Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Benj Edwards)

On Tuesday, IBM and Meta announced the AI Alliance, an international coalition of over 50 organizations including AMD, Intel, NASA, CERN, and Harvard University that aims to advance “open innovation and open science in AI.” In other words, the goal is to collectively promote alternatives to closed AI systems currently in use by market leaders such as OpenAI and Google with ChatGPT and Duet.

In the AI Alliance news release, OpenAI isn’t mentioned by name—and OpenAI is not part of the alliance, nor is Google. But over the past year, clear battle lines have been drawn between companies like OpenAI that keep AI model weights (neural network files) and data about how the models are created to themselves and companies like Meta, which provide AI model weights for others to run on their own hardware and allow others to build derivative models based on their research.

“Open and transparent innovation is essential to empower a broad spectrum of AI researchers, builders, and adopters with the information and tools needed to harness these advancements in ways that prioritize safety, diversity, economic opportunity and benefits to all,” writes the alliance.

Enlarge (credit: TrevorJacob | YouTube)

Trevor Jacob, a 30-year-old YouTuber pilot who intentionally crashed his plane to drive up views on a sponsored video, has been sentenced to six months in federal prison, the US Attorney’s Office announced Monday.

Earlier this year, Jacob pled guilty to “deliberately” crashing the plane, destroying the plane wreckage, and repeatedly lying to officials, obstructing federal probes into the crash. His sentence is much lower than the maximum sentence of 20 years that he may have faced had he not accepted a plea deal.

An “experienced pilot, skydiver, and former Olympic athlete,” Jacob hatched his plot to crash the plane after a company agreed to sponsor a video in which Jacob would promote a wallet, the US Attorney’s Office said.

Enlarge / That “Coming 2025” probably won’t apply to any PC version. (credit: Rockstar)

PC players will likely have to wait a bit longer than their console counterparts to play the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI. In a press release accompanying last night’s earlier-than-scheduled trailer launch, Rockstar specifically says it is “proud to announce that Grand Theft Auto VI is coming to PlayStation 5 computer entertainment systems and Xbox Series X|S games and entertainment systems in 2025.”

The explicit lack of any immediate PC release plans in that statement shouldn’t be a shock to longtime Rockstar Games watchers. Sure, the 2D, top-down Grand Theft Auto actually launched on Windows and MS-DOS(!) a few months before the more popular port to PlayStation in 1998. And the game’s 1999 sequel debuted on PlayStation and Windows on the same day.

When it comes to major 3D releases, Rockstar clearly prioritizes console launches over PC ports.

Since 2000, though, Rockstar has clearly prioritized its console releases over any PC ports. When one of Rockstar’s console games is released on the PC, the port tends to come anywhere from five months to over two full years after the first console release, according to an Ars analysis. Even Grand Theft Auto DLC like “The Lost and the Damned” and “The Ballad of Gay Tony” hit the PC well after their console launches—420 days and 166 days, respectively.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | kontekbrothers)

Support in Congress is growing for intensified vetting procedures at the US border, which would see immigrants and foreign visitors subjected to the same levels of scrutiny as suspected terrorists and spies. A bill introduced last week by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) and forthcoming legislation from its House counterpart both aim to expand the use of a key foreign intelligence program—Section 702—for screening and vetting visitors to the US.

Enlarge / A Pixel 3, messaging a savvy iPhone owner, one with the kinds of concerns Beeper hopes to resolve for its customers. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Sending an iMessage without an Apple device isn’t entirely new, but this way of doing it is. I didn’t hand over my Apple credentials or log in with my Apple ID on a Mac server on some far-away rack. I put my primary SIM card in the Pixel, I installed Beeper Mini, and it sent a text message to register my number with Apple. I never gave Beeper Mini my Apple ID.

From then on, my iPhone-toting friends who sent messages to my Pixel 3 saw them as other-iPhone blue, not noticeably distracting green. We could all access the typing, delivered/read receipts, emoji reactions, and most other iPhone-to-iPhone message features. Even if I had no active Apple devices, it seems, I could have chosen to meet Apple users where they were and gain end-to-end encryption by doing so.

