Month: October 2023

Enlarge / This view from an international volcano monitoring system shows the Kolumbo volcanic crater on the seafloor. (credit: SANTORY )

In 1650 CE, the Greek island of Santorini was devastated by the eruption of an underwater volcano called Kolumbo. People first noticed the water boiling and changing color and a cone poking out of the surface of the sea. Next came ejected glowing rocks, fire and lightning, fumes of thick smoke, falling pumice and ash, earthquakes, and a powerful tsunami with waves as high as 20 meters. All this eruptive activity killed around 70 people and hundreds of cattle.

These details are based on contemporary accounts compiled by French geologist Ferdinand A. Fouqué in 1879. A team of German and Greek scientists has now combined that historical knowledge with 3D seismic mapping and computer simulations to determine why the volcano's violent eruption triggered a tsunami. According to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the tsunami resulted from a landslide followed by the volcanic explosion.

Located some 8 kilometers northeast of Santorini, Kolumbo also erupted around 1630 BCE with catastrophic consequences for ancient Minoan culture. Today, the volcano boasts sulfide-sulfate hydrothermal vents that are home to some rare species of microorganisms typically not found elsewhere near hydrothermal vents. And it remains active and potentially dangerous: A previously unknown magma chamber was discovered last year and is growing at a rate of around 4 million cubic meters per year. At that rate, the chamber will reach the same volume as the amount of magma ejected in the 1650 eruption within the next 150 years.

Enlarge / Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president at Google (where he is responsible for Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products), speaks during a 2018 event. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

On Friday, Google started defending its search business during the Justice Department's monopoly trial. Among the first witnesses called was Google's senior vice president responsible for search, Prabhakar Raghavan, who testified that Google's default agreements with makers of popular mobile phones and web browsers were "the company’s biggest cost" in 2021, Bloomberg Law reported.

Raghavan's testimony for the first time revealed that Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021 for default agreements, seemingly investing in default status for its search engine while raking in $146.4 billion in revenue from search advertising that year. Those numbers had increased "significantly" since 2014, Big Tech on Trial reported, when Google's search ad revenue was approximately 46 billion and traffic acquisition cost was approximately $7.1 billion.

Prior to Raghavan's testimony, Google had been carefully guarding this information. According to Bloomberg, Judge Amit Mehta overruled Google's objections to revealing the numbers, despite Google's claims that such transparency could harm future deals.

Enlarge / The Apple Watch Series 6. (credit: Apple)

The Apple Watch violates patents owned by California-based Masimo, the US International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled on Thursday [PDF]. The federal agency issued a limited exclusion order for the smartwatches, meaning the Apple Watch is in jeopardy of an import ban.

The ITC's ruling upholds a January ruling that found that the Apple Watch infringed on a Masimo patent. The exclusion period recommended on Thursday is supposed to go into effect after 60 days, during which time President Joe Biden can overturn the ruling. Biden previously declined to veto an ITC ruling that found the Apple Watch violated patents of a different company, AliveCor.

The debate is over Masimo's light-based pulse oximetry. The ITC's ruling doesn't specify which watches are affected. But the first Apple Watch to feature blood oxygen monitoring was the Apple Watch Series 6, which came out in 2020.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Android 14 has a nasty storage bug that seems to be affecting users of the "multiple profiles" feature. The bug is about as bad as you can get, with users having "unusable" devices due to getting locked out of device storage. A few users are likening the experience to getting hit with "ransomware."

Earlier reports had this bug limited to the Pixel 6, but Google seemed to ignore those reports, and now with a wider rollout, this does not seem device-specific. Everything upgrading to Android 14 this early seems to be affected: Pixel 6, 6a, 7, 7a, Pixel Fold, and Pixel Tablet.

The Google issue tracker for this is now up to over 350 replies and has had no response from Google. The bug is languishing at only the medium "P2" priority (P0 is the highest) and remains "unassigned," meaning, assuming the tracker is up to date, no one is looking into it.

Enlarge / Joaquin Phoenix talking with AI in Her (2013). (credit: Warner Bros.)

In 2013, Spike Jonze's Her imagined a world where humans form deep emotional connections with AI, challenging perceptions of love and loneliness. Ten years later, thanks to ChatGPT's recently added voice features, people are playing out a small slice of Her in reality, having hours-long discussions with the AI assistant on the go.

In 2016, we put Her on our list of top sci-fi films of all time, and it also made our top films of the 2010s list. In the film, Joaquin Phoenix's character falls in love with an AI personality called Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and he spends much of the film walking through life, talking to her through wireless earbuds reminiscent of Apple AirPods, which launched in 2016. In reality, ChatGPT isn't as situationally aware as Samantha was in the film, and OpenAI has done enough conditioning on ChatGPT to keep conversations from getting too intimate or personal. But that hasn't stopped people from having long talks with the AI assistant to pass the time.

Last week, we related a story in which AI researcher Simon Willison spent hours talking to ChatGPT. "I had an hourlong conversation while walking my dog the other day," he told Ars for that report. "At one point, I thought I'd turned it off, and I saw a pelican, and I said to my dog, 'Oh, wow, a pelican!' And my AirPod went, 'A pelican, huh? That's so exciting for you! What's it doing?' I've never felt so deeply like I'm living out the first ten minutes of some dystopian sci-fi movie."

Enlarge / This is the Freightliner Super Truck II, the result of Daimler Trucks North America's work partly funded by the Department of Energy. (credit: Daimler Trucks NA)

In America, we move most of our stuff by road—trucks carried almost five times as much cargo as trains in 2017, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. While it's true that personal vehicles contribute the majority of our transport-related carbon emissions, a quarter still comes from bigger trucks and buses. When it comes to the biggest trucks on our roads—the Class 8 trucks that can pull up to 80,000 lbs (36.2 tonnes)—there's a lot of room for improvement, which is where Super Truck II comes in. The Department of Energy funded a challenge to double the efficiency of 18-wheeler trucks, and the big machine you see in the photos here is Freightliner's response.

In fact, the story dates back to 2010 and the first DoE Super Truck program, which eventually funded four truck makers (including Daimler Trucks, which owns Freightliner) to develop a heavy truck with 50 percent better efficiency than anything then in production.

Super Truck II got going in 2017, a couple of years after the end of the first program. Having already demonstrated that big efficiency savings were possible, Super Truck II has been about developing them into something production-ready.

Enlarge (credit: MANDEL NGAN / Contributor | AFP)

One year into Elon Musk's ownership of X, the finances of the platform formerly known as Twitter remain shaky. But the ongoing money troubles haven't stopped Musk from forging ahead with his plan to turn X into a bank, a move he said last November would be key to helping the platform avoid bankruptcy. On an earnings call yesterday, Musk told X employees that he predicts X's payments system will launch by the end of 2024, The Verge reported.

“It would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year,” Musk said, confirming that “when I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life. If it involves money, it’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So it’s not just like 'send $20 to my friend.' I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”

In January, Musk took his first steps toward this ambitious goal by registering Twitter Payments LLC with the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. This was a necessary step for Twitter to start transmitting money between users in all states and US territories, and according to The Verge, Musk confirmed that he expects to get the rest of the money-transmitting licenses "in the next few months."