Month: March 2021

The public's appetite for all things Sherlock Holmes—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famed fictional detective—appears to be limitless, with film, TV adaptations, and/or reinventions being released almost every year. The latest offering is The Irregulars, a new supernatural drama from Netflix, that focuses on the the ragtag group of street urchins the Baker Street sleuth often relied upon to gather useful information.

Netflix also ventured into Holmesian lore last year with the film Enola Holmes, starring Millie Bobby Brown as the young (and equally brilliant) teenaged sister of Sherlock Holmes (Henry Cavill). It garnered generally positive reviews, and vague plans are circulating for a sequel, despite a lawsuit filed by the Conan Doyle estate over the portrayal of an overly "emotional" Holmes. (The lawsuit was dismissed last December.)

Netflix greenlighted The Irregulars in 2018, created by Tom Bidwell (who also produced an adaptation of Watership Down for the streaming platform). Bidwell had long had the idea for a series centered on the Baker Street Irregulars, led in the original fiction by a boy named Wiggins. The group is first mentioned in the 1887 story "A Study in Scarlet," in which Holmes pays them each a shilling to track down a particular cabbie. They also feature in a chapter of the 1890 novel The Sign of the Four, and one member of the group briefly pops up in the 1893 short story "The Adventure of the Crooked Man." Holmes described the Irregulars as being "sharp as needles... all they want is organization."

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  The SLS Core Stage ignites, beginning a nominal full-duration hot-fire test on March 18, 2021. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann / Ars Technica ]

It has been a long, difficult, and expensive road for NASA and its Space Launch System rocket. But on Thursday afternoon, the space agency got to taste some success with what appeared to be a nominal ground test-firing of the vehicle's core stage.

With brilliant spring sunshine blazing overhead, the four space shuttle main engines that power the rocket roared to life on a test stand in Mississippi. Then they burned for 499.6 seconds, exhausting the vehicle's supply of liquid oxygen.

At about one minute into the test, the engines began rocking and rolling. Known as gimbaling, this process is what allows a rocket to change the direction of thrust in flight. This dynamic exercise lasted for about 30 seconds and appeared to proceed nominally as well.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A team of advanced hackers exploited no fewer than 11 zeroday vulnerabilities in a nine-month campaign that used compromised websites to infect fully patched devices running Windows, iOS, and Android, a Google researcher said.

Using novel exploitation and obfuscation techniques, a mastery of a wide range of vulnerability types, and a complex delivery infrastructure, the group exploited four zerodays in February 2020. The hackers’ ability to chain together multiple exploits that compromised fully patched Windows and Android devices led members of Google’s Project Zero and Threat Analysis Group to call the group “highly sophisticated.”

Not over yet

On Thursday, Project Zero researcher Maddie Stone said that, in the eight months that followed the February attacks, the same group exploited seven more previously unknown vulnerabilities, which this time also resided in iOS. As was the case in February, the hackers delivered the exploits through watering-hole attacks, which compromise websites frequented by targets of interest and add code that installs malware on visitors’ devices.

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  An average Supercross track uses 5,500 cubic feet (155 m³) of dirt, which is built into a track inside an existing stadium. [credit: Monster Energy Supercross ]

When it comes to racing games, do you prefer digital replicas of real-world racetracks? Obviously, it depends on the game. Few will complain that Mario Kart's Rainbow Road is unrealistic as they shoot red shells at a gorilla on wheels, but a boring street circuit with too many 90-degree turns that only exists to show off a NYC skyline is another matter.

Done well, a made-up sequence of twists and turns can make a game; there's a reason we cheered so hard when we found out Trial Mountain will return with Gran Turismo 7. On the other hand, developers are constantly asked about adding real-world racetracks to their games. And the presence of a decently digitized Spa or Nürburgring Nordschleife may well tempt a wavering gamer into a purchase.

It's the kind of thing I think about, which might just mean I'm a bit weird. But it also explains why I said "yes" when someone asked if I'd like to talk to Mike Muye, senior director of operations for Monster Energy Supercross, about this very topic. I agreed even though I don't really know much about Supercross, an evolution of motocross in which off-road motorcycles race each other on dirt tracks constructed specially for the occasion. (Monster Energy Supercross 4 went on sale earlier this month for both Playstation and Xbox platforms, hence the offer of a chat.)

Enlarge / Street Fighter V's top-eight world finals tournament at EVO 2017, held at the Mandalay Bay casino arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

When it comes to acquisitions in the gaming industry, headlines usually revolve around big-ticket video games or backend software. Wednesday's news from Sony saw a major acquisition come in a much different form: the EVO gaming tournament series.

When it comes to fighting-game tournaments, none has proven larger or more long-lasting than EVO, which grew from a grassroots community effort in the '90s to a formal physical-event series in 2002. It expanded to include a Japanese variant, EVO Japan, in 2018, and it hosted over 14,000 players in 2019 to compete for a prize pool of over $200,000.

However, after its 2020 tournaments were transformed into an online-only, pandemic-era series, EVO co-founder Joey Cuellar was accused of sexual assaulting minors—and he confirmed the allegations in a public statement (since removed from Twitter). Shortly afterward, EVO removed Cuellar from all operational duties and canceled its EVO 2020 plans.

Enlarge / Longtime AT&T executive John Stankey, who became CEO in July 2020, speaks onstage at the HBO Max WarnerMedia Investor Day on October 29, 2019, in Burbank, California. (credit: Getty Images | Presley Ann)

AT&T lied about California's net neutrality law yesterday when it claimed the law requires AT&T to stop providing "free data" to mobile customers.

In reality, the California law allows AT&T to continue zero-rating HBO Max, its own video service, as long as it exempts all competing video services from data caps without charging the other video providers. But instead of zero-rating all video without collecting payments from its competitors in the online-video business, AT&T decided it would rather not exempt anything at all.

"Unfortunately, under the California law we are now prohibited from providing certain data features to consumers free of charge," AT&T claimed in its announcement that it is ending the "zero-rating" program that exempts some content from data caps. "Given that the Internet does not recognize state borders, the new law not only ends our ability to offer California customers such free data services but also similarly impacts our customers in states beyond California," the AT&T announcement also said.