Month: June 2021

Enlarge / Vials of the Sinopharm vaccine in Beijing on June 1. (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency)

Despite a sluggish start, China is now vaccinating its people against COVID-19 at an impressive clip, currently averaging nearly 20 million doses administered per day. As of Friday, the country had given more than 720 million vaccinations since mid-December, with nearly 400 million of those were given in May alone.

The dramatic ramp up comes at an awkward time, however. Early adopters of China’s vaccines have seen dramatic surges in COVID-19 cases—despite high vaccination rates—and are now backing away from the country’s offerings.

In Bahrain, for instance, officials are now offering high-risk people who have already received two doses of China’s Sinopharm vaccine a third vaccine dose—but one made by Pfizer-BioNTech. The apparent vote of no confidence by officials is striking: Bahrain was one of the first countries to back and rollout Sinopharm’s vaccine, and it has had a highly successful vaccination campaign. Nearly 58 percent of the Persian Gulf country has received at least one dose of a vaccine, and most of the vaccines given in Bahrain are from Sinopharm. But the country is now seeing its worst wave of COVID-19 yet and the government has recently issued a two-week lockdown to try to get transmission under control.

Enlarge / Gimme five! New University of Arizona study finds puppies are wired to communicate with people. "There's definitely a strong genetic component, and they're definitely doing it from the get-go." (credit: Anita Kot/Getty Images)

That special social bond between dogs and humans might be a genetic trait that evolved as dogs became domesticated and diverged from wolves, according to a new study published in the journal Current Biology, looking at the cognitive and behavioral social skills of hundreds of adorable puppies.

"People have been interested in dogs' abilities to do these kinds of things for a long time, but there's always been debate about to what extent is this really in the biology of dogs, versus something they learn by palling around with humans," said co-author Evan MacLean, director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "We found that there's definitely a strong genetic component, and they're definitely doing it from the get-go."

His co-author, Emily Bray, an anthropology postdoc at the university, has spent the last ten years studying how dogs think and solve problems, in conjunction with Canine Companions, a California-based service dog organization catering to people with disabilities. It's known that human children can reason about the physical world, and have sufficient social cognitive skills for cooperative communication by the age of two-and-a-half years. But according to the authors, there is also a growing body of research showing evidence that domesticated dogs share similar social cognitive skills, although possible biological bases for those abilities had not been tested.

Enlarge / Apple's splash image for WWDC 2021, which references a meme from last year. (credit: Apple)

At 10 am Pacific Time (1 pm EDT) this Monday, June 7, Apple will kick off the keynote presentation at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The company is sure to announce details about the next versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS, but we could also be in for a lot more, including (potentially) new Apple Silicon Macs.

Here at Ars Technica, we'll be liveblogging the event as soon as it starts and publishing stories about the announcements as they are revealed.

It's going to be an interesting event. We know a lot less about iOS 15 than we did about iOS 14 before last year's event, so there are sure to be some surprises.

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A VMware vulnerability with a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10 is under active exploitation. At least one reliable exploit has gone public, and there have been successful attempts in the wild to compromise servers that run the vulnerable software.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-21985, resides in the vCenter Server, a tool for managing virtualization in large data centers. A VMware advisory published last week said vCenter machines using default configurations have a bug that, in many networks, allows for the execution of malicious code when the machines are reachable on a port that is exposed to the Internet.

Code execution, no authentication required

On Wednesday, a researcher published proof-of-concept code that exploits the flaw. A fellow researcher who asked not to be named said the exploit works reliably and that little additional work is needed to use the code for malicious purposes. It can be reproduced using five requests from cURL, a command-line tool that transfers data using HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, and other common Internet protocols.

Enlarge / A SpaceX Starship prototype takes flight in April, 2021. (credit: SpaceX)

The Air Force confirmed a strong interest in delivery of cargo around the world—by rockets—during an hourlong conference call with reporters on Friday. Military officials said they were elevating the cargo initiative to become the newest "Vanguard Program," indicating a desire to move the concept from an experimental state into an operational capability.

"This idea has been around since the dawn of spaceflight," said Dr. Greg Spanjers, an Air Force scientist and the Rocket Cargo Program Manager. "It's always been an intriguing idea. We've looked at it about every 10 years, but it's never really made sense. The reason we're doing it now is because it looks like technology may have caught up with a good idea."

Ars first reported about the "Rocket Cargo" program in the Air Force's budget request on Monday. As part of its $200 billion annual budget, the Air Force is seeking $47.9 million to leverage emerging commercial rocket capabilities to launch cargo from one location and land elsewhere on Earth.

Enlarge / Amazing what can be found on decades-old disks full of "deleted" files. (credit: Video Game History Foundation)

The golden-age rebirth of console gaming, largely spurned by Nintendo's mega-success, has remained a lucrative era for conservationists. There's a whole community out there rushing to find documents, disks, and hard drives from the '80s and '90s before they're savaged by time and bit rot. Yet sometimes, those old storage standards' limitations can work out in game historians' favor.

On Friday, the Video Game History Foundation announced its restoration of a single Nintendo-related, 3.5-inch floppy disk, as discovered by original Earthbound translator Marcus Lindblom in 2018. The story sounds a lot like ones we've heard in the past, where someone from the gaming industry cleans out an attic or a storage unit only to find disks that they think are lost to time.

In Lindblom's case, he thought the Earthbound disk he'd discovered was lost to his own younger stupidity. At one point he learned, after putting it into an older computer, that he'd deleted the disk's contents to save other work on it. He donated the disk to VGHF with fingers crossed that they could work their magic, which they apparently did. As it turns out, only one small file had been saved to the disk after its "deletion," thus leaving most of the original magnetic tape untouched. Forensic recovery tools managed to recover every single disk sector, revealing the SNES RPG's "complete" scripting files for English and Japanese text, along with related code for event triggers in the game.