Month: May 2023

Enlarge / Samsung Display imagines its unfurling screen embodying future portable monitors. (credit: Samsung Display)

No one knows what the future of tech shows holds. The pricey, flashy E3 show, for example, was declining for years before its last in-person show in 2019. Other trade shows are enduring notable decline in exhibitor numbers, in-show announcements, and attendee numbers.

This May, however, remained a time for tech trade shows. Computex started Tuesday, and The Society for Information Display (SID) held Display Week 2023 in Los Angeles last week.

As a tech reporter, the fun part of trade shows isn't racking up steps or spotting slivers of time to eat and sleep. It's checking out interesting products, features, and concepts that customers will soon see. It feels somewhat odd to say in this post-pandemic world, but May was actually an interesting time for trade show displays.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Firewalls made by Zyxel are being wrangled into a destructive botnet, which is taking control of them by exploiting a recently patched vulnerability with a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10.

“At this stage if you have a vulnerable device exposed, assume compromise,” officials from Shadowserver, an organization that monitors Internet threats in real time, warned four days ago. The officials said the exploits are coming from a botnet that’s similar to Mirai, which harnesses the collective bandwidth of thousands of compromised Internet devices to knock sites offline with distributed denial-of-service attacks.

According to data from Shadowserver collected over the past 10 days, 25 of the top 62 Internet-connected devices waging “downstream attacks”—meaning attempting to hack other Internet-connected devices—were made by Zyxel as measured by IP addresses.

Enlarge / An AI-expanded version of a famous album cover involving four lads and a certain road created using Adobe Generative Fill. (credit: Capitol Records / Adobe / Dobrokotov)

Over the weekend, AI-powered makeovers of famous music album covers went viral on Twitter thanks to Adobe Photoshop's Generative Fill, an image synthesis tool that debuted in a beta version of the image editor last week. Using Generative Fill, people have been expanding the size of famous works of art, revealing larger imaginary artworks beyond the borders of the original images.

This image-expanding feat, often called "outpainting" in AI circles (and introduced with OpenAI's DALL-E 2 last year), is possible due to an image synthesis model called Adobe Firefly, which has been trained on millions of works of art from Adobe's stock photo catalog. When given an existing image to work with, Firefly uses what it knows about other artworks to synthesize plausible continuations of the original artwork. And when guided with text prompts that describe a specific scenario, the synthesized results can go in wild places.

For example, an expansion of Michael Jackson's famous Thriller album rendered the rest of Jackson's body lying on a piano. That seems reasonable, based on the context. But depending on user guidance, Generative Fill can also create more fantastic interpretations: An expansion of Katy Perry's Teenage Dream cover art (likely guided by a text suggestion from the user) revealed Perry lying on a gigantic fluffy pink cat.

Enlarge / The Reddit iOS app icon. (credit: Getty Images | Yuriko Nakao )

Reddit is an enormously popular website, but the official design has always needed some reworking. This is even more true of the mobile experience, which didn't have a mobile app until 2016, and even then, not everyone's a fan of it. The site's popularity rose partly thanks to third-party developers filling in the gaps with pre-existing and better mobile apps. Last month, following in the footsteps of Twitter, Reddit suddenly announced it wanted to charge apps for API access, but how much? Would it pull a Twitter and price everything out of the market?

The most popular Reddit app is the iOS app Apollo, which has been running for eight years now and has millions of downloads. Apollo's developer, Christian Selig, has been in meetings with Reddit regarding the cost of the API, and it sounds like the company is using a recent Twitter tactic. Selig says "50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined." Twitter, for the record, is charging $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Selig cites the photo site Imgur as a more reasonable pricing scheme, "I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls." Selig estimates it would cost $20 million a year to keep Apollo running.

Apollo and most other third-party apps use Reddit's data but don't show Reddit's ads, so the proliferation of third-party apps costs Reddit money. It's reasonable to expect some money to change hands here, but how much? Selig links to a CNBC report from 2019 that estimated Reddit earns 30 cents a year per user and says Reddit's API pricing would work out to about $2.50 per user per month or $30 a year, which aligns with Imgur's pricing.

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  This game is all about tracing the rays, so to speak. It looks fantastic. [credit: Sony ]

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will be the next PlayStation Studios game to make its way to PC, Sony announced in a blog post on Tuesday. The game, which debuted in 2021, will launch on the new platform on July 26.

Although Sony has been in the habit of releasing its big PlayStation exclusives on PC long after their console debuts for a bit now, there are a couple of things that make this announcement particularly interesting.

First, this is the first Ratchet & Clank game to be released on PC—that's after 16 home and handheld console releases since the first game was released on PlayStation 2 more than 20 years ago.

