Month: July 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | BeeBright)

The European Commission today decided it is safe for personal data to be transferred from the European Union to US-based companies, handing a victory to firms like Facebook and Google despite protests from privacy advocates who worry about US government surveillance.

The commission announced that it "adopted its adequacy decision for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework," concluding "that the United States ensures an adequate level of protection—comparable to that of the European Union—for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies under the new framework. On the basis of the new adequacy decision, personal data can flow safely from the EU to US companies participating in the Framework, without having to put in place additional data protection safeguards."

In May, Facebook-owner Meta was fined 1.2 billion euros for violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with transfers of personal data to the United States and was ordered to stop storing European Union user data in the US within six months. But Meta said at the time that if the pending data-transfer pact "comes into effect before the implementation deadlines expire, our services can continue as they do today without any disruption or impact on users."

Enlarge / The sun sets behind power transmission lines in Texas on July 11, 2022. (credit: Nick Wagner/Xinhua via Getty Images)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

As a massive heat dome engulfed much of Texas in 100°-plus weather throughout the second half of June, breaking temperature records throughout South and West Texas, renewable energy output also set new records. Renewable’s contribution to the Texas grid reached an all-time high on June 28, when 41.6 percent of the electricity on the grid was coming from wind and solar power during peak hours.

With demand for electricity also setting a record in late June, the grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, has so far held up to the challenge. But summer is only beginning, and Texans are already enduring high electric bills.

Enlarge / The Windows 95 desktop. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you have any interest in retro-computing, you know it can be difficult to round up the last official bug fixes and updates available for early Internet-era versions of Windows like 95, 98, and NT 4.0. A new independent project called "Windows Update Restored" is aiming to fix that, hosting lightly modified versions of old Windows Update sites and the update files themselves so that fresh installs of these old OSes can grab years' worth of fixes that aren't present on old install CDs and disks.

These old versions of Windows relied primarily on a Windows Update web app to function, rather than built-in updaters like the ones used in current Windows versions. Microsoft took down the version of the site that could scan and update Windows 95 and 98 sometime in mid-2011. The Windows Update Restored site is a lightly modified version of Microsoft's original code, and the site itself doesn't use any kind of SSL or TLS encryption, so ancient Internet Explorer versions can still access it without modification.

You'll need at least Internet Explorer 5 to access the Windows Update Restored update sites; that browser is no longer available directly from Microsoft, but the Windows Update Restored site offers download links to IE5 and IE5.5 in all supported languages.

Enlarge / Rimrock Draw Rockshelter has been excavated since 2011. (credit: Bureau of Land Management)

Stone tools unearthed from a rock shelter in Southern Oregon were last used more than 18,000 years ago, radiocarbon dating suggests. That makes the site one of the oldest-known human living spaces in the Americas. But the people who lived in Oregon more than 18,000 years ago almost certainly weren’t the first to call the continent home.

A home where the buffalo roam

Buried deep beneath a layer of volcanic ash, archaeologists excavating Rimrock Draw Rockshelter found two stone scraping tools, which ancient knappers had skillfully shaped from pieces of orange agate. A residue of dried bison blood still clung to the edges of one scraper, a remnant of the last bit of work some ancient person had done with the tool before discarding it. The layer of volcanic ash above the tools had blasted out of Mount St. Helens, a few hundred kilometers north of the rock shelter, 15,000 years ago, long after the fine agate scrapers, and the people who made and used them, had been forgotten.

But how long?

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket streaks into the sky over Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission Sunday night to deploy 22 more Starlink internet satellites. (credit: SpaceX)

The late-night liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites on Sunday set a new record for the most flights by a SpaceX launch vehicle, with a first-stage booster flying for a 16th time. SpaceX now aims to fly its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 20 times, double the company’s original goal.

The flight followed several months of inspections and refurbishment of SpaceX’s most-flown rocket, a process that included a “recertification” of the booster to prove, at least on paper, that it could fly as many as five more times after completing its 15th launch and landing last December.

Sunday night’s mission got the booster’s extended life off to a good start.

Enlarge / A woman getting a non-vampire facial. (credit: Getty | Sammy Dallal)

Health officials in New Mexico have identified new cases of HIV linked to tainted "vampire facials" performed at a bogus beauty clinic that was shut down five years ago. With their investigation reopened, officials are now renewing calls for anyone who went to the clinic to get tested for blood-borne pathogens.

Vampire facials are a popular cosmetic medical procedure in which a person's own blood is spun in a centrifuge to separate proteins and platelets, and the resulting platelet-rich plasma (PRP) is re-injected into the face via microneedles or micro-abrasions. The procedure is claimed to rejuvenate skin, despite little evidence backing the claims. Nevertheless, it has been endorsed and promoted by many wellness-minded celebrities, including Kim Kardashian (who later had regrets because it was painful, though she still touted it) and Gwyneth Paltrow, who had it done on screen for an episode of her Goop Netflix series.

In 2018, health officials in New Mexico got a tip that an infection may have been linked to the facials at the VIP Beauty Salon and Spa in Albuquerque. A subsequent inspection of the salon by the health department and the Barbers and Cosmetologists Board of the New Mexico Regulation and Licensing Department "identified practices that could potentially spread blood-borne infections, such as HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C to clients." The health department set up free testing for the spa's clients.

It's been about three months since Microsoft cracked down on a number of emulators designed for Xbox consoles and distributed via a loophole in the Xbox Store. But that crackdown hasn't stopped the Xbox emulation community, which this weekend launched a new version of those "retail mode" emulators that they're confident will be able to evade Microsoft's automatic detection and removal tools.

The newly accessible emulators come courtesy of the "UWeaPons Store," a name that references the Universal Windows Platform program that allows generic Windows apps to be distributed to Xbox consoles in the first place. Subscribing to the group's Patreon for $2 per month puts supporters on an email "whitelist" that allows access to "Le Bombe," a package that can install Dolphin (GameCube/Wii), XBSX2.0 (PlayStation 2), Xenia (Xbox 360), and RetroArch (multiple older consoles) on a standard Xbox console.

That new unified distribution package is partly designed as a way to avoid the algorithms that were automatically flagging and blocking previous attempts to distribute UWP emulators through the Xbox Store, according to emulator developer SirMangler. "We wrote a new package from scratch and stripped as many identifiable elements as possible, including all the emulators into one download," he told Ars in a Discord chat.