Month: November 2022

(credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Labs)

Last week, researchers published the results of a clinical trial that used CRISPR gene editing to create a large population of cancer-targeting immune cells. The trial was short, and the reprogrammed immune cells weren't especially effective against the cancer. But the technology, or something similar, is likely to be used in additional attempts to attack cancer and potentially treat a variety of diseases.

So, the trial provides a good opportunity to go through and explain what was done and why. But if you go back and re-read the first sentence, a lot was going on here, so there's a fair amount to explain.

Cancer and the immune system

Cancers and the immune system have a complicated relationship. The immune system apparently eliminates many cancers before they become problems—people who are on immunosuppressive drugs experience a higher incidence of cancer because this function is inhibited. And, even once tumors become established, there's often an immune response to the cancer. It's just that cancer cells evolve the ability to evade and/or tamp down the immune response, allowing them to keep growing despite the immune system's vigilance.

Enlarge / Nobody said getting root access to space was going to be easy. (credit: KU Leuven)

Getting root access inside one of Starlink's dishes requires a few things that are hard to come by: a deep understanding of board circuitry, eMMC dumping hardware and skills, bootloader software understanding, and a custom PCB board. But researchers have proven it can be done.

In their talk "Glitched on Earth by Humans: A Black-Box Security Evaluation of the SpaceX Starlink User Terminal," researchers at KU Leuven in Belgium detailed at Black Hat 2022 earlier this year how they were able to execute arbitrary code on a Starlink User Terminal (i.e., a dish board) using a custom-built modchip through a voltage fault injection. The talk took place in August, but the researchers' slides and repository have recently made the rounds.

There's no immediate threat, and the vulnerability is both disclosed and limited. While bypassing signature verification allowed the researchers to "further explore the Starlink User Terminal and networking side of the system," slides from the Black Hat talk note that Starlink is "a well-designed product (from a security standpoint)." Getting a root shell was challenging, and doing so didn't open up obvious lateral movement or escalation. But updating firmware and repurposing Starlink dishes for other purposes? Perhaps.

Enlarge / The Cerebras Andromeda, a 13.5 million core AI supercomputer. (credit: Cerebras)

On Monday, Cerebras Systems unveiled its 13.5 million core Andromeda AI supercomputer for deep learning, reports Reuters. According Cerebras, Andromeda delivers over one 1 exaflop (1 quintillion operations per second) of AI computational power at 16-bit half precision.

The Andromeda is itself a cluster of 16 Cerebras C-2 computers linked together. Each CS-2 contains one Wafer Scale Engine chip (often called "WSE-2"), which is currently the largest silicon chip ever made, at about 8.5-inches square and packed with 2.6 trillion transistors organized into 850,000 cores.

Cerebras built Andromeda at a data center in Santa Clara, California, for $35 million. It's tuned for applications like large language models and has already been in use for academic and commercial work. "Andromeda delivers near-perfect scaling via simple data parallelism across GPT-class large language models, including GPT-3, GPT-J and GPT-NeoX," writes Cerebras in a press release.

Enlarge (credit: CARINA JOHANSEN / Contributor | AFP)

Unlike brands like Nintendo and Eli Lilly, Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) knew who was behind the parody account recently impersonating the lawmaker on Twitter. Washington Post reporter Geoffrey Fowler had asked permission to create the fake Markey account, part of the reporter’s quest to see how hard it could really be to impersonate a public official under Elon Musk’s new paid verification system.

What Fowler found was that it wasn’t hard at all to launch a fake Markey account. As soon as Fowler confirmed the ease with which any public official could be impersonated, an outraged Markey used his real Twitter account to call out Musk for allowing the impersonation because he favors “putting profits over people and his debt over stopping disinformation.”

Musk took almost two days to respond to Markey, opting to troll the Senator rather than take the complaint seriously.

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  Pick a wallpaper, and Chrome will automatically color the browser to match. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

It looks like the beginning of Google's color-changing "Material You" design language is finally coming to Chrome, at least in the canary builds. Redditor Leopeva64-2 spotted new flags in the latest nightly builds that will automatically recolor the Chrome UI based on what wallpaper you pick, just like Android.

If you want to try this yourself right now, you'll need to grab yourself a copy of Chrome Canary and turn on two flags (paste these into the address bar): "chrome://flags/#customize-chrome-color-extraction," and "chrome://flags/#ntp-comprehensive-theming." Once those are turned on, picking a Chrome wallpaper from the "customize" button in the bottom right of the new tab page will also change the color of the tab bar. One more flag at "chrome://flags/#ntp-comprehensive-theming" will also apply these colors to the new tab page search bar.

Material You launched in 2021 with Android 12. In addition to a new set of guidelines for the sizes and shapes of UI components, Material You also came with an automatic color system. Android can automatically snatch colors from your wallpaper and apply that to the UI, with lots of algorithm magic to ensure zero contrast problems. It works great if you're into a colorful UI, and it gives Android a unique look.

Enlarge / Danish racing driver Tom Kristensen leads another pair of Audi RS e-tron GTs through the corkscrew corner at Laguna Seca. (credit: Audi)

Call it platform sharing, call it badge engineering, call it what you like—car companies have collaborated with each other to make cars for much of the automobile's history. Sometimes these link-ups happen between companies that might normally be considered rivals: Honda and Rover in the 1980s; the BMW/Toyota project that gave us the new Supra; or perhaps the forthcoming electric vehicle platform-sharing between Ford and Volkswagen or General Motors and Honda.

More often, it occurs among the shared brands of a single OEM—Chrysler Group's K platform in the 1980s is a good example. But few automakers have exploited the advantages of that quite like Volkswagen Group, which builds hundreds of different vehicles across its 10 brands around the world using just a handful of different platforms. The vast majority of these—and we're talking several million cars a year—are built on VW Group's MQB platform, which can give rise to anything from an Audi A3 to a Volkswagen Transporter van, with cars and crossovers and SUVs of most sizes and shapes.

The RS e-tron GT is a little draggier than the Taycan, with a Cd of 0.24. (credit: Audi)

But even as you go up the price scale, this practice is still widely used. For example, for decades Bentleys were basically Rolls-Royces with a slightly different nose; today, they share platforms with Porsche's Panamera and Cayenne. And it's why the handsome four-door EV in this review wears Audi RS e-tron GT badging yet features very Porsche Taycan-like specifications—a consequence of sharing the same J1 platform.