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

The first Pixel Watch represented a promising but first-generation-feeling return to the smartwatch market for Google—will a second-generation version do any better? 9to5Google reports it will at least come with a new system on a chip: the Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 Gen 1. This change would have the Pixel Watch line changing from Samsung to Qualcomm SoCs.

The original Pixel Watch shipped with an Exynos 9110—not a bad chip by any means—except that when the Pixel Watch hit the market, the Exynos 9110 was four years old. As a 10 nm, dual Cortex A53 chip, it was ancient by technology standards. By the time the Pixel Watch came out, Samsung already had a next-generation chip on the market, the Exynos W920, and had shipped watches with the new chip.

While the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear W5 still has the same A53 CPUs, it has four of them, and the chip should be a lot more power efficient thanks to its 4 nm manufacturing process. The Pixel Watch 2 is expected to come out by the end of the year, and by then, the Snapdragon W5 SoC will be no spring chicken either. The chip was announced in July 2022, and the first products hit the market a month later in August 2022—that's what a good technology rollout looks like, by the way. The Pixel Watch 2's assumed October 2023 release date would be 15 months after the chip was announced. That's better than four years, but time still seems to be Google's biggest enemy when it ships a smartwatch.

Enlarge / Emergency braking systems have been on the road for some years, but now the federal government wants them to be mandatory equipment on all new light trucks and passenger cars. (credit: Volvo)

On Wednesday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a notice of proposed rulemaking that would see automatic emergency braking become a standard feature on all new light passenger vehicles. If adopted, NHTSA says it would save 360 lives and prevent 24,000 crashes each year.

"Today, we take an important step forward to save lives and make our roadways safer for all Americans," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said. “Just as lifesaving innovations from previous generations like seat belts and airbags have helped improve safety, requiring automatic emergency braking on cars and trucks would keep all of us safer on our roads."

NHTSA added automatic emergency braking to its list of recommended safety features in 2015. At the time, it started noting the presence or absence of this advanced driver assistance system when determining a car's rating under the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), which is aimed at giving consumers safety information about new vehicles.

Enlarge / This Dolphin is not currently under legal threat from Nintendo. (credit: Flickr / Andreas Ahrens)

When it comes to emulation, Nintendo has a long history of going after the websites that distribute copyrighted game ROMs and some of the modders that make piracy-enabling hardware. But Nintendo's legal takedown efforts have generally stayed away from emulation software itself.

This weekend saw an exception to that rule, though, as Nintendo's lawyers formally asked Valve to cut off the planned Steam release of Wii and Gamecube emulator Dolphin. In a letter addressed to the Valve Legal Department (a copy of which was provided to Ars by the Dolphin Team), an attorney representing Nintendo of America requests that Valve take down Dolphin's "coming soon" Steam store page (which originally went up in March) and "ensure the emulator does not release on the Steam store moving forward." The letter exerts the company's "rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)’s Anti-Circumvention and Anti-Trafficking provisions," even though it doesn't take the form of a formal DMCA takedown request.

In fighting a decision like this, an emulator maker would usually be able to point to some robust legal precedents that protect emulation software as a general concept. But legal experts that spoke to Ars said that Nintendo's argument here might actually get around those precedents and present some legitimate legal problems for the Dolphin Team.

Enlarge / An image of a ring-shaped supramolecule where only one Fe atom is present in the entire ring. (credit: Saw-Wai Hla)

Atomic-scale imaging emerged in the mid-1950s and has been advancing rapidly ever since—so much so, that back in 2008, physicists successfully used an electron microscope to image a single hydrogen atom. Five years later, scientists were able to peer inside a hydrogen atom using a "quantum microscope," resulting in the first direct observation of electron orbitals. And now we have the first X-ray taken of a single atom, courtesy of scientists from Ohio University, Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois-Chicago, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature.

“Atoms can be routinely imaged with scanning probe microscopes, but without X-rays one cannot tell what they are made of," said co-author Saw-Wai Hla, a physicist at Ohio University and Argonne National Laboratory. "We can now detect exactly the type of a particular atom, one atom at a time, and can simultaneously measure its chemical state. Once we are able to do that, we can trace the materials down to [the] ultimate limit of just one atom. This will have a great impact on environmental and medical sciences.”

When the average non-scientist thinks of an atom, chances are they envision some popularized version of the classic, much-maligned Bohr model of the atom. That's the one where electrons move about the atomic nucleus in circular orbits, like planets orbiting the Sun in our Solar System. The orbits have set discrete energies, and those energies are related to an orbit’s size: The lowest energy, or “ground state,” is associated with the smallest orbit. Whenever an electron changes speed or direction (according to the Bohr model), it emits radiation in the specific frequencies associated with particular orbitals.