Technology News

A toxic mix of disinformation, digital tools, and generative AI is challenging election officials across the country.

Transparency advocates say that Eric Schmidt's pursuit of “personal” connections with AI companies in China represents a concerning conflict of interest.

Transparency advocates say that Eric Schmidt's pursuit of “personal” connections with AI companies in China represents a concerning conflict of interest.

• The Frankenstein's monster of a GamePad hack responsible for the creation of Trimming the Herbs. [credit: Ahoyo ]

Last month, the Super Mario Maker community was rocked by the shocking admission that the game's last uncleared level—an ultra-hard reflex test named "Trimming the Herbs" (TTH)—had been secretly created and uploaded using the assistance of automated, tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) techniques back in 2017. That admission didn't stop Super Mario Maker streamer Sanyx from finally pulling off a confirmed human-powered clear of the level last Friday, just days before Nintendo's final shutdown of the Wii U's online servers Sunday would have made that an impossibility.

But while "Trimming the Herbs" itself was solved in the nick of time, the mystery of the level's creation remained at least partially unsolved. Before TTH creator Ahoyo admitted to his TAS exploit last month, the player community at large didn't think it was even possible to precisely automate such pre-recorded inputs on the Wii U.

The first confirmed clear of Trimming the Herbs by a human.

Now, speaking to Ars, Ahoyo has finally explained the console hacking that went into his clandestine TAS so many years ago and opened up about the physical and psychological motivations for the level's creation. He also discussed the remorse he feels over what ended up being a years-long fraud on the community, which is still struggling with frame-perfect input timing issues that seem inherent to the Wii U hardware.

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Violent threats, rampant disinformation, budget shortfalls, and mass resignations: Election workers have a long road to November.

Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan’s new show keeps Fallout’s gallows humor. He also packed the first season because “you have to be careful not to leave too much down the road.”

Enlarge / Norland is a game that communicates its intent well through screenshots. (credit: Hooded Horse)

The Triple-i initiative is a gaming showcase that gets it, and is also in on the joke.

The thing Triple-i gets is that most gaming "showcases" are full of corporate fluff, go on way too long, and are often anchored around a couple huge titles. Triple-i's first event on Wednesday delivered 30-plus game trailers and teases within 45 minutes, and there was a consistent intrigue to all of them. There were some big names with some bigger studios loosely attached, and the definition of what is "triple-i" is quite vague, maybe intentionally. But there were a lot of games worth noting, especially on PC.

What kind of games? Triple-i's website notes the announcement "may contain traces of rogue-lites." At a breakpoint in the showcase, the omniscient text narrator notes there are "only a few more rogue-lites (promise)." Triple-i was stuffed full of rogue-lites, roguelikes, survival, city-builders, deckbuilders, Hades-likes, 16-bit-esque platformers, Vampire Survivors and its progeny, turn-based tacticals, and then a car that sometimes has legs. There are strong trends in indie and indie-adjacent gaming, but also some real surprises.

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AT&T is notifying millions of current or former customers that their account data has been compromised and published last month on the dark web. Just how many millions, the company isn't saying.

In a mandatory filing with the Maine Attorney General’s office, the telecommunications company said 51.2 million account holders were affected. On its corporate website, AT&T put the number at 73 million. In either event, compromised data included one or more of the following: full names, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, AT&T account numbers, and AT&T passcodes. Personal financial information and call history didn’t appear to be included, AT&T said, and data appeared to be from June 2019 or earlier.

The disclosure on the AT&T site said the 73 million affected customers comprised 7.6 million current customers and 65.4 million former customers. The notification said AT&T has reset the account PINs of all current customers and is notifying current and former customers by mail. AT&T representatives haven’t explained why the letter filed with the Maine AG lists 51.2 million affected and the disclosure on its site lists 73 million.

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Enlarge / Avi Wigderson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton is the recipient of the 2023 A.M. Turing Award. (credit: Andrea Kane/Institute for Advanced Study)

Computational scientist and mathematician Avi Wigderson of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton has won the 2023 A.M. Turing Award. The prize, which is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to a computer scientist for their contributions to the field, comes with $1 million thanks to Google. It is named in honor of the British mathematician Alan Turing, who helped develop a theoretical foundation for understanding machine computation.

Wigderson is being honored "for foundational contributions to the theory of computation, including reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation and for his decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science." He also won the prestigious Abel Prize in 2021 for his work in theoretical computer science—the first person to be so doubly honored.

"Avi has made fundamental contributions to the theory of computation from parallel algorithms to cryptography to absolutely all aspects of complexity theory," said Shafi Goldwasser, director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, who won the 2012 Turing Award. "His numerous contributions over decades to the areas of derandomization and pseudorandomness has led us to a deep understanding of the deep role of randomness in computing."

