Month: December 2019

Enlarge / The Handmaid's Tale, a Hulu original series. (credit: Hulu)

The long, give-and-take saga of 4K streaming on Hulu continues with the addition of 4K streaming for supported Roku devices. Hulu also added 5.1 surround sound capabilities on Roku.

The Disney-owned streaming platform updated its user-facing help pages with the information sometime in the past few days. Previously, only 1080p streaming was possible with the Hulu app on Roku devices, despite many Roku devices' hardware support for 4K. Unfortunately, Hulu still does not support HDR.

It's been a rocky road for 4K on Hulu. The service first offered 4K streaming on select titles for some devices in 2016, then removed support in 2018. It was then re-added on some devices like the Apple TV 4K, but it was not available on Roku sticks or boxes.

Enlarge (credit: iphonedigital)

Hackers believed to be working for the North Korean government have upped their game with a recently discovered Mac trojan that uses in-memory execution to remain stealthy.

In-memory execution, also known as fileless infection, never writes anything to a computer hard drive. Instead, it loads malicious code directly into memory and executes it from there. The technique is an effective way to evade antivirus protection because there’s no file to be analyzed or flagged as suspicious.

In-memory infections were once the sole province of state-sponsored attackers. By 2017, more advanced financially motivated hackers had adopted the technique. It has become increasingly common since then.

Enlarge / Back into Reach. This time, on Windows PC. (credit: Xbox Game Studios)

Years of teases and waiting have finally ended with this: Halo is back on PC in officially supported fashion.

In particular, this week's launch of 2011's Halo Reach on Windows PC is fascinating because of how it compares to the last time Microsoft tried the Halo-on-PC thing. Rewind to 2007, and Microsoft shoved out a Halo 2 port that required both Games For Windows Live and Windows Vista to run—and shipped in mod-unfriendly fashion. It received nary a patch or useful update and left diehard fans scrambling to patch it into decent shape.

Compare that to Halo Reach, which is still a Windows-only game but works on any Microsoft OS from Windows 7 and up and can be purchased either on the Windows Store or Steam. If you pay for Xbox Game Pass on PCs, you get it day-and-date via Windows Store. If you buy it on Steam, meanwhile, you get one heckuva cool option already: total mod support. Simply pick the game's "cheat detection disabled" option upon boot and you can fiddle with every relevant file (within a "friends-only" online sandbox, which is fair enough).

Enlarge / Constant burping is one of the defining features of mad scientist Rick Sanchez on Rick and Morty. (credit: Adult Swim/Comedy Central)

Eccentric mad scientist Rick Sanchez, of Rick and Morty fame, is as notorious for his constant mid-speech belching as he is for his brilliantly eccentric inventions—and for routinely dragging grandson Morty into highly dangerous situations. Now, paralinguistic researcher Brooke Kidner of the University of Southern California has made the first acoustical analysis of Rick's unique speech patterns. She described her work at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America this week in San Diego.

“Paralinguistics have been shown to carry significant meaning when inserted into conversation, and being able to understand the meanings of these less common sounds can lead to a greater understanding of natural language processing," Kidner said at a press conference.

Kidner's unusual study began with a phonetics seminar course at USC, focusing on non-speech sounds that occur in human speech—groans, gasps, sighs, the infamous "Loser!" sneeze, and so forth—and how we attribute meaning to them (sarcasm, for instance). The instructor noted that burps were an example of non-speech sounds with no meaning. Kidner brought up Rick Sanchez's constant mid-sentence burps in Rick and Morty as a counter-argument, and the instructor encouraged her to investigate further.

Enlarge / One hundred cardboard cutouts of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stand outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, April 10, 2018. (credit: SAUL LOEB | AFP | Getty Images)

It's no secret that every major social media platform is chock-full of bad actors, fake accounts, and bots. The big companies continually pledge to do a better job weeding out organized networks of fake accounts, but a new report confirms what many of us have long suspected: they're pretty terrible at doing so.

