Month: July 2023

Enlarge / What the Golf?, a popular Apple Arcade game, running in shared 3D space with other visionOS applications. (credit: Unity)

Starting today, some developers can use the popular software Unity to make apps and games for Apple's upcoming Vision Pro headset.

A partnership between Unity and Apple was first announced during Apple's WWDC 2023 keynote last month, in the same segment the Vision Pro and visionOS were introduced. At that time, Apple noted that developers could start making visionOS apps immediately using SwiftUI in a new beta version of the company's Xcode IDE for Macs, but it also promised that Unity would begin supporting Vision Pro this month.

Now it's here—albeit in a slow, limited rollout to developers that sign up for a beta. Unity says it is admitting a wide range of developers into the program gradually over the coming weeks or months but hasn't gone into much detail about the criteria it's using to pick people other than not solely focusing on makers of AAA games.

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / Getty Images)

On Tuesday, researchers from Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley published a research paper that purports to show changes in GPT-4's outputs over time. The paper fuels a common-but-unproven belief that the AI language model has grown worse at coding and compositional tasks over the past few months. Some experts aren't convinced by the results, but they say that the lack of certainty points to a larger problem with how OpenAI handles its model releases.

In a study titled "How Is ChatGPT’s Behavior Changing over Time?" published on arXiv, Lingjiao Chen, Matei Zaharia, and James Zou, cast doubt on the consistent performance of OpenAI's large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Using API access, they tested the March and June 2023 versions of these models on tasks like math problem-solving, answering sensitive questions, code generation, and visual reasoning. Most notably, GPT-4's ability to identify prime numbers reportedly plunged dramatically from an accuracy of 97.6 percent in March to just 2.4 percent in June. Strangely, GPT-3.5 showed improved performance in the same period.

This study comes on the heels of people frequently complaining that GPT-4 has subjectively declined in performance over the past few months. Popular theories about why include OpenAI "distilling" models to reduce their computational overhead in a quest to speed up the output and save GPU resources, fine-tuning (additional training) to reduce harmful outputs that may have unintended effects, and a smattering of unsupported conspiracy theories such as OpenAI reducing GPT-4's coding capabilities so more people will pay for GitHub Copilot.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)

The Internet is dangerous, so what if you just didn't use it? That's the somewhat ironic recommendation Google, one of the world's largest Internet companies, is making to its employees. CNBC's Jennifer Elias reports that Google is "starting a new pilot program where some employees will be restricted to Internet-free desktop PCs" while they work. An internal memo seen by CNBC notes that “Googlers are frequent targets of attacks” by criminals, and a great way to combat that is to not be on the Internet.

Employees that work at major tech companies are a much richer target for criminals compared to normal people. Tech company employees have all sorts of access to sensitive data, and compromising a single employee could lead to exploiting sensitive infrastructure. Just last week, Microsoft was targeted by a Chinese espionage hacking group that somehow stole a cryptographic key to bypass Microsoft's authentication systems, giving it access to 25 organizations, including multiple government agencies.

The report says Google's new pilot program "will disable Internet access on the select desktops, with the exception of internal web-based tools and Google-owned websites like Google Drive and Gmail." This was originally mandatory for the 2,500 employees that were selected, but after "receiving feedback"—we're going to assume that was very enthusiastic feedback—Google is letting employees opt out of the program. The company also wants some employees to work without root access, which is common sense for a lot of computer roles, but not really for developers, which are used to being able to install new programs and tools.

An Anopheles stephensi mosquito, which can carry the malaria parasite. (credit: CDC)

A seventh person has been diagnosed with a locally acquired case of malaria in Florida's Sarasota County, state health officials reported this week.

The rare outbreak is now in its third month after authorities in the Sunshine State reported the first case in May. When Florida had identified four cases by late June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a health alert to clinicians calling locally acquired malaria cases in the US a "public health emergency."

Florida's outbreak and a single, unrelated case in Texas from June collectively mark the first time in two decades that the US has seen locally acquired malaria cases, which, if left untreated, can be deadly. In the last instance, in 2003, Florida officials reported a small outbreak of at least seven people in Palm Beach.

