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In response to one of the attacks, the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa in western Pennsylvania temporarily shut down a pump providing drinking water from the facility’s treatment plant to the townships of Raccoon and Potter, according to reporting by the Beaver Countian. A photo the Water Authority provided to news outlets showed the front panel of a programmable logic controller—a toaster-sized box often abbreviated as PLC that’s used to automate physical processes inside of industrial settings—that displayed an anti-Israeli message. The PLC bore the logo of the manufacturer Unitronics. A sign above it read “Primary PLC.”

WWS facilities in the cross hairs

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration on Tuesday published an advisory that warned of recent attacks compromising Unitronics PLCs used in Water and Wastewater Systems, which are often abbreviated as WWSes. Although the notice didn’t identify any facilities by name, the account of one hack was almost identical to the one that occurred inside the Aliquippa facility.

Enlarge / A solid-fueled Ceres 1 rocket, developed by the Chinese company Galactic Energy, fires away from an ocean-going launch platform in the Yellow Sea on September 5. (credit: Chen Xiao/VCG via Getty Images)

On Sunday, the Transportation Security Administration reported that it screened more than 2.9 million airline passengers making their way through US airports after Thanksgiving. It was the busiest day in history for US airports.

A few days earlier, the world’s spaceports set a new record with the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites from Florida. This launch on November 22 was the 180th launch of 2023 to put its payload into orbit, eclipsing the mark of 179 successful orbital launches from last year.

Enlarge / Founder and CEO of NVIDIA Jensen Huang speaks during the New York Times annual DealBook summit on November 29, 2023, in New York City. (credit: Michael M. Santiago / Staff | Getty Images North America)

Nvidia is a giant in the semiconductor industry, and Huang said his company’s success depends on “myriad components that come from different parts of the world,” Bloomberg reported. “Not just Taiwan,” Huang said, where Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing company makes the world’s most advanced semiconductor technology.

“We are somewhere between a decade and two decades away from supply chain independence,” Huang said. “It’s not a really practical thing for a decade or two.”

Enlarge / The enhanced edition trilogy includes Grand Theft Auto 3, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. (credit: Rockstar Games)

Netflix subscribers will be able to play the three original 3D Grand Theft Auto games on iOS and Android starting in December, according to a blog post from the streamer.

The titles included are 2001’s Grand Theft Auto III, 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and 2004’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

All three released initially on the PS2 and Xbox. The first 3D entry in the series, Grand Theft Auto III, was a crossover cultural sensation when it debuted, and it is credited as one of the main originators of the open-world genre, which remains one of the most popular genres in triple-A games to this day.

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“Google will contribute $100 million in financial support annually, indexed to inflation, for a wide range of news businesses across the country, including independent news businesses and those from Indigenous and official-language minority communities,” Minister of Canadian Heritage Pascale St-Onge said in a statement today.

Enlarge / Example images generated using Stable Diffusion XL Turbo. (credit: Stable Diffusion XL Turbo / Benj Edwards)

On Tuesday, Stability AI launched Stable Diffusion XL Turbo, an AI image-synthesis model that can rapidly generate imagery based on a written prompt. So rapidly, in fact, that the company is billing it as “real-time” image generation, since it can also quickly transform images from a source, such as a webcam, quickly.

SDXL Turbo’s primary innovation lies in its ability to produce image outputs in a single step, a significant reduction from the 20–50 steps required by its predecessor. Stability attributes this leap in efficiency to a technique it calls Adversarial Diffusion Distillation (ADD). ADD uses score distillation, where the model learns from existing image-synthesis models, and adversarial loss, which enhances the model’s ability to differentiate between real and generated images, improving the realism of the output.

Stability detailed the model’s inner workings in a research paper released Tuesday that focuses on the ADD technique. One of the claimed advantages of SDXL Turbo is its similarity to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), especially in producing single-step image outputs.

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In theory, this should make it easier for researchers to build teams that have the right talents to bring a scientific project to completion. But is it working out that way? Some recent studies have indicated that the research we produce may be getting increasingly derivative. And a study released today ties that directly to the growth in what it calls “remote collaboration.”

So, is science-by-Zoom at fault? While it’s a possibility worth exploring, it’s difficult to separate cause and effect at this point.

