Month: September 2023

Enlarge / Scientists created this mosaic of asteroid Bennu using imagery collected by NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The asteroid spans about 1,600 feet (500 meters) across.

A NASA spacecraft will complete a round-trip journey to an asteroid this weekend, returning to Earth after a seven-year voyage to bring back unspoiled rock specimens from an alien world that could yield insights into the formation of life.

The landing Sunday at 8:55 am local time in Utah (10:55 am EDT or 14:55 UTC) will wrap up a round-trip journey of 4.4 billion miles (7.1 billion kilometers) for NASA's robotic OSIRIS-REx mission. The return will set into motion another sequence of tightly-choreographed events to secure the asteroid sample capsule, fly it halfway across the country to a NASA facility at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, then open it up to reveal the bounty inside.

"The spacecraft trajectory and performance have just been spot on," said Sandra Freund, OSIRIS-REx's program manager at Lockheed Martin, which built and operates the spacecraft on behalf of NASA. "We have just a few remaining steps before we have Bennu samples on the ground."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Apple has patched a potent chain of iOS zero-days that were used to infect the iPhone of an Egyptian presidential candidate with sophisticated spyware developed by a commercial exploit seller, Google and researchers from Citizen Lab said Friday.

The previously unknown vulnerabilities, which Apple patched on Thursday, were exploited in clickless attacks, meaning they didn’t require a target to take any steps other than to visit a website that used the HTTP protocol rather than the safer HTTPS alternative. A packet inspection device sitting on a cellular network in Egypt kept an eye out for connections from the phone of the targeted candidate and, when spotted, redirected it to a site that delivered the exploit chain, according to Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto’s Munk School.

A cast of villains, 3 0-days, and a compromised cell network

Citizen Lab said the attack was made possible by participation from the Egyptian government, spyware known as Predator sold by a company known as Cytrox, and hardware sold by Egypt-based Sandvine. The campaign targeted Ahmed Eltantawy, a former member of the Egyptian Parliament who announced he was running for president in March. Citizen Lab said the recent attacks were at least the third time Eltantawy’s iPhone has been attacked. One of them, in 2021, was successful and also installed Predator.

Enlarge / An intensive care nurse cares for a patient suffering from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), who is being ventilated in the children's intensive care unit of the Olga Hospital of the Stuttgart Clinic in Germany. (credit: Getty | picture alliance)

A Pfizer vaccine designed to protect newborns and infants from severe RSV illness won a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Friday—but only for seasonal use.

The vaccine is Pfizer’s bivalent RSVpreF vaccine, called Abrysvo, and is administered to pregnant people late in gestation, between 32 and 36 weeks.

RSV, or respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus, is the leading cause of hospitalization for infants in the US. Each year, 1.5 million children seek out-patient care for RSV, with 58,000 to 80,000 ending up in the hospital and 100 to 300 tragically dying from the infection.

Enlarge (credit: Unity)

Unity executive Marc Whitten tells Ars the company has learned a lot over the last week. (credit: LinkedIn)

"It's been a very feedback-giving week for Unity," Whitten told Ars, possibly the biggest understatement he made during an interview accompanying the new, scaled-back fee structure plans the company announced today. "There was a lot more [feedback than we expected] for sure... I think that feedback has made us better, even though it has sometimes been difficult."

But Whitten was also quick to find the bright side of the tsunami of backlash that came Unity's way in the week since the company announced its (now outdated) plans for per-install fees of up to $0.20 on all Unity games starting in 2024. That's because that anger reflected "the extraordinary passion that our community has for their craft, their livelihoods, and their tools, including Unity," Whitten said. "When Unity disappoints them, in a way where they're overly surprised or whatever, they give very, very critical feedback. I don't love hearing every single one of those pieces of feedback—sometimes they can be pretty pointed—but I love that that passion exists."

Enlarge / The Pixel 7 Pro camera layout. Between the first two lenses, you can make out sensors for laser autofocus and a color sensor.

Here's a fun new use for your Android phone: A PC webcam! In the latest Android beta, plugging a phone into a PC will reveal a new option in the USB Preferences menu for webcam functionality. Just pick that option instead of the default "file transfer," and the phone camera will register itself as a webcam. Then you can fire up Zoom and start video calling.

The Android build with this feature is "Android 14 QPR1 Beta 1." Android's getting confusing with all these overlapping betas, but the current stable version is still Android 13. Android 14, currently on its 10th beta/developer preview, will most likely be out alongside the Pixel 8 in October. Android 14 QPR1 is the quarterly release after the first stable build of Android 14, and it should be out around December. (QPR stands for quarterly platform release.) These happen between major releases, often marketed as "feature drops." Right now, Android 13 is technically "Android 13 QPR3."

Android's 14 QPR1's webcam settings. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Android is technically copying this feature from iOS. In Apple land, this is called the "Continuity Camera," and will work wirelessly between an iPhone and a Mac, which is pretty cool. As usual, the Android version is much more flexible since the feature presents as a generic USB webcam. It should work on almost everything, like Windows, Mac, Chrome OS, and probably Linux. You can even plug an Android phone into another Android phone and use the first phone's camera as the webcam for the second phone.