Month: March 2020

A high school music teacher on the verge of a big break finds himself taking an unexpected detour through the afterlife in Soul, the latest animated feature by Pixar. Based on the trailer, it looks like Soul will have a similar existential emphasis on depicting highly abstract conceptions of human consciousness and the afterlife as Pixar's Inside Out (2015) and Coco (2017).

Directed by Pete Docter (Inside Out, Up), Soul features the vocal talents of Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Phylicia Rashad, Daveed Diggs, and Questlove. Per the official synopsis:

Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) is a middle-school band teacher who gets the chance of a lifetime to play at the best jazz club in town. But one small misstep takes him from the streets of New York City to The Great Before—a fantastical place where new souls get their personalities, quirks, and interests before they go to Earth. Determined to return to his life, Joe teams up with a precocious soul, 22 (Tina Fey), who has never understood the appeal of the human experience. As Joe desperately tries to show 22 what's great about living, he may just discover the answers to some of life's most important questions.

Docter told Entertainment Weekly last November that the film is "an exploration of, where should your focus be? What are the things that, at the end of the day, are really going to be the important things that you look back on and go, 'I spent a worthy amount of my limited time on Earth worrying or focused on that'?"

Enlarge (credit: Cortney Dean / Flickr)

Microsoft on Thursday released an unscheduled fix for a critical security bug that makes it possible for attackers to remotely execute malicious code that can spread from vulnerable machine to vulnerable machine without requiring any interaction from users.

The flaw, in version 3 of Microsoft's implementation of the Server Message block protocol, is present only in 32- and 64-bit Windows 10 versions 1903 and 1093 for clients and servers. Although the vulnerability is difficult to exploit in a reliable way, Microsoft and outside researchers consider it critical because it opens large networks to "wormable" attacks, in which the compromise of a single machine can trigger a chain reaction that causes all other Windows machines to quickly become infected. That's the scenario that played on with the WannaCry and NotPetya in 2017.

In a bulletin accompanying Thursday's patch, Microsoft said it has no evidence the flaw is being actively exploited, but the company went on to say label the bug as "exploitation more likely." That designation means malicious actors will probably develop and use exploits in the future.

Enlarge / A user tries out features in Apple's ARKit. (credit: Apple)

Citing a source with knowledge about Apple's new iPhones, Fast Company writes that Apple will introduce a rear-facing 3D sensor array to new iPhone models. Apple plans to buy the laser components for this array from Lumentum, the California-based company from which it already buys the front-facing TrueDepth lasers found in today's iPhones.

The publication’s source says that Apple engineers have been working on the rear-facing 3D camera for two years, and it is currently planned for inclusion in at least one model later this year. However, the timing could still change.

Apple is not alone in including this feature in 2020 flagship phones. Samsung’s new Galaxy S20+ and S20 Ultra, announced just last month, have rear-facing time-of-flight (ToF) sensors. They are used for Live Focus (which is an optional blur effect in photos) and Quick Measure (which allows users to measure objects in front of them).

Enlarge / The business end of Falcon 9 serial B1035, now on permanent static display at Space Center Houston. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

HOUSTON—Space Center Houston took the wraps off of its newest exhibit on Thursday morning: a Block 3 Falcon 9 booster, serial number B1035. It is only the second Falcon 9 on permanent public display, with the other being outside SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

The process of getting B1035 from Hawthorne to Houston has been something of a long one, but the booster finally arrived at Space Center Houston on the evening of March 3.

B1035 was used on two ISS commercial resupply missions; it first flew as CRS-11 in June 2017 and again as CRS-13 in December of the same year. The vehicle is streaked with authentic soot from its launches, and SCH Exhibits Director Paul Spana explained to Ars that the grime was purposefully left in place so that the public could get an accurate perception of the booster as it looked as an actual working piece of technology that went to space—twice.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson's total compensation was more than $32 million in 2019, giving him a 10 percent raise while he slashed tens of thousands of jobs and reduced spending on network upgrades. Stephenson's total compensation was $28.72 million in 2017, $29.12 million in 2018, and $32.03 million in 2019, an AT&T filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission said. His pay raise was driven by stock performance.

