Month: February 2021

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  Loki from Loki. [credit: Disney ]

Today is a red-letter day for Disney property announcements: release dates have been set for the Disney+ series Loki and Star Wars: The Bad Batch, and the new Spider-Man film has a new name.

We'll start with Spider-Man. Following a marketing stunt in which three different stars of the movie shared three fake movie names alongside initial images from the film on Instagram, the actual title for the new Spider-Man movie has been revealed in a cheeky Twitter video and blog post: Spider Man: No Way Home.

The fake names that had circulated previously included Spider-Man: Phone Home, Spider-Man: Home-Wrecker, and Spider-Man: Home Slice.

Enlarge / The Federal Reserve Building in Washington, DC. (credit: Rudy Sulgan / Getty Images)

Federal Reserve electronic systems that enable US banks to send each other electronic payments experienced a massive outage on Wednesday afternoon. A Fed statement attributed it to an "operational error" but didn't provide much more detail.

The Federal Reserve System acts as America's central bank, and it controls much of the plumbing of the US financial system.

The automated clearing house (ACH) system is used for paychecks, bill payments, and other small and medium-sized transactions across the economy. The Check 21 system is used for clearing paper checks. It takes one to two days for these transactions to clear.

Enlarge / President Joe Biden signing a different executive order on January 28, 2021. (credit: Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images)

The White House is launching an effort today to ease a global semiconductor supply crunch affecting a wide array of other industries, but any boost the administration can provide is likely to be on the far side of many more months of shortages.

President Joe Biden plans to sign an executive order this afternoon for "securing America's critical supply chains." The order will address several challenges in the US supply chain, according to a fact sheet from the White House, with a particular focus on pharmaceuticals, mineral resources, semiconductors, and large-capacity batteries.

The order is a sort of combination of all politicians' favorite rallying cry—"more American jobs"—and an acknowledgement that shortages and production challenges in critical supply chains really have had a profound effect on the nation, especially in the past year. It calls for an immediate 100-day review that will "identify near-term steps the administration can take, including with Congress" to identify where the vulnerabilities in these supply chains are and what regulators or legislators can do to increase US manufacturing of these critical components.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Jill Ferry Photography)

Cox has been making it extremely difficult or impossible for some customers to stick with their current Internet speeds despite promising that it won't force users onto plans with slower uploads.

As we wrote two weeks ago, Cox informed customers with 300Mbps download and 30Mbps upload speeds that they will be switched to a plan with 500Mbps downloads and 10Mbps uploads on March 3. A Cox spokesperson told Ars at the time that customers can stay on the plan with 30Mbps uploads as long as they upgrade to a DOCSIS 3.1 modem. But Cox's email to its customers did not mention this option, and customers who called Cox customer service have since been told in no uncertain terms that they cannot stay on their current plans.

Several Cox users from California emailed Ars about the problem after reading our article, all with similar experiences.

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  I installed Firefox 86 on my Ubuntu workstation using Snap to be certain I wouldn't accidentally mess with my working system configuration. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Mozilla released Firefox 86 yesterday, and the browser is now available for download and installation for all major operating systems, including Android. Along with the usual round of bug fixes and under-the-hood updates, the new build offers a couple of high-profile features—multiple Picture-in-Picture video-watching support, and (optional) stricter cookie separation, which Mozilla is branding Total Cookie Protection.

Taking Firefox 86 for a spin

Firefox 86 became the default download at mozilla.org on Tuesday—but as an Ubuntu 20.04 user, I didn't want to leave the Canonical-managed repositories just to test the new version. This is one scenario in which snaps truly excel—providing you with a containerized version of an application, easily installed but guaranteed not to mess with your "real" operating system.

As it turns out, Firefox's snap channel didn't get the message about build 86 being the new default—the latest/default snap is still on build 85. In order to get the new version, I needed to snap refresh firefox --channel=latest/candidate.

Enlarge / The remains of a shredded star formed an accretion disk around the black hole whose powerful tidal forces ripped it apart. This created a cosmic particle accelerator spewing out fast subatomic particles. (credit: DESY, Science Communication Lab)

Roughly 700 million years ago, a tiny subatomic particle was born in a galaxy far, far away, and began its journey across the vast expanses of our universe. That neutrino finally reached the Earth's South Pole last October, setting off detectors buried deep beneath the Antarctic ice. A few months earlier, a telescope in California had recorded a bright glow emanating from the friction of that same distant galaxy—evidence of a so-called "tidal disruption event" (TDE), most likely the result of a star being shredded by a supermassive black hole.

According to two new papers (here and here) published in the journal Nature Astronomy, that lone neutrino was likely born from the TDE, which serves as a cosmic-scale particle accelerator near the center of the distant galaxy, spewing out high-energy subatomic particles as the star's matter is consumed by the black hole. This finding also sheds light on the origin of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, a question that has puzzled astronomers for decades.

"The origin of cosmic high-energy neutrinos is unknown, primarily because they are notoriously hard to pin down," said co-author Sjoert van Velzen, a postdoc at New York University at the time of the discovery. "This result would be only the second time high-energy neutrinos have been traced back to their source."

Enlarge (credit: Oleksii Leonov)

Ukraine has accused the Russian government of hacking into one of its government Web portals and planting malicious documents that would install malware on end users’ computers.

“The purpose of the attack was the mass contamination of information resources of public authorities, as this system is used for the circulation of documents in most public authorities,” officials from Ukraine’s National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity said in a statement published on Wednesday. “The malicious documents contained a macro that secretly downloaded a program to remotely control a computer when opening the files.”

Wednesday’s statement said that the methods used in the attack connected the hackers to the Russian Federation. Ukraine didn’t say if the attack succeeded in infecting any authorities’ computers.