Enlarge (credit: Waymo)

The new data comes at a crucial time for the self-driving industry. In October, a woman was dragged about 20 feet underneath a vehicle by Waymo’s main rival, Cruise. Since then, Cruise has lost its CEO, laid off 24 percent of its workforce, and suspended driverless operations nationwide.

Enlarge / The UNI FAN TL LCD series puts screens where there were no screens before. (credit: Lian Li)

If you’re trying to add lights to a PC case, you have lots of options: LED strips, CPU coolers with lights, case fans with lights, keyboards and mice with lights, motherboards with lights, GPUs with lights, sticks of RAM with lights, even fake sticks of RAM that go into your RAM slots so that you don’t have un-RGB-ed spots in your setup.

But if all of that isn’t enough for you, and you need to take things one step further, Lian Li has a new product for you: case fans that include not just RGB LEDs with two different lighting zones, but 1.6-inch LCD screens that can be programmed to show your PC’s stats or small looping images and videos.

Fans in the UNI FAN TL LCD lineup are available in 120 mm and 140 mm sizes, with black and white color options. The versions with screens cost $47 for a 120 mm version and $52 for a 140 mm version, and TL fans without screens go for $33 and $36, respectively. The fans need to be connected to their own dedicated fan controller, which can drive up to seven of the LCD-equipped fans at a time. The screens can then be customized via proprietary software, as is unfortunately common for RGB lights and mini-screens.

Enlarge / A closeup of the webcam on the Displace TV announced in January. (credit: Dislace)

It’s no secret that TV makers are seriously invested in pushing ads. Using TVs for advertising goes back to 1941, when the first TV commercial aired. But as we trudge our way through the 21st century, TV vendors are becoming more involved in ensuring that their hardware is used to sell stuff and add to their own recurring revenue.

This has taken various forms, but in some cases we’re seeing increasingly invasive strategies for turning TVs into a primary place for shopping. The latest approach catching attention comes from startup Displace. Its upcoming TVs will use integrated webcams and NFC payment readers to make it easy for people to buy stuff they see on TV.

Displace hasn’t officially released a product yet, so skepticism about the TVs it says it will demo at CES 2024 in Las Vegas next month, as spotted by sites like Wifi Hifi, is warranted. (Displace said it would have images of the newly announced TVs to share next year). The startup is specializing in wireless TVs with hot-swappable batteries that can vacuum suction-mount to a wall and zip-line slowly off said wall when sensing an unstable connection or low battery. The original “Displace TV” that Displace announced in January is supposed to ship in mid-2024. Displace has been taking preorders for those.

Enlarge / Shortly after the FBI posted a notice saying it had seized the dark-web site of AlphV, the ransomware group posted this notice claiming otherwise.

Around the same time, the Justice Department said it had disrupted AlphV’s operations by releasing a software tool that would allow roughly 500 AlphV victims to restore their systems and data. In all, Justice Department officials said, AlphV had extorted roughly $300 million from 1,000 victims.

Enlarge (credit: Aitor Diago | Moment)

More than 1,000 known child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) were found in a large open dataset—known as LAION-5B—that was used to train popular text-to-image generators such as Stable Diffusion, Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) researcher David Thiel revealed on Wednesday.

SIO’s report seems to confirm rumors swirling on the Internet since 2022 that LAION-5B included illegal images, Bloomberg reported. In an email to Ars, Thiel warned that “the inclusion of child abuse material in AI model training data teaches tools to associate children in illicit sexual activity and uses known child abuse images to generate new, potentially realistic child abuse content.”

Thiel began his research in September after discovering in June that AI image generators were being used to create thousands of fake but realistic AI child sex images rapidly spreading on the dark web. His goal was to find out what role CSAM may play in the training process of AI models powering the image generators spouting this illicit content.

Enlarge / The lab’s empty because everyone’s relaxing in the park while the AI does their work. (credit: Fei Yang)

Despite rapid advances in artificial intelligence, AIs are nowhere close to being ready to replace humans for doing science. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t help automate some of the drudgery out of the daily grind of scientific experimentation. For example, a few years back, researchers put an AI in control of automated lab equipment and taught it to exhaustively catalog all the reactions that can occur among a set of starting materials.

