Month: October 2023

Enlarge / One of the final components added to the Europa Clipper spacecraft was the high-gain antenna, seen here during installation in August. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—The launch window for one of the most expensive robotic space missions in NASA's history opens one year from Tuesday. Coming in at $5 billion, Europa Clipper will try to help scientists answer a bold question commensurate with its eye-popping cost: Are there places below the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, that could support life?

Europa is slightly smaller than Earth's Moon, and is significantly more interesting to scientists searching for life. The icy world harbors a vast global ocean of liquid water underneath a frozen crust. Clipper will sail past Europa nearly 50 times, coming as close as 16 miles (25 kilometers) from its icy surface to interrogate the moon with a sophisticated suite of nine instruments.

Jordan Evans, who leads the team developing Europa Clipper at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told Ars on Tuesday the mission is on track to depart for Jupiter during a 21-day planetary launch window opening on October 10, 2024.

Enlarge / An AI-generated vector graphic of a barbarian and a landscape generated with Adobe Illustrator. (credit: Benj Edwards / Adobe)

On Tuesday, Adobe announced major updates to AI image synthesis features across several products, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Adobe Express. The updates include three new generative AI models—Firefly 2, Firefly Design Model, and Firefly Vector Model—which improve its previous offerings and add new capabilities. With the vector model, Adobe is notably launching its first text-to-vector AI image generator.

It's been a busy year for generative AI, and Adobe has not been content to sit it out. In March, the graphic design software giant debuted its text-to-image synthesis model called Firefly, which it billed as an ethical alternative to Stable Diffusion and Midjourney due to being trained on Adobe Stock imagery only. Firefly can generate novel images based on text descriptions called prompts (i.e., "a scenic vista" or "a beefy-looking barbarian"). The company later brought the technology to Photoshop and web apps, and promised to cover any legal bills that might arise from copyright claims against artwork generated with its tools.

Now, Adobe is extending its reach with a wave of new generative AI features. Adobe's Firefly Image 2 model is an update to its original Firefly AI image generator, which powers Photoshop features like Generative Fill. Adobe claims this new version offers improved image quality, particularly in areas like foliage, skin texture, and facial features. In addition to these enhancements, the Firefly Image 2 model introduces AI-driven editing capabilities that can adjust various photo settings like depth of field and motion blur. A new "Prompt Guidance" feature also aids users in refining the wording of their text descriptions and automatically completes prompts to boost efficiency.

Enlarge / Caroline Ellison, former CEO of Alameda Research, arrives at court in New York on Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Caroline Ellison, the former Alameda Research CEO who dated Sam Bankman-Fried, testified against her former partner today in his criminal trial. "In the trial's second week, Ellison said she committed fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering along with Bankman-Fried and others," the Associated Press reported.

"He was originally the CEO of Alameda and the owner of Alameda and he directed me to commit these crimes," Ellison said today, according to a Bloomberg article. She added that "Alameda took several billion dollars from FTX customers and used it for its own investments" and to pay off lenders.

Ellison's testimony began shortly before the court took a break for a lunch. The trial is in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, located in Manhattan.

Enlarge / A Google-created splash image on the passkey theme. (credit: Google)

Google is taking a big step toward making passkeys the default login option for its users. Starting today, users logging in to personal Google accounts will be prompted to create and use passkeys instead of passwords when possible. (Passwords will still be used in some contexts where they are not yet supported.)

Built on the WebAuthn standard, passkeys seek to replace passwords by leaning on your local device's authentication method, like biometrics or a PIN. We've published a couple of articles explaining passkeys in detail and answering common questions about them, but the very short explanation is that your operating system creates a unique, local pair of keys to match your account for a website, service, or application. One key is on the server, but the other (the one you need to sign in) is local.

Here's how Google describes them:

Enlarge / A MacBook Pro running a game, a scenario that is technically possible but practically rare. (credit: Apple)

For the last two years, Apple has been working to make Mac gaming a thing. Expanded gamepad support, a new version of the Metal graphics API, and a low-latency Game Mode are among the gaming improvements added to recent versions of macOS.

But despite a handful of high-profile ports like No Man’s Sky or Resident Evil Village, Mac gaming is still stuck in the cul-de-sac that it has always been stuck in: There aren’t a lot of high-profile games, so there aren’t many gamers who choose macOS, so there isn’t a lot of interest in developing high-profile games.

That cycle played out again in Valve’s recent Counter-Strike 2 update, which removed the Mac support already present in the outgoing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Today a Valve support document for CS2 confirmed that Mac support had been removed and wasn’t likely to be re-added, along with support for ancient DirectX 9-class GPU hardware and legacy 32-bit operating systems.

Enlarge / The Pyramid of Sahura in Abusir, Egypt. (credit: Mohamed Ismail Khaled)

Over a century after a British archaeologist noted a blocked passageway in the ruins of Sahura's Pyramid in Egypt and suggested it might lead to additional rooms, a team of Egyptian and German archaeologists have cleared out that passageway to prove the archaeologist right. They discovered several previously undocumented storage rooms and used 3D laser scanning to produce a map of the interior, shedding additional light on the structure's architecture.

Sahura ("He who is close to Re") was the second ruler of Egypt's Fifth Dynasty and reigned for roughly 13 years in the early 25th century BCE. Egyptologists believe he was the son of the first Fifth Dynasty founder, Userkaf, and Queen Neferhetepes II. When the time came for Sahura to build his pyramid complex, he chose to do so at a site called Abusir instead of Saqqara or Giza, where prior pharaohs had constructed their edifices. Archaeologists have suggested this might have been because Userkaf had built a sun temple at Abusir. Regardless, Sahura started a new trend: Abusir became the main acropolis for three other pharaohs of the early Fifth Dynasty.

The decorative carved reliefs of Sahura's Pyramid are widely considered to be unparalleled in Egyptian art, and the architectural design was a milestone in its use of palmiform columns, among other innovations; it became a template for subsequent pyramid/temple complexes in the Old Kingdom. The pyramid was smaller than the great monuments at Giza and Saqqara and more cheaply constructed, indicative of the decline in pyramid building in Egypt. For instance, the inner core was made of roughly hewn stones packed with a fill of limestone chips, pottery shards, and sand, held together with a thick clay mortar; only the outer casing was built with high-quality limestone. It might have made the pyramid faster and cheaper to build, but it also meant the pyramid deteriorated more over time.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

Facebook may have to overhaul its entire ad-targeting system after a California court ruled last month that the platform's practice of routinely targeting ads by age, gender, and other protected categories violates a state anti-discrimination law.

The decision came after a 48-year-old Facebook user, Samantha Liapes, fought for years to prove that Facebook had discriminated against her as an older woman using the platform's ad-targeting system to shop for life insurance policies.

Liapes filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook in 2020. In her complaint, Liapes alleged that "Facebook requires all advertisers to choose the age and gender of its users who will receive ads, and companies offering insurance products routinely tell it to not send their ads to women or older people." Further, she alleged that Facebook’s ad-delivery algorithm magnifies the problem by using these required inputs to serve the ads to "lookalike audiences." Through its algorithm, Liapes alleged that she found that Facebook "discriminates against women and older people," by intentionally excluding them from seeing certain life insurance ads.