Enlarge / An assortment of Ubiquiti cameras. (credit: Ubiquiti)

“Recently, my wife received a notification from UniFi Protect, which included an image from a security camera,” one Reddit user reported. “However, here’s the twist—this camera doesn’t belong to us.”

Stoking concern and anxiety

The post included two images. The first showed a notification pushed to the person’s phone reporting that their UDM Pro, a network controller and network gateway used by tech-enthusiast consumers, had detected someone moving in the backyard. A still shot of video recorded by a connected surveillance camera showed a three-story house surrounded by trees. The second image showed the dashboard belonging to the Reddit user. The user’s connected device was a UDM SE, and the video it captured showed a completely different house.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Chrome has finally announced plans to kill third-party cookies. It’s been almost four years since third-party cookies have been disabled in Firefox and Safari, but Google, one of the world’s largest ad companies, has been slow-rolling the death of the tracking cookie. Ad companies use third-party cookies to track users across the web, and that web activity is used to show users relevant ads. Now that Google’s alternative user-tracking ad system, the “Privacy Sandbox,” has launched in Chrome, it’s finally ready to do away with the previous form of ad tracking. The new timeline to kill third-party cookies is the second half of 2024.

Google’s blog post calls the rollout “Tracking Protection” and says the first tests will begin on January 4, where 1 percent of Chrome users will get the feature. By the second half of 2024, the rollout should hit everyone on desktop Chrome and Android (Chrome on iOS is just a reskinned Safari and is not applicable). The rollout comes with some new UI bits for Chrome, with Google saying, “If a site doesn’t work without third-party cookies and Chrome notices you’re having issues—like if you refresh a page multiple times—we’ll prompt you with an option to temporarily re-enable third-party cookies for that website from the eye icon on the right side of your address bar.” Since other browsers have been doing this for four years, it’s hard to imagine many web admins not being ready for it.

Chrome’s new third-party cookies controls. (credit: Google)

Google says the rollout is “subject to addressing any remaining competition concerns from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority.” Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox switch represents the world’s most popular browser (Google Chrome) integrating with the web’s biggest advertising platform (Google Ads) and shutting down alternative tracking methods used by competing ad companies. So, some regulators are naturally interested in the whole process.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

In one prominent example, just two days before the policy change, Twitch banned OnlyFans model Morgpie for posting “topless” streams. Although Morgpie’s videos were shot to imply nudity, they “never actually showed content that explicitly violated Twitch’s sexual content policies,” TechCrunch reported. To critics, Twitch’s rationale for banning Morgpie remains unclear.

In a blog, Twitch Chief Customer Trust Officer Angela Hession wrote that Twitch “received consistent feedback from streamers that our current policies around sexual content are confusing and that it can be difficult to know how their content will be interpreted based on these policies.”

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos, shortly after he rode on New Shepard to space. (credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gives very few interviews, but he recently sat down with the computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman for a two-hour interview about Amazon, Blue Origin, his business practices, and more.

The discussion meanders somewhat, but there are some interesting tidbits about spaceflight, especially when the conversation turns to Blue Origin. This is the space company Bezos founded more than 23 years ago. He has invested an extraordinary amount of money into Blue Origin—likely somewhere between $10 billion and $20 billion—and it truly is a passion project.

But the inescapable truth about Blue Origin is that to date, it has been a disappointment in terms of execution. At present, Blue Origin employs approximately 11,000 people, about the same total as SpaceX. However, Blue Origin has launched zero rockets this year, whereas SpaceX has launched nearly 100, as well as building and launching thousands of satellites.

Enlarge / The dream of everybody having blue bubbles, and epic photos of perfectly digestible meals, as proffered by Beeper. (credit: Beeper)

A friend of mine had been using Beeper’s iMessage-for-Android app, Beeper Mini to keep up on group chats where she was the only Android user. It worked great until last Friday, when it didn’t work at all.

What stung her wasn’t the return to being the Android interloper in the chats again. It wasn’t the resulting lower-quality images, loss of encryption, and strange “Emphasized your message” reaction texts. It was losing messages during the outage and never being entirely certain they had been sent or received. There was a gathering on Saturday, and she had to double-check with a couple people about the details after showing up inadvertently early at the wrong spot.

That kind of grievance is why, after Apple on Wednesday appeared to have blocked what Beeper described as “~5% of Beeper Mini users” from accessing iMessages, both co-founder Eric Migicovksy and the app told users they understood if people wanted out. The app had already suspended its plans to charge customers $1.99 per month, following the first major outage. But this was something more about “how ridiculously annoying this uncertainty is for our users,” Migicovsky posted.

Enlarge / Sure, they can use tools, but do they know where the nearest subway stop is? (credit: Jonas Adner)

“A thirsty crow wanted water from a pitcher, so he filled it with pebbles to raise the water level to drink,” summarizes a famous Aesop Fable. While this tale is thousands of years old, animal behaviorists still use this challenge to study corvids (which include crows, ravens, jays, and magpies) and their use of tools. In a recent Nature Communications study, researchers from a collaboration of universities across Washington, Florida, and Utah used radioactive tracers within the brains of several American crows to see which parts of their brains were active when they used stones to obtain food from the bottom of a water-filled tube.