While useful, that still required a lot of researcher intervention to train the system in the first place. A group at Carnegie Mellon University has now figured out how to get an AI system to teach itself to do chemistry. The system requires a set of three AI instances, each specialized for different operations. But, once set up and supplied with raw materials, you just have to tell it what type of reaction you want done, and it’ll figure it out.

An AI trinity

The researchers indicate that they were interested in understanding what capacities large language models (LLMs) can bring to the scientific endeavor. So all of the AI systems used in this work are LLMs, mostly GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, although some others—Claude 1.3 and Falcon-40B-Instruct—were tested as well. (GPT-4 and Claude 1.3 performed the best.) But, rather than using a single system to handle all aspects of the chemistry, the researchers set up distinct instances to cooperate in a division of labor setup and called it “Coscientist.”

Enlarge / The Galaxy Z Fold5 and Flip5, being carefully taken apart. (credit: Samsung)

Samsung says it’s doing a big expansion to its self-repair program this month. The repair program launched last year in partnership with iFixit, and now Samsung will be offering parts and repair manuals for more phones in more countries.

First up, the device list is adding some of Samsung’s newest and most expensive models. Foldables are landing in the self-repair system for the first time, with the Galaxy Z Flip5, and Z Fold5 getting parts and manuals soon. The parts aren’t up for sale yet, but we’re dying to know the cost of a Z Fold5 display. (The Pixel Fold, a similarly sized flexible Samsung display, costs $900.) Samsung’s current slab-phone flagship is also hitting the repair system for the first time, with all S23 models getting included. The Galaxy A05s, the first mid-range phone, is landing in the system, too. All the Galaxy S9 and A9 tablets are now repairable, as is the Galaxy Book 2 Pro laptop.

The number of countries where you can buy parts is increasing, too. Samsung’s repair program is currently active in the US, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. Samsung now says it’s expanding the repair program to 30 additional companies, with the full list being: “Albania, Andorra, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Kosovo, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Switzerland.” Forty-three countries is a huge progression in just a year, but the flagship S23 is sold in 130 countries if Samsung wants complete coverage.

Enlarge (credit: Jean Varner, National Science Foundation)

The US National Science Foundation is one of the US’s primary means of supporting fundamental scientific research—its investments account for about 25 percent of federal support to America’s colleges and universities for basic research, or research driven by curiosity and discovery. But NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan has asked Ars for the opportunity to explain how the unique facilities that NSF supports in the Antarctic have value for both commercial interests and national security. In making this argument, he’s joined by Representative Tony Gonzales of Texas, who explains how NSF’s Antarctic research has had direct impacts on people in his district.

Enlarge / British Airways Aerospatiale BAC Concorde taking off with afterburners blazing. (credit: aviation-images.com/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

If you’re a bit of a plane nerd—and if you’re reading this site, the odds are good that you are—a rather interesting eBay auction ended over the weekend. The auction site knows it as item number 116001533010; a less anodyne description would be a Rolls-Royce Olympus 593 turbojet engine, one of four that powered a Concorde—complete with afterburner attached.

The world’s first and most successful supersonic airliner, Concorde was an ambitious and extremely expensive joint project developed by the UK and France. The initial plans started in 1956, with the first in a series of studies commissioned by the British Ministry of Supply, which set about exploring the idea of a supersonic transport plane—then, as now, the sole preserve of military jets.

A parallel effort was also underway across the Channel in France, with both countries coming up with fairly similar designs. At some point, bean counters on both sides of la manche realized that the cost of developing such an extreme aircraft was perhaps better shared than borne alone, and in 1962 the two projects—one headed by the British Aircraft Corporation, the other by Sud-Aviation combined—were merged.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches in January 2023 carrying a GPS III satellite into orbit. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

After our inaugural ranking last year, Ars Technica is again publishing a list of the most accomplished US commercial launch companies. We hope the list sparks debate, discussion, and appreciation for the challenge of operating a successful rocket company.

Please note that this is a subjective list, although hard metrics such as total launches, tonnage to orbit, success rate, and more were all important factors in the decision. And our focus remains on what each company accomplished in 2023, not on what they might do in the future. Certainly there will be more reshuffling next year.

