Month: November 2022

Enlarge / An illustrated depiction of data in an audio wave. (credit: Meta AI)

Last week, Meta announced an AI-powered audio compression method called "EnCodec" that can reportedly compress audio 10 times smaller than the MP3 format at 64kbps with no loss in quality. Meta says this technique could dramatically improve the sound quality of speech on low-bandwidth connections, such as phone calls in areas with spotty service. The technique also works for music.

Meta debuted the technology on October 25 in a paper titled "High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression," authored by Meta AI researchers Alexandre Défossez, Jade Copet, Gabriel Synnaeve, and Yossi Adi. Meta also summarized the research on its blog devoted to EnCodec.

Meta claims its new audio encoder/decoder can compress audio 10x smaller than MP3. (credit: Meta AI)

Meta describes its method as a three-part system trained to compress audio to a desired target size. First, the encoder transforms uncompressed data into a lower frame rate "latent space" representation. The "quantizer" then compresses the representation to the target size while keeping track of the most important information that will later be used to rebuild the original signal. (This compressed signal is what gets sent through a network or saved to disk.) Finally, the decoder turns the compressed data back into audio in real time using a neural network on a single CPU.

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  Two Falcon rockets returning to the roost on Tuesday morning after launching a military mission into space. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

On Tuesday morning, a Falcon Heavy rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center, carrying a pair of satellites for the US Space Force to geostationary orbit.

This was the fourth overall launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket, but it marked the first time that SpaceX invited a handful of photographers to set up remote cameras next to Landing Zone 2, which is located at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This is one of two concrete pads where Falcon 9 rockets launched from Florida occasionally land.

Each of the circular landing pads, which measure 86 meters in diameter, was busy on Tuesday morning with the return of a pair of side-boosters from the Falcon Heavy launch. After separating from the core stage of the heavy rocket, these boosters then made a propulsive descent. The first touched down 8 minutes and 15 seconds after launch. The second followed five seconds later.

Enlarge / Musk's Twitter bio now lists him as "Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator." (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Elon Musk today seemed to confirm a plan to charge Twitter users for account verification, but for $8 instead of the $20 monthly charge he was previously floating. "Twitter's current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn't have a blue checkmark is bullshit. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month," Musk tweeted today.

That's a reference to Twitter Blue, which currently costs $4.99 a month and provides access to the Undo Tweet option and several other features. On Sunday, The Verge reported that Musk ordered employees to raise the price of Twitter Blue to $19.99 and require anyone with a verified account to subscribe in order to keep their blue verification checkmark.

The Wall Street Journal later reported that it viewed "internal company correspondence" confirming the plan to charge $19.99 and make account verification contingent on subscribing. Accounts that are already verified would reportedly lose their verification status within 90 days if they don't buy a subscription.

Enlarge / The Pantone Solid Coated and Solid Uncoated color libraries are disappearing from Adobe's apps at some point, though the exact timing isn't clear. (credit: Pantone)

If you want to use up-to-date versions of Adobe's Creative Cloud apps, you've already been paying subscription fees for years now. And if you want to use Pantone colors inside of Adobe's apps, it's about to get even more expensive. Starting this month, the Pantone color books in Adobe's apps are mostly going away, and continuing to use those colors in your files will require a new Pantone Connect extension.

Using that extension is free once you've created an account, but using the full library of colors, creating unlimited color palettes, and "a dozen more tools to create smarter, more impactful palettes" will now require a subscription that will run $15 per month or $90 per year, on top of what you're already paying to use Adobe's apps in the first place. I could browse through colors using the basic version of the extension, but trying to browse and select most colors from most libraries prompted me to pay for a subscription.

This change seems to be rolling out gradually. Some users have already encountered Photoshop error messages informing them of the change, and that Pantone colors in old Photoshop files are being replaced with black when they're opened in newer versions of the software. Adobe says that the Solid Coated and Solid Uncoated Pantone libraries will be removed "after November 2022," leaving only the CMYK Coated, CMYK Uncoated, and Metallic Coated Pantone libraries behind.

