Enlarge / This image shows the asteroid Dinkinesh and its satellite as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI) as NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft departed the system. (credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL)

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.

Good morning. It is November 8, and yes, we’re headed back out to the Lucy mission again. NASA has shared some additional information about an asteroid flyby last week, and there’s more goodness to share.

A few days ago, the Daily Telescope reported that the Lucy spacecraft had found not one but two asteroids during its flyby of the small main-belt asteroid Dinkinesh. It turns out that was not the whole story. Subsequent data downlinked from the spacecraft revealed that the smaller of the two asteroids is a contact binary—two smaller asteroids in contact with one another.

Enlarge / We have no idea what’s going to be in the movie, but likely this is the height of the romance. (credit: Nintendo)

Sony and Nintendo haven’t collaborated on much of anything since the Nintendo PlayStation went awry. But Sony’s film division is putting its money together with its console semi-rival to produce a live-action The Legend of Zelda film.

Details are scant beyond a Nintendo press release and Hollywood reporting by Deadline. The director is Wes Ball, director of the Maze Runner film trilogy, and the writer is Derek Connolly, who wrote the Jurassic World trilogy and was tagged to work on a putative Metal Gear film.

The film will be produced by Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto and Avi Arad, the founder of Marvel’s film arm, Marvel Studios, who later produced Marvel and other IP-based films for Sony, including Uncharted and the Spider-Man and X-Men films. Arad, Deadline reports, was “a lynchpin” to finalizing a film that has long been in the works. Arad is also reportedly involved in the gestating Metal Gear film.

Artist interpretation of the creatures talking about your mom on Xbox Live last night. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

Microsoft’s latest Xbox transparency report—the company’s third public look at enforcement of its community standards enforcement—is the first to include a section on “advancing content moderation and platform safety with AI.” And that report specifically calls out two tools that the company says “enable us to achieve greater scale, elevate the capabilities of our human moderators, and reduce exposure to sensitive content.”

Microsoft says many of its Xbox safety systems are now powered by Community Sift, a moderation tool created by Microsoft subsidiary TwoHat. Among the “billions of human interactions” the Community Sift system has filtered this year are “over 36 million” Xbox player reports in 22 languages, according to the Microsoft report. The Community Sift system evaluates those player reports to see which ones need further attention from a human moderator.

Enlarge / A photo of the myQ app from LiftMaster’s website. (credit: Liftmaster)

Chamberlain Group—the owner of most of the garage door opener brands like LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin, and Grifco—would like its customers to stop doing smart home things with its “myQ” smart garage door openers. The company recently issued a statement decrying “unauthorized usage” of its smart garage door openers. That’s “unauthorized usage” by the people who bought the garage door opener, by the way. Basically, Chamberlain’s customers want to trigger the garage door and see its status through third-party smart home apps, and Chamberlain doesn’t want that.

Here’s the statement:

Chamberlain Group recently made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of our myQ ecosystem through third-party apps.

This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience for our 10 million+ users, as well as our authorized partners who put their trust in us. We understand that this impacts a small percentage of users, but ultimately this will improve the performance and reliability of myQ, benefiting all of our users.

We encourage those who were impacted to check out our authorized partners here: https://www.myq.com/works-with-myq.

We caught wind of this statement through the Home Assistant blog, a popular open source smart home platform. The myQ integration is being stripped from the project because it doesn’t work anymore. Allegedly, Chamberlain has been sabotaging Home Assistant support for a while now, with the integration maintainer, Lash-L, telling the Home Assistant blog, “We are playing a game of cat and mouse with MyQ and right now it looks like the cat is winning.”

Enlarge (credit: da-kuk | E+)

US District Judge B. Lynn Winmill recently unsealed a court filing, an amended complaint that perhaps contains the most evidence yet gathered by the FTC in its long-standing mission to crack down on data brokers allegedly “substantially” harming consumers by invading their privacy.

The FTC has accused Kochava of violating the FTC Act by amassing and disclosing “a staggering amount of sensitive and identifying information about consumers,” alleging that Kochava’s database includes products seemingly capable of identifying nearly every person in the United States.

Enlarge / It’s the same chip in the PS5 Slim, but there are some changes in where the heat goes. (credit: Dave2D)

You aren’t supposed to be able to buy Sony’s redesigned PlayStation 5 yet, but because global commerce is just too complicated, some people have already gotten their hands on them. One of those people is YouTube vlogger Dave2D. He gently took apart the unofficially named “Slim,” noted the savings in weight, if not so much size, and detailed some intriguing details about the new heat management and detachable disc drive.

