Month: July 2022

Enlarge / Conceptual computer artwork of electronic circuitry with blue and red light passing through it, representing how data may be controlled and stored in a quantum computer. (credit: Getty Images)

In the not-too-distant future—as little as a decade, perhaps, nobody knows exactly how long—the cryptography protecting your bank transactions, chat messages, and medical records from prying eyes is going to break spectacularly with the advent of quantum computing. On Tuesday, a US government agency named four replacement encryption schemes to head off this cryptopocalypse.

Some of the most widely used public-key encryption systems—including those using the RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman algorithms—rely on mathematics to protect sensitive data. These mathematical problems include (1) factoring a key's large composite number (usually denoted as N) to derive its two factors (usually denoted as P and Q) and (2) computing the discrete logarithm that keys are based on.

The security of these cryptosystems depends entirely on classical computers' difficulty in solving these problems. While it's easy to generate keys that can encrypt and decrypt data at will, it's impossible from a practical standpoint for an adversary to calculate the numbers that make them work.

Enlarge / A woman watches white flags on the National Mall on September 18, 2021 in Washington, DC. Over 660,000 white flags were installed here to honor Americans who have lost their lives to COVID-19 epidemic. (credit: Getty | Chen Mengtong)

COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in Americans between March 2020 and October 2021, accounting for one in every eight deaths.

In that time frame, COVID-19 ranked in the top five causes of death for every age group of people older than 15 years. Between January and October 2021, the pandemic disease was the leading cause of death among people 45 to 54 years old.

That's all according to a study of national death certificate data, published Tuesday in JAMA Internal Medicine by researchers at the National Institutes of Health.

Enlarge / YouTube thinks the dark and creepy "Local58TV" series is for kids. (credit: Local58TV)

Google's wonderful content moderation bots are at it again. After previously doing things like including suicide instructions in a children's video, and the whole Elsagate problem, YouTube is now flagging a horror video as "for kids." Worst of all, this is against the creator's wishes. The video was previously flagged as for ages 18 and up, and YouTube decided it was for kids and won't let the creator restore its content rating.

The video in question is from horror series Local58TV. The creator, Kirs Straub, checked his account over the weekend to find that his not-for-kids content has been spotted by YouTube's content moderation AI, and automatically marked for kids.

congrats @youtube on the decision to auto-designate @LOCAL58TV’s “show for children” as FOR KIDS despite my having set it as inappropriate for kids. i also can’t change it voluntarily without an *appeal* pic.twitter.com/dnhmzL9hbi

— Kris Straub (@krisstraub) July 5, 2022

"For kids" in this context means Google has flagged the video for inclusion in the "YouTube Kids" app, which is a separate interface for YouTube that is supposed to only show a "safe" curated slice of YouTube. The "Kids" flag also means the video is forced to comply with US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), so comments are turned off.

Enlarge / Tesla factory in Fremont, California as seen on April 20, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan )

Tesla is facing a new racial discrimination lawsuit filed by 15 factory employees who allege that Tesla's "standard operating procedures include blatant, open, and unmitigated race discrimination." Racial harassment and discrimination is "rampant" at Tesla and the company has "done little to nothing to reasonably prevent or stop this toxic behavior and work environment," the lawsuit says.

The plaintiffs include nine men and six women who work or worked at Tesla factories in California. About half of the plaintiffs were either fired or quit, while the rest still work at Tesla.

"Plaintiffs, who [are] African-American employees, have been subjected to offensive racist comments and offensive racist behavior and discipline by colleagues, leads, supervisors, managers, and/or Human Resources personnel on a daily basis," the complaint says. The complaint alleges that an April 2021 incident at Tesla CEO Elon Musk's home led to one of the plaintiffs being fired on the same day.

Enlarge / This... isn't supposed to happen in Ocarina of Time. Here's the story of how some fans made it happen anyway—all on a stock N64 with an unmodified Ocarina cartridge. (credit: Summer Games Done Quick)

Shortly after our guide to Summer Games Done Quick 2022 went live, the event hosted an astounding demonstration of a classic video game—one that has since crowded that Ars article's replies. If we want to split hairs, this run through the 1998 N64 classic Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is not a "speedrun," but it's another example of the "TASBot" concept transforming games in ways we would never have dreamed of 24 years ago.

The team of fans and programmers responsible for this week's "Triforce-percent" demonstration have since revealed how they achieved the feat with nothing more than a stock N64 and an original Ocarina retail cartridge—though the secret involves controller inputs so fast and precise that they cannot be performed by anything less than a computer.

Nothing stale about this run

The 53-minute demonstration (embedded at the end of this article) opens with an exploit previously unearthed in late 2019, which the community dubbed "Stale Reference Manipulation." This exploit takes advantage of a vulnerability in the game's original 1.0 version, which allowed players to manipulate numerical values assigned to specific objects in the game's memory. The breeziest explanation for this complicated technique can be found in a YouTube video from early 2020 (embedded above), as it spells out the various numerical values assigned to each object in the game, such as their X-, Y-, and Z-axes and their rotation.

Enlarge / Tesla's new factories in Berlin and Texas are proving more costly to set up than its plant in Shanghai (pictured). (credit: Tesla)

After several quarters of impressive growth, Tesla is starting to feel the pinch. The US automaker announced on Saturday that, between April and June, it has produced only 258,580 electric vehicles and delivered only 254,695 cars.

By comparison, it was able to build 305,407 EVs and deliver 291,189 of them in the first three months of 2022. However, it claims that it produced more cars in June 2022 than any previous month in its history.

A detailed breakdown of this quarter's results is scheduled for July 20, which should shed light on CEO Elon Musk's claims that the company's new factories in Berlin and Texas are "gigantic money furnaces" costing Tesla billions.