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KQED reports that DePape said he’d look up strategies for defeating a video game boss, for instance, when he would stumble on a video that would “be a total different person, and these people would talk about how toxic Anita Sarkeesian is, over and over and over.” DePape said these videos inspired him to research more about Sarkeesian, the Feminist Frequency founder who was a long-time target for the amorphous, 4chan-inspired, anti-feminist online movement known as Gamergate. “I wanted to find out what was going on here. I wanted to get both sides of the story.”

This isn’t the first time DePape has been linked to Gamergate; The New York Times reported last December that DePape’s online writings explicitly referenced the group as inspiration for his politics. “How did I get into all this,” Mr. DePape wrote in a blog post. “Gamer Gate it was gamer gate.”

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On Tuesday, US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that discovery can proceed in a lawsuit documenting individual cases involving hundreds of children and teens allegedly harmed by social media use across 30 states. Their complaint alleged that tech companies were guilty of negligently operating platforms with many design defects—including lack of parental controls, insufficient age verification, complicated account deletion processes, appearance-altering filters, and requirements forcing users to log in to report child sexual abuse materials (CSAM)—and failed to warn young users and their parents about those defects.

Defendants are companies operating “the world’s most used social media platforms: Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Google’s YouTube, ByteDance’s TikTok, and Snapchat.” All of these companies moved to dismiss the multi-district litigation entirely, hoping that the First Amendment and Section 230 immunity would effectively bar all the plaintiffs’ claims—including, apparently, claims that companies ignored addressing when moving to dismiss.

Enlarge / Anker’s latest MagGo portable charger, already Qi2 equipped, will soon be able to charge iPhones, Androids, and other devices at 15 W. (credit: Anker)

If you’ve only ever used standard Qi chargers with devices that don’t have their own schemes, the Wireless Power Consortium’s announcement today of the first Qi 2.0 devices being ready to launch before the holidays, with more than 100 in the queue behind them, is great. Qi2 sports a “Magnetic Power Profile” (MPP), created with help by Apple’s MagSafe team, to help align devices and chargers’ coils for faster, more efficient charging. Qi2-certified devices set onto Qi2 chargers can achieve 15 W charging, up from 7.5 W in the standard Qi scheme.

That brings Qi2 devices up to the same speed as iPhones on MagSafe chargers, and it clears up some consumer confusion about how fast a device might charge on Qi, MagSafe, or proprietary chargers. Should a phone and charger be Qi2 certified, you can now expect about 15 W out of it, regardless of whatever Google, Apple, or third party is behind them. Android and iPhone users alike are no longer beholden to their primary hardware vendor if they want 15 W of wireless juice.

Enlarge / The Microsoft Copilot logo. (credit: Microsoft)

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that Bing Chat—its famously once-unhinged AI chatbot—has been officially renamed “Microsoft Copilot.” The company also announced it will support OpenAI’s recently released GPTs, which are custom roles for its ChatGPT AI assistant.

The rebranding move consolidates Bing Chat into Microsoft’s somewhat confusing “Copilot” AI assistant naming scheme, which has a lineage that began with GitHub Copilot in 2021. In March this year, Microsoft announced Dynamics 365 Copilot, Copilot in Windows, Microsoft Security Copilot, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Now Bing Chat is just “Microsoft Copilot”—its sixth copilot so far. Pretty soon, Microsoft will need a Branding Copilot to keep them all straight.

Regarding the naming scheme, Microsoft customer Amit Malik took to X and wrote, “I love Microsoft, but this whole copilot thing is becoming more confusing than it should be. Microsoft Copilot, Windows Copilot, M365 Copilot, then all the m365 apps, D365 copilot and so on. AI was supposed to simplify, not otherwise.” Note that Malik wrote that in September—nearly two months before the recent announcement.

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The digital discrimination rules were approved in a 3-2 party-line vote. “Under these rules, the FCC can protect consumers by directly addressing companies’ policies and practices if they differentially impact consumers’ access to broadband Internet access service or are intended to do so, and by applying these protections to ensure communities see equitable broadband deployment, network upgrades, and maintenance,” an FCC announcement today said.

