Month: November 2023

Enlarge / If it were me, I would simply not burrow my way directly to where all the creatures are gaining levels as fast as my gold allows them. But I'm not full of grog and adventuring spirit. (credit: EA/KeeperFX)

In an interview about The Making of Karateka, a wonderful interactive documentary and game-about-a-game, Chris Kohler of Digital Eclipse notes that, based on the company's data, people don't actually play the games inside "classics" collections. Maybe they spend 5 minutes inside a few games they remember, but that's about it. Presenting classic games, exactly as they were when they arrived, can be historically important but often falls short of real engagement.

That's why it's a thrill to see (as first spotted by PC Gamer) a triumphant 1.0 release from KeeperFX, an open source "remake and fan expansion" of Dungeon Keeper, the 1997 Bullfrog strategy game that had players take on the other side of a dungeon crawl. The project had already, over 15 years, carried the game quite far, giving it modern Windows support, hi-res support, and loads of bugfixes and quality-of-life improvements. Now, says the team, all the original code from the original executable has been rewritten, freeing them up to change whatever they want in the future. There can be more than 2,048 "things" on the map, maps can have more than 85 square tiles, and scripting and mods can go much further.

But take note: "Ownership of the original game is still and will always be required for copyright reasons." You can, like I did earlier today, rectify that with a $6 GOG purchase, at least while it's on sale today. After downloading KeeperFX, you unpack it, run its launcher, point it to where you've installed the original Dungeon Keeper, and launch it. And then you get ready to click.

Enlarge / The Nothing Phone 2 all lit up. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Can an Android OEM really just hack its way into Apple's iMessage? That is the hard-to-believe plan from upstart phone manufacturer "Nothing," which says the new "Nothing Chats" will allow users to use "iMessage on Android" complete with a blue bubble sent to all their iPhone friends.

Nothing Chat will be powered by Sunbird, an app developer that has claimed to be able to send iMessage chats for about a year now, with no public launch. According to a Washington Post article with quotes from the CEOs of Nothing and Sunbird, Nothing will "start" rolling out "an early version" of Nothing Chats with iMessage compatibility on Friday. The only catch, supposedly, is that you'll need a Nothing Phone 2.

Is this for real or a publicity stunt? Apple is on record saying that iMessage on Android would only serve to weaken Apple, and it doesn't want to do that. Surely, any Android OEM offering "iMessage" support would immediately have the project shut down by Apple.

Enlarge / Eight images used in the study; four of them are synthetic. Can you tell which ones? (Answers at bottom of the article.) (credit: Nightingale and Farid (2022))

A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science on Monday found that AI-generated faces, particularly those representing white individuals, were perceived as more real than actual face photographs, reports The Guardian. The finding did not extend to images of people of color, likely due to AI models being trained predominantly on images of white individuals—a common bias that is well-known in machine learning research.

In the paper titled "AI Hyperrealism: Why AI Faces Are Perceived as More Real Than Human Ones," researchers from Australian National University, the University of Toronto, University of Aberdeen, and University College London coined the term in the paper's title, hyperrealism, which they define as a phenomenon where people think AI-generated faces are more real than actual human faces.

In their experiments, the researchers presented white adults with a mix of 100 AI-generated and 100 real white faces, asking them to identify which were real and their confidence in their decision. Out of 124 participants, 66 percent of AI images were identified as human, compared to 51 percent for real images. This trend, however, was not observed in images of people of color, where both AI and real faces were judged as human about 51 percent of the time, irrespective of the participant's race.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

On Tuesday, Google ended two and a half weeks of defending its search business against the Department of Justice's monopoly claims, reportedly with a whimper.

During the DOJ's cross-examination of Google's final witness, Kevin Murphy, the economist got "upset" when the DOJ introduced a 2011 email from an ex-Google executive, Chris Barton, which suggested that Google's default search agreements with wireless carriers, mobile device manufacturers, and browser partners had to be "exclusive," Big Tech on Trial reported, or else they were worthless.

"Without the exclusivity, we are not getting anything," Barton's email said. "Without an exclusive search deal, a large carrier can and will ship alternatives to Google."