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Enlarge / A screenshot of AI-generated songs listed on Udio on April 10, 2024. (credit: Benj Edwards)

Between 2002 and 2005, I ran a music website where visitors could submit song titles that I would write and record a silly song around. In the liner notes for my first CD release in 2003, I wrote about a day when computers would potentially put me out of business, churning out music automatically at a pace I could not match. While I don't actively post music on that site anymore, that day is almost here.

On Wednesday, a group of ex-DeepMind employees launched Udio, a new AI music-synthesis service that can create novel high-fidelity musical audio from written prompts, including user-provided lyrics. It's similar to Suno, which we covered on Monday. With some key human input, Udio can create facsimiles of human-produced music in genres like country, barbershop quartet, German pop, classical, hard rock, hip hop, show tunes, and more. It's currently free to use during a beta period.

Udio is also freaking out some musicians on Reddit. As we mentioned in our Suno piece, Udio is exactly the kind of AI-powered music-generation service that over 200 musical artists were afraid of when they signed an open protest letter last week.

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A sample consumer label for home Internet service. (credit: FCC)

Starting today, home Internet and mobile broadband providers in the US are required to display consumer labels with information on prices, speeds, and data allowances.

"Today's nationwide launch of the Broadband Consumer Labels means internet service providers are now required to display consumer-friendly labels at the point of sale," the Federal Communications Commission said. "Labels are required for all standalone home or fixed Internet service or mobile broadband plans. Providers must display the label—not simply an icon or link to the label—in close proximity to an associated plan's advertisement."

The labels are required now for providers with at least 100,000 subscribers, while ISPs with fewer customers have until October 10, 2024, to comply. "If a provider is not displaying their labels or has posted inaccurate information about its fees or service plans, consumers can file a complaint with the FCC Consumer Complaint Center," an agency webpage says.

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An attempt to reauthorize Section 702, the so-called crown jewel of US spy powers, failed for a third time in the House of Representatives after former president Donald Trump criticized the law.

The sun and the moon aren’t the only circles worth talking about this week. Target’s Circle Week deals event has a bunch of discounts on our favorite gear.

Enlarge / F1 has a few more months before it has to finalize the technical regulations for 2026. (credit: Darren Heath/Getty Images)

F1 is set to undergo another of its periodic technical rule changes in 2026, undertaken every few years in an effort to keep the racing safe and at least somewhat relevant. The sport is adopting carbon-neutral synthetic fuels and switching to a simplified, if far more powerful, hybrid system, powering cars with much less drag. But early simulation tests have been alarming, with cars that were at times "undriveable," according to a report in Motorsport.

The FIA, which is in charge of F1's rules and regulations, wants cars that can race each other closely and entertain an audience, so expect the 2026 cars to generate less aerodynamic downforce, since that is often conducive to processional racing.

Reducing drag is a bigger priority for the FIA, especially since the new hybrid system, which still regenerates energy under braking but no longer also from the engine's turbocharger, won't have the energy sufficient to aid the car's combustion engine throughout the entire lap.

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Enlarge / Dental students, working as volunteers, attend to patients at a Remote Area Medical (RAM) mobile dental and medical clinic on October 7, 2023 in Grundy, Virginia. More than a thousand people were expected to seek free dental, medical and vision care at the two-day event in the rural and financially struggling area of western Virginia. (credit: Getty | Spencer Platt)

In the 1960s and 1970s, people who lived in rural America fared a little better than their urban counterparts. The rate of deaths from all causes was a tad lower outside of metropolitan areas. In the 1980s, though, things evened out, and in the early 1990s, a gap emerged, with rural areas seeing higher death rates—and the gap has been growing ever since. By 1999, the gap was 6 percent. In 2019, just before the pandemic struck, the gap was over 20 percent.

While this news might not be surprising to anyone following mortality trends, a recent analysis by the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service drilled down further, finding a yet more alarming chasm in the urban-rural divide. The report focused in on a key indicator of population health: mortality among prime working-age adults (people ages 25 to 54) and only their natural-cause mortality (NCM) rates—deaths among 100,000 residents from chronic and acute diseases—clearing away external causes of death, including suicides, drug overdoses, violence, and accidents. On this metric, rural areas saw dramatically worsening trends compared with urban populations.

Change in age-adjusted, prime working-age, external- and natural-cause mortality rates for metro and nonmetro areas, 1999–2001 to 2017–2019. (credit: USDA)

The federal researchers compared NCM rates of prime working-age adults in two three-year periods: 1999 to 2001, and 2017 to 2019. In 1999, the NCM rate in 25- to 54-year-olds in rural areas was 6 percent higher than the NCM rate of this age group in urban areas. In 2019, the gap had grown to a whopping 43 percent. In fact, prime working-age adults in rural areas was the only age group in the US that saw an increased NCM rate in this time period. In urban areas, working-age adults' NCM rate declined.