Their results indicate that the motor learning and tactile control centers were activated in the brains of the more proficient crows, while the sensory and higher-order processing centers lit up in the brains of less proficient crows. These results suggest that competence with tools is linked to certain memories and muscle control, which the researchers claimed is similar to a ski jumper visualizing the course before jumping.

The researchers also found that out of their avian test subjects, female crows were especially proficient at tool usage, succeeding in the challenge quickly. “[A] follow-up question is whether female crows actually have more need for creative thinking relative to male crows,” elaborates Loma Pendergraft, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the University of Washington, who wants to understand if the caregiving and less dominant role of female crows gives them a higher capacity for tool use.

Enlarge (credit: Alphabet)

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is launching a new company called “Renew Home.” The new company will pull in some other projects from Nest and the rest of Alphabet to become a supposed one-stop shop for power savings and clean energy usage. The core concept is partnering with power companies to obtain data about the current condition of the power grid and using that data to change consumer habits. The new company is bankrolled by Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), an Alphabet venture capital firm.

The first existing service getting pulled into Renew Home is Nest Renew. This service for Nest Thermostats uses power company data to tell consumers how their electricity is being generated and what it costs. That data lets your thermostat do things like automatically shift heating and cooling to times of day when energy is cheaper or cleaner, and shows various reports about the cleanness of the energy you’ve been using. (Nest’s feature that lets utility companies remotely take control of your thermostat, Rush Hour Rewards, does not seem to be part of Renew Home.)

Another Alphabet service being pulled into Renew Home is OhmConnect, which is the same basic idea as Nest’s grid data-power thermostat adjustments but for more than just your thermostat. OhmConnect is compatible with a very small list of smart devices, like Nest-rival Ecobee and Honeywell thermostats, TL-Link’s “Kasa” smart home system, and Tesla vehicles. The backbone of the service appears to be the in-house “OhmPlug” smart outlet, which can monitor the energy usage of anything that plugs into the wall. By seeing that you’ve turned these smart devices during peak usage times, OhmConnect offers people rewards like gift cards or cash for not using power when the grid is at capacity.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | RoyalFive)

The new rules are being floated in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that the FCC voted to approve yesterday in a 3–2 vote, with both Republicans dissenting. The NPRM seeks public comment on the proposed rules and could lead to a final vote in a few months or so.

“Today’s action proposes to adopt customer service protections that prohibit cable operators and DBS (Direct Broadcast Satellite) providers from imposing a fee for the early termination of a cable or DBS video service contract,” the FCC said. “Additionally, the NPRM recommends the adoption of customer service protections to require cable and DBS providers to grant subscribers a prorated credit or rebate for the remaining whole days in a monthly or periodic billing cycle after the subscriber cancels service.”

The archived hour-long chat is a must-watch for any long-time Doom fan.

While Doom can sometimes feel like an overnight smash success, the seminal first-person shooter was far from the first game created by id co-founders John Carmack and John Romero. Now, in a rare joint interview that was livestreamed during last weekend’s 30th-anniversary celebration, the pair waxed philosophical about how Doom struck a perfect balance between technology and simplicity that they hadn’t been able to capture previously and have struggled to recapture since.

Carmack said that Doom-precursor Wolfenstein 3D, for instance, “was done under these extreme, extraordinary design constraints” because of the technology available at the time. “There just wasn’t that much we could do.”

Wolfenstein 3D‘s grid-based mapping led to a lot of boring rectangular rooms connected by long corridors. (credit: Steam)

One of the biggest constraints in Wolfenstein 3D was a grid-based mapping system that forced walls to be at 90-degree angles, leading to a lot of large, rectangular rooms connected by long corridors. “Making the levels for the original Wolfenstein had to be the most boring level design job ever because it was so simple,” Romero said. “Even [2D platformer Commander Keen] was more rewarding to make levels for.”

Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Source: Ars Technica – Doom’s creators reminisce about “as close to a perfect game as anything we made”

Enlarge / Severe weather reports from Saturday across Tennessee and Kentucky. Note the cluster of tornado reports north of Nashville. (credit: NOAA)

Tennessee tornado 2023. Please be safe.

Friend from my wrestling academy captured this insane video in Madison. Please be safe. pic.twitter.com/2JDWNznfUn

— BD (@BrandonDavisBD) December 9, 2023

This tornado occurred between Madison and Goodlettsville, just north of Nashville, east of I-65. What you see is the tornado striking a power substation, followed by an explosion. The power substation belonged to Nashville Electric Service, which subsequently released a video from the substation on Monday showing the strike and explosion.

Enlarge / Intel’s Core Ultra CPUs combine multiple silicon dies into a single chip. (credit: Intel)

Intel announced technical details about its next-generation Core CPUs a few months ago. Codenamed Meteor Lake, the chips are good and bad news for Intel’s chip manufacturing ambitions—they’re simultaneously the first chips to use the brand-new Intel 4 process and the first of Intel’s mass-market consumer processors to use silicon manufactured by someone other than Intel (in this case, TSMC). They’re also a showcase for Intel’s Foveros packaging technology, which welds together several pieces of silicon (“tiles,” in Intel’s words) rather than integrating everything into a single monolithic die.

