Month: October 2022

Enlarge / The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science." (credit: Niklas Elmehed/Nobel Prize Outreach)

Cornell University physicist N. David Mermin once described quantum entanglement as "the closest thing we have to magic" since it means that disturbances in one part of the universe can instantly affect distant other parts of the universe, somehow bypassing the cosmic speed-of-light limit. Albert Einstein memorably dubbed it "spooky action at a distance." Today, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored three physicists with the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on entanglement. Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger were recognized "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science."

When subatomic particles interact, they can become invisibly connected even though they may be physically separated. So knowledge about one partner can instantly reveal knowledge about its twin. If you measure the state of one, you will know the state of the other without having to make a second measurement because the first measurement determines the properties of the other particle as well.

There are many different ways particles can become entangled, but in every case, both particles must arise from a single "mother" process. For instance, passing a single photon through a special kind of crystal can split that photon into two new "daughter" particles. We'll call them "green" and "red" (shorthand for more abstract particle properties like spin or velocity). Those particles will be entangled. Energy must be conserved, so both daughter particles have a lower frequency and energy than the original mother particle, but the total energy between them equals the mother's energy. We have no way of knowing which is the green one and which is the red. We just know that each daughter photon has a 50-50 chance of being one or the other color. But should we chance to see one of the particles and note that it is red, we can instantly conclude that the other must be green.

Enlarge / "Sarah" from Virtua Fighter gets an AI makeover thanks to Stable Diffusion and a fan named Colin Williamson. (credit: Colin Williamson)

In 1993, Sega's Virtual Fighter arcade game broke new ground with fully 3D polygonal graphics, a first for a fighting game. Thanks to a Twitter thread from an artist named Colin Williamson, we can take a look at what those original boxy characters might look like with their angles smoothed out.

To create the images, Williamson took vintage Virtua Fighter game graphics and fed them through an "img2img" mode of the Stable Diffusion image synthesis model, which takes an input image as a prompt, combines it with a written description, and synthesizes an output image. (In particular, Williamson used the "AUTOMATIC1111" release, which comes with a nice web-based user interface.)

Stable Diffusion doesn't work magically, so it can take some trial and error, and a keen eye to figure out prompting to get worthwhile results. Still, Williamson enjoyed the process. "Just describe the character, and img2img does its best," Williamson told Ars. "Though the hardest part was simply figuring out how to describe the characters' clothes."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

VideoLAN is threatening to sue India's government, saying it has received no explanation for why the VLC website has been blocked by Indian ISPs for the past six months.

"In March 2022, to our shock and dismay, the URL 'https://www.videolan.org/' appeared to have been blocked for viewing in India without any prior notice to me or any other person in the organization," VideoLAN president and lead VLC developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote in a September 30 letter to India's Department of Telecommunications. "Despite reportage and uproar on social media, no reasons for blocking the URL were provided to us, or to the Indian public."

The letter said attempts to reach the URL in India resulted in the message, "Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from the Department of Telecommunications, Government of India."

Enlarge (credit: Matthew Horwood / Contributor | Getty Images News)

Over the past decade, Google has consistently documented its efforts to remove links from its search results to content that the tech giant considers pirated, and recently, the total number of Google takedowns since its reporting began has shot past 6 billion. It's a milestone that Torrent Freak suggested shows that, "[w]hile copyright infringement can't be eradicated entirely, Google is slowly but steadily presenting itself as a willing partner in the anti-piracy fight."

Google's slow evolution into an anti-piracy champion began ramping up in 1998. That's when the Federal Communications Commission granted safe harbor to online service providers like Google, protecting them from copyright infringement claims about third-party content, with a condition that the providers disclose information on any users alleged to be infringers. A decade later in 2009, it seemed like Google wasn't doing enough, though, and the FCC again intervened, responding to news publishers lashing out at Google and others. At that time, the publishers accused service providers of profiting off ad placements next to links from aggregators and scrapers, who were accused of grabbing and republishing news content without permission.

Back then, Google promised to address the issue by making it easier for rights holders to flag infringing content in search results. Then it launched its first transparency report in 2010, but that initial report only shared information on government requests for takedowns. Two years later, Google expanded its report, publicly counting every takedown notice that it received and "providing information about who sends us copyright removal notices, how often, on behalf of which copyright owners and for which websites."