The rules and a related complaint process will ensure that the FCC “can investigate possible instances of discrimination of broadband access, work with companies to solve problems, facilitate mediation, and, when necessary, penalize companies for violating the rules,” the agency also said.

Enlarge / Anti-satellite weapons from Mission Shakti are displayed during Republic Day Parade on January 26, 2020 in New Delhi, India. (credit: Ramesh Pathania/Mint via Getty Images)

More than two dozen private space companies have signed on to a statement that supports an end to destructive anti-satellite testing in space.

The statement comes two years after Russia shot down one of its older satellites, Kosmos 1408, with a Nudol missile launched from the ground. The test, intended to demonstrate Russia’s capability to shoot down assets in space, showered more than 1,500 pieces of debris into low-Earth orbit. This has forced the International Space Station and Chinese Tiangong station to perform avoidance maneuvers, along with many private and government-owned satellites.

Russia is not the only country to perform such tests. India recently did so, and in the more distant past, China and the US have also demonstrated such capabilities.

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On Tuesday, YouTube announced it will soon implement stricter measures on realistic AI-generated content hosted by the service. “We’ll require creators to disclose when they’ve created altered or synthetic content that is realistic, including using AI tools,” the company wrote in a statement. The changes will roll out over the coming months and into next year.

The move by YouTube comes as part of a series of efforts by the platform to address challenges posed by generative AI in content creation, including deepfakes, voice cloning, and disinformation. When creators upload content, YouTube will provide new options to indicate if the content includes realistic AI-generated or AI-altered material. “For example, this could be an AI-generated video that realistically depicts an event that never happened, or content showing someone saying or doing something they didn’t actually do,” YouTube writes.

In the detailed announcement, Jennifer Flannery O’Connor and Emily Moxley, vice presidents of product management at YouTube, explained that the policy update aims to maintain a positive ecosystem in the face of generative AI. “We believe it’s in everyone’s interest to maintain a healthy ecosystem of information on YouTube,” they write. “We have long-standing policies that prohibit technically manipulated content that misleads viewers … However, AI’s powerful new forms of storytelling can also be used to generate content that has the potential to mislead viewers—particularly if they’re unaware that the video has been altered or is synthetically created.”

Enlarge / A Starlink satellite dish in Oriximiná, Brazil on August 9, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Tarcisio Schnaider)

As we previously reported, some customers received an email on November 9 saying their accounts had been reset and that “all pending orders and deposits have been refunded.” The bug affected some new users who had ordered Starlink service but had not yet set up their dishes, making it hard for them to start the Internet service.

Enlarge / All the accessories an iPhone could want. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Fujifilm Instax Mini Evo effortlessly combines the analog and the digital for memorable keepsake photo prints. (credit: Chuong Nguyen)

If you’d like to upgrade to the latest generation of smartphones—like Samsung’s Galaxy S22 Ultra, Apple’s iPhone 15 Pro Max, or Google’s Pixel 8 Pro—chances are you’re doing so to get a camera boost. So why would you get a separate digital camera to pair with your phone, especially one with a lower-resolution image sensor? Fujifilm isn’t banking on the technology prowess of its Instax line—instead, the camera-maker wants to play into your sense of nostalgia with a tool that produces Polaroid-like photos. The Instax Mini Evo tugs on your heartstrings with its film-based approach to photography, turning snaps into tangible keepsakes rather than a digital file that’s destined to be ignored in the cloud.

Unlike cheaper analog-only models in Fujifilm’s Instax lineup, the flagship Evo also captures digital photo files so you can transfer them wirelessly to your phone and share them with friends. Though not a true analog print, I appreciate the combined digital and print approach of the Instax Mini Evo, as it brings a lot more versatility.

