Month: July 2023

Enlarge / Varda Space's first "Winnebago" spacecraft, called W-Series 1, before its launch June 12. (credit: Rocket Lab)

The co-founder of California-based startup Varda Space Industries says his company’s first space mission—a miniature lab that has grown crystals of the drug ritonavir in orbit—is on track to end in the coming weeks with a first-of-its-kind re-entry and landing in Utah.

Varda’s spacecraft launched June 12 as part of a rideshare mission on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, then completed several weeks of checkouts before starting a 27-hour drug-manufacturing experiment last week. When ground controllers gave the go-ahead, the mini-lab began growing crystals of ritonavir, a drug commonly used to treat HIV.

The experiment’s 27-hour run was completed on June 30, and data downlinked from the spacecraft showed everything went well.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Medical imagery tends to burst with gore and horror, from grisly gashes, festering flesh, to a merciless gush of other odious afflictions. But the most disturbing sights aren't always the most grievous ailments—as a recent case in Ohio demonstrates. A man there developed a completely benign condition. His prognosis was excellent. He recovered in full, quickly. Yet, for any observer, a ghastly glimpse of his mild malady may cause acute discomfort and enduring trauma.

The man briefly developed an unusual condition in which a shaggy carpet of green fibers covered his tongue, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. (If you dare, an image of the man's tongue can be found here.) The thick, plush matt of foul fur was a form of hairy tongue syndrome. The most common version of this condition is black—which is also pretty disturbing. But, in exceptional cases, the repulsive rug can also appear as tongue-colored, brown, yellow, blue, or green.

The rare hue seemed to initially stump doctors, who prescribed him an antifungal medication after assuming the fuzzy eruption was a yeast infection. But, after a course of the drugs, his oral outgrowth remained in all its glory. After that, doctors at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base medical center diagnosed it as hairy tongue syndrome.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The mass sponge EV charger plug migration continues to gather steam. Since we last wrote about the topic, first Polestar and then Mercedes-Benz also announced that they're dropping the Combined Charging Standard 1 (CCS1) connector in favor of Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS). Sometime next year, non-Tesla electric vehicles from those makes, as well as Ford, General Motors, Volvo, and Rivian, will be able to start making use of Tesla's Supercharger network. In 2025, those automakers—and probably a few more—will start building cars with NACS ports built in.

It's not just the car makers. Charger manufacturers and charging networks have also been announcing new NACS products, and it feels like enough critical mass is building that CCS1 might be headed for extinction. Or at least it may be relegated to curio status alongside CHAdeMO. Things are looking even better now that SAE International is taking over the management of NACS, so it will no longer be under the control of a rival OEM run by a billionaire known for impulsive and often arbitrary decisions. At this point, many are merely waiting to see if Hyundai Motor Group or Volkswagen Group will be the next big convert.

The justification for dropping an entrenched standard and switching to NACS, from Ford and others, was as much about obtaining access for their EV owners to Tesla's Supercharger network, and why not? Even the most hardened partisan from the EV brand flame wars has to concede that not only are there far more Superchargers out there, but they offer a vastly superior charging experience to any of the public charging networks.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Duncan Hull / Getty)

Elon Musk's X Corp. this week sued a law firm that Twitter hired last year after Musk tried to break their $44 billion merger agreement. Musk's lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court alleges that Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz overcharged Twitter when it collected $90 million—including $84.3 million on the same day Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter.

"This action for equitable relief arises out of an effort by Wachtell to fundamentally alter its fee arrangement as litigation counsel in the twilight of its representation of Twitter to obtain an improper bonus payment in violation of its fiduciary and ethical obligations to its client," claimed the lawsuit filed by X Corp., the successor company to Twitter. "Wachtell exploited a corporate client left unprotected by lame duck fiduciaries who had lost their motivation to act in Twitter's best interest pending its imminent sale to Elon Musk and his entities, X Holdings I, Inc. and X Holdings II, Inc."

When Musk tried to pull out of his commitment to buy Twitter, the company hired Wachtell in July 2022 to handle the lawsuit that eventually forced Musk to complete the merger. Musk finally honored the merger contract in October when it became clear that he would likely lose in court.

