Month: January 2023

Enlarge / The PlayStation 5.

In a blog post published on Monday, Sony hardware VP Isabelle Tomatis announced that there is now an "increased supply" of PlayStation 5 game consoles after more than two years of shortages. "If you’re looking to purchase a PS5 console, you should now have a much easier time finding one at retailers globally," she wrote.

This is the second time this month Sony has publicly said that it believes its PlayStation 5 supply woes have concluded—the first was during a press conference at this year's Consumer Electronics Show.

In the blog post, Tomatis pinned the prior struggles on "unprecedented demand." That seems to be true, according to analysts who watch Sony and the video game industry—but there may have been other factors at play, such as pandemic-related supply constraints for some components.

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GitHub said unknown intruders gained unauthorized access to some of its code repositories and stole code-signing certificates for two of its desktop applications: Desktop and Atom.

Code-signing certificates place a cryptographic stamp on code to verify it was developed by the listed organization, which in this case is GitHub. If decrypted, the certificates could allow an attacker to sign unofficial versions of the apps that had been maliciously tampered with and pass them off as legitimate updates from GitHub. Current versions of Desktop and Atom are unaffected by the credential theft.

“A set of encrypted code signing certificates were exfiltrated; however, the certificates were password-protected and we have no evidence of malicious use,” the company wrote in an advisory. “As a preventative measure, we will revoke the exposed certificates used for the GitHub Desktop and Atom applications.”

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of an exploding ball of music. (credit: Ars Technica)

On Thursday, researchers from Google announced a new generative AI model called MusicLM that can create 24 KHz musical audio from text descriptions, such as "a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff." It can also transform a hummed melody into a different musical style and output high-fidelity, sustained music for several minutes.

MusicLM uses an AI model trained on what Google calls "a large dataset of unlabeled music," along with captions from MusicCaps, a new dataset composed of 5,521 music-text pairs. MusicCaps gets its text descriptions from human experts and its matching audio clips from Google's AudioSet, a collection of over 2 million labeled 10-second sound clips pulled from YouTube videos.

Generally speaking, MusicLM works in two main parts: first, it takes a sequence of audio tokens (pieces of sound) and maps them to semantic tokens (words that represent meaning) in captions for training. The second part receives user captions and/or input audio and generates acoustic tokens (pieces of sound that make up the resulting song output). The system relies on an earlier AI model called AudioLM (introduced by Google in September) along with other components such as SoundStream and MuLan.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Dating apps are helping an attempted murderer evade capture in Oregon, the Grants Pass Police Department warned last week after the suspect escaped arrest.

The accused 36-year-old man, Benjamin Obadiah Foster, allegedly received assistance from a 68-year-old woman named Tina Marie Jones, who has since been arrested for hindering prosecution.

Ars could not immediately reach Grants Pass PD for comment on which dating apps Foster is known to be using. After arresting Jones, the department vaguely reported that its search revealed that Foster is “actively using online dating applications to contact unsuspecting individuals who may be lured into assisting with the suspect’s escape or potentially as additional victims.”