Enlarge / A stunning view of the Barnard 150 nebula. (credit: Tom Carrico)

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 / If it were me, I would simply not burrow my way directly to where all the creatures are gaining levels as fast as my gold allows them. But I’m not full of grog and adventuring spirit. (credit: EA/KeeperFX)

In an interview about The Making of Karateka, a wonderful interactive documentary and game-about-a-game, Chris Kohler of Digital Eclipse notes that, based on the company’s data, people don’t actually play the games inside “classics” collections. Maybe they spend 5 minutes inside a few games they remember, but that’s about it. Presenting classic games, exactly as they were when they arrived, can be historically important but often falls short of real engagement.

That’s why it’s a thrill to see (as first spotted by PC Gamer) a triumphant 1.0 release from KeeperFX, an open source “remake and fan expansion” of Dungeon Keeper, the 1997 Bullfrog strategy game that had players take on the other side of a dungeon crawl. The project had already, over 15 years, carried the game quite far, giving it modern Windows support, hi-res support, and loads of bugfixes and quality-of-life improvements. Now, says the team, all the original code from the original executable has been rewritten, freeing them up to change whatever they want in the future. There can be more than 2,048 “things” on the map, maps can have more than 85 square tiles, and scripting and mods can go much further.

But take note: “Ownership of the original game is still and will always be required for copyright reasons.” You can, like I did earlier today, rectify that with a $6 GOG purchase, at least while it’s on sale today. After downloading KeeperFX, you unpack it, run its launcher, point it to where you’ve installed the original Dungeon Keeper, and launch it. And then you get ready to click.

Enlarge / The Nothing Phone 2 all lit up. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Can an Android OEM really just hack its way into Apple’s iMessage? That is the hard-to-believe plan from upstart phone manufacturer “Nothing,” which says the new “Nothing Chats” will allow users to use “iMessage on Android” complete with a blue bubble sent to all their iPhone friends.

Nothing Chat will be powered by Sunbird, an app developer that has claimed to be able to send iMessage chats for about a year now, with no public launch. According to a Washington Post article with quotes from the CEOs of Nothing and Sunbird, Nothing will “start” rolling out “an early version” of Nothing Chats with iMessage compatibility on Friday. The only catch, supposedly, is that you’ll need a Nothing Phone 2.

Is this for real or a publicity stunt? Apple is on record saying that iMessage on Android would only serve to weaken Apple, and it doesn’t want to do that. Surely, any Android OEM offering “iMessage” support would immediately have the project shut down by Apple.

Enlarge / Eight images used in the study; four of them are synthetic. Can you tell which ones? (Answers at bottom of the article.) (credit: Nightingale and Farid (2022))

A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science on Monday found that AI-generated faces, particularly those representing white individuals, were perceived as more real than actual face photographs, reports The Guardian. The finding did not extend to images of people of color, likely due to AI models being trained predominantly on images of white individuals—a common bias that is well-known in machine learning research.

In the paper titled “AI Hyperrealism: Why AI Faces Are Perceived as More Real Than Human Ones,” researchers from Australian National University, the University of Toronto, University of Aberdeen, and University College London coined the term in the paper’s title, hyperrealism, which they define as a phenomenon where people think AI-generated faces are more real than actual human faces.

In their experiments, the researchers presented white adults with a mix of 100 AI-generated and 100 real white faces, asking them to identify which were real and their confidence in their decision. Out of 124 participants, 66 percent of AI images were identified as human, compared to 51 percent for real images. This trend, however, was not observed in images of people of color, where both AI and real faces were judged as human about 51 percent of the time, irrespective of the participant’s race.

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On Tuesday, Google ended two and a half weeks of defending its search business against the Department of Justice’s monopoly claims, reportedly with a whimper.

During the DOJ’s cross-examination of Google’s final witness, Kevin Murphy, the economist got “upset” when the DOJ introduced a 2011 email from an ex-Google executive, Chris Barton, which suggested that Google’s default search agreements with wireless carriers, mobile device manufacturers, and browser partners had to be “exclusive,” Big Tech on Trial reported, or else they were worthless.

“Without the exclusivity, we are not getting anything,” Barton’s email said. “Without an exclusive search deal, a large carrier can and will ship alternatives to Google.”