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According to an Adalytics report, the Google Search Partner Network (SPN) has allegedly been putting brands at risk of all of these undesirable placements without advertisers fully realizing the dangers. Adalytics researchers reported finding Google search ads for top brands and government agencies displaying on hundreds of undesirable websites.

Among those impacted were big brands—like Amazon, Apple, BMW, Home Depot, Lego, Meta, Microsoft, Paramount+, Samsung, and Uber—and top government entities including the US Treasury and the European Commission. Ads from nonprofits like the American Cancer Society and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, as well as major media outlets like The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal were also found on illegal or adult sites.

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Google Play has reversed its latest ban on a web browser that keeps getting targeted by vague Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices. Downloader, an Android TV app that combines a browser with a file manager, was restored to Google Play last night.

Downloader, made by app developer Elias Saba, was suspended on Sunday after a DMCA notice submitted by copyright-enforcement firm MarkScan on behalf of Warner Bros. Discovery. It was the second time in six months that Downloader was suspended based on a complaint that the app’s web browser is capable of loading websites.

The first suspension in May lasted three weeks, but Google reversed the latest one much more quickly. As we wrote on Monday, the MarkScan DMCA notice didn’t even list any copyrighted works that Downloader supposedly infringed upon.

Enlarge / Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe plant on Long Island circa 1902 in partial stage of completion. (credit: Public domain)

Back in 2012, a crowdfunding effort on Indigogo successfully raised the funds necessary to purchase the Wardenclyffe Tower site on Long Island, New York, where Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla once tried to build an ambitious wireless transmission station. The goal was to raise additional funds to build a $20 million Tesla Science Center there, with a museum, an educational center, and a technological innovation program. The nonprofit group behind the project finally broke ground this April after years of basic restoration work—only to experience a devastating setback last week, two days before Thanksgiving, when a fire broke out.

Over 100 firefighters from 17 local departments responded and battled the flames throughout the night, as residual embers led to two additional outbreaks. One firefighter sustained bruised ribs after falling off a ladder, but there were no other injuries or fatalities. Once the blaze was extinguished, the TSC group called in their engineers to assess the damage and make recommendations for repairs. While an investigation is ongoing as to the cause of the fire, Fire Chief Sean McCarrick said during a press conference on Tuesday, November 28, that they had ruled out arson. According to project architect Mark Thaler, there was nothing flammable in the lab that could have caused the fire, although the back buildings had wood-frame roofs.

The original brick building, designed by Stanford White, is still standing, although there is considerable damage to the structure of the roof, steel girders, chimney, cupola, and a portion of a wall. Some elements have been irreparably destroyed, but fortunately all museum artifacts in TSC’s collection were stored offsite. The most pressing concern is that water from the firehoses saturated the brick walls, according to Thaler, since the upcoming colder winter temperatures could freeze that moisture and cause the brick work to break apart and collapse. The engineers have also recommended adding strategic wall supports to both the interior and exterior to shore up the structure.

Enlarge / A vintage 1981 BBC Micro computer. Fun fact: it was rather tricky to determine which version of BBC Basic a Micro was actually running. (credit: Getty Images)

BBCSDL, or BBC Basic for SDL 2.0, uses Simple DirectMedia Layer’s OS abstraction to make itself available on Windows, x86 Linux, macOS, Raspberry Pi’s OS, Android, iOS, and inside browsers through WebAssembly. Version 1.38a arrived in mid-November with quite a few fixes and niceties (as first noticed by Hackaday and its readers). On the project’s website, you can see BBCSDL running on all these devices, along with a note that on iOS and in browsers, an assembler and a few other functions are not available, due to arbitrary code-execution restrictions.

BBCSDL, or BBC Basic for SDL 2.0, running on iOS devices, in graphical mode. (credit: Richard Russell / R.T. Russell)

Richard Russell has been working on ports, interpreters, and other variations of BBC BASIC since 1983, starting with interpreters for Z80 and Intel processors. By 2001, BBC BASIC for Windows was available with a graphical interface and was still compatible with the BBC Micro and Acorn computers from whence it came. BBCSDL has been in development since 2015, providing wider platform offerings while still retaining decent compatibility with BBC BASIC for Windows.

