Month: September 2022

Enlarge (credit: Alexander Newton)

Last weekend, Meta told Ars that it reversed an advertising ban on a newly released Holocaust film called Beautiful Blue Eyes, saying that the ban—for allegedly violating Meta's race policy—was implemented in error.

The filmmaker whose movie was being blocked, Joshua Newton, told Ars that he’s still experiencing issues promoting the movie on Meta platforms, where accounts still seem to be restricted. Most frustrating to Alexander Newton, Joshua’s son and an actor featured in the film, is the fact that he still can’t promote his version of the movie’s title track on his Instagram.

“My Instagram page just has an endless spinning wheel when I click to promote, so they've damaged my account somehow,” Alexander alleged. "I have to completely restart the app on my phone to even get out of the app."

Enlarge / A computer-generated simulation of cosmic strings. (credit: Chris Ringeval)

Remember that time in the Lord of the Rings lore when the dwarves of Moria dug too greedily and too deep, unearthing the Balrog, an ancient horror not meant to roam free in the modern age?

Cosmic strings are kind of like that but for physics. They are hypothetical leftovers from the momentous transformations experienced by our Universe when it was less than a second old. They are defects, flaws in space itself. They’re no wider than a proton, but they may potentially stretch across the observable volume of the Universe. They have unspeakable powers—the ability to warp space so much that circles around them never complete, and they carry enough energy to unleash planet-destroying levels of gravitational waves. They’re also the path into some of the most exotic physics known (and unknown) to science.

But perhaps the greatest power cosmic strings possess is their capacity to confound physicists. According to our best understanding of the early Universe, our cosmos should be riddled with cosmic strings. And yet not a single search has found any evidence for them. Figuring out where the cosmic strings are hiding, or why they shouldn’t exist after all, will help push our understanding of cosmology and fundamental physics to new heights.

Enlarge / Time to bust out the checkbook again, GPU lovers. The RTX 4090 is here (and it's not alone). (credit: Nvidia)

After weeks of teases, Nvidia's newest computer graphics cards, the "Ada Lovelace" generation of RTX 4000 GPUs, are here. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang debuted two new models on Tuesday: the RTX 4090, which will start at a whopping $1,599, and the RTX 4080, which will launch in two configurations.

The pricier card, slated to launch on October 12, occupies the same highest-end category as Nvidia's 2020 megaton RTX 3090 (previously designated by the company as its "Titan" product). The 4090's increase in physical size will demand three slots on your PC build of choice. The specs are indicative of a highest-end GPU: 16,384 CUDA cores (up from the 3090's 10,496 CUDA cores) and 2.52 GHz of boost clock (up from 1.695 GHz on the 3090). Despite the improvements, the card still performs within the same 450 W power envelope as the 3090. Its RAM allocation will remain at 24GB of GDDR6X memory.

This jump in performance is fueled in part by Nvidia's long-rumored jump to TSMC's "4N" process, which is a new generation of 5 nm chips that provides a massive efficiency jump from the previous Ampere generation's 8 nm process.

Enlarge (credit: Knk Phl Prasan Kha Phibuly / EyeEm via Getty)

Imagine the following scenario. A phone rings. An office worker answers it and hears his boss, in a panic, tell him that she forgot to transfer money to the new contractor before she left for the day and needs him to do it. She gives him the wire transfer information, and with the money transferred, the crisis has been averted.

The worker sits back in his chair, takes a deep breath, and watches as his boss walks in the door. The voice on the other end of the call was not his boss. In fact, it wasn’t even a human. The voice he heard was that of an audio deepfake, a machine-generated audio sample designed to sound exactly like his boss.

Attacks like this using recorded audio have already occurred, and conversational audio deepfakes might not be far off.