Month: February 2023

Enlarge / The Pixel 7 Pro. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica)

Did you ever see that movie The Ring? People who watched a cursed, creepy video would all mysteriously die in seven days. Somehow Google seems to have re-created the tech version of that, where the creepy video is this clip of the 1979 movie Alien, and the thing that dies after watching it is a Google Pixel phone.

As noted by the user 'OGPixel5" on the Google Pixel subreddit, watching this specific clip on a Google Pixel 6, 6a, or Pixel 7 will cause the phone to instantly reboot. Something about the clip is disagreeable to the phone, and it hard-crashes before it can even load a frame. Some users in the thread say cell service wouldn't work after the reboot, requiring another reboot to get it back up and running.

The leading theory floating around is that something about the format of the video (it's 4K HDR) is causing the phone to crash. It wouldn't be the first time something like this happened to an Android phone. In 2020, there was a cursed wallpaper that would crash a phone when set as the background due to a color space bug. The affected phones all use Google's Exynos-derived Tensor SoC, so don't expect non-Google phones to be affected by this. Samsung Exynos phones would be the next most-likely candidates, but we haven't seen any reports of that.

Enlarge / An artist's concept of a Vast space station with artificial gravity. (credit: Vast)

There's a new space billionaire, and this one is not interested in launching rockets. His name is Jed McCaleb, a US software developer who made his fortune in blockchain development and cryptocurrency. With an acquisition last week of a small space company named Launcher, McCaleb has shown he is serious about building a space station in low-Earth orbit.

McCaleb's space habitation company, Vast, emerged publicly last fall with a plan to build space stations that featured artificial gravity. This was significant because NASA and most other space agencies around the world have devoted little time to developing systems for artificial gravity in space, which may be important for long-term human habitation due to the deleterious effects of microgravity experienced by astronauts on the International Space Station. Vast boasted three technical advisers who were major players in the success of SpaceX—Hans Koenigsmann, Will Heltsley, and Yang Li—but did not offer too much information about its plans.

Now it seems clear that McCaleb is genuinely interested in making a run at this. An early pioneer in blockchain technology, McCaleb created Mt. Gox, the first major Bitcoin exchange. He is estimated by Forbes to be worth $2.5 billion and has vowed to invest at least $300 million into Vast Space as it seeks to develop space stations.

Enlarge / Welcome back

Publisher Namco Bandai has officially announced the first expansion content for Elden Ring, just over a year after the game's initial release earned it Ars' 2022 Game of the Year honors. "Shadow of the Erdtree" is "currently in development," according to a tweet from the game's official account, and promises "new adventure in the Lands Between."

While the announcement is extremely light on details, we do get a single image of what looks like a long-haired woman on horseback, looking over a misty and wheat-filled moor with a few ruined arches poking up here and there. There's already some rampant speculation that this figure is Miquella, the previously unseen twin of the infamous and frustratingly difficult Elden Ring boss Malenia.

Elden Ring became an immediate best-seller after its launch last February, selling 12 million copies in just 17 days, according to Namco Bandai. The publisher recently announced that the game had surpassed 20 million sales in its first year, putting it in the rarefied realm of mega-sellers like Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Grand Theft Auto series.