Month: March 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

President Joe Biden on Monday signed an executive order barring many uses by the federal government of commercial spyware, which has been increasingly used by other countries in recent years to surveil dissidents, journalists, and politicians.

The signing of the executive order came as administration officials told journalists that roughly 50 US government personnel in at least 10 countries had been infected or targeted by such spyware, a larger number than previously known. The officials didn’t elaborate.

Commercial spyware is sold by a host of companies, with the best known being NSO Group of Israel. The company sells a hacking tool known as Pegasus that can surreptitiously compromise both iPhones and Android devices using “clickless” exploits, meaning they require no user interaction. By sending a text or ringing the device, Pegasus can install spying software that steals contacts, messages, geo locations, and more, even when the text or call isn’t answered. Other companies selling commercial spyware include Cytrox, Candiru, and Paragon.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

President Joe Biden on Monday signed an executive order barring many uses by the federal government of commercial spyware, which has been increasingly used by other countries in recent years to surveil dissidents, journalists, and politicians.

The signing of the executive order came as administration officials told journalists that roughly 50 US government personnel in at least 10 countries had been infected or targeted by such spyware, a larger number than previously known. The officials didn’t elaborate.

Commercial spyware is sold by a host of companies, with the best known being NSO Group of Israel. The company sells a hacking tool known as Pegasus that can surreptitiously compromise both iPhones and Android devices using “clickless” exploits, meaning they require no user interaction. By sending a text or ringing the device, Pegasus can install spying software that steals contacts, messages, geo locations, and more, even when the text or call isn’t answered. Other companies selling commercial spyware include Cytrox, Candiru, and Paragon.

Enlarge / The new OLED Switch above its predecessor. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Kicking off the week, we have a couple of today-only sales, including a rare discount on Nintendo's Switch OLED and a free $50 Amazon gift card deal on Microsoft's 365 Family office software. There are also price cuts on the PS5 God of War Ragnarök bundle and Apple's four-pack of AirTags.

Nintendo Switch OLED for $310 ($350)

Nintendo's Switch OLED is the best Switch console you can buy. In our review, we praised the larger, upgraded display's completely blacked-out pixels and infinite contrast ratio whether gaming before bed or during the day. We also appreciated the bigger, sturdier hinge, Ethernet-toting dock, and 64GB standard storage, as opposed to 32GB on other Switch models.

We still think the Switch Lite is an unbeatable deal in portable gaming for $200, but for those among us who like the best of the best, the Switch OLED is the ultimate portable gaming device. With today's one-day-only $40 discount, it's a bit more affordable now, too. Samsung's 256GB microSD Evo Select is also on sale for $20, which pairs well with the Switch for game storage.

Enlarge / The 2021, 24-inch iMac with Apple's M1. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple released new updates for most of its software platforms today, including macOS Ventura 13.3, iOS 16.4, iPadOS 16.4, tvOS 16.4, and watchOS 9.4.

These are all feature updates, meaning they actually add new functionality in addition to fixing bugs or addressing security vulnerabilities.

iOS and iPadOS 16.4 add a number of minor features. The headliner is (of course) 21 new emojis, like new heart colors, additional animals, and a shaking head. Beyond that, though, Apple says you'll see improved voice isolation on phone calls, support for notifications from web apps that have been added to your phone's home screen, new ways to weed out duplicates in your Photos library, and a number of bug fixes.

Enlarge / Your last chance to buy individual games for the Wii U and 3DS—assuming you have credits in your wallet account—arrives tonight.

Only a few hours remain for anyone who wants to buy games from the eShops for Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS.

As it promised more than a year ago, Nintendo is shutting down those digital storefronts tonight at 8 pm Eastern, after previously halting the ability to add eShop funds in May 2022. After today, you can still download or re-download any titles you've previously bought from those shops, though that can obviously change in the future. Closing the eShops means that roughly 1,000 digital-only games will no longer be accessible, according to research by VGC, including 335 Virtual Console games that aren't available through the Nintendo Switch Online service.

These kinds of sweeping moves, while perhaps understandable from a business perspective, pose a serious danger to the preservation of many games in the systems' libraries. As Ars detailed earlier this month, video game preservationists are hamstrung by laws and regulations around remote access to DRM-protected work, even if it's kept by research-driven organizations. Nintendo is one of many organizations that, through the Entertainment Software Association, lobbies to prevent libraries from offering legal access to archived games.

