Month: August 2023

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

Amazon ships more than a million packages daily, but there's at least one person in a million who frowns when she encounters a smiling box placed on her doorstep.

A Canadian woman, Anca Nitu, told CBC that over the past two months, more than 50 packages have arrived at her home. Each package contained a return slip and a pair of shoes from an Amazon buyer located in North America who wrongly shipped their rejected shoes to Nitu's address.

Nitu thinks she knows what's happening. She believes that Amazon sellers stole her information from a dormant Amazon account and are using her name and home address as an easy way to get rid of unwanted return items that sellers either cannot afford to store or do not wish to store. The Better Business Bureau (BBB) told CBC that it sounded like a vendor-return scheme that's common in the US but rarer in Canada, where foreign sellers dodge fees associated with storing and shipping return items by sending the items anywhere but their own addresses.

Enlarge / There are some energies you should not tap for sorcery, something both Hogwarts students and Hogwarts Legacy installs running under Linux should know. (credit: Warner Bros. Games)

Linux gaming's march toward being a real, actual thing has taken serious strides lately, due in large part to Valve's Proton-powered Steam Play efforts. Being Linux, there are still some quirks to figure out. One of them involves games trying to make use of Intel's upscaling tools.

Intel's ARC series GPUs are interesting, in many senses of the word. They offer the best implementation of Intel's image reconstruction system, XeSS, similar to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR. XeSS, like its counterparts, utilizes machine learning to fill in the pixel gaps on anti-aliased objects and scenes. The results are sometimes clear, sometimes a bit fuzzy if you pay close attention. In our review of Intel's A770 and A750 GPUs in late 2022, we noted that cross-compatibility between all three systems could be in the works.

That kind of easy-swap function is not the case when a game is running on a customized version of the WINE Windows-on-Linux, translating Direct3D graphics calls to Vulkan and prodding to see whether it, too, can make use of Intel's graphics boost. As noted by Phoronix, Intel developers contributing to the open source Mesa graphics project added the ability to hide an Intel GPU from the Vulkan Linux driver.

Enlarge / GM President Mark Reuss introduced the new Cadillac Escalade IQ on Wednesday morning in Manhattan. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

NEW YORK—If you're not a fan of the embiggification of American cars, perhaps look away now. Today in New York, Cadillac took the wraps off its next electric vehicle, and it's a large one—a fully electric version of the Escalade. Called the Escalade IQ, Cadillac has gone all-out, fitting this one with a monster battery that stores enough energy to propel this behemoth 450 miles (724 km) before it needs plugging in.

The Escalade IQ isn't just a big battery and some electric motors shoehorned into the internal combustion version that we tested in 2020. It's a clean-sheet design that uses GM's new Ultium battery platform and, in this case, the company's  architecture shared by the forthcoming Chevrolet Silverado EV, among others.

LEDs replace a physical front grille. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

It's an imposing thing, with a high bluff nose, which is so unfortunately on-trend right now, and frankly enormous 24-inch wheels. It's actually even bigger than the gas-powered Escalade, at 224.3 inches (5,697 mm) long, 85.3 inches (2,167 mm) wide, and 76.1 inches (1,934 mm) tall, with a 136.2-inch (3,460 mm) wheelbase.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Researchers have discovered a suite of vulnerabilities that largely break a next-generation protocol that was designed to prevent the hacking of access control systems used at secure facilities on US military bases and buildings belonging to federal, state, and local governments and private organizations.

The next-generation mechanism, known as Secure Channel, was added about 10 years ago to an open standard known as OSDP, short for the Open Supervised Device Protocol. Like an earlier protocol, known as Wiegand, OSDP provides a framework for connecting card readers, fingerprint scanners, and other types of peripheral devices to control panels that check the collected credentials against a database of valid personnel. When credentials match, the control panel sends a message that opens a door, gate, or other entry system.

Broken before getting out the gate

OSDP came about in the aftermath of an attack demonstrated in 2008 at the BlackHat security conference. In a talk there, researcher Zac Franken demonstrated a device dubbed Gecko, which was no bigger than a US quarter. When surreptitiously inserted by a would-be intruder into the wiring behind a peripheral device, Gecko performed an adversary-in-the-middle attack that monitors all communications sent to and from the control panel.

Enlarge / Elkhorn coral fragments rescued from overheating ocean nurseries sit in cooler water at Keys Marine Laboratory. (credit: NOAA)

Armed with scrub brushes, young scuba divers took to the waters of Florida’s Alligator Reef in late July to try to help corals struggling to survive 2023’s extraordinary marine heat wave. They carefully scraped away harmful algae and predators impinging on staghorn fragments, under the supervision and training of interns from Islamorada Conservation and Restoration Education, or I.CARE.

Normally, I.CARE’s volunteer divers would be transplanting corals to waters off the Florida Keys this time of year, as part of a national effort to restore the Florida Reef. But this year, everything is going in reverse.

As water temperatures spiked in the Florida Keys, scientists from universities, coral reef restoration groups, and government agencies launched a heroic effort to save the corals. Divers have been in the water every day, collecting thousands of corals from ocean nurseries along the Florida Keys reef tract and moving them to cooler water and into giant tanks on land.