Month: February 2025

Unlike workers at many other federal agencies this week, probationary employees at NASA were not terminated on Tuesday.

For much of the day employees at the space agency anticipated a directive from the White House Office of Personnel Management to fire these employees, but it never came. "We were on pins and needles throughout the day," said one senior official at Johnson Space Center in Houston on Tuesday afternoon.

However, by late in the afternoon, several field center directors received confirmation from the White House that their probationary employees—of which there are more than 1,000 across the agency's headquarters and 10 field centers—would not be terminated. NASA had sought exemptions for all of these employees, who comprise about 6 percent of NASA's workforce. Ars could not confirm whether the reprieve applied to some field centers or all 10 of them.

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Most PC games that you can play on a modern PC would run faster on an Nvidia RTX 5080 or 5090 than, say, a GTX 1070. But some games, from a particular phase of enthusiasm for particles, destructible environments, and smooth-moving hair, will take a notable hit if their owners upgrade to the latest Nvidia cards.

That's because PhysX, once a dedicated physics simulation tool and card that became a selling point for Nvidia's gear, has been largely deprecated on Nvidia 50-series cards. The transition was announced in January, but it seems to have taken some time for someone to notice the impact on 32-bit, PhysX-enabled games (as seen by PCGamesN). The most recent of these affected games, Assassin's Creek IV: Black Flag, came out in 2013.

What follows is a brief primer on PhysX: what it was, what it did, and why it's left out of Nvidia's road map.

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The Humane Ai Pin generated a lot of buzz ahead of launch as Humane positioned it as a brand new category for mobile devices that would leverage artificial intelligence to let you perform all sorts of tasks without a phone or PC. It was a spectacular flop at launch with reviewers complaining that the product […]

The post HP is acquiring Humane’s assets, but shutting down the Ai Pin business (and bricking existing units) appeared first on Liliputing.

On Monday, Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, released Grok 3, a new AI model family set to power chatbot features on the social network X. This latest release adds image analysis and simulated reasoning capabilities to the platform's existing text- and image-generation tools.

Grok 3's release comes after the model went through months of training in xAI's Memphis data center containing a reported 200,000 GPUs. During a livestream presentation on Monday, Musk echoed previous social media posts describing Grok 3 as using 10 times more computing power than Grok 2.

Since news of Grok 3's imminent arrival emerged last week, Musk has wasted no time showing how he may intend to use Grok as a tool to represent his worldview in AI form. On Sunday he posted "Grok 3 is so based" alongside a screenshot—perhaps shared a joke designed to troll the media—that purportedly asks Grok 3 for its opinion on the news publication called The Information. In response, Grok replies:

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If you know just one thing about FromSoft's recent history of so-called "Soulslike" games, you probably know that they have a well-earned reputation for absolutely brutal difficulty. But these titles apparently just weren't difficult enough for streamer dinossindgeil (aka Nico) who spent the weekend beating seven of FromSoft's most punishing titles without taking a single hit or leveling up even once.

Nico's conquest of what he calls "The God Run 3" dates back to 2022, when he took down all three Dark Souls games as well as Demon's Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and Elden Ring live on his Twitch stream without sustaining any damage from enemies. Back then, though, Nico relied at least a little bit on grinding leveled-up characters and high-end gear to make the game's most difficult bosses a bit more manageable. Even with that advantage, though, a successful God Run 3 completion took Nico 120 days of real-time effort due to frequent restarts whenever he took a single hit.

This time around, Nico cranked up the difficulty even further by deciding not to level his characters even once (though he was able to increase his stats and abilities in some games with level 1-accessible items and weapons). After his first level 1 God Run attempt two months ago, Nico's efforts culminated in a roughly 11-hour multi-day marathon run over the weekend, which saw Nico break down in tears at the end of the ordeal.

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PC-manufacturer Acer has said that it plans to raise the prices of its PCs in the US by 10 percent, a direct response to the new 10 percent import tariff on Chinese goods that the Trump administration announced earlier this month.

"We will have to adjust the end user price to reflect the tariff," said Acer CEO Jason Chen in an interview with The Telegraph. "We think 10 percent probably will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It’s very straightforward."