Sony has made a smaller, usually slimmer version of each of its PlayStation consoles available as its market matures: the PS2, PS3, PS4, even the PS One, kinda-sorta. Usually there is no question that the newer, smaller version is an all-around better pick. But the newest version of the largest home console in decades isn’t a straightforward improvement in efficiency, at least as seen by Dave2D and Linus Tech Tips.

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Source: Ars Technica – PS5 “Slim” teardowns suggest same chip, not much shrinking, but nifty disc drive

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

It’s the start of November, and that means a new Android security patch. Google claims this one is fixing a high-profile Android 14 storage bug that was locking some people out of their devices. The November Security Bulletin contains the usual pile of security fixes, while consumer-oriented Pixel patch notes list a few user-facing changes. The important line is “Fix for issue occasionally causing devices with multiple users enabled to show out of space or be in a reboot loop.” A footnote points out that this is for the “Pixel 6, Pixel 6a, 6 Pro, 7, 7 Pro, 7a, Tablet, Fold, Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro.”

We’re on about day 33 of the Android 14 storage bug. For devices with multiple users set up, there is some kind of storage issue that is locking users out of their device. Some are completely unusable, with the phone bootlooping constantly and never reaching the home screen. Others are able to boot up the device but don’t have access to lock storage, which causes a huge amount of issues. Some users likened the bug to “ransomware,” a type of malware that encrypts your local storage and then demands money for your data. One fix is to completely erase your device with a factory reset, but a lot of users don’t want to do that.

The earliest reports of this started just days after the October 4 launch date. Google usually rolls updates out slowly so it can pull them if issues like this pop up to minimize damage. That didn’t happen here, though. Google failed to respond quickly to initial reports and just let the bug roll out to everyone. Some people even report being freshly hit with the bug just four days ago because Google 1) let the update roll out without stopping it and 2) can’t patch its software quickly enough. The biggest issue tracker thread on this bug is up to 1,000-plus likes and 850 comments of people locked out of their devices, and it took two separate rounds of news coverage for Google to acknowledge the bug after about 20 days.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino)

Evidence received during a comment period “shows that competition in the Internet services market is declining,” the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said in its announcement Monday. The CRTC said the “decrease is most significant in Ontario and Quebec, where independent competitors now serve 47 percent fewer customers than they did just two years ago. At the same time, several competitors have been bought out by larger Internet providers. This has left many Canadians with fewer options for high-speed Internet services.”

The CRTC hasn’t made a final decision on fiber resale. But in the meantime, until a more permanent ruling is made, large telcos in Ontario and Quebec will be “required to provide competitors with access to their fibre-to-the-home networks within six months,” the CRTC said. The six-month period is intended to give companies time to prepare their networks and develop information technology and billing systems, the agency said.

Enlarge / The default desktop wallpaper for macOS 13 Ventura. (credit: Apple)

Affected users have posted complaints on X, formerly Twitter, as well as places like the MacRumors forums. The unreleased build of Ventura appears to be build 22G80, where the officially released version from July of 2023 is build 22G74. So far the issue only seems to affect the basic M3 versions of the MacBook Pro and iMac and not the M3 Pro or M3 Max versions, suggesting that the M3 Macs were ready to go a few months before the more powerful versions.

So why did this happen, why can’t these Macs update, and what can you do about it if you’re affected?

Enlarge / John Carmack (left) and John Romero (second from right) pose with their id Software colleagues in the early ’90s. (credit: John Romero)

The Twitch-streamed event, announced on social media late last week by Romero, will take place on Doom‘s anniversary of December 10. Carmack and Romero will discuss the game and its legacy with moderator and Rocket Jump author David L. Craddock, whom Ars readers might remember from the Long Live Mortal Kombat excerpt that ran on the site last year.

Carmack and Romero reuniting might feel like a historic burying of the hatchet to those who have followed the pair’s story over the decades. But “the two Johns” say that reports of their falling out have been exaggerated over the years, to say the least.

Enlarge / A view looking down on a test model of Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket on its launch pad in French Guiana. (credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/ArianeGroup/Optique video du CSG-S. Martin)

This is a big moment for the European Space Agency and its member states, which have traditionally funded the lion’s share of rocket development costs since the start of Europe’s launcher programs more than half a century ago. Josef Aschbacher, a scientist who took over as director general of ESA in 2021, has argued that Europe is in an “acute launcher crisis” now that the continent lacks independent launch capability for most of its space missions.