1. SpaceX (no change)

Only one rocket company approached a mind-boggling 100 launches this year. Only one company reused more than 90 percent of the rockets it launched in 2023. Only one company launched one million kilograms of cargo into orbit. And only one company debuted the (privately developed) largest and most powerful rocket ever seen—Starship. And then launched it again just months later on a mostly successful flight.

Enlarge / A new image of NGC 2264, also known as the “Christmas Tree Cluster.” (credit: NASA et. al.)

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 / A Comcast Xfinity service van in San Ramon, California on February 25, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado )

The breach, which was carried out by exploiting a vulnerability in network hardware sold by Citrix, gave hackers access to usernames and cryptographically hashed passwords for 35.9 million Xfinity customers, the cable TV and Internet provider said in a notification filed Monday with the Maine attorney general’s office. Citrix disclosed the vulnerability and issued a patch on October 10. Eight days later, researchers reported that the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-4966 and by the name Citrix Bleed, had been under active exploitation since August. Comcast didn’t patch its network until October 23, 13 days after a patch became available and five days after the report of the in-the-wild attacks exploiting it.

“However, we subsequently discovered that prior to mitigation, between October 16 and October 19, 2023, there was unauthorized access to some of our internal systems that we concluded was a result of this vulnerability,” an accompanying notice stated. “We notified federal law enforcement and conducted an investigation into the nature and scope of the incident. On November 16, 2023, it was determined that information was likely acquired.”

Enlarge / Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster comes in for landing in West Texas at the conclusion of Tuesday’s suborbital flight. (credit: Blue Origin)

This was the first flight of Blue Origin’s 60-foot-tall (18-meter) New Shepard rocket since September 12, 2022, when an engine failure destroyed the booster and triggered an in-flight abort for the vehicle’s pressurized capsule. There were no passengers aboard for that mission, and the capsule safely separated from the failed booster and parachuted to a controlled landing.

The flight on Tuesday also didn’t carry people. Instead, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company, lofted 33 payloads from NASA, research institutions, and commercial companies. Some of these payloads were flown again on Tuesday’s launch after failing to reach space on the failed New Shepard mission last year. Among these payloads were an experiment to demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell technology in microgravity and an investigation studying the strength of planetary soils under different gravity conditions.

Enlarge / An officially released image for Insomniac Games’ upcoming game Wolverine. (credit: Insomniac Games)

Acclaimed Sony-owned game development studio Insomniac Games became the victim of a large-scale ransomware attack this week, as initially reported by Cyber Daily. Ransomware group Rhysida dumped 1.67TB of data, including assets and story spoilers from unreleased games, a road map of upcoming titles, internal company communications, employees’ personal data such as passport scans and compensation figures, and much more.

The gang said it chose Insomniac because, as a large and successful studio, it made an attractive target for a money grab. The ransom was $2 million, and Insomniac refused to pay it.

As a result, a trove of emails, Slack messages, slideshow presentations, and more hit the web. Notably, these included screenshots and assets from the studio’s upcoming Wolverine game, as well as confirmation that Wolverine is planned to be the first in a trilogy of games starring X-Men characters. The materials also revealed that the company is working on another Ratchet & Clank game and a new Spider-Man sequel.

Enlarge / If you have one of these, or another Mac handy, you should soon be able to access Beeper on Android and desktop platforms. You’ll just need to grab its “registration data” every so often. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Beeper’s Android app, which initially promised iMessage support with just a phone number, lost that connection once Apple started openly pushing back on it less than a week after it launched. Beeper has kept revising its approach, and its newest method—involving regular access to a physical Mac—suggests why the company has added a political component to its efforts.

Beeper started pushing back after its initial blockage, both through continued development and through media and political messaging. After a second, if smaller, Apple crackdown, co-founder Eric Migicovsky welcomed CBS Mornings into his garage, where he advanced his argument that Beeper was turning grossly insecure SMS messages between iPhone and Android users into secure, end-to-end encrypted chats. (CBS also interviewed James Gill, the 16-year-old whose work connecting to iMessage, using reverse-engineering methods, is the foundation of Beeper’s iMessage tech).

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Source: Ars Technica – Beeper’s esoteric fix for iMessage access suggests why it’s pushing politically