These price increases won't roll out right away, according to Chen—products shipped from China before the tariffs went into effect earlier this month won't be subject to the increased import taxes—but we can expect them to show up in PC price tags over the next few weeks.

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Microsoft said it has detected a new variant of XCSSET, a powerful macOS malware family that has targeted developers and users since at least 2020.

The variant, which Microsoft reported Monday, marked the first publicly known update to the malware since 2022. The malware first came to light in 2020, when security firm Trend Micro said it had targeted app developers after spreading through a publicly available project the attacker wrote for Xcode, a developer tool Apple makes freely available. The malware gained immediate attention because it exploited what, at the time, were two zero-day vulnerabilities, a testament to the resourcefulness of the entity behind the attacks.

In 2021, XCSSET surfaced again, first when it was used to backdoor developers’ devices and a few months later when researchers found it exploiting what at the time was a new zero-day.

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Astronomers have detected over 5,800 confirmed exoplanets. One extreme class is ultra-hot Jupiters, of particular interest because they can provide a unique window into planetary atmospheric dynamics. According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, astronomers have mapped the 3D structure of the layered atmosphere of one such ultra-hot Jupiter-size exoplanet, revealing powerful winds that create intricate weather patterns across that atmosphere. A companion paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics reported on the unexpected identification of titanium in the exoplanet's atmosphere as well.

As previously reported, thanks to the massive trove of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler mission, we now have a good idea of what kinds of planets are out there, where they orbit, and how common the different types are. What we lack is a good sense of what that implies in terms of the conditions on the planets themselves. Kepler can tell us how big a planet is, but it doesn't know what the planet is made of. And planets in the "habitable zone" around stars could be consistent with anything from a blazing hell to a frozen rock.

Like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), Kepler identifies planets using the transit method. This works for systems in which the planets orbit in a plane that takes them between their host star and Earth. As this occurs, the planet blocks a small fraction of the starlight that we see from Earth (or nearby orbits). If these dips in light occur with regularity, they're diagnostic of something orbiting the star.

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When pirate site-blocking measures have hit Cloudflare in the past, those responsible responded in various ways when news of collateral damage began to spread.

A swift and relatively silent ‘CTRL-Z response’ seemed most effective at subduing criticism, mostly because it solved the problem.

When blunders were to blame, a quick-fix while pretending to know nothing was reasonably effective too. Flat-out public denials, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, has rarely shown to be effective. Bald-faced denial isn’t without its merits, however.

Denial tends to show that while blocking still took place, those responsible prefer not to be associated with the collateral damage making the headlines. In the grand scheme of things, only a tiny minority care about pirate sites being blocked because, in the grand scheme of things, only a small minority of people are pirates.

When paying customers end up paying the price, site-blocking successes are no match for widespread feelings of injustice.

Viva España

In Spain, LaLiga has torn up the metaphorical site-blocking etiquette rule book and challenged Cloudflare to a public fistfight instead. By admitting last weekend that it deliberately blocked Cloudflare to block a webpage run by a piracy app, and by extension many innocent websites and countless internet users, LaLiga publicly owned its actions and sailed into unchartered waters.

Paraphrasing Cloudflare, LaLiga blocked Cloudflare to get at piracy app Duckvision because it believes it has authority from a local court to do so. Having weighed its interests against those of pirates, Cloudflare, and all internet users in Spain, LaLiga’s interests came out on top.

LaLiga paints Cloudflare as an uncooperative villain who must now take responsibility for the consequences of its own inaction. And LaLiga has every right to take that position, just as Cloudflare has the right to refute the allegations.

In many parts of Spain, meanwhile, fundamental EU rights may face challenges: Article 11: Freedom of expression and information, and Article 16: Freedom to conduct a business, for example. Article 17: Right to property, which includes intellectual property, is the base upon which site-blocking measures ultimately stand, so at least everyone isn’t losing out.

Meanwhile on the Internet

So, in the all-important court of public opinion, Judge Disposable Income presiding, who will shoulder most blame for the disaster depicted in the image below?

Posted to X by a user in Spain, the image shows Uptime Kuma, a great tool easily configured to point towards most online services for the purpose of monitoring their availability. After pointing the software at a Cloudflare IP address, a series of successful ‘pings’ build to create the horizontal green line seen in the middle, with a history of what went before displayed in the chart at the bottom.

