Month: April 2023

Enlarge / Me-ow. (credit: Nintendo; Illumination Entertainment & Universal Pictures)

I've been waiting three decades for Hollywood to make a film that could wash away my disappointing memories of seeing the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie in theaters on opening weekend.

Yes, I know that famously messy production has now become something of a cult classic among people who are now nostalgic for its uniquely '90s vibe. But I'm still not completely recovered from my experience as a 10-year-old Mario superfan who was crushed to see a completely unrecognizable version of Mario on the silver screen. Rather than a loving homage to the world of my favorite video game, that younger version of me got an unrelated gonzo steampunk fever dream with the barest sprinkling of Mario references layered on top.

If anything, Illumination's The Super Mario Bros. Movie has the opposite problem. This film version captures all the fun and vibrancy of the Mario games, with enough references to familiar characters, items, and locations to make even a die-hard Mario fan's head spin. But the movie is so maniacally focused on squeezing in so many of those references at a madcap pace that the film comes off as unfocused, cluttered, and nearly incomprehensible from a story perspective.

Enlarge / Phil Harrison announces Stadia to the world. (credit: Google)

Google Stadia and all its associated projects are dead, and that means it's finally time for the division's leader, Phil Harrison, to move on. Business Insider reports Harrison has left Google. The report claims he left in January, but Harrison's Linkedin was only updated in the last few days to say he left Google in April. Harrison spent five years working on Stadia.

Google is not a gaming company, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off the launch of Google's gaming platform by announcing to the crowd, "I'm not a big gamer." As Stadia's VP and General Manager, Harrison was supposed to bring gaming credibility to Google, though. Harrison is an industry veteran that previously worked at Microsoft and Sony for their game console launches, so his experience was supposed to help the company up set up deals with game developers and deal with the uh, enthusiastic gaming community.

In the early days, Harrison was the face of Stadia. During the initial 2019 announcement, Harrison took the stage after Pichai to announce Stadia to the world, detailing the basic premise and how Stadia would be "the future of games." When things started going south, though, Harrison stopped appearing in videos, stopped tweeting, and generally disappeared. Harrison made the news rounds in 2021 when Google killed off Stadia's only first-party game studio, the Games & Entertainment division, after just 1.5 years. Harrison reportedly told the team they were "making great progress" one week before they were laid off, which was, according to Kotaku, part of a pattern of leadership "not being honest and upfront with the company's developers." He also announced the death of Stadia in a blog post.

Enlarge / Illumination from the late 14th or early 15th century, which portrays two individuals observing a lunar eclipse. It features the words "La lune avant est eclipsee" ("the moon is eclipsed"). (credit: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF)

Sébastien Guillet, an environmental scientist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, was rocking out to Pink Floyd's classic Dark Side of the Moon album one day when he made a prescient connection. The darkest lunar eclipses all occurred within a year or so of major volcanic eruptions. And astronomers know the exact days of those eclipses. So medieval historical accounts of lunar eclipse sightings should be able to help scientists narrow down the time frame in which major eruptions occurred during the High Medieval period spanning 1100 to 1300 CE. Guillet collaborated with several other scientists to conduct such a study, combining textual analysis with tree ring and ice core data. They described their findings in a new paper published in the journal Nature.

"Climate scientists usually identify past volcanic eruptions by measuring the acidity and amount of volcanic ash in cores drilled from polar ice, or by inferring abrupt temperature changes in tree ring records," Andrea Seim (University of Freiburg) and Eduardo Zorita (Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon) wrote in an accompanying commentary. "However, these sources sometimes disagree, because the location, intensity, and timing of eruptions can produce varying results, as can circulation of the atmosphere. Guillet and colleagues' approach offers an independent—and perhaps even more direct—source of information about the timing of volcanic eruptions, which could resolve some of these disagreements."

Major eruptions can belch huge amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, which gets converted into aerosols in the stratosphere. This produces volcanic dust. That dust then blocks incoming solar radiation, changing the Earth's surface temperatures, precipitation, and atmospheric circulation. Climate models suggest that this kind of volcano-induced cooling of about 1° Celsius over several years can lead to unusual precipitation patterns: major flooding in one area and droughts in another. It could also lower ocean temperatures and expand sea ice, so the effects could last decades or more. In fact, there has been speculation that major volcanic eruptions during the High Medieval period may have contributed to the onset of the Little Ice Age (circa 1300-1850).

Enlarge / Domain seizure message at genesis.market.

An international law enforcement operation shut down a "notorious hacker marketplace" that sold access to infected devices and stolen account credentials, the US Department of Justice and Europol announced today. The operation targeting Genesis Market involved 17 countries, seized the platform's infrastructure, and resulted in "119 arrests, 208 property searches, and 97 knock-and-talk measures," Europol said.

The now-shuttered Genesis Market "advertised and sold packages of account access credentials—such as usernames and passwords for email, bank accounts, and social media—that had been stolen from malware-infected computers around the world," the Justice Department said. The so-called "Operation Cookie Monster" seized 11 domain names pursuant to a warrant authorized by the US District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.

While Genesis Market's public website was taken down, its .onion domain was still accessible on the dark web using Tor today. Law enforcement is apparently still looking for at least some of the people behind the platform, as the domain seizure message seeks tips from anyone who's been in contact with Genesis Market administrators. The US Treasury Department said Genesis Market "is believed to be located in Russia."

Enlarge / An example of SAM selecting the outline of a corgi in a photo. (credit: Meta)

On Wednesday, Meta announced an AI model called the Segment Anything Model (SAM) that can identify individual objects in images and videos, even those not encountered during training, reports Reuters.

According to a blog post from Meta, SAM is an image segmentation model that can respond to text prompts or user clicks to isolate specific objects within an image. Image segmentation is a process in computer vision that involves dividing an image into multiple segments or regions, each representing a specific object or area of interest.

The purpose of image segmentation is to make an image easier to analyze or process. Meta also sees the technology as being useful for understanding webpage content, augmented reality applications, image editing, and aiding scientific study by automatically localizing animals or objects to track on video.