Month: September 2022

Enlarge (credit: VCG / Contributor | Visual China Group)

Millions of Americans share data daily on the video-streaming app TikTok—data the federal government considers a national security risk because the app is owned by China, a foreign adversary. Now it has been left up to President Joe Biden to figure out a way to minimize the national security risks without forcing the sale of TikTok or taking away one of America’s favorite apps, as former President Donald Trump tried and failed to do in 2020.

Today, The New York Times reported that Biden may be close to arriving at a potential solution to the TikTok problem. “Four people with knowledge of the discussions” told NYT that over the past few months, the Biden administration has drafted a preliminary agreement with TikTok “to resolve national security concerns.”

Because the negotiation is confidential, all sources requested anonymity, and not much is yet known about the terms. However, there are three main areas of change in the current draft. The first focuses on preventing China-based employees from accessing American data by storing all TikTok data solely on US servers. The second is designed to block Chinese propaganda or disinformation campaigns by granting US-based Oracle power to monitor what’s recommended by algorithms. The last provides some oversight by forming a TikTok board of security experts that oversees TikTok’s US operations and reports directly to the US government. (Oracle declined to comment to NYT and did not immediately respond to Ars.)

Enlarge / The DART spacecraft is prepared for launch. (credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman)

Monday will see NASA's first attempt at real-world testing of a technology that it hopes can protect the Earth from the dangers posed by impacts from large asteroids. The Double Asteroid Redirect Test, or DART, will smash a spacecraft into a small asteroid called Dimorphos at 7:14 pm US Eastern time in the expectation that the impact will alter Dimorphos' orbit around the nearby large asteroid Didymos. If successful, then we can have some confidence that we can alter the orbit of small objects that pose a threat of colliding with Earth, sending them off into orbits where they no longer create a risk of catastrophic impact.

There are still things that can go wrong. As we detailed earlier, the camera on DART won't even be able to resolve its target until under two hours prior to the collision, and the final trajectory to impact will be handled by its on-board software, rather than controllers on Earth.

NASA will be hosting pre- and post-impact briefings for the press, which Ars will be attending, so expect updates later today. One option if you want to watch for yourself is coverage on NASA TV, which will start at 6 pm US Eastern.

Enlarge / First spotted by astronomers in May 1999, Ryugu is essentially a large collection of loose rubble. (credit: JAXA)

The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 returned to Earth in December 2020 bearing soil samples collected from a nearby asteroid, 162173 Ryugu. Those samples were divided between six scientific teams around the world for cutting-edge analysis to determine their composition in hopes of learning more about how such bodies form. The results of the first year of analysis of those samples appeared in a new paper published in the journal Science and included the detection of a precious drop of water embedded in a crystal.

These findings suggest that Ryugu was once part of a much larger asteroid that formed out of various materials some two million years after our Solar System (some 4.5 billion years ago). Over the next three million years, the parent body's carbon dioxide ice melted, resulting in a water-rich interior and a drier surface. When another space rock hit the parent body about a billion years ago, it broke apart, and some of the resulting debris formed Ryugu. An accompanying computer simulation supports this formation history, backed by the results of the sample analyses.

First spotted by astronomers in May 1999, Ryugu is essentially a large collection of loose rubble. As much as 50 percent of its volume could be empty space. Like the asteroid Bennu, Ryugu is shaped a bit like a spinning top: a round shape with a sharp equatorial ridge. Its name derives from a Japanese folktale in which a fisherman travels to an underwater palace called Ryūgū-jō ("Dragon Palace") on the back of a turtle.

Enlarge / Terra, the "algorithmic stablecoin" designed to stick close to the value of the US dollar, collapsed in May 2022, spurring a wider crypto sell-off. (credit: Getty Images)

Do Kwon, the cryptocurrency founder whose tanking Luna and "stablecoin" TerraUSD currencies ushered in a $300 billion crypto crash, is now sought by Interpol following arrest warrants issued earlier this month.

South Korean authorities issued warrants last week for Kwon and five others on September 14, alleging their work on Terraform Labs' crypto products violated the country's trading laws. All six were believed to be located in Singapore at the time. Singapore police believe Kwon is no longer there, according to media reports. Interpol issued a "red notice" recently, asking law enforcement agencies around the world to locate and hold Kwon.

Kwon tweeted three days after the South Korean warrant that he was "not 'on the run' or anything similar" and that he was "in full cooperation and we don't have anything to hide." But he hasn't tweeted publicly in more than a week since.

Enlarge / The fully stacked Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft will roll back to the Vehicle Assembly Building on Monday night. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

After delaying a final decision for two days, NASA on Monday made the call to roll its massive Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The space agency took this precautionary step as the storm Ian intensified into a hurricane in the Caribbean Sea and remained on track to move into the southeastern Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday.

"Managers met Monday morning and made the decision based on the latest weather predictions associated with Hurricane Ian, after additional data gathered overnight did not show improving expected conditions for the Kennedy Space Center area," NASA said in a blog post. "The decision allows time for employees to address the needs of their families and protect the integrated rocket and spacecraft system."

Enlarge / As James Earl Jones retires, Darth Vader's voice will come courtesy of voice-cloning software called Respeecher. (credit: Lucasfilm / Benj Edwards)

During the creation of the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series, James Earl Jones signed off on allowing Disney to replicate his vocal performance as Darth Vader in future projects using an AI voice-modeling tool called Respeecher, according to a Vanity Fair report published Friday.

Jones, who is 91, has voiced the iconic Star Wars villain for 45 years, starting with Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope in 1977 and concluding with a brief line of dialog in 2019's The Rise of Skywalker. "He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character,” said Matthew Wood, a supervising sound editor at Lucasfilm, during an interview with Vanity Fair. “So how do we move forward?”

The answer was Respeecher, a voice cloning product from a company in Ukraine that uses deep learning to model and replicate human voices in a way that is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. Previously, Lucasfilm had used Respeecher to clone Mark Hamill's voice for The Mandalorian, and the company thought the same technology would be ideal for a major appearance of Darth Vader that would require dozens of lines of dialog. Working from archival recordings of Jones, Respeecher created a voice model that could be "performed" vocally by another actor using the company's speech-to-speech technology.

Enlarge / The Starlink dish and router. (credit: Starlink)

Elon Musk’s Starlink has activated its satellite broadband service in Iran after the US allowed private companies to offer uncensored Internet access to the country amid protests that have caused more than 40 deaths.

The open Internet access follows Starlink’s activation in Ukraine earlier this year as that country’s communication networks were disrupted by Russia’s invasion.

Starlink is the first in a new generation of satellite networks operating in low Earth orbit that are designed to provide high-bandwidth Internet connections from space directly to individual users. Starlink users are able to bypass a country’s terrestrial communications networks, freeing them from Internet censorship.