Month: May 2021

• 

  From 2020, Aston Martin signed a deal to supply Formula 1 with a Vantage to use as a safety car at some races. The sport is also using a DBX SUV as the medical car at those races. [credit: Aston Martin ]

The life of a car company is not an easy one; as Tesla CEO Elon Musk has often noted, "[a]s of 2016, the number of American car companies that haven't gone bankrupt is a grand total of two." Aston Martin isn't American, but it has gone bankrupt in the past—more than once, in fact. Founded in 1913, it has at times been owned by industrialists as well as the Ford Motor Company, but today it finds itself publicly listed on the London stock exchange, trading at a much cheaper price than its initial offering in 2018.

At the same time, it has a product portfolio that now includes that must-have—an SUV—as well as an increased presence in Formula 1. Perhaps more importantly, it also signed a technology transfer agreement with Mercedes-AMG that gives the small marque access to the latest and greatest in powertrain technology. And the British company has a new CEO: German businessman Tobias Moers. Moers joined the company in 2020 after more than two decades at Daimler AG, most recently as head of... Mercedes-AMG.

Recently, Ars met up with Moers (via Zoom) to talk about electrification and the future of James Bond's brand of choice.

An ambitious young knight of King Arthur's Round Table makes an ill-advised bargain and embarks on a personal quest in the new trailer for The Green Knight, a forthcoming film by director David Lowery (Pete's Dragon, A Ghost Story) adapted from the famous 14th-century medieval poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Originally meant to debut at the 2020 SXSW festival, with a May 2020 theatrical release, the film was shelved in the face of the global pandemic. With theaters slowly reopening around the country (and the world), The Green Knight is finally being released this summer.

(Spoilers for the 14th-century medieval poem below.)

The original poem falls into the chivalric romance genre, relating a well-known story from Arthurian legend. (I highly recommend J.R.R. Tolkien's translation from 1925 or Simon Armitage's 2008 translation, recently revised.) On New Year's Day, King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table gather at Camelot to feast and exchange gifts. A mysterious Green Knight disrupts the festivities and proposes a different kind of exchange: any one of the knights may strike him with one blow with his axe; in return, the Green Knight will come back in a year to return the blow. Sir Gawain, the youngest of the knights and nephew to Arthur, accepts the challenge and beheads the Green Knight. Everyone is shocked when the Green Knight picks up his severed head. He says Gawain must meet him at the Green Chapel one year hence to receive a similar blow, per their bargain.

Enlarge / A health worker exits an ambulance outside a quarantine center in the Goregaon suburb of Mumbai, India, on Tuesday, April 27, 2021. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

As the pandemic coronavirus continues to ravage India, doctors are reporting a disturbing uptick in cases of a rare, potentially fatal fungal infection among people recovered or recovering from COVID-19.

The infection is called mucormycosis, or sometimes “black fungus” in media reports, and it appears to be attacking COVID-19 patients through the nose and sinuses, where it can aggressively spread to facial bones, the eyes, and even the brain (rhinocerebral mucormycosis). In other cases, the fungus can also attack the lungs, breaks in the skin, and the gastrointestinal system or spread throughout the body in the blood stream.

A classic feature of mucormycosis is tissue necrosis—the death of flesh, essentially—which, in the rhinocerebral form of the disease, can lead to black, discolored lesions on and in the face, particularly on the bridge of the nose and the roof of the mouth. Mucormycosis is fatal in around 50 percent of cases.

Enlarge (credit: carlballou / Getty Images)

A ransomware gang that hacked the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in April posted personnel records on Tuesday that revealed highly sensitive details for almost two dozen officers, including the results of psychological assessments and polygraph tests; driver's license images; fingerprints; social security numbers; dates of birth; and residential, financial, and marriage histories.

The data, included in a 161GB download from a website on the dark web, was made available after negotiations broke down between members of the Babuk ransomware group and MDP officials, according to screenshots purporting to be chat transcripts between the two organizations. After earlier threatening to leak the names of confidential informants to crime gangs, the operators agreed to remove the data while they carried out the now-aborted negotiations, the transcripts showed.

“This is unacceptable”

The operators demanded $4 million in exchange for a promise not to publish any more information and provide a decryption key that would restore the data.

Enlarge (credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia has added two entry-level GPUs—the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti and RTX 3050—to the RTX 30 laptop line. Nvidia says the chips will be available "this summer" in laptops starting at $799.

Like every other product in the RTX 30 line, these cards are based on the Ampere architecture and are capable of ray tracing and Nvidia's proprietary "Deep Learning Super Sampling" (DLSS) upscaling tech. As you can probably guess from their names, the cards slot in below the existing RTX 3060 GPU, with cuts across the board. You can dive into Nvidia's comparison table below, but the short version is that these cheaper GPUs have less memory (4GB) and fewer CUDA, Tensor, and ray-tracing cores.

Nvidia's comparison of its laptop GPU lineup. (credit: Nvidia)

DLSS lets your GPU render a game at a lower resolution and then uses AI to upscale everything to a higher resolution, helping you hit a higher frame rate than you could at your native resolution. It sounds like AI hocus-pocus, but it actually works—you just need the right Nvidia card and a game that supports it. On a lower-powered laptop, anything that helps boost gaming performance without sacrificing graphical fidelity is welcome.

• 

  Shots from the reverse-engineered version of Grand Theft Auto III showing off the graphical improvements over the 2002 original. [credit: RockStar Games ]

The reverse-engineered source code for the PC versions of Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City is back online today, months after it was originally posted and then quickly taken down due to a DMCA request from publisher Take-Two.

TorrentFreak reports on the restored version of the project, which was posted as a seemingly identical fork of the original by a New Zealand-based developer named Theo. While the original GitHub poster (who goes by the handle aac) has not contested Take-Two's original takedown, Theo told TorrentFreak he filed a counterclaim to restore his copy of the project, saying it "contained no code owned by Take Two."

A question of law

We've previously looked in depth at how video game fan coders use reverse-engineering techniques to deconstruct the packaged executable files distributed by a game's original developers. This painstaking, function-by-function process creates raw programming code that can generate exactly the same binary file when compiled (though the code as distributed on GitHub still requires external, copyrighted art and sound assets from legitimate copies of the games).