Enlarge / India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar spacecraft undergoes accoustic testing. The propulsion module can be seen at the bottom. (credit: ISRO)

A little more than three months ago the Indian space agency, ISRO, achieved a major success by putting its Vikram lander safely down on the surface of the Moon. In doing so India became the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, and this further ignited the country’s interest in space exploration.

But it turns out that is not the end of the story for the Chandrayaan 3 mission. In a surprise announcement made Monday, ISRO announced that it has successfully returned the propulsion module used by the spacecraft into a high orbit around Earth. This experimental phase of the mission, the agency said in a statement, tested key capabilities needed for future lunar missions, including the potential for returning lunar rocks to Earth.

A capable module

The primary task of the propulsion module was to deliver the Vikram 3 lander into a low-lunar orbit, 100 km above the surface of the Moon. After doing this in August, the propulsion module moved to an orbit around the Moon at an altitude of 150 km. There, its remaining operational goal was to support a science experiment, known as SHAPE, to observe the Earth.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

But bear in mind, all cars lose range in the winter. Air gets denser as it cools, which takes more work to push through. And all the viscous fluids vehicles need take more time to warm up to their respective operating temperatures. And that means your engine, transmission, and differential all have more work to do—requiring more energy—in the cold.

Enlarge / Color composite of galaxy AzTECC71 from multiple color filters in the NIRCam instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope. (credit: J. McKinney/M. Franco/C. Casey/The University of Texas at Austin)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Enlarge / “Coming 2025.” (credit: Rockstar Games / YouTube)

The trailer for Rockstar Games heavily, mightily, impossibly anticipated sequel in its record-breaking series landed on YouTube Monday evening, earlier than its previously published Tuesday morning release. That’s because a pop-up, quickly suspended X (formerly Twitter) account posted it early, and Rockstar rushed to get its official version out, ending with a “Coming 2025” notice.

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Source: Ars Technica – Grand Theft Auto VI trailer confirms arrives early with a crime-crazy Florida

Enlarge / A crescent Earth rises over the horizon of the Moon in this view from NASA’s Orion spacecraft on the unpiloted Artemis I test flight in December 2022. (credit: NASA)

“NASA and its contractors have made progress, including completing several important milestones, but they still face multiple challenges with development of the human landing system and the space suits,” the GAO said in a report published Thursday. “As a result, GAO found that the Artemis III crewed lunar landing is unlikely to occur in 2025.”

Enlarge / Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. (credit: Getty | Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle)

The lawsuit also blames Pfizer for not ending the pandemic after the vaccine’s release in December 2020. “Contrary to Pfizer’s public statements, however, the pandemic did not end; it got worse” in 2021, the complaint reads.

“We are pursuing justice for the people of Texas, many of whom were coerced by tyrannical vaccine mandates to take a defective product sold by lies,” Paxton said in a press release. “The facts are clear. Pfizer did not tell the truth about their COVID-19 vaccines.”

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

This is a much larger number of accounts than 23andMe previously disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, which estimated that 0.1 percent of users—approximately 14,000, TechCrunch estimated—had accounts accessed by hackers using compromised passwords.

After the cyberattack was reported, Wired estimated that “at least a million data points from 23andMe accounts” that were “exclusively about Ashkenazi Jews” and data points from “hundreds of thousands of users of Chinese descent” seemed to be exposed. But beyond those estimates, for two months, all the public knew was that 23andMe’s filing noted that “a significant number of files containing profile information about other users’ ancestry” were also accessed.

Enlarge / AMD’s Radeon RX 7600. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It’s been an up-and-down decade for most consumer technology, with a pandemic-fueled boom in PC sales giving way to a sales crater that the market is still gradually recovering from. But few components have had as hard a time as gaming graphics cards, which were near impossible to buy at reasonable prices for about two years and then crashed hard as GPU companies responded with unattainable new high-end products.

According to the GPU sales analysts at Jon Peddie Research, things may finally be evening out. Its data shows that GPU shipments have returned to quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year growth after two years of shrinking sales. This is the second consecutive quarter this has happened, which “strongly indicates that things are finally on the upswing for the graphics industry.”

