Month: February 2021

A young couple fights to hold its relationship together in the midst of pandemic, where a memory loss virus is robbing everyone of their memories in Little Fish, a new science fiction romantic drama from IFC Films. Directed by Chad Hartigan, this thoughtful, genuinely moving film explores themes of memory, self, and the power of shared experiences to forge strong bonds between us, all through the lens of an otherwise average, ordinary Everycouple.

(Some spoilers below.)

The film is loosely based on a short story by Aja Gabel, about a young couple dealing with the man losing his memories in a fictional pandemic, although screenwriter Mattson Tomlin (Project Power) substantially rewrote and fleshed out this core idea. This was well before the current pandemic, but even in the Before Times of 2018, Hartigan was struck by the concept of the world metaphorically crumbling around two people who clung to optimism for the future—and each other. "We never could have imagined or predicted that this would be the case," Hartigan told Ars. "It always felt to me like an emotional story with a science fiction backdrop."

Enlarge (credit: portal gda / Flickr)

A benign barcode scanner with more than 10 million downloads from Google Play has been caught receiving an upgrade that turned it to the dark side, prompting the search-and-advertising giant to remove it.

Barcode Scanner, one of dozens of such apps available in the official Google app repository, began its life as a legitimate offering. Then in late December, researchers with security firm Malwarebytes began receiving messages from customers complaining that ads were opening out of nowhere on their default browser.

One update is all it takes

Malwarebytes mobile malware researcher Nathan Collier was at first puzzled. None of the customers had recently installed any apps, and all the apps they had already installed came from Play, a market that despite its long history of admitting malicious apps remains safer than most third-party sites. Eventually, Collier identified the culprit as the Barcode Scanner. The researcher said an update delivered in December included code that was responsible for the bombardment of ads.

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  The controversial Pi update just adds Microsoft's VS Code repo in a separate file in sources.list.d. No actual packages were installed. [credit: Jim Salter ]

We were recently alerted to something of a tempest in a teapot: when the Raspberry Pi Foundation made it easier to install Microsoft's Visual Studio Code development environment, some Linux users mistook it for a sort of Mark of the Beast, with concerns being raised about telemetry and "what Microsoft repo secretly installed without your knowledge."

It's true that an update recently pushed to Raspberry Pi OS added a Microsoft repo to Raspberry Pi OS systems—but it's not true that it added any actual packages whatsoever.

Investigating the changes

Just to the right of the 40-pin GPIO header, you can see the Pi 400's SD card slot. Want to play with two different distros without the hassle of uninstalling and reinstalling when you switch? Just use two different SD cards! (credit: Jim Salter)

Luckily, my own Raspberry Pi 400 was running Ubuntu, not Raspberry Pi OS, which made it easy to switch back to see what changes occurred in the system. Equally luckily, the Raspberry Pi 400 is almost ideally suited to distro-hopping—all I needed to do to get a pre-update version of Pi OS running was to power my Pi off, swap SD cards from the Ubuntu card I had been using to my old Pi OS card, and then fire it back up. Presto, a pre-update Pi!

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Google is in hot water after banning the Google account of Andrew Spinks, the lead developer of the hit indie game Terraria. The YouTube account of Spinks' game dev company, Re-Logic, was hit with some kind of terms-of-service violation, resulting in Google banning Spinks' entire Google account, greatly disrupting his company's ability to do business. After three fruitless weeks of trying to get the situation fixed, Spinks announced that his company will no longer do business with Google and that the upcoming Stadia version of Terraria is canceled. "I will not be involved with a corporation that values their customers and partners so little," Spinks said. "Doing business with you is a liability."

Three weeks ago, the official Terraria Twitter account publicly pleaded with YouTube for some kind of resolution to a recent Google account ban. The Terraria account explained, "We have not added anything new to our only YT channel (RelogicGames) in several months. However, we randomly received an email saying there was a TOS violation but that it was likely accidental and as such, the account would receive no strikes." The Terraria Twitter account continued, "Three days later, the entire Google account (YT, Gmail, all Google apps, even every purchase made over 15 years on Google Play Store) was disabled with no warning or recourse. This account links into many business functions and as such the impact to us is quite substantial."

Re-Logic's vague recollection of "a TOS violation" highlights one of the main frustration points of a Google account ban: you immediately lose access to your Gmail account, so you can't give a thorough account of what happened or what any communication said, because you can't read your email. Re-Logic's YouTube channel, which is still up here, (with a disabled profile picture) appears to be nothing but trailers of the company's games.

Enlarge / El Salt is an open-air rock shelter nestled against the base of a limestone cliff. Archaeological evidence tells us that Neanderthals lived here from around 60,700 to 45,200 years ago. (credit: Candela et al. 2021)

Biologist Marco Candela and his colleagues recently sequenced ancient microbial DNA from 50,000-year-old Neanderthal feces found at the El Salt archaeological site in Spain. The sequences included DNA from several of the microbes that still call our intestines home, as well as a few that have nearly vanished from today’s urban dwellers. According to Candela and his colleagues, their results suggest that the microscopic population of our guts may have been with us since at least 500,000 years ago, in the era of our species’ last common ancestor with Neanderthals.

Digging up Neanderthal poop

Mixed in with the layer of sediment that once formed the floor of a Neanderthal rock shelter in eastern Spain, archaeologists found millimeter-sized coprolites (fossil poop) and chemical signatures of human feces. An earlier study, published in 2014, sifted through the tiny coprolites to look for traces of Neanderthal diets. “These samples therefore represent, to our knowledge, the oldest known positive identification of human fecal matter,” wrote Candela and his colleagues.

They recently returned to El Salt for new samples, which they scoured for fragments of ancient DNA from the bacteria and other microbes that once lived in the intestines of Neanderthals. To weed out possible contamination, Candela and his colleagues sorted out the old, obviously degraded ancient DNA from the more pristine modern sequences. Most of the ancient DNA in the sediments came from bacteria that lived in the soil and water—tiny relics of the Pleistocene environment. But the rest included some familiar companions.

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  Reddit user matejamm1's screenshot illustrating the change in iOS 14.5. [credit: u/matejamm1 ]

It had long been an inescapable fact about Apple's iOS operating system for iPhones that you couldn't change your default apps away from those made by Apple itself. But only a few months after Apple changed course and allowed users to change the default email or browser apps, it now appears that same choice is coming for music-streaming services.

After Apple recently pushed out the first public beta of iOS 14.5, a Reddit user quickly discovered that the first time they asked Siri to play a song after updating, they were given a prompt to pick which streaming service to use. Subsequent prompts then obeyed that selection.

Other users on Reddit and MacRumors confirmed similar experiences. They also confirmed that it works if you specify the streaming service verbally, for example, by saying, "Hey Siri, play Heroes by David Bowie on Spotify."