Month: March 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The Biden administration on Thursday pushed for new mandatory regulations and liabilities to be imposed on software makers and service providers in an attempt to shift the burden of defending US cyberspace away from small organizations and individuals.

"The most capable and best-positioned actors in cyberspace must be better stewards of the digital ecosystem,” administration officials wrote in a highly anticipated documenting an updated National Cybersecurity Strategy. “Today, end users bear too great a burden for mitigating cyber risks. Individuals, small businesses, state and local governments, and infrastructure operators have limited resources and competing priorities, yet these actors’ choices can have a significant impact on our national cybersecurity."

Increasing regulations and liabilities

The 39-page document cited recent ransomware attacks that have disrupted hospitals, schools, government services, pipeline operations, and other critical infrastructure and essential services. One of the most visible such attacks occurred in 2021 with a ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, which delivers gasoline and jet fuel to much of the southeastern US. The attack shut down the vast pipeline for several days, prompting fuel shortages in some states.

Enlarge / Map of the known corridors and rooms inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. Evidence of a secret corridor was detected in 2016 behind the famed chevron blocks on the north face (h). Another mysterious large void (i) was discovered in 2017—a possible hidden chamber. (credit: Procureur et al., 2023)

In 2016, scientists using muon imaging picked up signals indicating a hidden corridor behind the famous chevron blocks on the north face of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The following year, the same team detected a mysterious void in another area of the pyramid, believing it could be a hidden chamber. Two independent teams of researchers, using two different muon imaging methods, have now successfully mapped out the corridor for the first time, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s former antiquities minister, called it "the most important discovery of the 21st century."

As we've reported previously, there is a long history of using muons to image archaeological structures, a process made easier because cosmic rays provide a steady supply of these particles. An engineer named E.P. George used them to make measurements of an Australian tunnel in the 1950s. But Nobel-prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez really put muon imaging on the map when he teamed up with Egyptian archaeologists to use the technique to search for hidden chambers in the Pyramid of Khafre at Giza. Although it worked in principle, they didn't find any hidden chambers.

There are many variations of muon imaging, but they all typically involve gas-filled chambers. As muons zip through the gas, they collide with the gas particles and emit a telltale flash of light, which is recorded by the detector so scientists can calculate the particle's energy and trajectory. It's similar to X-ray imaging or ground-penetrating radar, except with naturally occurring high-energy muons rather than X-rays or radio waves. That higher energy makes it possible to image thick, dense substances like the stones used to build pyramids. The denser the imaged object, the more muons are blocked, casting a telltale shadow. Hidden chambers in a pyramid would show up in the final image because they blocked fewer particles.

Enlarge / The Pixel Watch. It's a perfect, round little pebble. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Why is the Pixel Watch so expensive? The device's $350 and $400 price tags are well above the closest comparable products from Apple and Samsung, especially considering Google's first-generation smartwatches use slower, older parts compared to other products. The company is charging more for less, and while the Pixel Watch is a nice piece of hardware, it's hard to make the price make sense compared to faster products with better parts, like the $250 Apple Watch SE and $280 Galaxy Watch 5.

Counterpoint Research's report details the Bill of Materials (BoM) for Google's Pixel Watch, and comes to the conclusion that the $400 LTE version device costs $123 to build. Companies always need to build big profit margins into their products to cover R&D, labor, and other costs, and to justify the endeavor, but the $123 bill of materials shows Google is just charging more than the competition rather than facing some kind of supply chain problem.

For comparison, we can look at Counterpoint Research's last bill of material estimate for the Apple Watch, which happened in 2021 for the Apple Watch Series 6. The Series 6 had an MSRP of $400, the same as this LTE Pixel Watch, but Counterpoint's bill of materials had it costing more than the Pixel Watch: $136. Just like how it feels in the market, Counterpoint says Apple is offering more watch for less money. Apple is a company famous for having the highest profit margins in the industry, yet comparing these estimates would give the Apple Watch a 66 percent profit margin, and Google a 69 percent margin.