Today, Intel is announcing the first wave of actual Meteor Lake processors, which Intel says will be available in some PCs starting today—expect to see quite a few of these PC designs announced this week, and even more of them at CES next month.

The lineup includes 11 chips across two different product families: H-series processors for thin-and-light workstation and gaming laptops and U-series chips that will end up in Ultrabooks. Eight of these are launching today, and three more are expected in Q1 of 2024. The two families share many similarities, including Intel’s first built-in neural processing unit (NPU) for accelerating machine learning and AI workloads, but in short, the H-series chips use more power and include more P-cores and GPU cores.

Enlarge / I’m not 100 percent sure but it looks a lot like the Vistiq will be a three-row SUV. (credit: Cadillac)

Cadillac’s product planners sure love the letter Q. Last year the American luxury automaker started building the Lyriq, a rather competent midsize electric SUV. Last month, it revealed plans for an entry-level electric crossover called the Optiq, that goes on sale next year. And today, it tells us there’s another new SUV due in model year 2026 called the Vistiq.

Size-wize, the Vistiq slots between the Lyriq and the rather ginormous Escalade IQ due for model year 2025—the brand recognition on that name is far too good to Q-icize it directly. Although we have no details other than the model year and the name right now, there’s a fairly good chance the Vistiq will be an electric analogue to the Cadillac XT6.

(Similarly we have no further details on the Optiq yet, other than it will share the same smaller crossover architecture as the forthcoming Chevrolet Equinox and will arrive in 2024.)

Enlarge / This image from the NIRCam on the James Webb Space Telescope shows the central portion of the star cluster IC 348. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and K. Luhman and C. Alves de Oliveira)

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 / Reflective screens and creases aren’t the only concerns with foldable PCs. (credit: Scharon Harding)

Although foldable smartphones have been available for five years, the devices are still trying to justify themselves. And after using a foldable-screen laptop as my primary PC for about four weeks, I’m not sure they’re ready for prime time.

I’m leaving my time with HP’s first foldable laptop with a sense of anticipation for the future of laptops, which I think would benefit from a resurgence of creative ideas that cater to the unique ways people use their computers. But I seriously question if the benefits of having a 17-inch screen in a 12-inch laptop body are worth the trade-offs inherent in today’s foldable PCs.

Early participants in the foldable laptop world have an opportunity to define the space, while consumers can decide if this is something they even want. HP’s foldable is the most beefed-up option ever, and weeks of use have shown me a lot about what I want and don’t want to see when the dust settles.

Enlarge / A service center for “Kyivstar”, a Ukrainian telecommunications company, that provides communication services and data transmission based on a broad range of fixed and mobile technologies. (credit: Getty Images)

Two separate hacking groups with ties to the Russian government took responsibility for Tuesday’s attack striking Kyivstar, which has said it serves 24.3 million mobile subscribers and more than 1.1 million home Internet users. One group, calling itself Killnet, said on Telegram that “an attack was carried out on Ukrainian mobile operators, as well as on some banks,” but didn’t elaborate or provide any evidence. A separate group known as Solntsepek said on the same site that it took “full responsibility for the cyberattack on Kyivstar” and had “destroyed 10,000 computers, more than 4,000 servers, and all cloud storage and backup systems.” The post was accompanied by screenshots purporting to show someone with control over the Kyivstar systems.

In the city of Lviv, street lights remained on after sunrise and had to be disconnected manually, because Internet-dependent automated power switches didn’t work, according to NBC News. Additionally, the outage prevented shops throughout the country from processing credit payments and many ATMs from functioning, the Kyiv Post said.

Enlarge / The iPhone 15 lineup.

So, for our final Apple gift guide, we’ll revisit some of what we explored in our iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro review with a special focus on the cameras. If you’re looking to grab a new iPhone for yourself or someone in your family, which camera is best?

The idea here is to provide a top-level, quick summary of the features of each iPhone camera as they pertain to specific uses to make for an easy buying guide for last-minute holiday shoppers who want a quick answer. We’ll go over each phone and survey its features, detailing their relevant uses and noting some recommendations and considerations along the way.

Enlarge / The iPhone 15 is part of Apple’s self-repair program now. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple today expanded the Self Service Repair program it launched in April to include access to Apple’s diagnostics tool online and the iPhone 15 series and M2 Macs.

The online tool, Apple said in today’s announcement, provides “the same ability as Apple Authorized Service Providers and Independent Repair Providers to test devices for optimal part functionality and performance, as well as identify which parts may need repair.” The troubleshooting tool is only available in the US and will hit Europe in 2024, according to Apple.

Upon visiting the tool’s website, you’ll be prompted to put your device in diagnostic mode before entering the device’s serial number. Then, you’ll have access to a diagnostic suite, including things like a mobile resource inspector for checking software and validating components’ presence, testing for audio output and “display pixel anomalies,” and tests for cameras and Face ID.