Enlarge / A photo of an IBM PC 5155 portable computer running a ChatGPT client written by Yeo Kheng Meng. (credit: Yeo Kheng Meng)

On Sunday, Singapore-based retrocomputing enthusiast Yeo Kheng Meng released a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS that can run on a 4.77 MHz IBM PC from 1981, providing a unique way to converse with the popular OpenAI language model.

Vintage computer development projects come naturally to Yeo, who created a Slack client for Windows 3.1 back in 2019. "I thought to try something different this time and develop for an even older platform as a challenge," he writes on his blog. In this case, he turned his attention to MS-DOS, a text-only operating system first released in 1981, and ChatGPT, an AI-powered large language model (LLM) released by OpenAI in November.

As a conversational AI model, ChatGPT draws on knowledge scraped from the Internet to answer questions and generate text. Thanks to an API that launched his month, anyone with the programming chops can interface ChatGPT with their own custom application.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Elon Musk told Twitter employees that the company is now worth about $20 billion, less than half the amount he paid for it. The New York Times reported that Musk provided the $20 billion figure in an email sent to staff on Friday to announce a new stock compensation program.

"According to Mr. Musk's email about the new stock compensation program, Twitter employees will receive stock in X Corporation, the holding company he used to buy the company. Those awards will be granted under the $20 billion valuation. Mr. Musk also said in the email that he believed Twitter could someday be worth $250 billion," the NYT article said.

Musk "warned workers that Twitter remained in a precarious financial position and, at one point, had been four months away from running out of money," the article said. Musk's email reportedly said bankruptcy was averted because of the "radical changes" he implemented—like staff cuts that reduced the company headcount from about 7,500 to under 2,000.

Enlarge / An illustration of what the inner portion of the TRAPPIST-1 system might look like. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI), T. P. Greene (NASA Ames), T. Bell (BAERI), E. Ducrot (CEA), P. Lagage (CEA))

At this point, we've discovered lots of exoplanets that fall under the general label "Earth-like." They're rocky, and many orbit at distances from their host stars to potentially have moderate temperatures. But "like" is doing a lot of work there. In many cases, we have no idea whether they even have an atmosphere, and the greenhouse effect means that the atmosphere can have a huge impact on the planet's temperature. So the Earth-like category can include dry, baking hellscapes like Venus with its massive atmosphere, as well as dry, frozen hellscapes with sparse atmospheres like Mars.

But we're slowly getting the chance to image the atmospheres of rocky exoplanets. And today, researchers are releasing the results of turning the Webb Space Telescope on a rocky planet orbiting a nearby star, showing that the new hardware is so sensitive that it can detect the star blocking out light originating from the planet. The results suggest that the planet has very little atmosphere and is mostly radiating away heat from being baked by its nearby star.

The ultra-cool dwarf and its seven planets

TRAPPIST-1 is a small, reddish star—in astronomical terminology, it's an "ultra-cool dwarf"—that's about 40 light-years from Earth. While the star itself is pretty nondescript, it's notable for having lots of planets, with seven in total having been identified so far. All of these are small, rocky bodies, much like the ones that occupy the inner portion of our Solar System. While the star itself emits very little light, the planets are all packed in closer to it than Mercury is to the Sun.

Enlarge / Fitbit's now-dead Challenges feature. (credit: Sherwin Fong)

Today's the day for Google's biggest change yet to Fitbit: It's shutting down some more features. As Google announced in February, the popular fitness gamification features, Fitbit "Challenges" and "Adventures," are being shut down today. Google is also removing the "Open Group" social networking feature.

Getting motivated to work out is tough for some people, so Fitbit's software included a few ways to gamify fitness to keep people interested. Challenges were introduced in 2014 as a way to share and compare your step counts with friends, hopefully motivating both of you to get more exercise. The feature came with badges that could be earned for specific tasks and trophies for winning a battle. Adventures were announced in 2017 as location-specific challenges that highlighted local places that were good for exercise and hiking, like national parks and landmarks. You could tackle these areas solo at your own pace or participate in multiplayer "Adventure Races" where you could track your hiking speed or progress against other Fitbit users. This seems like something that would only get better with Google Maps integration. Oh, well.

Adventures, Challenges, and all player-earned trophies and badges are going away today. The Fitbit community on Reddit has been furious over the feature removals, with the most popular post of the past year being a call to cancel your Fitbit Premium subscription over the changes. On Twitter, Fitbit tried celebrating the company's birthday yesterday, but nearly all the replies were about the feature shutdown and what other services people should switch to. Several users have confirmed today that the features are dead.