Enlarge / The world’s smallest 3D-printed wineglass in silica glass (left) and an optical resonator for fiber optic telecommunication, photographed with scanning electron microscopy. The rim of the glass is smaller than the width of a human hair. (credit: KTH Royal Institute of Technology)

A team of Swedish scientists has developed a novel 3D-printing technique for silica glass that streamlines a complicated energy-intensive process. As a proof of concept, they 3D-printed the world's smallest wineglass (made of actual glass) with a rim smaller than the width of one human hair, as well as an optical resonator for fiber optic telecommunications systems—one of several potential applications for 3D-printed silica glass components. They described their new method in a recent paper in the journal Nature Communications.

“The backbone of the Internet is based on optical fibers made of glass," said co-author Kristinn Gylfason of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. "In those systems, all kinds of filters and couplers are needed that can now be 3D printed by our technique. This opens many new possibilities.”

Silica glass (i.e., amorphous silicon dioxide) is one material that remains challenging for 3D printing, particularly at the microscale, according to the authors, though several methods seek to address that challenge, including stereolithography, direct ink writing, and digital light processing. Even those have only been able to achieve feature sizes on the order of several tens of micrometers, apart from one 2021 study that reported nanoscale resolution.

Enlarge / You have nothing to lose but your chains. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Simply mentioning the name "Denuvo" among some gamers is pretty much guaranteed to get you an instant, strong reaction. Just look at the comment threads underneath any Ars article covering Denuvo and you'll see plenty of complaints about the DRM-enhancing anti-piracy technology.

Irdeto, the company that acquired Denuvo in a 2018 purchase, doesn't generally make a habit of commenting at length on this reputation (or its secretive DRM schemes) in the public press. So when Irdeto Chief Operating Officer of Video Games Steeve Huin agreed to defend his company publicly in an exclusive interview with Ars Technica, I jumped at the chance to talk to him.

Enlarge / There could soon be much more of this on Reddit. (credit: Getty)

The Reddit community is still reckoning with the consequences of the platform's API price hike. The changes have led to the shuttering of numerous third-party Reddit apps and have pushed several important communities, like the Ask Me Anything (AMAs) organizers, to reduce or end their presence on the site.

The latest group to announce its departure is BotDefense. BotDefense, which helps removes rogue submission and comment bots from Reddit and which is maintained by volunteer moderators, is said to help moderate 3,650 subreddits. BotDefense's creator told Ars Technica that the team is now quitting over Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward moderators and developers, with concerning implications for spam moderation on some large subreddits like r/space.

Valued bot fighter

BotDefense started in 2019 as a volunteer project and has been run by volunteer mods, known as "dequeued" and "andabrownn" on Reddit. Since then, it claims to have populated its ban list with 144,926 accounts, and it helps moderates subreddits with huge followings, like r/gaming (37.4 million members), /r/aww (34.2 million), r/music (32.4 million), r/Jokes (26.2 million), r/space (23.5 million), and /r/LifeProTips (22.2 million). Dequeued told Ars that other large subreddits BotDefense helps moderates include /r/food, /r/EarthPorn, /r/DIY, and /r/mildlyinteresting.

Enlarge (credit: Lino Mirgeler/picture alliance via Getty Images)

MOVEit, the file-transfer software exploited in recent weeks in one of the biggest cyberattacks ever, has received yet another security update that fixes a critical vulnerability that could be exploited to give hackers access to vast amounts of sensitive data.

On Thursday, MOVEit maker Progress Software published a security bulletin that included fixes for three newly discovered vulnerabilities in the file-transfer application. The most serious of them, tracked as CVE-2023-36934, allows an unauthenticated attacker to gain unauthorized access to the application database. It stems from a security flaw that allows for SQL injection, one of the oldest and most common exploit classes.

The vulnerability contains the same elements—and, likely, the same potentially devastating consequences—as one that came to light in late May when members of the Clop ransomware crime syndicate began mass-exploiting it on vulnerable networks around the world. To date, the Clop offensive has hit 229 organizations and spilled data affecting more than 17 million people, according to statistics tracked by Brett Callow, an analyst with security firm Emsisoft. Casualties include Louisiana and Oregon DMVs, the New York City Department of Education, and energy companies Schneider Electric and Siemens Electric.