Month: September 2023

Enlarge / Tablets of ivermectin. (credit: Getty | Nurphoto)

A panel of conservative judges has revived a lawsuit over the Food and Drug Administration's statements about the anti-parasitic and de-worming drug ivermectin—statements meant to clarify that the drug is not effective against COVID-19 and that formulations for animals, including livestock, are not safe for use in humans.

After the FDA received reports of people being hospitalized from taking livestock ivermectin, one of the agency's particularly viral posts began: "You are not a horse."

The lawsuit over the posts comes from three doctors, all of whom have faced charges and/or discipline from their respective state medical boards and employers over the ivermectin prescribing. The disgraced trio argue that the FDA's statements interfered with their ability to prescribe the antiparasitic drug to COVID-19 patients—including some patients the doctors had never actually examined, according to allegations by state medical boards.

Enlarge / A US Army soldier lifts the hydraulic launching system on the new Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) during Operation Thunderbolt Strike at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on March 3. (credit: Spc. Chandler Coats, US Army)

Airspace and maritime navigation warnings released to pilots and mariners suggest the US military might launch a hypersonic missile this week on a test flight from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

This test could be one of the final milestones before the US Army fields the nation's first ground-based hypersonic weapon, which is more maneuverable and more difficult for an enemy to track and destroy than a conventional ballistic missile. Russia has used hypersonic in combat against Ukraine, and US defense officials have labeled China as the world's leader in emerging hypersonic missile technology.

That has left the US military playing catch-up, and the Army is on the cusp of having its first ground-based hypersonic missiles ready for active duty. If informed speculation is correct, the test launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station this week—performed in partnership between the Army and the Navy—could be a full-scale test of the new solid-fueled hypersonic missile to propel a hypersonic glide vehicle to high speeds over the Atlantic Ocean.

Enlarge / Look around this image and you'll know fairly quickly whether a Strong Museum visit is worth your time or not. (credit: Strong Museum of Play)

Most of my friends in upstate New York, when trying to entice me into a return visit, send pictures of chicken wings, summer days at human-tolerable temperatures, or houses that don't cost more than their parents might have made in their lifetimes.

Recently, however, a friend sent a picture that had me idly checking my vacation balance for the fall: a framed prototype chip for the home version of Pong. It was given as a gift to original programmer Al Alcorn, and it now lives at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester.

Alcorn, who made the game that would establish video games as a training exercise, fought terrifically with Atari founder Nolan Bushnell over the at-home version of Pong and the custom chip required to make it work on TV-ready hardware. After the home version hit Sears in time for the 1975 US holiday season, the chip was given to Alcorn as a gift. And now I must be in its presence.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Authentication service Okta said four of its customers have been hit in a recent social-engineering campaign that allowed hackers to gain control of super administrator accounts and from there weaken or entirely remove two-factor authentication protecting accounts from unauthorized access.

The Okta super administrator accounts are assigned to users with the highest permissions inside an organization using Okta’s service. In recent weeks, Okta customers’ IT desk personnel have received calls that follow a consistent pattern of social engineering, in which attackers pose as a company insider in an attempt to trick workers into divulging passwords or doing other dangerous things. The attackers in this case call service desk personnel and attempt to convince them to reset all multi-factor authentication factors assigned to super administrators or other highly privileged users, Okta said recently.

Two-factor authentication and multi-factor authentication, usually abbreviated as 2FA and MFA, require a biometric, possession of a physical security key, or knowledge of a one-time password in addition to a normally used password to access an account.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

A prominent anti-vaccine activist, Joseph Mercola, yesterday lost a lawsuit attempting to force YouTube to provide access to videos that were removed from the platform after YouTube banned his channels.

Mercola had tried to argue that YouTube owed him more than $75,000 in damages for breaching its own user contract and denying him access to his videos. However, in an order dismissing Mercola's complaint, US magistrate judge Laurel Beeler wrote that according to the contract Mercola signed, YouTube was "under no obligation to host" Mercola's content after terminating his channel in 2021 "for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines by posting medical misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines."

"The court found no breach because 'there is no provision in the Terms of Service that requires YouTube to maintain particular content' or be a 'storage site for users’ content,'" Beeler wrote.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Last week, Gizmodo parent company G/O Media fired the staff of its Spanish-language site Gizmodo en Español and began to replace their work with AI translations of English-language articles, reports The Verge.

Former Gizmodo writer Matías S. Zavia publicly mentioned the layoffs, which took place via video call on August 29, in a social media post. On August 31, Zavia wrote, "Hello friends. On Tuesday they shut down @GizmodoES to turn it into a translation self-publisher (an AI took my job, literally)."

Previously, Gizmodo en Español had a small but dedicated team who wrote original content tailored specifically for Spanish-speaking readers, as well as producing translations of Gizmodo's English articles. The site represented Gizmodo's first foray into international markets when it launched in 2012 after being acquired from Guanabee.

Enlarge / Everyday witch Samantha Stephens and the rest of the Bewitched crew. (credit: Sony)

A nonprofit that preserves classic television videos may have its YouTube channel shut down tomorrow over copyright claims for Bewitched episodes that originally aired in the 1960s.

The Museum of Classic Chicago Television has about 5,000 videos, including many decades-old commercials and news shows, posted on its YouTube channel and its own Fuzzy Memories website. President and chief curator Rick Klein's "quest to save vintage Chicago TV shows and commercials" was featured in a WBEZ story two years ago.

But after 16 years of Klein and his group, who rely on donors and volunteers, archiving old videos, the TV museum's YouTube channel on August 30 received six copyright strikes for posting 27 Bewitched episodes owned by Sony Pictures Television. Copyright complaints were sent by MarkScan, a "digital asset protection" firm that content owners hire to enforce copyrights. MarkScan has been sending copyright complaints on Sony's behalf since at least 2014.

Nvidia graphics card owners can rest easy; Starfield modders have already added support for Nvidia's Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS) technology (alongside the game's official support for AMD's FSR2 upscaling). But unlocking the full power of that mod will require either paying for a Patreon subscription or using cracks to get around some controversial DRM protecting the most full-featured version of the mod.

Since its initial release on Friday, the "Starfield Upscaler" is currently the most popular Starfield mod listed on clearinghouse NexusMods. That should be welcome news to a significant portion of the PC gaming community running a newer Nvidia GPU that supports the frame-rate-enhancing upscaling technology. That's especially true for the Nvidia owners who were outraged when Bethesda announced an official Starfield partnership with AMD this summer.

In practice, though, the practical effect of that DLSS support might be hard to notice for many players. In Ars' testing on a GTX 2080 Ti gaming rig (running at 2560×1440 resolution, Ultra quality, and 50 percent render resolution), we were able to hit 35 frames per second using both the DLSS mod and the game's built-in AMD FSR2 support (which also works on Nvidia cards). Neither upscaling technology had an apparent performance edge, even as both improved significantly on the ~25 fps frame rate when running at full resolution without any upscaling (and even as DLSS has shown superior visual quality in other tests).