Month: May 2021

Tom Hardy (Mad Max: Fury Road) returns as intrepid reporter Eddie Brock, infected with a parasitic alien symbiote that gives him super powers, in Venom: There Will be Carnage. Directed by motion-capture icon Andy Serkis, it's the sequel to 2018's box-office smash, Venom. After being delayed for nearly a year due to the ongoing pandemic, Sony just dropped the official trailer, in which Brock/Venom must battle serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson, Zombieland), infected with another alien symbiote dubbed Carnage.

(Some spoilers for first film below.)

A Venom film was in development at New Line Cinema back in 1997, although the project didn't really get off the ground until Sony acquired the rights to the character, as well as Spider-Man. Sony initially planned for Venom and Spider-Man to inhabit a shared universe, given their history in the comics. (Spider-Man was Venom's first host, before moving on to Brock, and the character gradually evolved from villain to more of an antihero.) The disappointing box office performance of 2014's The Amazing Spider-Man 2 changed those plans, and Venom was re-conceived as a standalone film, with Tom Hardy signing on as the star and Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer agreeing to direct.

Enlarge (credit: Italian Culture Ministry)

Archaeologists in Italy recently unearthed the remains of at least nine Neanderthals in Guattari Cave, near the Tyrrhenian Sea about 100 km southeast of Rome. While excavating a previously unexplored section of the cave, archaeologists from the Archaeological Superintendency of Latina and the University of Tor Vergata recently unearthed broken skulls, jawbones, teeth, and pieces of several other bones, which they say represent at least nine Neanderthals. That brings the cave’s total to at least 10; anthropologist Alberto Carlo Blanc found a Neanderthal skull in another chamber in 1939.

Italy was a very different place 60,000 years ago. Hyenas, along with other Pleistocene carnivores, stalked rhinoceroses, wild horses (an extinct wild bovine called aurochs), and people.

“Neanderthals were prey for these animals. Hyenas hunted them, especially the most vulnerable, like sick or elderly individuals,” Tor Vergata University archaeologist Mario Rolfo told The Guardian. The archaeologists found the Neanderthal remains mingled with the bones of rhinos, giant deer, wild horses, and other hyenas. Predators and scavengers tend to leave behind different parts of the skeleton than, say, flowing water or simple burial—and tooth marks are usually a dead giveaway.

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  After permanently bricking two AirTags, stacksmashing succeeded in breaking into and reprogramming a third. [credit: stacksmashing ]

This weekend, German security researcher stacksmashing declared success at breaking into, dumping, and reflashing the microcontroller of Apple's new AirTag object-location product.

Breaking into the microcontroller essentially meant being able both to research how the devices function (by analyzing the dumped firmware) and to reprogram them to do unexpected things. Stacksmashing demonstrated this by reprogramming an AirTag to pass a non-Apple URL while in Lost Mode.

Lost Mode gets a little more lost

When an AirTag is set to Lost Mode, tapping any NFC-enabled smartphone to the tag brings up a notification with a link to found.apple.com. The link allows whoever found the lost object to contact its owner, hopefully resulting in the lost object finding its way home.

Enlarge / Google tells users where they can find YouTube TV now: inside the regular YouTube app. (credit: Google)

Previously on Google versus Roku: Roku and Google needed to renew the contract for YouTube TV, Google's $65-per-month cable TV replacement, on Roku's TV platform. The two companies weren't able to come to an agreement on the new contract, resulting in YouTube TV being pulled from the Roku store. Oh no! While existing customers could still use the YouTube TV app they had already installed, new users couldn't sign up. Will the two companies ever be able to settle their differences, or is their friendship ruined forever?

The next exciting episode in this saga aired on Friday, when Google announced in a blog post that it was just going to run an end-around on Roku and stick the YouTube TV app in the YouTube app. YouTube and YouTube TV exist as separate apps, and while the YouTube TV contract expired and the app was taken off the Roku store, the YouTube contract does not expire until December.

Since the YouTube app is still running, Google was able to quickly shove YouTube TV functionality into it. On the side navigation menu, the last link in the list reads, "Go to YouTube TV." This is not unprecedented—it's actually the way YouTube Music works, too, with a sort of app-within-an-app interface.

Enlarge / Vials with COVID-19 Vaccine labels showing logos of pharmaceutical company Pfizer and German biotechnology company BioNTech. (credit: Getty | Photonews)

The European Union has declined to renew orders for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, an EU official said Sunday. The decision comes after a series of production and safety troubles with AstraZeneca’s vaccine—and news on Saturday that the EU signed a deal to have Pfizer and BioNTech provide up to 1.8 billion doses of their vaccine between 2021 and 2023.

Last month, the EU took legal action against AstraZeneca, alleging that the company had failed to live up to its contract to supply the bloc with doses. The contract ends in June.

"We did not renew the order after June,” European Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said in a Sunday French radio interview, which was reported by Reuters. “We’ll see what happens," he added, leaving open the possibility of future orders.

Enlarge / Problems with Colonial Pipeline's distribution system tend to lead to gasoline runs and price increases across the US Southeast and Eastern seaboard. In this September 2016 photo, a man prepared to refuel his vehicle after a Colonial leak in Alabama. (credit: Luke Sharrett via Getty Images)

On Friday, Colonial Pipeline took many of its systems offline in the wake of a ransomware attack. With systems offline to contain the threat, the company's pipeline system is inoperative. The system delivers approximately 45% of the East Coast's petroleum products, including gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel.

Colonial Pipeline issued a statement Sunday saying that the US Department of Energy is leading the US federal government response to the attack. "[L]eading, third-party cybersecurity experts" engaged by Colonial Pipeline itself are also on the case. The company's four main pipelines are still down, but it has begun restoring service to smaller lateral lines between terminals and delivery points as it determines how to safely restart its systems and restore full functionality.

Colonial Pipeline has not publicly said what was demanded of it or how the demand was made.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

Few bitcoin projects illustrate the cryptocurrency’s enormous climate impact better than the Greenidge power plant in upstate New York. The once-abandoned power plant was bought by private equity firm Atlas Holdings and retasked. A significant portion of Greenidge's electricity no longer powers nearby homes or businesses; rather, the plant's smokestacks are increasingly pouring pollutants into the atmosphere in the service of mining bitcoin.

Now, Greenidge is on the verge of ramping up its bitcoin ambitions. By the end of this year, it plans to have 18,000 specialized machines mining bitcoin, and with the recent approval of its data center expansion plans, it will add 10,500 more. When the project is complete, the miners will be using 79 percent of the power plant’s capacity, or 85 MW. 

“No direct competitor currently owns and operates its own power plant for the purpose of bitcoin mining,” the company wrote in its recent S-4 filing with the SEC. “No other bitcoin-mining operation of this scale in the United States currently uses power generated from its own power plant.” The filings came as a result of Greenidge's recent merger with Support.com.