Enlarge / Experiments yield fresh evidence to support controversial hypothesis about the formation of the Great Sphinx of Giza. (credit: MusikAnimal/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Leif Ristroph, a physicist and applied mathematician at New York University, was conducting experiments on how clay erodes in response to flowing water when he noticed tiny shapes emerging that resembled seated lions—in essence, miniature versions of the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt. Further experiments provided evidence in support of a longstanding hypothesis that natural processes first created a land formation known as a yardang, after which humans added additional details to create the final statue. Initial results were first presented last year as part of the American Physical Society's Gallery of Fluid Motion, with a full paper being published this week in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

"Our results suggest that Sphinx-like structures can form under fairly commonplace conditions," Ristroph et al. wrote in their paper. "These findings hardly resolve the mysteries behind yardangs and the Great Sphinx, but perhaps they provoke us to wonder what awe-inspiring landforms ancient people could have encountered in the deserts of Egypt and why they might have envisioned a fantastic creature."

In 2018, Ristroph's applied mathematics lab fine-tuned the recipe for blowing the perfect bubble based on experiments with soapy thin films, pinpointing exactly what wind speed is needed to push out the film and cause it to form a bubble, and how that speed depends on parameters like the size of the wand. (You want a circular wand with a 1.5-inch perimeter, and you should gently blow at a consistent 6.9 cm/s.)

Enlarge

On Tuesday, Intel pushed microcode updates to fix a high-severity CPU bug that has the potential to be maliciously exploited against cloud-based hosts.

The flaw, affecting virtually all modern Intel CPUs, causes them to “enter a glitch state where the normal rules don’t apply,” Tavis Ormandy, one of several security researchers inside Google who discovered the bug, reported. Once triggered, the glitch state results in unexpected and potentially serious behavior, most notably system crashes that occur even when untrusted code is executed within a guest account of a virtual machine, which, under most cloud security models, is assumed to be safe from such faults. Escalation of privileges is also a possibility.

Very strange behavior

The bug, tracked under the common name Reptar and the designation CVE-2023-23583, is related to how affected CPUs manage prefixes, which change the behavior of instructions sent by running software. Intel x64 decoding generally allows redundant prefixes—meaning those that don’t make sense in a given context—to be ignored without consequence. During testing in August, Ormandy noticed that the REX prefix was generating “unexpected results” when running on Intel CPUs that support a newer feature known as fast short repeat move, which was introduced in the Ice Lake architecture to fix microcoding bottlenecks.

Enlarge / A file photo of Tropical Storm Fiona as seen in a satellite image from 2022. (credit: Getty Images)

On Tuesday, the peer-reviewed journal Science published a study that shows how an AI meteorology model from Google DeepMind called GraphCast has significantly outperformed conventional weather forecasting methods in predicting global weather conditions up to 10 days in advance. The achievement suggests that future weather forecasting may become far more accurate, reports The Washington Post and Financial Times.

In the study, GraphCast demonstrated superior performance over the world's leading conventional system, operated by the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). In a comprehensive evaluation, GraphCast outperformed ECMWF's system in 90 percent of 1,380 metrics, including temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction, and humidity at various atmospheric levels.

And GraphCast does all this quickly: "It predicts hundreds of weather variables, over 10 days at 0.25° resolution globally, in under one minute," write the authors in the paper "Learning skillful medium-range global weather forecasting."

Enlarge (credit: AaronAmat)

On Tuesday, the Pew Research Center released its latest look at how the US public views scientists and the scientific endeavor. While recent years have shown a decline in the public's trust in science, these could be viewed as a return to normalcy after a spike in positive feelings during the pandemic's peak. But this year's data shows the decline has continued, creating a decline that has now taken us below pre-pandemic levels of trust.

The drop is most pronounced for self-identified Republicans and those without a college education. Despite the decline, however, scientists rank among the most trusted occupations in the US.

A trust deficit

The data used by Pew comes from a survey of nearly 9,000 participants, which provides a margin of error of just ±1.6 percentage points. For some of the individual questions, Pew has been gathering data since at least 2016, allowing it to spot trends in the public's views. It also has data from all of the pandemic years, including two polls done during 2020, making it easier to spot how that event influenced perceptions of science.

Enlarge / Note: This is not what the actual software update looks like when it fails; in reality, it just causes the screens to go black. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Rivian)

The more innovation-minded people in the auto industry have heralded the advent of the software-defined car. It's been spun as a big benefit for consumers, too—witness the excitement among Tesla owners when that company adds a new video game or childish noise to see why the rest of the industry joined the hype train. But sometimes there are downsides, as some Rivian owners are finding out this week.

The EV startup, which makes well-regarded pickup trucks and SUVs, as well as delivery vans for Amazon, pushed out a new over-the-air software update on Monday. But all is not well with 2023.42; the update stalls before it completes installing, taking out both infotainment and main instrument display screens.

Rivian VP of software engineering Wassym Bensaid explained the problem in a post on Rivian's subreddit: