 40ºC. While researchers previously explored volcanism and carbon as potential causes for the massive extinction, this work provides more insight into the event, said Wolfram Kürschner, a geologist at the University of Oslo and one of the authors of the paper.

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SushiSwap’s chief technology officer says the company’s MISO platform has been hit by a software supply chain attack. SushiSwap is a community-driven decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that lets users swap, earn, lend, borrow, and leverage cryptocurrency assets all from one place. Launched earlier this year, Sushi’s newest offering, Minimal Initial SushiSwap Offering (MISO), is a token launchpad that lets projects launch their own tokens on the Sushi network.

Unlike cryptocurrency coins that need a native blockchain and substantive groundwork, DeFi tokens are an easier alternative to implement, as they can function on an existing blockchain. For example, anybody can create their own “digital tokens” on top of the Ethereum blockchain without having to recreate a new cryptocurrency altogether.

Attacker steals $3 million in Ethereum via one GitHub commit

In a Twitter thread today, SushiSwap CTO Joseph Delong announced that an auction on MISO launchpad had been hijacked via a supply chain attack. An “anonymous contractor” with the GitHub handle AristoK3 and access to the project’s code repository had pushed a malicious code commit that was distributed on the platform’s front-end.

The latest XPS 15 (officially, model number 9510) is yet another iterative improvement for a laptop that has always looked and felt like a blown-up version of the XPS 13. But six- or eight-core Intel Tiger Lake processors and a new Nvidia GeForce RTX GPUs with ray tracing capabilities make this version of the XPS 15 especially appealing for professionals and light gamers, even if updated competitors like Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 (and, when it’s finally released, an updated version of the 16-inch MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon) give it a run for its money.

Enlarge / Inspiration4 reflected in the shores of the St. Johns River on the space coast of Florida. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann / Ars Technica)

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin Galactic delays next flight. The space tourism company said Friday that it was delaying the next flight of its VSS Unity vehicle to no earlier than mid-October. As a reason, Virgin Galactic said, “During preparation for the Unity 23 test flight, a third-party supplier recently flagged a potential manufacturing defect in a component of the flight control actuation system that they supply to Virgin Galactic.”

Enlarge / A 1729 Stradivari known as the “Solomon, Ex-Lambert” on display at Christie’s in New York in March 2007. (credit: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

Along with Andrea Amati and Andrea Guarneri, Antonio Stradivari dominated the so-called Golden Age of Violins (roughly 1660 to 1750), and the instruments they crafted remain the gold standard today in terms of acoustic quality. World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma has long favored a Stradivarius instrument, as does violinist Joshua Bell. But scientists have been arguing for years about precisely why these instruments have such superior sound. A recent paper published in the journal Angewandte Chemie confirms a theory dating back to 2006: the secret lies in the chemicals used to soak the wood, most notably borax, zinc, copper, alum, and lime water.

I’ve written extensively about this topic in the past. The (perceived) unique sound can’t just be due to the instrument’s geometry, although Stradivari’s geometrical approach did give us the violin’s signature shape. One hypothesis is that Stradivari may have used Alpine spruce that grew during a period of uncommonly cold weather, which caused the annual growth rings to be closer together, making the wood abnormally dense. Another prevailing theory has to do with the varnish: namely, that Stradivari used an ingenious cocktail of honey, egg whites, and gum arabic from sub-Saharan trees—or perhaps salts or other chemicals.

Then again, the difference may be all in our heads. A player’s instrument preference is highly subjective, and there’s some evidence of so-called “psychoacoustics” at play: that is, we’ve become so awed by the name Stradivarius that it influences how we evaluate or respond to the sound of one of Stradivari’s instruments.

Enlarge / PURDUE PHARMA, STAMFORD, Conn. – 2019/09/12: Members of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and Truth Pharm staged a protest outside Purdue Pharma headquarters over the recent, controversial opioid settlement. (credit: Getty | Erik McGregor)

The Department of Justice is fighting to strip the billionaire Sackler family of the sweeping legal immunity granted as part of a controversial $4.5 billion opioid settlement.

The department filed a motion late Wednesday to block the implementation of the settlement until appeals can be heard in a higher court. Attorneys for the department argued that some aspects of the deal could go into effect quickly, complicating the appeal, according to NPR. Along with the DOJ, Connecticut, Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Washington state are also preparing to fight the settlement.

The Justice Department also requested an expedited hearing within the next two weeks.

The reports say that the 2022 iPhone SE will feature the Apple’s A15 chip—the same one that’s inside the newly announced iPhone 13, iPhone 13 Pro, and iPad mini. The phone would also feature 5G and have Qualcomm’s X60 modem, according to Nikkei.

Enlarge / This looks fun. (credit: EA)

After Battlefield 2042‘s reveal during EA’s June E3 news blitz, the publisher announced that the game will feature three modes, none of which are battle royale-related. “All-Out Warfare,” the traditional BF deathmatch mode, is finally upgrading to 128 players on current-gen consoles and PC. “Battlefield Portal” is a mashup game that lets players customize matches with elements of Battlefield 1942, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and Battlefield 3 inside 2042 maps. “Hazard Zone” is an alleged squad-based mode that EA has thus far been mum on. Today’s announcement didn’t specify whether all three modes would launch with the game.

Enlarge / Eric Eoin Marques led away from the High Court in Dublin in August 2013 after US authorities formally requested his extradition. (credit: Getty Images | Niall Carson | PA Images )

A man who operated a dark web service that hosted millions of child-sexual-abuse images was sentenced to 27 years in federal prison for conspiracy to advertise child pornography, the US Department of Justice announced today. Eric Eoin Marques, a 36-year-old dual national of the US and Ireland, was also sentenced to “a lifetime of supervised release” after his prison time is over.

Marques will get credit for time served from July 2013 to the present, a sentencing document says. He was also ordered to forfeit over $154,000.

During a 2013 bail hearing in Dublin, FBI Special Agent Brooke Donahue “agreed that he had described Marques as ‘the largest facilitator of child porn on the planet’ and added ‘that remains true to this day,'” according to an Irish Examiner article in September 2013. An Irish court record provides a slightly different wording of Donahue’s quote, describing Marques as “the largest facilitator of child pornography websites on the planet.” Today’s DOJ announcement said that “Marques was one of the largest facilitators of child pornography in the world.”

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

New versions of Microsoft Office aren’t as big a deal as they used to be, thanks to the continuously updated (and continuously paid for) versions of the apps that come with a Microsoft 365 subscription. But for everyone else, there’s still Office 2021, an upgrade to Office 2019 that’s coming to both Windows and macOS on October 5, Microsoft announced today. Office 2021 will add the same features as the Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (or LTSC, catchy) release, which is available today.

Compared to Office 2019, the last “perpetual” version of Office, the new version includes Dark Mode support, support for version 1.3 of the OpenDocument format, new Excel functions and formulas, improved slide show recording for PowerPoint, and various user-interface tweaks and enhancements. Microsoft lists most of the new features here.

Microsoft plans to offer five years of “Mainstream Support” for Office 2021, without any extended support beyond that. The end date for Office 2021 support is in October of 2016, just a year after support ends for the Windows versions of Office 2016 and Office 2019.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Jeff Greenberg)

“This was significantly disproportionate to what we’ve seen with the influenza vaccine,” Matt Troup, president and CEO of Conway Regional Health System, told Becker’s Hospital Review in an interview Wednesday.