An Anopheles stephensi mosquito, which can carry the malaria parasite. (credit: CDC)

A seventh person has been diagnosed with a locally acquired case of malaria in Florida's Sarasota County, state health officials reported this week.

The rare outbreak is now in its third month after authorities in the Sunshine State reported the first case in May. When Florida had identified four cases by late June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a health alert to clinicians calling locally acquired malaria cases in the US a "public health emergency."

Florida's outbreak and a single, unrelated case in Texas from June collectively mark the first time in two decades that the US has seen locally acquired malaria cases, which, if left untreated, can be deadly. In the last instance, in 2003, Florida officials reported a small outbreak of at least seven people in Palm Beach.

Enlarge / Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

Antitrust enforcers released a draft update outlining new rules today that officials say will make it easier to crack down on mergers and acquisitions that could substantially lessen competition in the US.

Now the public has 60 days to review the draft guidelines and submit comments to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) before the agencies' September 18 deadline. A fierce debate has already started between those in support and those who oppose the draft guidelines.

Over the next two months, the FTC hopes to gain widespread public support for what the FTC has positioned as commonsense updates as tech mergers have recently raised complex legal questions. In a press release, FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said that the merger guidelines "contain critical updates" and were "informed by thousands of public comments—spanning healthcare workers, farmers, patient advocates, musicians, and entrepreneurs."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

The protracted arms race between criminals who wage distributed denial-of-service attacks and the defenders who attempt to stop them continues, as the former embraces “alarming” new methods to make their online offensives more powerful and destructive, researchers from content-delivery network Cloudflare reported Wednesday.

With a global network spanning more than 300 cities in more than 100 countries around the world, Cloudflare has visibility into these types of attacks that’s shared by only a handful of other companies. The company said it delivers more than 63 million network requests per second and more than 2 trillion domain lookups per day during peak times. Among the services that Cloudflare provides is mitigation for the attacks, which are typically referred to by the abbreviation DDoS.

Alarming escalation

“In recent months, there's been an alarming escalation in the sophistication of DDoS attacks,” Cloudflare researchers Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco wrote Wednesday in a threat report that recaps highlights during the second quarter of this year. “And even the largest and most sophisticated attacks that we’ve seen may only last a few minutes or even seconds—which doesn’t give a human sufficient time to respond.”

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Ronald Martinez)

AT&T's legacy telephone network may have nearly 200,000 miles of lead-covered cables, according to an estimate by AT&T submitted in a court filing.

"Based on its records, AT&T estimates that lead-clad cables represent less than 10 percent of its copper footprint of roughly two million sheath miles of cable, the overwhelming majority of which remains in active service," AT&T wrote in a court filing yesterday in US District Court for the Eastern District of California. "More than two thirds of its lead-clad cabling is either buried or in conduit, followed by aerial cable, and with a very small portion running underwater. There are varying costs of installation, maintenance, and removal by cable type (aerial, buried, buried in conduit, underwater)."

Reacting to the court filing, financial analyst firm Raymond James & Associates wrote in a research note, "AT&T is telling us that the total exposure is 200,000 route miles or less." With about two-thirds of the lead cables either buried or installed inside conduit, "We believe the implication for AT&T's data is that the route miles that should be addressed most immediately is about 3.3 percent (or less)," the analyst firm wrote.

Enlarge / Most of the explanations for this phenomenon involve a neutron star, depicted above. These explanations are uniformly terrible. (credit: MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

On Wednesday, researchers announced the discovery of a new astronomical enigma. The new object, GPM J1839–10, behaves a bit like a pulsar, sending out regular bursts of radio energy. But the physics that drives pulsars means that they'd stop emitting if they slowed down too much, and almost every pulsar we know of blinks at least once per minute.

GPM J1839–10 takes 21 minutes between pulses. We have no idea what kind of physics or what kind of objects can power that.

A persistent transient

GPM J1839–10 was discovered in a search of the galactic plane for transient objects—something that's not there when you first look, but appears the next time you check. The typical explanation for a transient object is something like a supernova, where a major event gives something an immense boost in brightness. They're found at the radio end of the spectrum, fast radio bursts, but are also very brief and, so, fairly difficult to spot.