Enlarge / The Pantone Solid Coated and Solid Uncoated color libraries are disappearing from Adobe's apps at some point, though the exact timing isn't clear. (credit: Pantone)

If you want to use up-to-date versions of Adobe's Creative Cloud apps, you've already been paying subscription fees for years now. And if you want to use Pantone colors inside of Adobe's apps, it's about to get even more expensive. Starting this month, the Pantone color books in Adobe's apps are mostly going away, and continuing to use those colors in your files will require a new Pantone Connect extension.

Using that extension is free once you've created an account, but using the full library of colors, creating unlimited color palettes, and "a dozen more tools to create smarter, more impactful palettes" will now require a subscription that will run $15 per month or $90 per year, on top of what you're already paying to use Adobe's apps in the first place. I could browse through colors using the basic version of the extension, but trying to browse and select most colors from most libraries prompted me to pay for a subscription.

This change seems to be rolling out gradually. Some users have already encountered Photoshop error messages informing them of the change, and that Pantone colors in old Photoshop files are being replaced with black when they're opened in newer versions of the software. Adobe says that the Solid Coated and Solid Uncoated Pantone libraries will be removed "after November 2022," leaving only the CMYK Coated, CMYK Uncoated, and Metallic Coated Pantone libraries behind.

Enlarge / The fallout of an OpenSSL vulnerability, initially listed as "critical," should be much less severe than that of the last critical OpenSSL bug, Heartbleed.

An OpenSSL vulnerability once signaled as the first critical-level patch since the Internet-reshaping Heartbleed bug has just been patched. It ultimately arrived as a "high" security fix for a buffer overflow, one that affects all OpenSSL 3.x installations, but is unlikely to lead to remote code execution.

OpenSSL version 3.0.7 was announced last week as a critical security fix release. The specific vulnerabilities (now CVE-2022-37786 and CVE-2022-3602) had been largely unknown until today, but analysts and businesses in the web security field hinted there could be notable problems and maintenance pain. Some Linux distributions, including Fedora, held up releases until the patch was available. Distribution giant Akamai noted before the patch that half of their monitored networks had at least one machine with a vulnerable OpenSSL 3.x instance, and among those networks, between 0.2 and 33 percent of machines were vulnerable.

But the specific vulnerabilities—limited-circumstance, client-side overflows that are mitigated by the stack layout on most modern platforms—are now patched, and rated as "High." And with OpenSSL 1.1.1 still in its long-term support phase, OpenSSL 3.x is not nearly as widespread.

Enlarge / The fallout of an OpenSSL vulnerability, initially listed as "critical," should be much less severe than that of the last critical OpenSSL bug, Heartbleed.

An OpenSSL vulnerability once signaled as the first critical-level patch since the Internet-reshaping Heartbleed bug has just been patched. It ultimately arrived as a "high" security fix for a buffer overflow, one that affects all OpenSSL 3.x installations, but is unlikely to lead to remote code execution.

OpenSSL version 3.0.7 was announced last week as a critical security fix release. The specific vulnerabilities (now CVE-2022-37786 and CVE-2022-3602) had been largely unknown until today, but analysts and businesses in the web security field hinted there could be notable problems and maintenance pain. Some Linux distributions, including Fedora, held up releases until the patch was available. Distribution giant Akamai noted before the patch that half of their monitored networks had at least one machine with a vulnerable OpenSSL 3.x instance, and among those networks, between 0.2 and 33 percent of machines were vulnerable.

But the specific vulnerabilities—limited-circumstance, client-side overflows that are mitigated by the stack layout on most modern platforms—are now patched, and rated as "High." And with OpenSSL 1.1.1 still in its long-term support phase, OpenSSL 3.x is not nearly as widespread.