Month: August 2024

Enlarge (credit: T-Mobile)

AT&T and Verizon are urging telecom regulators to reject a key part of SpaceX's plan to offer cellular service with T-Mobile, claiming the satellite system will interfere with and degrade service for terrestrial mobile broadband networks.

Filings urging the Federal Communications Commission to deny SpaceX's request for a waiver were submitted by AT&T and Verizon this week. The plan by SpaceX's Starlink division also faces opposition from satellite companies EchoStar (which owns Dish and Hughes) and Omnispace.

SpaceX and T-Mobile plan to offer Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) for T-Mobile's cellular network using SpaceX satellites. As part of that plan, SpaceX is seeking a waiver of FCC rules regarding out-of-band emission limits.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Kei cars are the antithesis of the big American SUV. Where EPA regulations effectively penalize automakers for building smaller, more efficient cars, Japan's Kei car regulations cap size, weight, and power to just fractions. Kei cars aren't just small, they're also pretty cheap, a fact that has made them a sales success in Japan and highly desirable as a grey-market import, particularly by people who think new cars have gotten too large, too complicated, and too expensive. A few years ago, Ars even wrote a guide on how to go about importing one from Japan.

But not everyone is a fan of the diminutive Kei import. As far as the federal government is concerned, as long as it's more than 25 years old, an imported car does not have to comply with federal motor vehicle safety standards or fuel economy standards; just makes sure you pay all your import duties.

That's because the federal government doesn't license vehicles to operate on public roads. That task belongs to the individual states, and increasingly they are giving Kei cars the thumbs down—sometimes even in cases where previously those cars posed no problem.

Enlarge / Roger Stone, former adviser to Donald Trump's presidential campaign, center, during the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee on July 17, 2024. (credit: Getty Images)

Google's Threat Analysis Group confirmed Wednesday that they observed a threat actor backed by the Iranian government targeting Google accounts associated with US presidential campaigns, in addition to stepped-up attacks on Israeli targets.

APT42, associated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, "consistently targets high-profile users in Israel and the US," the Threat Analysis Group (TAG) writes. The Iranian group uses hosted malware, phishing pages, malicious redirects, and other tactics to gain access to Google, Dropbox, OneDrive, and other cloud-based accounts. Google's TAG writes that it reset accounts, sent warnings to users, and blacklisted domains associated with APT42's phishing attempts.

Among APT42's tools were Google Sites pages that appeared to be a petition from legitimate Jewish activists, calling on Israel to mediate its ongoing conflict with Hamas. The page was fashioned from image files, not HTML, and an ngrok redirect sent users to phishing pages when they moved to sign the petition.

Enlarge / Artist impression of a large asteroid impacting on Earth, such as the Chicxulub event that caused the end-Cretaceous mass extinction 66 million years ago. (credit: Mark Garlick)

Some 66 million years ago, an errant asteroid wiped out three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, most notably taking down the dinosaurs. That has long been the scientific consensus. However, three years ago, Harvard astronomers offered an alternative hypothesis: The culprit may have been a fragment of a comet thrown off-course by Jupiter's gravity and ripped apart by the Sun.

Now an international team of scientists have reaffirmed the original hypothesis, according to a new paper published in the journal Science. They analyzed ruthenium isotopes from the Chicxulub impact crater and concluded the impact was due to a carbonaceous-type asteroid, likely hailing from beyond Jupiter.

As previously reported, the most widely accepted explanation for what triggered that catastrophic mass extinction is known as the "Alvarez hypothesis," after the late physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son, Walter. In 1980, they proposed that the extinction event may have been caused by a massive asteroid or comet hitting the Earth. They based this conclusion on their analysis of sedimentary layers at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (the K-Pg boundary, formerly known as the K-T boundary) found all over the world, which included unusually high concentrations of iridium—a metal more commonly found in asteroids than on Earth. (That same year, Dutch geophysicist Jan Smit independently arrived at a similar conclusion.)

Enlarge / A Soyuz 2.1b rocket booster with a Frigate upper stage block, the Meteor-M 2-1 meteorological satellite, and 18 small satellites launched from the Vostochny Cosmodrome. (credit: Yuri Smityuk/TASS)

A Progress cargo supply spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan early on Thursday, local time. The mission was successful, and Russia has launched hundreds of these spacecraft before. So it wasn't all that big of a deal, except for one small detail: this was just Russia's ninth orbital launch of the year.

At this pace, it appears that the country's space program is on pace for the fewest number of Russian or Soviet space launches in a year since 1961. That was when Yuri Gagarin went to space at the dawn of the human spaceflight era.

There are myriad reasons for this, including a decision by Western space powers to distance themselves from the Russian space corporation, Roscosmos, after the invasion of Ukraine. This has had disastrous effects for the Russian space program, but only recently have we gotten any insight into how deep those impacts have cut.

Enlarge (credit: Primate Labs )

Neural processing units (NPUs) are becoming commonplace in chips from Intel and AMD after several years of being something you'd find mostly in smartphones and tablets (and Macs). But as more companies push to do more generative AI processing, image editing, and chatbot-ing locally on-device instead of in the cloud, being able to measure NPU performance will become more important to people making purchasing decisions.

Enter Primate Labs, developers of Geekbench. The main Geekbench app is designed to test CPU performance as well as GPU compute performance, but for the last few years, the company has been experimenting with a side project called Geekbench ML (for "Machine Learning") to test the inference performance of NPUs. Now, as Microsoft's Copilot+ initiative gets off the ground and Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple all push to boost NPU performance, Primate Labs is bumping Geekbench ML to version 1.0 and renaming it "Geekbench AI," a change that will presumably help it ride the wave of AI-related buzz.

"Just as CPU-bound workloads vary in how they can take advantage of multiple cores or threads for performance scaling (necessitating both single-core and multi-core metrics in most related benchmarks), AI workloads cover a range of precision levels, depending on the task needed and the hardware available," wrote Primate Labs' John Poole in a blog post about the update. "Geekbench AI presents its summary for a range of workload tests accomplished with single-precision data, half-precision data, and quantized data, covering a variety used by developers in terms of both precision and purpose in AI systems."

Enlarge / Kim Dotcom speaks to the media after a bail hearing at Auckland District Court on December 1, 2014, in Auckland, New Zealand. (credit: Getty Images | Fiona Goodall)

Kim Dotcom has lost yet another ruling in his attempt to avoid extradition from New Zealand to the United States, over a dozen years after the file-sharing site Megaupload was shut down. But he hasn't run out of appeal options yet.

On Thursday, a government spokesperson confirmed that New Zealand Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith signed an extradition order for Dotcom, according to Reuters.

"I have received extensive advice from the Ministry of Justice on this matter," Goldsmith said in a statement quoted by numerous news organizations. "I considered all of the information carefully and have decided that Mr. Dotcom should be surrendered to the US to face trial. As is common practice, I have allowed Mr. Dotcom a short period of time to consider and take advice on my decision. I will not, therefore, be commenting further at this stage."