Month: April 2023

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft's Edge browser has a relatively recent on-by-default feature that allows you to "follow content creators" in Edge itself. If you follow lots of channels or individual users across multiple websites, the feature promises to create a site-agnostic feed for updates from those creators that you can access in one place, plus a way to save videos and other files to your Collections. To drive more people to use the feature, it's also designed to show you suggestions about creators you could be following.

The problem is that this feature may be sending information about every single site you visit in Edge to Microsoft. Reddit user hackermchackface says that as of Edge version 112.0.1722.34 (released on April 7), the browser sends the full URL of any site you visit to a Microsoft-owned "bingapis.com" domain, including locally hosted URLs and IP addresses. Older versions of the browser would only send this information to bingapis.com if you were on a site supported by the content-follower feature, like Pinterest, Instagram, or YouTube.

Developer Rafael Rivera, speaking to The Verge, said that the feature intended to only notify Bing when you were on specific sites you had elected to follow but that "it doesn’t appear to be working correctly, instead sending nearly every domain you visit to Bing."

Enlarge / Enough taking in majestic beauty, it's time to build! (credit: Nintendo)

For decades, solving puzzles and figuring out how to advance in Zelda games followed a well-established pattern. You'd hunt around a dungeon for a key item, use that item to get around some obstacle and/or beat a new boss, then explore the overworld until you found an area that was newly accessible with your shiny new item.

It's been over six years since Breath of the Wild turned that basic design on its head. Traversal abilities like climbing and floating made it much easier to carve your own path through the game's wide open world, to the point where players can technically run to the final boss after completing the tutorial area. The game's early introduction of Link's magical new abilities has also led players to craft some incredibly inventive and unintended solutions to the game's shrine puzzles and combat challenges.

After spending an hour or so playing a near-final build of Tears of the Kingdom, it seems clear that the newest Zelda sequel is determined to go even further in letting players craft their own creative solutions to the game's challenges. In doing so, though, the game seems to have gotten even further from the basic Zelda gameplay loop that served the series so well for so long.

Despite creating one of the most recognizable video games of all time, Tetris creators Alexey Pajitnov (who first coded the game in Russia) and Henk Rogers (who was instrumental in bringing the game to prominence in the West) have not been all that recognizable to the general public. That has started to change, though, with the recent release of Apple TV's Tetris movie, which dramatizes the real-life story of the pair's unlikely friendship and business partnership.

In Ars Technica's latest Unsolved Mysteries video, Pajitnov and Rogers went all the way back to the game's earliest origins. That includes the origin of "the Tetris song," aka Korobeiniki, which Game Boy Tetris fans have had stuck in their heads for decades now.

"In 1988, when I first published Tetris in Japan... I knew somehow that Alexey didn't want Tetris associated with the Cold War side of Russia or the Soviet Union at the time," Rogers told Ars. "So I looked back in the history of Russia and found some folk songs."

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Selling a new smartphone is the hardest it has been in years. Rising device costs, limited differences between model upgrades, and economic and environment-related desires to keep electronics alive as long as possible are making people turn to refurbished phones, data shared this week by analyst Counterpoint found. And if someone is buying a refurbished phone, there's a good chance it's an iPhone.

According to Counterpoint, Apple represented 49 percent of refurbished phones sold worldwide in 2022. The number of refurbished iPhones sold increased 16 percent year-over-year, with the overall used smartphone market growing 5 percent year-over-year, Counterpoint said. The numbers would be even higher, but a reported 17 percent drop in refurbished smartphone sales in China—driven, the firm said, by an increase in COVID-19 cases and related policies—was detrimental.

By Counterpoint's measures, Apple grew its market share here from 44 percent in 2021 to 49 percent. Samsung is the biggest competitor, but it lost market share.

Astronomers today unveiled new images of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, showing both a fluffier version of the black hole's glowing ring and its powerful jet together in the same image for the first time. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) first imaged the black hole in 2017; this new image is based on data collected by the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA), which captured radio emissions in a slightly different but scientifically significant wavelength. The details of the new observational data, image processing methods, and associated computer simulations are described in a new paper published in the journal Nature.

“This is the first image where we are able to pin down where the ring is relative to the powerful jet escaping out of the central black hole,” said co-author Kazunori Akiyama of MIT’s Haystack Observatory, who developed the imaging software used to visualize the black hole. “Now we can start to address questions such as how particles are accelerated and heated and many other mysteries around the black hole more deeply.”

As we've reported previously, the EHT is actually a collection of telescopes scattered around the globe, including hardware from Hawaii to Europe and from the South Pole to Greenland. The "telescope" is created by a process called interferometry, which uses light captured at different locations to build an image with a resolution that is the equivalent of a giant telescope (a telescope so big, it’s as if it were as large as the distance between the most distant locations of the individual telescopes).

Astronomers today unveiled new images of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, showing both a fluffier version of the black hole's glowing ring and its powerful jet together in the same image for the first time. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) first imaged the black hole in 2017; this new image is based on data collected by the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA), which captured radio emissions in a slightly different but scientifically significant wavelength. The details of the new observational data, image processing methods, and associated computer simulations are described in a new paper published in the journal Nature.

“This is the first image where we are able to pin down where the ring is relative to the powerful jet escaping out of the central black hole,” said co-author Kazunori Akiyama of MIT’s Haystack Observatory, who developed the imaging software used to visualize the black hole. “Now we can start to address questions such as how particles are accelerated and heated and many other mysteries around the black hole more deeply.”

As we've reported previously, the EHT is actually a collection of telescopes scattered around the globe, including hardware from Hawaii to Europe and from the South Pole to Greenland. The "telescope" is created by a process called interferometry, which uses light captured at different locations to build an image with a resolution that is the equivalent of a giant telescope (a telescope so big, it’s as if it were as large as the distance between the most distant locations of the individual telescopes).

Enlarge / There's probably no mistaking the Revuelto for anything other than a Lamborghini. (credit: Alex Kalogiannis)

Ten years ago, the then-"holy trinity" of supercars kicked off a new era of performance by showing the world that electrification wasn't just for drivers looking to stretch a mile. That year, Ferrari, Porsche, and McLaren debuted limited-run hybrids that informed what would soon come to pass for each brand, with all three embracing electrons for the powertrains of at least one of their production vehicles.

Lamborghini's name has been mostly absent from the discussion of hybrid supercars, and while the company teased us with electrified possibilities over the years, it was happy to let its V10 and V12 engines do all the talking. Now, the V10s are screaming off into the sunset, and Lamborghini is on the precipice of a new electrified future, one that begins with the Revuelto, the replacement for the V12 Aventador and the brand's first production plug-in hybrid.

During the 2023 New York International Auto Show, Ars had a chance to check out the Revuelto up close and to speak to Lamborghini Chief Technical Officer Rouven Mohr about the car's development, its challenges, and what to expect from Lamborghini in the future.