Month: May 2024

Enlarge / MDMA is now in the FDA's hands. (credit: Getty | PYMCA/Avalon)

The safety and efficacy data on the use of MDMA (aka ecstasy) for post-traumatic stress disorder therapy is "challenging to interpret," the Food and Drug Administration said in a briefing document posted Friday. The agency noted significant flaws in the design of the underlying clinical trials as well as safety concerns for the drug, particularly cardiovascular harms.

On Tuesday, June 4, the FDA will convene an advisory committee that will review the evidence and vote on MDMA's efficacy and whether its benefits outweigh its risks. The FDA does not have to follow the committee's recommendations, but it often does. If the FDA subsequently approves MDMA as part of treatment for PTSD, it would mark a significant shift in the federal government's stance on MDMA, as well as psychedelics, generally. Currently, the US Drug Enforcement Administration considers MDMA a Schedule I drug, defined as one with "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." It would also offer a new treatment option for patients with PTSD, a disabling psychiatric condition with few treatment options currently.

As Ars has reported previously, the submission of MDMA for approval is based on two clinical trials. The first trial, published in Nature Medicine in 2021, involved 90 participants with moderate PTSD and found that MDMA-assisted psychotherapy significantly improved Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale for DSM-5 (CAPS-5) scores compared with participants who were given psychotherapy along with a placebo. In the second study, published in September in Nature Medicine, the finding held up among 104 participants with moderate or severe PTSD (73 percent had severe PTSD).

Enlarge / The Clip attached to a late-90s vintage mountain bike. (credit: Eric Bangeman)

Shortly after World War II, a French manufacturer by the name of Solex started selling mopeds. These were not your "typical" moped that looks kind of like a motorcycle with pedals—the mopeds made by Solex were essentially bicycles with a small, two-stroke engine mounted over the front wheel that could propel the rider around 100 km on a single liter of gas mixture. The downside: Solex mopeds were loud and cumbersome to ride due to the weight distribution, and they never really caught on in North America.

Clip, a startup based in Brooklyn, New York, has come up with its own twist on the Solex. Its only product, the eponymously named Clip, is a friction drive unit that attaches to the front fork of any bicycle, turning it into an e-bike. At $499 for the Commuter model and $599 for the Explorer, it is a relatively inexpensive way to turn just about any bicycle into an e-bike for a fraction of the cost of a new one.

The Clip mounts to the front fork just below the brake caliper. (credit: Eric Bangeman)

Weighing in at 8.8 lb (4 kg) for the Commuter model (the Explorer is a pound heavier), the Clip is at its essence a portable friction-drive. There's a detachable controller that mounts on the handlebar and the unit itself. The Explorer model, the one we reviewed, has a 192 Wh battery that takes an hour to fully charge. Its range is pegged at "up to 12 miles," a claim that is pretty accurate based on our testing, and the top speed is 15 mph. The Commuter model offers half the battery capacity, charge time, and range.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Axios broke the news that OpenAI had signed deals with The Atlantic and Vox Media that will allow the ChatGPT maker to license their editorial content to further train its language models. But some of the publications' writers—and the unions that represent them—were surprised by the announcements and aren't happy about it. Already, two unions have released statements expressing "alarm" and "concern."

"The unionized members of The Atlantic Editorial and Business and Technology units are deeply troubled by the opaque agreement The Atlantic has made with OpenAI," reads a statement from the Atlantic union. "And especially by management's complete lack of transparency about what the agreement entails and how it will affect our work."

The Vox Union—which represents The Verge, SB Nation, and Vulture, among other publications—reacted in similar fashion, writing in a statement, "Today, members of the Vox Media Union ... were informed without warning that Vox Media entered into a 'strategic content and product partnership' with OpenAI. As both journalists and workers, we have serious concerns about this partnership, which we believe could adversely impact members of our union, not to mention the well-documented ethical and environmental concerns surrounding the use of generative AI."

Enlarge / Is there a better way to have a tri-monitor setup? (credit: Getty)

In a technical disclosure published this month, HP explored a Micro LED monitor concept that would enable consumers to easily use various multi-monitor configurations through use of "Lego-like building blocks." HP has no immediate plans to make what it has called "composable Micro LED monitors," but its discussion explores a potential way to simplify multi-tasking with numerous displays.

