Month: December 2023

Enlarge / Shortly after the FBI posted a notice saying it had seized the dark-web site of AlphV, the ransomware group posted this notice claiming otherwise.

The FBI spent much of Tuesday locked in an online tug-of-war with one of the Internet’s most aggressive ransomware groups after taking control of infrastructure the group has used to generate more than $300 million in illicit payments to date.

Early Tuesday morning, the dark-web site belonging to AlphV, a ransomware group that also goes by the name BlackCat, suddenly started displaying a banner that said it had been seized by the FBI as part of a coordinated law enforcement action. Gone was all the content AlphV had posted to the site previously.

Around the same time, the Justice Department said it had disrupted AlphV’s operations by releasing a software tool that would allow roughly 500 AlphV victims to restore their systems and data. In all, Justice Department officials said, AlphV had extorted roughly $300 million from 1,000 victims.

Enlarge / Ship 28 is seen after being moved to SpaceX's launch site in South Texas. (credit: SpaceX)

Just one month after the second flight of its massive Starship rocket, SpaceX is making progress toward a third attempt.

On Wednesday, at 1:37 pm local time in South Texas, the company performed a static fire test of the next Starship—which bears the serial number Ship 28. The test of the rocket's six engines appeared to be nominal as the Raptors ignited for a handful of seconds. The rocket and ground support equipment looked undamaged after the test.

Also this week SpaceX rolled the booster to be used for the next attempt—Booster 10—to the launch site at its Starbase facility in South Texas. The vehicle has since been lifted onto the orbital launch mount. Presumably this rocket, too, will undergo a static fire test in the coming days.

Enlarge (credit: Aitor Diago | Moment)

More than 1,000 known child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) were found in a large open dataset—known as LAION-5B—that was used to train popular text-to-image generators such as Stable Diffusion, Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) researcher David Thiel revealed on Wednesday.

SIO's report seems to confirm rumors swirling on the Internet since 2022 that LAION-5B included illegal images, Bloomberg reported. In an email to Ars, Thiel warned that "the inclusion of child abuse material in AI model training data teaches tools to associate children in illicit sexual activity and uses known child abuse images to generate new, potentially realistic child abuse content."

Thiel began his research in September after discovering in June that AI image generators were being used to create thousands of fake but realistic AI child sex images rapidly spreading on the dark web. His goal was to find out what role CSAM may play in the training process of AI models powering the image generators spouting this illicit content.

Enlarge / Just some of the prizes you can win in this year's charity drive sweepstakes. (credit: Kyle Orland)

If you've been too busy reading about major game publisher leaks to take part in this year's Ars Technica Charity Drive sweepstakes, don't worry. You still have time to donate to a good cause and get a chance to win your share of over $2,500 worth of swag (no purchase necessary to win).

So far, over 220 readers have contributed more than $19,000 to either the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Child's Play as part of the charity drive (EFF is still leading in the donation totals by nearly $6,000). That's a long way from 2020's record haul of over $58,000, but there's still plenty of time until the Charity Drive wraps up on Tuesday, January 2, 2024.

That doesn't mean you should put your donation off, though. Do yourself and the charities involved a favor and give now while you're thinking about it.

Enlarge (credit: Maridav)

It’s summer 2021. You rent a house in the countryside with a bunch of friends for someone’s birthday. The weather’s gorgeous that weekend, so mostly you’re all outside—pool, firepit, hammock, etc.—but you do all sleep in the same house. And then on Tuesday, you get an alert on your phone that you’ve been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. How likely are you to now have it?

To answer that question, a group of statisticians, data scientists, computer scientists, and epidemiologists in the UK analyzed 7 million people who were notified that they were exposed to COVID-19 by the NHS COVID-19 app in England and Wales between April 2021 and February 2022. They wanted to know if—and how—these app notifications correlated to actual disease transmission. Analyses like this can help ensure that an app designed for the next pathogen could retain efficacy while minimizing social and economic burdens. And it can tell us more about the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

Over 20 million quarantine requests

The NHS COVID-19 app was active on 13 to 18 million smartphones per day in 2021. It used Bluetooth signals to estimate the proximity between those smartphones while maintaining privacy and then alerted people who spent 15 minutes or more at a distance of 2 meters or less from a confirmed case. This led to over 20 million such alerts, each of which came with a request to quarantine—quite a burden.