The huge block of red sits in a space where there was no connectivity for the user, at a time when a LaLiga match was airing on live TV. Cloudflare wasn’t offline, local ISPs were responsible for blocking Cloudflare under instruction from LaLiga. In a statement issued last weekend, LaLiga vowed that blocking Cloudflare would continue.

Google, Cloudflare, VPN providers, and other entities facilitating piracy are responsible for the illegal activities they enable and profit from. LALIGA, backed by the justice system, will not relent in its efforts to protect football and the interests of its clubs against criminal action related to audiovisual fraud and digital laundering.

LaLiga Makes Good On its Word

A new statement from LaLiga celebrates the successful blocking of two additional pirate IPTV services, DazcFutbolios and RBTV77, both of which reportedly used Cloudflare as a “digital shield” to stay online.

“In its ongoing commitment to protecting intellectual property rights, LALIGA has successfully blocked illegal broadcasts from the DazcFutbolios and RBTV77 platforms this weekend,” LaLiga’s statement reads.

“These illegal platforms, which allowed the unauthorized transmission of football matches, operated both on the Web and in Apps, and used Cloudflare’s infrastructure and resources to hide their criminal activity alongside legitimate domains, which are used as a digital shield, in order to try to evade security controls. Between them, they account for more than 400,000 unique monthly users in Spain.”

Addressing Public Concerns

From a business perspective, LaLiga’s recent statements address most of the key talking points underpinning the current controversy. The league says it obtained authority from a court but also understood that cooperation from Cloudflare would make a difficult job a lot easier.

As a result, Cloudflare was given every opportunity to cooperate but refused to do so, LaLiga notes, leaving it with no other choice or than to block Cloudflare in order to block the IPTV providers. Any suggestion of reckless behavior is incorrect, LaLiga adds.

“These blocks, which are neither massive nor indiscriminate as LALIGA has previously stated, have also disabled a series of IPs specifically identified as hosting pirate services and unauthorized streaming services that operated in parallel,” the statements adds.

No Backing Down, But at Any Cost?

In disputes of this magnitude, the devil can often be found in the detail. Before LaLiga obtained the court order, it knew that Cloudflare is generally opposed to blocking; hardly a revelation for a company with a mission to improve online connectivity. In the knowledge that collateral damage was inevitable, LaLiga had a choice too. Having made that choice, Cloudflare is framed as the party responsible for the collateral damage, despite the power to avoid that ultimately belonging to LaLiga.

Describing the blocks as neither massive nor indiscriminate is completely accurate, at least without context. The image to the right shows that LaLiga carefully selected its targets by blocking not one but several IP addresses, each with an unknown number of innocent sites behind them, in addition to the intended targets.

LaLiga wasn’t indiscriminate when it selected the IP addresses, nor did it block a massive number of them. That simply isn’t required; Cloudflare services a huge number of important websites in Spain using relatively few IP addresses.

No Peacemakers Available

Given that this dispute looks set to continue and backing down has been ruled out, the question of intervention raises its head and who might be responsible for preventing a potential national disaster. If malicious hackers had caused a similar loss in connectivity, Spain’s Ministry of Communications would be a logical choice. Thus far, we’re unaware of any action, or indeed any interest from groups that may have any power to step in.

Historically, ISPs have ensured that blocking orders “do no harm” in their quest to block pirate sites. The mechanism in Spain is unclear but at least thus far, the ISPs involved are informing the public they’re not to blame and are simply obeying orders.

Of course, attending court to negotiate the terms of blocking is always part of the process, just as it is for Cloudflare now, LaLiga insists. The truth is, choices are available in every direction but the only ones suitable for consideration put Spain’s internet users first.

Credit: @Sergio_deLuz

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

The Nokia Lumia 1020 is a smartphone that was released in 2013 with its major claims to fame including its 41MP camera, Nokia’s iconic Lumia design language, and the now-defunct Windows Phone operating system. It’s a phone that’s largely obsolete today, but it still has a pretty striking looking design. So redditor /u/OceanDepth95028 decided to […]

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