Enlarge / The "I don't need a refund" button as viewed in the Tweetbot app. (credit: Tapbots)

Elon Musk's "extremely hardcore" version of Twitter abruptly and unexpectedly cut off API access for popular third-party Twitter clients back in January, citing unnamed "long-standing API rules" that the apps had apparently been breaking. The company later retconned its developer agreement to prohibit "a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications."

For the former developers of Tweetbot and Twitterific, two of the longest-lived and most popular third-party Twitter clients, this meant losing their biggest products and revenue streams, and potentially refunding subscribers who suddenly couldn't use the apps they were paying for.

Tapbots and The Iconfactory (developers of Tweetbot and Twitterrific, respectively) have released one last update for their Twitter apps, walking users through the process of dealing with their expired subscriptions. If users want a prorated refund (back-dated to January 12, the last day both clients functioned normally), they don't need to take any action; both apps will be giving out prorated refunds to subscribers they don't hear from. But the apps also include a button that allows users to opt out of their refunds, allowing the developers to keep that money to fund future projects.

Enlarge / The peer group benchmarks dashboard within Apple's analytics suite. (credit: Apple)

Apple has introduced a new way for developers for platforms like the iPhone to track their apps' performance. It's a new dashboard called peer group benchmarks that shows percentile data on how an app compares in certain metrics to other similar apps.

The new dashboard will appear within App Analytics, a tool that is already offered as part of App Store Connect. This is Apple's portal for a suite of services that developers can use to manage their apps across the tech giant's various app stores.

The metrics tracked in the dashboard include conversion rate, proceeds per paying user, crash rate, and retention—all of which are displayed in weekly intervals. Apple automatically sorts an app into a peer group based on three criteria, according to a developer support document the company has published.

Enlarge / One of the species identified in this work. (credit: Thomas Brück)

Demand for rare-earth elements is growing and may reach 315,000 tons by 2030. Meanwhile, more than 40 million tons of e-waste—trashed computers, cell phones, and other electronics—is generated each year. Some of that waste contains the same valuable elements that face rising demand.

Over the years, several notable methods have been suggested for recovering spent or waste-based rare-earth elements, such as urban mining or nano-filtration systems in streams. One persistent idea is to use microorganisms such as bacteria to “bioabsorb” the desired substances—a passive biological process in which the organisms bind and remove the substances from an aqueous solution. The technology hasn't yet been rolled out at an industrial level, but some researchers suggest that their most recent findings represent a big step forward.

In a recent paper, Thomas Brück, a professor at the Technical University of Munich who studies synthetic biotechnology and sustainability, and his colleagues describe identifying 12 exotic cyanobacterial species that are particularly good at absorbing rare-earth elements. These species could be used to reclaim desirable elements, while also cleaning up the land and the water. “[I]t's not something we predicted in any way,” Brück told Ars.

Enlarge / One of the species identified in this work. (credit: Thomas Brück)

Demand for rare-earth elements is growing and may reach 315,000 tons by 2030. Meanwhile, more than 40 million tons of e-waste—trashed computers, cell phones, and other electronics—is generated each year. Some of that waste contains the same valuable elements that face rising demand.

Over the years, several notable methods have been suggested for recovering spent or waste-based rare-earth elements, such as urban mining or nano-filtration systems in streams. One persistent idea is to use microorganisms such as bacteria to “bioabsorb” the desired substances—a passive biological process in which the organisms bind and remove the substances from an aqueous solution. The technology hasn't yet been rolled out at an industrial level, but some researchers suggest that their most recent findings represent a big step forward.

In a recent paper, Thomas Brück, a professor at the Technical University of Munich who studies synthetic biotechnology and sustainability, and his colleagues describe identifying 12 exotic cyanobacterial species that are particularly good at absorbing rare-earth elements. These species could be used to reclaim desirable elements, while also cleaning up the land and the water. “[I]t's not something we predicted in any way,” Brück told Ars.