Officials from ESA’s 22 member states met Monday for a Space Summit in Seville, Spain, to decide on several priorities for the space agency. The rocket question was perhaps the most pressing among the topics up for discussion.

Enlarge (credit: PM Images/Getty Images)

In July, software engineer Julian Joseph became the latest victim of the tech industry’s sweeping job cuts. Facing his second layoff in two years, he dreaded spending another couple months hunched over his laptop filling out repetitive job applications and blasting them into the void.

Joseph specializes in user interface automation and figured someone must have roboticized the unpleasant task of applying for jobs. Casting about online, he came upon a company called LazyApply. It offers an AI-powered service called Job GPT that promises to automatically apply to thousands of jobs “in a single click.” All he had to fill in was some basic information about his skills, experience, and desired position.

Enlarge / A view of the “Headphones” nebula. (credit: Bill McLaughlin)

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 / The Waze crash history alerts look like this. (credit: Waze)

Originally an independent startup, in 2013 Google purchased the Israeli company for $1.15 billion, perhaps beating Apple to the punch. Even before the purchase, Waze was becoming an Ars reader favorite thanks to more advanced traffic rerouting than either Google Maps or Apple Maps.

It has not been entirely smooth sailingdriving; for a while the app was infamous for asking drivers to make difficult left turns across busy multi-lane roads and routing cars through once-quiet neighborhoods as shortcuts, aggravating the people who live in those neighborhoods.

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  This mysterious model appeared on eBay with little fanfare. [credit:
  eBay
  ]

The first model of the USS Enterprise ever used in shooting the original Star Trek series may have surfaced after going missing decades ago.

An eBay listing of a 3-foot model of the Enterprise appeared early last week and named a starting bid of $1,000. The listing was removed hours after it went up after enthusiasts on social media and forums discovered it and pieced together what it likely was. Some of those enthusiasts said in the private Facebook group “Star Trek Prop Makers & Collectors” that they had contacted the seller suggesting it be returned to its rightful owners, which many believe to be the estate of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.

On Thursday evening, Rod Roddenberry, son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and steward of the Roddenberry estate, shared a message on Facebook expressing a desire to get in touch with the seller to see about the model’s return. That post has since become inaccessible, but a nearly identical one appeared on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Friday afternoon. He wrote:

Enlarge / The letters before they were opened and read by Renaud Morieux at The National Archives, Kew. (credit: The National Archives / Renaud Morieux)

University of Cambridge historian Renaud Morieux was poring over materials at the National Archives in Kew when he came across a box holding three piles of sealed letters held together by ribbons. The archivist gave him permission to open the letters, all addressed to 18th century French sailors from their loved ones and seized by Great Britain’s Royal Navy during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763).

“I realized I was the first person to read these very personal messages since they’re written,” said Morieux, who just published his analysis of the letters in the journal Annales Histoire Sciences Sociales. “These letters are about universal human experiences, they’re not unique to France or the 18th century. They reveal how we all cope with major life challenges. When we are separated from loved ones by events beyond our control like the pandemic or wars, we have to work out how to stay in touch, how to reassure, care for people and keep the passion alive. Today we have Zoom and WhatsApp. In the 18th century, people only had letters, but what they wrote about feels very familiar.”

England and France have a long, complicated history of being at war, most notably the Hundred Years’ War in the 14th and 15th centuries. The two countries were also almost continuously at war during the 18th century, including the Seven Years’ War, which was fought in Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific as England and France tried to establish global dominance with the aid of their respective allies. The war technically evolved out of the North American colonies when England tried to expand into territory the French had already claimed. (Fun fact: A 22-year-old George Washington led a 1754 ambush on a French force at the Battle of Jumonville Glen.) But the conflict soon spread beyond colonial borders, and the British went on to seize hundreds of French ships at sea.

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“Widespread exploitation of the CVE-2023-22518 authentication bypass vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence Server has begun, posing a risk of significant data loss,” Glenn Thorpe, senior director of security research and detection engineering at security firm GreyNoise, wrote on Mastodon on Sunday. “So far, the attacking IPs all include Ukraine in their target.”

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Source: Ars Technica – Critical vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence server is under “mass exploitation”