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Today, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it has finalized rules for handling water supplies that are contaminated by a large family of chemicals collectively termed PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances). Commonly called "forever chemicals," these contaminants have been linked to a huge range of health issues, including cancers, heart disease, immune dysfunction, and developmental disorders.

The final rules keep one striking aspect of the initial proposal intact: a goal of completely eliminating exposure to two members of the PFAS family. The new rules require all drinking water suppliers to monitor for the chemicals' presence, and the EPA estimates that as many as 10 percent of them may need to take action to remove them. While that will be costly, the health benefits are expected to exceed those costs.

Going low

PFAS are a collection of hydrocarbons where some of the hydrogen atoms have been swapped out for fluorine. This swap retains the water-repellant behavior of hydrocarbons while making the molecules highly resistant to breaking down through natural processes—hence the forever chemicals moniker. They're widely used in water-resistant clothing and non-stick cooking equipment and have found uses in firefighting foam. Their widespread use and disposal has allowed them to get into water supplies in many locations.

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Enlarge / A Google Axion Processor. (credit: Google)

Google is joining the custom Arm data center chip trend. Google Cloud, the cloud platform division that competes with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, is following in the footsteps of those companies and rolling out its own Arm-based chip designs. Google says its new "Google Axion Processors" are "custom Arm-based CPUs designed for the data center" and offer "industry-leading performance and energy efficiency."

Google has been developing custom data center accelerators for things like AI and video transcoding, but this is the first time the company is making a CPU. Google says it's seeing "50% better performance and up to 60% better energy-efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances."

Google's "Axion" chip is based on the Arm Neoverse V2 CPU, so just like the ARM chips we see on mobile devices, by making "custom" chips, these companies are closely following a lot of blueprints that Arm makes available. Google says it did include a custom microcontroller called "Titanium," which it says handles networking, security, and storage I/O.

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Enlarge / The Fairbuds and their replaceable components, including the notably hand-friendly, non-soldered batteries. (credit: Fairphone)

Fairphone has spent years showing us that it could do what major phone manufacturers suggest is impossible: make a modern-looking phone, make it brazenly easy to open up, design it so battery swaps are something you could do on lunch break, and also provide software support for an unbelievable eight to 10 years.

Bluetooth headphones, specifically wireless earbuds, seemed destined to never receive this kind of eco-friendly, ownership-oriented upgrade, in large part because of how small they are. But the Fairbuds have arrived, and Fairphone has made them in its phones' image. They're only available in the EU at the moment, for 149 euro (or roughly $160 USD). Like the Fairphone 4, there's a chance interest could bring them to the US.

The highlights include:

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Enlarge / Motion Picture Association CEO Charles Rivkin speaks onstage during CinemaCon, a convention of the National Association of Theatre Owners, at Caesars Palace on April 9, 2024, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (credit: Getty Images | Jerod Harris )

Motion Picture Association CEO Charles Rivkin yesterday said his group plans a major push to impose a site-blocking law in the US. The MPA will "work with members of Congress" to require Internet service providers to block piracy websites, he said during a "state of the industry" address at CinemaCon 2024 in Las Vegas, a convention for movie theater owners.

"This danger [of piracy] continues to evolve, and so must our strategy to defeat it," Rivkin said. "So today, here with you at CinemaCon, I'm announcing the next major phase of this effort: the MPA is going to work with members of Congress to enact judicial site-blocking legislation here in the United States."

A site-blocking law would let copyright owners "request, in court, that Internet service providers block access to websites dedicated to sharing illegal, stolen content," he said. Rivkin claimed that in the US, piracy "steals hundreds of thousands of jobs from workers and tens of billions of dollars from our economy, including more than one billion in theatrical ticket sales."

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Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel / Contributor | Photothek)

Smaller web browsers are gaining traction in the European Union after the Digital Markets Act (DMA) started requiring designated gatekeepers like Google and Apple to make it easier to switch default web browsers on devices.

Previously, tech giants were able to lock users into setting their own browsers as defaults—or at least make it complicated to update the defaults—offering the majority of users their own browsing services for free while collecting data used for ad-targeting. This, the EU feared, kept users from switching to defaults that offered superior or more private web browsing experiences.

Reuters collected data from six companies, confirming that, when presented with a choice screen, many EU users will swap out default browsers like Chrome or Safari for more privacy-focused options. And because iPhones have a larger market share than Google-branded phones in the EU, Apple is emerging as the biggest loser, Reuters reported, noting that under the DMA, "the growth for smaller browsers is currently coming at the cost of Safari."

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