Month: August 2024

Enlarge (credit: nadia_bormotova | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

A federal judge sentenced a 53-year-old Kansas man to more than 24 years in prison after the former bank CEO abused his trusted position to embezzle $47 million after falling for a cryptocurrency scam that he believed would make him wildly rich.

In a press release, the US Attorney's Office said that Shan Hanes was driven by "greed" when directing bank employees to transfer millions in funds to a sketchy crypto wallet managed by still-unknown third parties behind the so-called "pig butchering" scheme.

Hanes was first targeted by scammers in late 2022, apparently when he got a message from an unidentified co-conspirator on WhatsApp, prosecutors said. After blowing through his own funds seeking promised profits, Hanes stole tens of thousands from a local church, then a local investor club, and finally his daughter's college fund, NBC News reported. Then when all those wells dried up, he started stealing bank funds—all in the false hopes that sending more and more money to the scammers would somehow "unlock the supposed returns" on his crypto investments.

Enlarge (credit: Peloton)

Peloton will start charging people a one-time $95 "used equipment activation fee" for used bikes purchased from outside of Peloton and its official distribution partners.

The fee will apply in the US and Canada. As pointed out by The Verge, Peloton confirmed in its fiscal Q4 2024 earnings call today that people who buy a used bike directly from Peloton or one of its third-party partners will not be subject to the fee.

During the call, Peloton's interim CEO, Christopher Bruzzo, said that the activation fee "will be a source of incremental revenue and gross profit" and support Peloton's "investments in improving the fitness experience for our members."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Josh Edelson)

Google has agreed to fund local journalism and an artificial intelligence initiative in California as part of a deal that would reportedly result in lawmakers shelving a proposal to require Google to pay news outlets for distributing their content. But the deal's state financing requires legislative approval as part of California's annual budget process and is drawing criticism from some lawmakers and a union for journalists.

Governor Gavin Newsom is on board, saying that the "agreement represents a major breakthrough in ensuring the survival of newsrooms and bolstering local journalism across California—leveraging substantial tech industry resources without imposing new taxes on Californians." The deal "will provide nearly $250 million in public and private funding over the next five years, with the majority of funding going to newsrooms," said an announcement by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, a Democrat.

A "News Transformation Fund" would be created with funding from the state and Google and be administered by the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. The state would contribute $30 million the first year and $10 million in each of the next four years, according to a summary provided to Ars by Wicks' office.

Pong will always hold a special place in the history of gaming as one of the earliest arcade video games. Introduced in 1972, it was a table tennis game featuring very simple graphics and gameplay. In fact, it's simple enough that even non-living materials known as hydrogels can "learn" to play the game by "remembering" previous patterns of electrical stimulation, according to a new paper published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

"Our research shows that even very simple materials can exhibit complex, adaptive behaviors typically associated with living systems or sophisticated AI," said co-author Yoshikatsu Hayashi, a biomedical engineer at the University of Reading in the UK. "This opens up exciting possibilities for developing new types of 'smart' materials that can learn and adapt to their environment."

Hydrogels are soft, flexible biphasic materials that swell but do not dissolve in water. So a hydrogel may contain a large amount of water but still maintain its shape, making it useful for a wide range of applications. Perhaps the best-known use is soft contact lenses, but various kinds of hydrogels are also used in breast implants, disposable diapers, EEG and ECG medical electrodes, glucose biosensors, encapsulating quantum dots, solar-powered water purification, cell cultures, tissue engineering scaffolds, water gel explosives, actuators for soft robotics, supersonic shock-absorbing materials, and sustained-release drug delivery systems, among other uses.

Enlarge / We (and other testers) have had issues getting the Ryzen 9000 series to behave normally. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

AMD recently released its Ryzen 9000-series processors, which brought the company's new Zen 5 CPU architecture to desktops for the first time. But we (and multiple other reviewers) had issues getting the chips' performance to match up to AMD's promises, something that the company wasn't able to fully resolve before the processors launched to the public.

AMD has since put out statements explaining some of the discrepancies and promising at least partial fixes for some of them.

A Windows problem

The main fix for slower-than-expected game performance, the company says, will come with the Windows 11 24H2 update later this year, which will include "optimized AMD-specific branch prediction code" that improves Ryzen 9000's performance by between 3 and 13 percent in an AMD-provided cross-section of games and benchmarks (though a handful of tests also showed no change). AMD says that these improvements will also benefit Zen 3- and Zen 4-based Ryzen processors, but that "the biggest boost" will be reserved for Ryzen 9000 and Zen 5.

Enlarge / A mosquito collected to test for mosquito-borne diseases. (credit: Getty | Jon Cherry)

A small town in Massachusetts is urging residents to stay indoors in the evenings after the spread of a dangerous mosquito-spread virus reached "critical risk level."

The virus causes Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), which kills between 30 and 50 percent of people who are stricken—who are often children under the age of 15 and the elderly. Around half who survive are left permanently disabled, and some die within a few years due to complications. There is no treatment for EEE. So far, one person in the town—an elderly resident of Oxford—has already become seriously ill with neuroinvasive EEE.

EEE virus is spread by mosquitoes in certain swampy areas of the country, particularly in Atlantic and Gulf Coast states and the Great Lakes region. Mosquitoes shuttle the virus between wild birds and animals, including horses and humans. In humans, the virus causes very few cases in the US each year—an average of 11, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But given the extreme risk of EEE, health officials take any spread seriously.

Enlarge / The player has a lot of agency in this game to choose exactly how snappy their responses will be. (credit: Suspicious Developments)

Tom Francis and his Suspicious Developments team spent 6.5 years crafting the perfect finale to his defenestration trilogy, and it shows. If you liked blasting people out of windows in Gunpoint or Heat Signature—or snappy writing, endearing characters, wizards, turn-based tactical gameplay, and efficiency challenges—you are going to love Tactical Breach Wizards.

The game's name is as efficient as its design, telling you a lot about its tone and distinct offerings. You play as a small team of magic wielders, each of which you can control, one at a time, in a world where magic use, mana, and all the rest have been militarized and corporatized. There are stasis hexes put on illegally parked cars and even a Traffic Warlock, who, after getting on his bad side, will try to mow you down with an entire ghost highway full of spectral drivers.

Luckily, bad guys like him can only hit you if you don't plan accordingly. Owing to the powers of your teammate Zan, you can foresee everything that will happen within a round of combat (he's a one-second clairvoyant). Move team member Jen to this square on the grid, have her chain-zap three guys, seal the door next to her, then see what that leaves Zan to do. Don't like the outcome? Rewind repeatedly until you've gotten the most out of your team's actions or maybe achieved one of the game's optional achievements. You get "Confidence" for pulling off stunts like "knock three baddies out a window with one action," but they're entirely optional because Confidence only unlocks cool outfits, not powers or gameplay. The actual perks you unlock give you delicious choices to make, deciding which way to take each character's powers to complement or offset one another.

Enlarge / The Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California. (credit: Anadolu Agency | Getty)

Apple is comprehensively restructuring its long-standing App Store team, splitting the team into two separate divisions as the executive who has run it for more than a decade says goodbye to the company.

There will now be one team for the familiar, Apple-run App Store, and another one to handle alternative app stores in the European Union. Apple recently partially opened the platform to third-party app stores in response to the Digital Markets Act, a set of European regulations meant to break up what legislators and regulators deemed to be app store monopolies.

As noted, the restructuring comes with some notable personnel changes, too. App Store Vice President Matt Fischer, who has been at the helm of the platform since 2010, will leave the company.