Stephenson's base salary was $1.8 million in all three years, but his stock awards jumped from $17.07 million to $19.80 million from 2018 to 2019. The other portions of his compensation remained roughly the same.

While Stephenson's pay rose, AT&T eliminated 7.6 percent of its workforce in 2019. AT&T had 247,800 employees at the end of 2019, down from 268,220 one year earlier. AT&T also slashed capital expenditures by more than $1.6 billion in 2019 and projects a capital-investment cut of more than $3 billion in 2020. The cuts to jobs and network spending came despite AT&T claiming that a corporate tax cut and repeal of net neutrality rules would cause broadband investment to rise. Some of these cuts came from the company's wireline division after AT&T finished a fiber buildout.

Enlarge / "School" is probably going to look something like this for a whole lot of families in the coming weeks. (credit: Rafael Ben-Ari | Getty Images)

Hundreds of colleges and universities are suddenly shutting their doors and making a rapid switch to distance learning in an effort to slow the spread of novel coronavirus disease. Likewise, hundreds of K-12 districts nationwide have either already followed suit or are likely to in the coming days.

Online education comes with a whole host of challenges of its own, though, especially when everyone's doing the best they can to pull together ad hoc solutions at the last minute. Many of the logistical questions are daunting in their own right: does everyone have a device to use? Does everyone have an Internet connection to use it on? What software tools do we already have that we can use for this? How on earth do we adapt intensive hands-on classroom curriculum, like lab work, for home viewing?

Even when all of the immediate logistical and technical needs have been triaged and handled, though, there remains another complicating factor. While the United States doesn't have all that much in the way of privacy legislation, we do, in fact, have a law protecting some student educational data. It's called the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA.

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  It's a magical world... let's go exploring. [credit: Microsoft ]

Long-time gamers are accustomed to the kind of gated progression offered by adventure games like Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. As you travel the map, you catch glimpses of portions you won't be able to access until later on, when you find an upgrade that gives you new powers necessary for the previously unreachable areas.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps operates firmly in this well-established pattern. Ori—the impish, monkey-like ball of light first seen in 2015's Ori and the Blind Forest—is so weak at the beginning of his quest to find a lost, adoptive owl brother that he can't even attack the myriad bug-like enemies in his path. Slowly but surely, though, he finds a wide array of upgrades to his offensive capabilities and locomotion that lets him fully explore a fallen forest world made dark by a mysterious corrupting force.

The most striking thing about Will of the Wisps, though, is how it maintains a feeling of near-overwhelming threat despite Ori's inexorable rise in power. Even as your abilities increase, Ori remains a very small force working against a sprawling and uncaring universe. This becomes most apparent in the boss battles, characterized by detailed, screen-filling monsters whose massive (if repetitive) attacks allow little room for error.

These battles are punctuated by thrilling chase scenes, where Ori has to use every movement ability in his arsenal in quick succession to stay ahead of the ever-encroaching threat. Here, as in much of the rest of the game, players need some extreme levels of technical skill to get through even standard platforming challenges. There are frequent sections when Ori needs to stay off the ground for 10 seconds or more at a time, often using dozens of intricate and well-timed button presses in perfect succession to survive to the next safe spot.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a $20 discount on Sony's PlayStation Plus service, one that brings 12-month subscriptions down to $40 at Newegg when you use the code "EMCDEGF56" at checkout. Note that this offer applies to digital codes, not physical cards, so you shouldn't have to wait as long to re-up your membership.

This kind of deal has popped up a few times over the past year, and while it's not an all-time low, it's still better than the $45 going rate we saw on Black Friday. One-year subscriptions typically run between $50 and Sony's MSRP of $60 at most major retailers. Either way, if you plan to keep your PS4 around for the next year or upgrade to the PlayStation 5, it's a good price for a service that's still required to play most PlayStation games online.

If you have no interest in PlayStation in the first place, though, we also have Amazon's latest Echo Dot for $25, a few leftover "Mario Day" deals that are still kicking, a nice price on the Ars-approved board game Mysterium, and more. Have a look at the full list below, and please continue to wash your hands.