Enlarge / The lab's empty because everyone's relaxing in the park while the AI does their work. (credit: Fei Yang)

Despite rapid advances in artificial intelligence, AIs are nowhere close to being ready to replace humans for doing science. But that doesn't mean that they can't help automate some of the drudgery out of the daily grind of scientific experimentation. For example, a few years back, researchers put an AI in control of automated lab equipment and taught it to exhaustively catalog all the reactions that can occur among a set of starting materials.

While useful, that still required a lot of researcher intervention to train the system in the first place. A group at Carnegie Mellon University has now figured out how to get an AI system to teach itself to do chemistry. The system requires a set of three AI instances, each specialized for different operations. But, once set up and supplied with raw materials, you just have to tell it what type of reaction you want done, and it'll figure it out.

An AI trinity

The researchers indicate that they were interested in understanding what capacities large language models (LLMs) can bring to the scientific endeavor. So all of the AI systems used in this work are LLMs, mostly GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, although some others—Claude 1.3 and Falcon-40B-Instruct—were tested as well. (GPT-4 and Claude 1.3 performed the best.) But, rather than using a single system to handle all aspects of the chemistry, the researchers set up distinct instances to cooperate in a division of labor setup and called it "Coscientist."

Apple's AAA gaming ambitions for the iPhone 15 Pro saw both a release and a delay this week.

When Apple unveiled the iPhone 15 Pro and touted its AAA gaming capabilities in September, the company named three upcoming games as showcases: the Resident Evil 4 remake, Death Stranding, and Assassin's Creed Mirage. All would arrive to iOS and all would require an iPhone 15 Pro to play.

Resident Evil 4 launched on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS today. And a few days ago, publisher 505 Games announced in a post to X that Death Stranding—which was expected to launch this month—has been delayed to "a new release date in early 2024" because it "needs a little more time."

Enlarge / The Galaxy Z Fold5 and Flip5, being carefully taken apart. (credit: Samsung)

Samsung says it's doing a big expansion to its self-repair program this month. The repair program launched last year in partnership with iFixit, and now Samsung will be offering parts and repair manuals for more phones in more countries.

First up, the device list is adding some of Samsung's newest and most expensive models. Foldables are landing in the self-repair system for the first time, with the Galaxy Z Flip5, and Z Fold5 getting parts and manuals soon. The parts aren't up for sale yet, but we're dying to know the cost of a Z Fold5 display. (The Pixel Fold, a similarly sized flexible Samsung display, costs $900.) Samsung's current slab-phone flagship is also hitting the repair system for the first time, with all S23 models getting included. The Galaxy A05s, the first mid-range phone, is landing in the system, too. All the Galaxy S9 and A9 tablets are now repairable, as is the Galaxy Book 2 Pro laptop.

The number of countries where you can buy parts is increasing, too. Samsung's repair program is currently active in the US, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. Samsung now says it's expanding the repair program to 30 additional companies, with the full list being: "Albania, Andorra, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Kosovo, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Switzerland." Forty-three countries is a huge progression in just a year, but the flagship S23 is sold in 130 countries if Samsung wants complete coverage.

Enlarge (credit: Jean Varner, National Science Foundation)

The US National Science Foundation is one of the US’s primary means of supporting fundamental scientific research—its investments account for about 25 percent of federal support to America's colleges and universities for basic research, or research driven by curiosity and discovery. But NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan has asked Ars for the opportunity to explain how the unique facilities that NSF supports in the Antarctic have value for both commercial interests and national security. In making this argument, he’s joined by Representative Tony Gonzales of Texas, who explains how NSF’s Antarctic research has had direct impacts on people in his district.

Antarctica's geopolitical significance is understated. US involvement in Antarctica is a strategic necessity for scientific advancement, engineering breakthroughs, educational opportunities, and national security.

Today, global competition is fiercer than ever. For our nation to maintain global competitiveness in an era of shifting geopolitical power dynamics—notably where China seeks to expand its global influence—we must support the critical science and engineering research efforts happening at the bottom of our planet. While seven nations claim territories across the Antarctic continent, the US recognizes none and claims none, in full alignment with the Antarctic Treaty. The US, with the world's most significant and influential presence in Antarctica, leads cooperatively to ensure interagency and international partnerships can succeed in everything from science to security.