HP's paper [PDF], written by HP scientists and technical architects, discusses a theoretical monitor that supports the easy addition of more flat or curved screens on its left, right, or bottom sides (the authors noted that top extensions could also be possible but they were "trying to keep the number of configurations manageable"). The setup would use one 12×12-inch "core" monitor that has a cable to the connected system. The computer's operating system (OS) would be able to view the display setup as one, two, or multiple monitors, and physical switches would let users quickly disable displays.

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  The illustration shows a monitor made of a core unit and two extension panels viewed as three monitors (left), two monitors (middle), and two monitors with different orientations (right). [credit: HP/Technical Disclosure Commons ]

Not a real product

HP's paper is only a technical disclosure, which companies often publish in order to support potential patent filings. So it's possible that we'll never see HP release "composable Micro LED monitors" as described. An HP spokesperson told me:

Enlarge / The Google "G" logo surrounded by whimsical characters, all of which look stunned and surprised. (credit: Google)

On Thursday, Google capped off a rough week of providing inaccurate and sometimes dangerous answers through its experimental AI Overview feature by authoring a follow-up blog post titled, "AI Overviews: About last week." In the post, attributed to Google VP Liz Reid, head of Google Search, the firm formally acknowledged issues with the feature and outlined steps taken to improve a system that appears flawed by design, even if it doesn't realize it is admitting it.

To recap, the AI Overview feature—which the company showed off at Google I/O a few weeks ago—aims to provide search users with summarized answers to questions by using an AI model integrated with Google's web ranking systems. Right now, it's an experimental feature that is not active for everyone, but when a participating user searches for a topic, they might see an AI-generated answer at the top of the results, pulled from highly ranked web content and summarized by an AI model.

While Google claims this approach is "highly effective" and on par with its Featured Snippets in terms of accuracy, the past week has seen numerous examples of the AI system generating bizarre, incorrect, or even potentially harmful responses, as we detailed in a recent feature where Ars reporter Kyle Orland replicated many of the unusual outputs.

Enlarge (credit: Future Publishing / Contributor | Future Publishing)

TikTok is now disputing a Reuters report that claims the short-video app is cloning its algorithm to potentially offer a different version of the app, which might degrade over time, just for US users.

Sources "with direct knowledge" of the project—granted anonymity because they're not authorized to discuss it publicly—told Reuters that the TikTok effort began late last year. They said that the project will likely take a year to complete, requiring hundreds of engineers to separate millions of lines of code.

As these sources reported, TikTok's tremendous undertaking could potentially help prepare its China-based owner ByteDance to appease US lawmakers who passed a law in April forcing TikTok to sell its US-based operations by January 19 or face a ban. But TikTok has maintained that the "qualified divestiture" required by the law would be impossible, and on Thursday, TikTok denied the accuracy of Reuters' report while reiterating its stance that a sale is not in the cards.

Enlarge / Someone really likes Google Chrome. (credit: Isaac Bowen / Flickr)

Google Chrome will be shutting down its older, more capable extension system, Manifest V2, in favor of exclusively using the more limited Manifest V3. The deeply controversial Manifest V3 system was announced in 2019, and the full switch has been delayed a million times, but now Google says it's really going to make the transition: As previously announced, the phase-out of older Chrome extensions is starting next week.

Google Chrome has been working toward a plan for a new, more limited extension system for a while now. Google says it created "Manifest V3" extensions with the goal of "improving the security, privacy, performance, and trustworthiness of the extension ecosystem."

Other groups don't agree with Google's description, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which called Manifest V3 "deceitful and threatening" back when it was first announced in 2019, saying the new system "will restrict the capabilities of web extensions—especially those that are designed to monitor, modify, and compute alongside the conversation your browser has with the websites you visit." It has a whole article out detailing how Manifest V3 won't help security.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has added a critical security bug in Linux to its list of vulnerabilities known to be actively exploited in the wild.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-1086 and carrying a severity rating of 7.8 out of a possible 10, allows people who have already gained a foothold inside an affected system to escalate their system privileges. It’s the result of a use-after-free error, a class of vulnerability that occurs in software written in the C and C++ languages when a process continues to access a memory location after it has been freed or deallocated. Use-after-free vulnerabilities can result in remote code or privilege escalation.

The vulnerability, which affects Linux kernel versions 5.14 through 6.6, resides in the NF_tables, a kernel component enabling the Netfilter, which in turn facilitates a variety of network operations, including packet filtering, network address [and port] translation (NA[P]T), packet logging, userspace packet queueing, and other packet mangling. It was patched in January, but as the CISA advisory indicates, some production systems have yet to install it. At the time this Ars post went live, there were no known details about the active exploitation.