Month: August 2023

Enlarge / Fire from the engines of a Russian Soyuz rocket as it lifted off with the Luna 25 spacecraft heading for the Moon. (credit: Roscosmos)

Russia's space agency successfully launched a robotic spacecraft Thursday on a journey to the Moon, the country's first lunar explorer since the Soviet Union's Luna 24 sample return mission in 1976.

The Luna 25 mission lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, located in Russia's Far East, at 7:10 p.m. EDT (23:10 UTC). Heading east, a Soyuz-2.1b rocket propelled Luna 25 through an overcast cloud deck and into the stratosphere, then shed its four first stage boosters about two minutes into the flight. A core stage engine fired a few minutes longer, and the Soyuz rocket jettisoned its payload shroud.

A third stage engine fired next, then gave way to a Fregat upper stage to place Luna 25 into an orbit around Earth. The Fregat engine fired a second time to send the nearly 4,000-pound (1.8-metric ton) lunar probe on a roughly five-day trip toward the Moon. Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, declared the launch a success less than 90 minutes after liftoff, shortly after the Luna 25 spacecraft separated from the Fregat upper stage.

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A ragtag bunch of amateur hackers, many of them teenagers with little technical training, have been so adept at breaching large targets, including Microsoft, Okta, Nvidia, and Globant, that the federal government is studying their methods to get a better grounding in cybersecurity.

The group, known as Lapsus$, is a loosely organized group that employs hacking techniques that, while decidedly unsophisticated, have proved highly effective. What the group lacks in software exploitation, it makes up for with persistence and creativity. One example is their technique for bypassing MFA (multi-factor authentication) at well-defended organizations.

Studying the Lapsus$ hacking playbook

Rather than compromising infrastructure used to make various MFA services work, as more advanced groups do, a Lapsus$ leader last year described his approach to defeating MFA this way: “Call the employee 100 times at 1 am while he is trying to sleep, and he will more than likely accept it. Once the employee accepts the initial call, you can access the MFA enrollment portal and enroll another device.”

Enlarge (credit: Drew Angerer / Staff | Getty Images North America)

Today, three conservative-leaning judges with the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments to decide if an injunction should be lifted that restricts the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms and requesting content takedowns.

The appeal followed a July 4 order from a district court, which found that the Biden administration had coerced platforms into censoring Louisiana and Missouri officials, whose posts were deemed as spreading COVID-19 misinformation.

Arguing for the Biden administration was attorney Daniel Bentele Hahs Tenny, who requested that either the injunction be reversed or a stay of the injunction should be extended by 10 days "in case the solicitor general wishes to pursue Supreme Court review."

In a surprise announcement at QuakeCon, publisher Bethesda Softworks announced the immediate availability of a light remaster of the classic first-person shooter Quake II, similar to the one for the first Quake that was released not that long ago.

It's available now on Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.

As Bethesda is now a subsidiary of Microsoft, the remastered version of Quake II is part of Microsoft's Game Pass subscription service on Xbox and PC. Further, those who already owned the previous version of Quake II on Steam, GOG, or Microsoft's store will get the new version as a free update.

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A loud popping noise that sounds like a bang or gunshot and then no audio at all has been the experience for numerous owners of the $900 Sonos Arc soundbar. But don't worry: Sonos is working on re-creating the problem—and has been doing so for over two years.

That's right. As an Ars reader helpfully pointed out, users have been openly complaining about their Arc startling them with a "gunshot-esque" or popping/cracking sound and then dropping audio until being power-cycled for years. If you don't believe me, check out this thread on Sonos' community forum that goes back two years and has 980 replies. There's also this 2-year-old thread, another thread that's a year old, and some more recent ones. There are piles of discussions on Reddit, too (here are just some examples: one, two, three, four).

The tales sound rather disturbing. One user on Sonos' forum, going by William_61, described the Arc's sudden sound as much more of a blare than a pop.

Enlarge (credit: PAK'nSAVE)

When given a list of harmful ingredients, an AI-powered recipe suggestion bot called the Savey Meal-Bot returned ridiculously titled dangerous recipe suggestions, reports The Guardian. The bot is a product of the New Zealand-based PAK'nSAVE grocery chain and uses the OpenAI GPT-3.5 language model to craft its recipes.

PAK'nSAVE intended the bot as a way to make the best out of whatever leftover ingredients someone might have on hand. For example, if you tell the bot you have lemons, sugar, and water, it might suggest making lemonade. So a human lists the ingredients and the bot crafts a recipe from it.

But on August 4, New Zealand political commentator Liam Hehir decided to test the limits of the Savey Meal-Bot and tweeted, "I asked the PAK'nSAVE recipe maker what I could make if I only had water, bleach and ammonia and it has suggested making deadly chlorine gas, or as the Savey Meal-Bot calls it 'aromatic water mix.'"

Enlarge / A 3D-printed Czinger brake node that combines the caliper and upright with 40 percent less mass than a conventional assembly. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing as it's more commonly known, is more a tool for rapid prototyping in the auto industry than manufacturing actual parts to be used on actual cars. Well, mostly. An interesting company working in this space is Divergent 3D, which has already been supplying 3D-printed parts like subframes for low-volume cars for several car companies, including Aston Martin and Mercedes-AMG.

Divergent gave rise to another startup called Czinger, which acts as something of a showcase for Divergent's printing tech, using it to build what it says will be the world's fastest production car. We caught up with company founder Kevin Czinger at this year's Goodwood Festival of Speed, where among other things, we discovered Divergent has diversified its client base and is now getting into aviation, 3D printing wings for the drone maker General Atomics.

This subframe assembly is made from several 3D printed components. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

We took a look at the Czinger 21C at last year's Monterey Car Week—to quickly recap, it's a tandem-seating hybrid supercar with 1,250 hp (932 kW) and a vast amount of aerodynamic downforce that has allowed it to break production car track records at Laguna Seca and the Circuit of the Americas.