JPR reports that overall GPU unit shipments (which include integrated and dedicated GPUs) are up 16.8 percent from Q2 and 36.6 percent from a year ago. Dedicated GPU sales increased 37.4 percent from Q2. When comparing year-over-year numbers, the biggest difference is that Nvidia, AMD, and Intel all have current-generation GPUs available in the $200–$300 range, including the GeForce RTX 4060, the Radeon RX 7600, and the Arc A770 and A750, all of which were either unavailable or newly launched in Q3 of 2022.

Enlarge (credit: zhihao | Moment)

Amazon hoped the court would dismiss the suit, arguing that the platform wasn’t responsible for the alleged criminal conduct harming the minor. But after nearly eight months deliberating, a judge recently largely denied the tech giant’s motion to dismiss.

Enlarge / Michael Keaton in The Flash, which is streaming on Max. (credit: YouTube/Warner Bros.)

Streaming services are on thin ice with many customers. With price hikes becoming a norm for streaming services, subscribers are reconsidering the value of streaming apps and whether subscriptions are worth the cost. In a bid to mollify disgruntled customers and make their packages seem more economical and simple, streaming services are bundling up.

Verizon announced today that its myPlan wireless phone customers will be able to get Netflix and Max, both with ads, for $10 per month total per phone line. Netflix with ads is usually $6.99 per month, while Max’s ad tier is $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. That means Verizon customers can save up to $6.98 per month with the new bundle, which Verizon will begin offering on December 7.

The new offer joins two other deals that Verizon already offers that bundle its wireless service with TV streaming. One lets customers add ad-free Disney+ and Hulu and ESPN with ads for $10 per month per line. Another lets customers add Apple One, which includes Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, and iCloud+, for $10 per month per line.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | pagadesign)

The latest post on the Google Security blog details a new upgrade to Gmail’s spam filters that Google is calling “one of the largest defense upgrades in recent years.” The upgrade comes in the form of a new text classification system called RETVec (Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer). Google says this can help understand “adversarial text manipulations”—these are emails full of special characters, emojis, typos, and other junk characters that previously were legible by humans but not easily understandable by machines. Previously, spam emails full of special characters made it through Gmail’s defenses easily.

If you want an example of what “adversarial text manipulation” looks like, the below message is something from my spam folder. My personal Gmail experience with these emails is that they used to be a major problem during the 1st half of the year, with emails like this regularly landing in my inbox. It does seem like this RETVec tech upgrade really works, though, because emails like this haven’t been a problem at all for me in the last few months.

An example of “adversarial text manipulation” from my spam folder. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

The reason emails like this have been so difficult to classify is that, while any spam filter could probably swat down an email that says “Congratulations! A balance of $1000 is available for your jackpot account,” that’s not what this email actually says. A big portion of the letters here are “homoglyphs“—by diving into the endless depths of the Unicode standard, you can find obscure characters that look like they’re part of the normal Latin alphabet but actually aren’t.

Enlarge / A Vega rocket rides a column of exhaust from its solid-fueled first stage, kicking off a mission to deliver 12 small satellites into orbit. (credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace)

The European Spaceflight newsletter reports that two of the four propellant tanks on the fourth stage of the Vega rocket—the upper stage, which is powered by dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide solid fuel—went missing earlier this year.

Now, it seems that the propellant tanks have been found. However, the newsletter says, the tanks were recovered in a dismal state, crushed, alongside metal scraps in a landfill. Someone, apparently, had trashed the tanks. This is a rather big problem for Avio, as this was to be the final Vega rocket launched, and the production lines are now closed for this hardware.

Enlarge / The family portrait of IBM’s quantum processors, with the two new arrivals (Heron and Condor) at right. (credit: IBM)

We talked with IBM’s Jay Gambetta about everything the company is announcing today, including existing processors, future roadmaps, what the machines might be used for over the next few years, and the software that makes it all possible. But to understand what the company is doing, we have to back up a bit to look at where the field as a whole is moving.