Enlarge / Experiments yield fresh evidence to support controversial hypothesis about the formation of the Great Sphinx of Giza. (credit: MusikAnimal/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Leif Ristroph, a physicist and applied mathematician at New York University, was conducting experiments on how clay erodes in response to flowing water when he noticed tiny shapes emerging that resembled seated lions—in essence, miniature versions of the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt. Further experiments provided evidence in support of a longstanding hypothesis that natural processes first created a land formation known as a yardang, after which humans added additional details to create the final statue. Initial results were first presented last year as part of the American Physical Society’s Gallery of Fluid Motion, with a full paper being published this week in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

“Our results suggest that Sphinx-like structures can form under fairly commonplace conditions,” Ristroph et al. wrote in their paper. “These findings hardly resolve the mysteries behind yardangs and the Great Sphinx, but perhaps they provoke us to wonder what awe-inspiring landforms ancient people could have encountered in the deserts of Egypt and why they might have envisioned a fantastic creature.”

In 2018, Ristroph’s applied mathematics lab fine-tuned the recipe for blowing the perfect bubble based on experiments with soapy thin films, pinpointing exactly what wind speed is needed to push out the film and cause it to form a bubble, and how that speed depends on parameters like the size of the wand. (You want a circular wand with a 1.5-inch perimeter, and you should gently blow at a consistent 6.9 cm/s.)

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The flaw, affecting virtually all modern Intel CPUs, causes them to “enter a glitch state where the normal rules don’t apply,” Tavis Ormandy, one of several security researchers inside Google who discovered the bug, reported. Once triggered, the glitch state results in unexpected and potentially serious behavior, most notably system crashes that occur even when untrusted code is executed within a guest account of a virtual machine, which, under most cloud security models, is assumed to be safe from such faults. Escalation of privileges is also a possibility.

Very strange behavior

The bug, tracked under the common name Reptar and the designation CVE-2023-23583, is related to how affected CPUs manage prefixes, which change the behavior of instructions sent by running software. Intel x64 decoding generally allows redundant prefixes—meaning those that don’t make sense in a given context—to be ignored without consequence. During testing in August, Ormandy noticed that the REX prefix was generating “unexpected results” when running on Intel CPUs that support a newer feature known as fast short repeat move, which was introduced in the Ice Lake architecture to fix microcoding bottlenecks.

Enlarge / A file photo of Tropical Storm Fiona as seen in a satellite image from 2022. (credit: Getty Images)

On Tuesday, the peer-reviewed journal Science published a study that shows how an AI meteorology model from Google DeepMind called GraphCast has significantly outperformed conventional weather forecasting methods in predicting global weather conditions up to 10 days in advance. The achievement suggests that future weather forecasting may become far more accurate, reports The Washington Post and Financial Times.

In the study, GraphCast demonstrated superior performance over the world’s leading conventional system, operated by the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). In a comprehensive evaluation, GraphCast outperformed ECMWF’s system in 90 percent of 1,380 metrics, including temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction, and humidity at various atmospheric levels.

And GraphCast does all this quickly: “It predicts hundreds of weather variables, over 10 days at 0.25° resolution globally, in under one minute,” write the authors in the paper “Learning skillful medium-range global weather forecasting.”

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On Tuesday, the Pew Research Center released its latest look at how the US public views scientists and the scientific endeavor. While recent years have shown a decline in the public’s trust in science, these could be viewed as a return to normalcy after a spike in positive feelings during the pandemic’s peak. But this year’s data shows the decline has continued, creating a decline that has now taken us below pre-pandemic levels of trust.

The drop is most pronounced for self-identified Republicans and those without a college education. Despite the decline, however, scientists rank among the most trusted occupations in the US.

A trust deficit

The data used by Pew comes from a survey of nearly 9,000 participants, which provides a margin of error of just ±1.6 percentage points. For some of the individual questions, Pew has been gathering data since at least 2016, allowing it to spot trends in the public’s views. It also has data from all of the pandemic years, including two polls done during 2020, making it easier to spot how that event influenced perceptions of science.