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CR is known for buying cars for its own test fleet, but for its annual auto reliability survey, the organization cast a wider net. Specifically, it gathered data from 330,000 owners of vehicles from model year 2000 onwards, and it uses that survey data to generate reliability scores for each vehicle and model year.

The results are a little inconvenient for the EV evangelist. EVs had 79 percent more reliability problems than a gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicle, on average. Plug-in hybrids fared even worse; these had 146 percent more issues on average than the conventional alternative. But simpler not-plug-in hybrids bucked this trend, with 26 percent fewer reliability problems than conventionally powered vehicles.

Enlarge / The Amazon Q logo. (credit: Amazon)

On Tuesday, Amazon unveiled Amazon Q, an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT that is tailored for corporate environments. Developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Q is designed to assist employees with tasks like summarizing documents, managing internal support tickets, and providing policy guidance, differentiating itself from consumer-focused chatbots. It also serves as a programming assistant.

According to The New York Times, the name “Q” is a play on the word “question” and a reference to the character Q in the James Bond novels, who makes helpful tools. (And there’s apparently a little bit of Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation thrown in, although hopefully the new bot won’t cause mischief on that scale.)

Amazon Q’s launch positions it against existing corporate AI tools like Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Duet AI, and ChatGPT Enterprise. Unlike some of its competitors, Amazon Q isn’t built on a singular AI large language model (LLM). Instead, it uses a platform called Bedrock, integrating multiple AI systems, including Amazon’s Titan and models from Anthropic and Meta.

Enlarge / Kaboom! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Unity spent a cool $1.625 billion in cash and stock to purchase the tech division of the Peter Jackson-led Weta Digital just over two years ago, taking in 275 company engineers in the process. The vast majority of those engineers are now being let go as Unity has “terminated its obligations to provide certain services to Weta FX and also amended certain intellectual property rights between the parties,” according to a recent SEC filing and Reuters reporting.

The Weta Digital acquisition came as game engines like Unity and Unreal were increasingly being embraced by Hollywood studios as the basis for their digital-effects work. The deal was also part of an expensive wave of corporate acquisitions Unity undertook after its late 2020 IPO. That buying spree included cloud gaming-service Parsec, mobile ad giant Ironsource, and 3D collaboration company SyncSketch, to name just a few.

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Apple has repeatedly trumpeted the success of its financial services, a product lineup that now encompasses the Apple Card credit card, high-interest savings accounts, and a buy-now-pay-later service called Apple Pay Later.

But even if those products have proven reasonably popular with consumers, they haven’t been working out for the bank that Apple has partnered with to supply those services. Goldman Sachs’ consumer services have been losing the company billions of dollars, according to reporting from Bloomberg, CNBC, and The New York Times, among others. These losses have been driven in part by a much higher-than-usual loss rate on its credit card loans—meaning that people with Goldman-backed credit cards like the Apple Card are actually making their payments less often than people with credit cards from other banks.

Today, The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has sent Goldman Sachs a proposal that will end their partnership within the next 12 to 15 months, leaving Apple to find a new backer for its financial products.

Enlarge / Democratic Senators Joe Manchin (L) and Debbie Stabenow (R) don’t exactly see eye to eye on the auto industry’s transition to electric vehicles. (credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Before, the tax credit was linked to the battery-storage capacity of a plug-in hybrid or battery-electric vehicle. But the Inflation Reduction Act changed that—now a range of conditions must be met, including final assembly in North America and an annually increasing percentage of locally sourced minerals and components within that battery pack.

On the one hand, the domestic sourcing requirements are beneficial because they are stimulating the development of local battery mineral refining and manufacturing here in the United States, adding well-paying jobs in the process. But the new rules have also significantly reduced the number of EVs that qualify.

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Project Red is small—producing between 2 and 3 megawatts of power, or enough to power a few thousand homes—but it is a crucial demonstration of a new approach to geothermal power that could make it possible to harness the Earth’s natural heat anywhere in the world.

Hot rock is everywhere, with temperatures rising hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit within the first few miles of the surface, but geothermal plants provide just a small fraction of the global electricity supply. That’s largely because they are mostly built where naturally heated water can be easily tapped, like hot springs and geysers. Hot water is pumped to the surface, where it produces steam that powers turbines.