Month: March 2025

Over the last month there has been something more than a minor kerfuffle in the space industry over the return of two NASA astronauts from the International Space Station.

The fate of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on the first crewed flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft on June 5, 2024, has become a political issue after President Donald Trump and SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the astronauts' return was held up by the Biden White House.

In February, Trump and Musk appeared on FOX News. During the joint interview, the subject of Wilmore and Williams came up. They remain in space today after NASA decided it would be best they did not fly home in their malfunctioning Starliner spacecraft—but would return in a SpaceX-built Crew Dragon.

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The US military's robotic mini-space shuttle dropped out of orbit and glided to a runway in California late Thursday, ending a 434-day mission that pioneered new ways of maneuvering in space.

The X-37B spaceplane touched down on Runway 12 at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, at 11:22 pm local time Thursday (2:22 am EST Friday), capping its high-flying mission with an automated reentry and landing on the nearly three-mile-long runway at the West Coast's spaceport.

The Space Force did not publicize the spacecraft's return ahead of time, keeping with the Pentagon's policy of secrecy surrounding the X-37B program. This was the seventh flight of an X-37B spaceplane, or Orbital Test Vehicle, since its first foray into orbit in 2010.

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The AI industry has a new buzzword: "PhD-level AI." According to a report from The Information, OpenAI may be planning to launch several specialized AI "agent" products including a $20,000 monthly tier focused on supporting "PhD-level research." Other reportedly planned agents include a "high-income knowledge worker" assistant at $2,000 monthly and a software developer agent at $10,000 monthly.

OpenAI has not yet confirmed these prices, but they have mentioned PhD-level AI capabilities before. So what exactly constitutes "PhD-level AI"? The term refers to models that supposedly perform tasks requiring doctoral-level expertise. These include agents conducting advanced research, writing and debugging complex code without human intervention, and analyzing large datasets to generate comprehensive reports. The key claim is that these models can tackle problems that typically require years of specialized academic training.

Companies like OpenAI base their "PhD-level" claims on performance in specific benchmark tests. For example, OpenAI's o1 series models reportedly performed well in science, coding, and math tests, with results similar to human PhD students on challenging tasks. The company's Deep Research tool, which can generate research papers with citations, scored 26.6 percent on "Humanity's Last Exam," a comprehensive evaluation covering over 3,000 questions across more than 100 subjects.

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The measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico has reached 208 cases.

Texas officials reported 198 confirmed cases across nine counties as of Friday, with 23 people requiring hospitalization since the outbreak exploded at the end of January. Most of the cases continue to be in children and teens, with 153 of the 198 cases being between the ages of 0 and 17. Eleven cases have no confirmed age listed. All but five cases are in people who are unvaccinated or have no vaccination record.

Texas officials have so far reported one death in the outbreak in an unvaccinated school-aged child with no underlying health conditions. Media reports have identified the child as being a 6-year-old.

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A 37-year-old Tennessee man was arrested Thursday, accused of stealing Blu-rays and DVDs from a manufacturing and distribution company used by major movie studios and sharing them online before the movies' scheduled release dates.

According to a US Department of Justice press release, Steven Hale worked at the DVD company and allegedly stole "numerous 'pre-release' DVDs and Blu-rays" between February 2021 and March 2022. He then allegedly "ripped" the movies, "bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying" and shared copies widely online. He also supposedly sold the actual stolen discs on e-commerce sites, the DOJ alleged.

Hale has been charged with "two counts of criminal copyright infringement and one count of interstate transportation of stolen goods," the DOJ said. He faces a maximum sentence of five years for the former, and 10 years for the latter.

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Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-Ho returns to the big screen this weekend with the sci-fi film Mickey 17. If you're expecting the subtly devastating social commentary of his 2019 drama/horror/thriller-hybrid Parasite, I suspect you'll be disappointed. Mickey 17 is a very different beast in both aesthetic and tone. When the first trailer dropped, I wrote that the film felt like a darkly comedic version of Duncan Jones' 2009 film Moon, with a dash of the surreal absurdity of Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) thrown in for good measure. I stand by that assessment, and it proves to be a winning combination.

(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)

The film is based on the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. Ashton's inspiration for the novel was the teletransportation paradox—a thought experiment pondering the philosophy of identity that challenges certain notions of the self and consciousness. It started as a short story about what Ashton called "a crappy immortality" and expanded from there into a full-length novel. (Ashton also penned a sequel, Antimatter Blues, which was published in 2023.)

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Nearly 1 million Windows devices were targeted in recent months by a sophisticated "malvertising" campaign that surreptitiously stole login credentials, cryptocurrency, and other sensitive information from infected machines, Microsoft said.

The campaign began in December, when the attackers, who remain unknown, seeded websites with links that downloaded ads from malicious servers. The links led targeted machines through several intermediary sites until finally arriving at repositories on Microsoft-owned Github, which hosted a raft of malicious files.

Chain of events

The malware was loaded in four stages, each of which acted as a building block for the next. Early stages collected device information, presumably to tailor configurations for the later ones. Later ones disabled malware detection apps and connected to command-and-control servers; affected devices remained infected even after being rebooted.

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Smartphones with physical keyboards are a dying breed (mostly dead, if I’m being honest). But there are some die-hard enthusiasts who continue to believe that nothing beats a physical keyboard. A startup called Clicks has generated a lot of buzz by offering keyboard cases that clip onto iPhones and (some) Android phones. But hardware hacker […]

The post This 3D printed case turns an old phone into a slider with a QWERTY keyboard and touchpad appeared first on Liliputing.

On Thursday, music labels sought to add nearly 500 more sound recordings to a lawsuit accusing the Internet Archive (IA) of mass copyright infringement through its Great 78 Project, which seeks to digitize all 3 million three-minute recordings published on 78 revolutions-per-minute (RPM) records from about 1898 to the 1950s.

If labels' proposed second amended complaint is accepted by the court, damages sought in the case—which some already feared could financially ruin IA and shut it down for good—could increase to almost $700 million. (Initially, labels sought about $400 million in damages.)

IA did not respond to Ars' request for comment, but the filing noted that IA has not consented to music labels' motion to amend their complaint.

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Although digital media has surpassed physical media in popularity, there are still plenty of reasons for movie buffs and TV fans to hold onto, and even continue buying, DVDs. With physical media, owners are assured that they'll always be able to play their favorite titles, so long as they take care of their discs. While digital copies are sometimes abruptly ripped away from viewers, physical media owners don't have to worry about a corporation ruining their Friday night movie plans. At least, that's what we thought.

It turns out that if your DVD collection includes titles distributed by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, the home movie distribution arm of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), you may one day open up the box to find a case of DVD rot.

Recently, Chris Bumbray, editor-in-chief of movie news and reviews site JoBlo, detailed what would be a harrowing experience for any film collector. He said he recently tried to play his Passage to Marseille DVD, but “after about an hour, the disc simply stopped working.” He said “the same thing happened” with Across the Pacific. Bumbray bought a new DVD player but still wasn’t able to play his Desperate Journey disc. The latter case was especially alarming because, like a lot of classic films and shows, the title isn’t available as a digital copy.

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