The report comes this week from researchers with the NATO Strategic Communication Centre of Excellence (StratCom). Through the four-month period between May and August of this year, the research team conducted an experiment to see just how easy it is to buy your way into a network of fake accounts and how hard it is to get social media platforms to do anything about it.

The research team spent €300 (about $332) to purchase engagement on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, the report (PDF) explains. That sum bought 3,520 comments, 25,750 likes, 20,000 views, and 5,100 followers. They then used those interactions to work backward to about 19,000 inauthentic accounts that were used for social media manipulation purposes.

Enlarge / APIA, SAMOA - DECEMBER 5: Red flags are seen hanging outside of homes of Apia residents indicating they have not been vaccinated for measles on December 5, 2019 in Apia, Samoa. (credit: Getty | Chikara Yoshida)

Samoa’s most prominent locally based anti-vaccine advocate will stay behind bars as officials go door-to-door vaccinating residents against a massive measles outbreak that has already killed 63—nearly all of whom are children under 4 years old.

Officials arrested Edwin Tamasese Thursday, December 5, charging him with "incitement against the Government vaccination order[s]," according to the Samoa Observer. He faces two-years in jail.

The arrest came after he allegedly posted a message on social media about the current vaccination campaign that read, "I will be here to mop up your mess. Enjoy your killing spree."

Enlarge / The Google Assistant and Google Keep, now back together.

Shopping list creation can be a very handy feature to have in a voice assistant. As you pull the jug of milk out of the fridge and realize it's a little light, just give a quick "Hey Google, add milk to my shopping list," and the little voice box on the kitchen counter will dutifully jot down that you need more milk. In the early days of the Google Assistant, this feature was pretty good—your lists were created in Google Keep, a fully featured note-taking app. In 2017, Google seriously limited the usefulness of Google Assistant shopping lists when it took away Google Keep integration and instead forced the feature into Google Express, Google's online-shopping-focused Amazon Prime clone.

It has been two and a half years now, and Google Keep integration is coming back to the Google Assistant. Google is actually introducing a full-blown note taking feature set now. You can pick from several note apps—Google Keep, Any.do, AnyList, and Bring—and you can juggle multiple lists now instead of just a single shopping list. Shopping lists, holiday gift lists, a list of who is naughty and nice—It seems like you can pick any arbitrary name you want and the Google Assistant will create it and add to it. These lists can now pop up on Google Smart Displays, too—just ask for them.

The Google Assistant's 2017 integration with Google Express (now called Google Shopping) was a mess. Google Express was nowhere near the fully featured note-taking app that Google Keep was, and overnight users lost the ability to reorder items with drag and drop, share lists and do real-time collaboration with other users, attach location or time-based reminders to lists, and add voice recordings and images. The Google Express-hosted shopping list turned your shopping list into a big advertisement for Google Express, adding search links next to all your items, encouraging you to order them online through Google's $95-a-year shipping service. If you were just intending to run down to the local grocery store, that wasn't really supported by the Google Express UX.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's tech deal roundup brings a number of leftover sales from Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Lenovo, for one, is still running a couple of deals on very good ThinkPad laptops: a configuration of its latest ThinkPad X1 Carbon with an 8th-gen Core i5, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB solid state drive is available for less than $1,000 with the code "THINKBF1," while a similar config of the more business-oriented ThinkPad T490 is down to $749 with the code "THINKBF7". We rate the former very highly—just note that its memory is not upgradeable, though it is a lighter and more premium-feeling machine than the latter.

Beyond that, we're still seeing a number of Cyber Week sales going strong: the Razer DeathAdder Elite, our favorite gaming mouse, is still at a low of $25; a number of Instant Pot models remain on sale; and our favorite noise-cancelling headphones, the Sony WH-1000XM3, are still at their Black Friday discount of $70 off. The Dealmaster has a one-day Amazon sale on board games, a discount on retro NES-style controllers for the Nintendo Switch, deals on recommended microSD cards and portable power banks, and much more. Have a look at the full rundown below.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.