Technology
Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back
Enlarge / Jürgen Trittin, member of the German Bundestag and former environment minister, stands next to an activist during an action of the environmental organization Greenpeace in front of the Brandenburg Gate in April 2023. The action is to celebrate the shutdown of the last three German nuclear power plants. (credit: Christoph Soeder/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)
One year ago, Germany took its last three nuclear power stations offline. When it comes to energy, few events have baffled outsiders more.
In the face of climate change, calls to expedite the transition away from fossil fuels, and an energy crisis precipitated by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Berlin’s move to quit nuclear before carbon-intensive energy sources like coal has attracted significant criticism. (Greta Thunberg prominently labeled it “a mistake.”)
This decision can only be understood in the context of post-war socio-political developments in Germany, where anti-nuclearism predated the public climate discourse.
There’s never been a better time to get into Fallout 76
Enlarge / More players have been emerging from this vault lately than have in years. (credit: Samuel Axon)
War never changes, but Fallout 76 sure has. The online game that launched to a negative reception with no NPCs but plenty of bugs has mutated in new directions since its 2018 debut. Now it’s finding new life thanks to the wildly popular Fallout TV series that debuted a couple of weeks ago.
In truth, it never died, though it has stayed in decidedly niche territory for the past six years. Developer Bethesda Game Studios has released regular updates fixing (many of) the bugs, adding new ways to play, softening the game’s rough edges, and yes, introducing Fallout 3- or Fallout 4-like, character-driven quest lines with fully voiced NPCs—something many players felt was missing in the early days.
It’s still not for everybody, but for a select few of us who’ve stuck with it, there’s nothing else quite like it.
NASA still doesn’t understand root cause of Orion heat shield issue
Enlarge / NASA's Orion spacecraft descends toward the Pacific Ocean on December 11, 2021, at the end of the Artemis I mission. (credit: NASA)
NASA officials declared the Artemis I mission successful in late 2021, and it's hard to argue with that assessment. The Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft performed nearly flawlessly on an unpiloted flight that took it around the Moon and back to Earth, setting the stage for the Artemis II, the program's first crew mission.
But one of the things engineers saw on Artemis I that didn't quite match expectations was an issue with the Orion spacecraft's heat shield. As the capsule streaked back into Earth's atmosphere at the end of the mission, the heat shield ablated, or burned off, in a different manner than predicted by computer models.
More of the charred material than expected came off the heat shield during the Artemis I reentry, and the way it came off was somewhat uneven, NASA officials said. Orion's heat shield is made of a material called Avcoat, which is designed to burn off as the spacecraft plunges into the atmosphere at 25,000 mph (40,000 km per hour). Coming back from the Moon, Orion encountered temperatures up to 5,000° Fahrenheit (2,760° Celsius), hotter than a spacecraft sees when it reenters the atmosphere from low-Earth orbit.
Putting Microsoft’s cratering Xbox console sales in context
Enlarge / Scale is important, especially when talking about relative console sales. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it made 31 percent less off Xbox hardware in the first quarter of 2024 (ending in March) than it had the year before, a decrease it says was "driven by lower volume of consoles sold." And that's not because the console sold particularly well a year ago, either; Xbox hardware revenue for the first calendar quarter of 2023 was already down 30 percent from the previous year.
Those two data points speak to a console that is struggling to substantially increase its player base during a period that should, historically, be its strongest sales period. But getting wider context on those numbers is a bit difficult because of how Microsoft reports its Xbox sales numbers (i.e., only in terms of quarterly changes in total console hardware revenue). Comparing those annual shifts to the unit sales numbers that Nintendo and Sony report every quarter is not exactly simple.
Context clues
Significant declines in Xbox hardware revenue for four of the last five quarters stand out relative to competitors' unit sales. (credit: Kyle Orland)
To attempt some direct contextual comparison, we took unit sales numbers for some recent successful Sony and Nintendo consoles and converted them to Microsoft-style year-over-year percentage changes (aligned with the launch date for each console). For this analysis, we skipped over each console's launch quarter, which contains less than three months of total sales (and often includes a lot of pent-up early adopter demand). We also skipped the first four quarters of a console's life cycle, which don't have a year-over-year comparison point from 12 months prior.
Court upholds New York law that says ISPs must offer $15 broadband
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Creativeye99)
A federal appeals court today reversed a ruling that prevented New York from enforcing a law requiring Internet service providers to sell $15 broadband plans to low-income consumers. The ruling is a loss for six trade groups that represent ISPs, although it isn't clear right now whether the law will be enforced.
New York's Affordable Broadband Act (ABA) was blocked in June 2021 by a US District Court judge who ruled that the state law is rate regulation and preempted by federal law. Today, the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit reversed the ruling and vacated the permanent injunction that barred enforcement of the state law.
For consumers who qualify for means-tested government benefits, the state law requires ISPs to offer "broadband at no more than $15 per month for service of 25Mbps, or $20 per month for high-speed service of 200Mbps," the ruling noted. The law allows for price increases every few years and makes exemptions available to ISPs with fewer than 20,000 customers.
Android TV has access to your entire account—but Google is changing that
Enlarge (credit: Google)
Google says it has patched a nasty loophole in the Android TV account security system, which would grant attackers with physical access to your device access to your entire Google account just by sideloading some apps. As 404 Media reports, the issue was originally brought to Google's attention by US Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) as part of a "review of the privacy practices of streaming TV technology providers." Google originally told the senator that the issue was expected behavior but, after media coverage, decided to change its stance and issue some kind of patch.
"My office is mid-way through a review of the privacy practices of streaming TV technology providers," Wyden told 404 Media. "As part of that inquiry, my staff discovered an alarming video in which a YouTuber demonstrated how with 15 minutes of unsupervised access to an Android TV set-top box, a criminal could get access to private emails of the Gmail user who set up the TV."
The video in question was a PSA from YouTuber Cameron Gray, and it shows that grabbing any Android TV device and sideloading a few apps will grant access to the current Google account. This is obvious if you know how Android works, but it's not obvious to most users looking at a limited TV interface.
Hackers try to exploit WordPress plugin vulnerability that’s as severe as it gets
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Hackers are assailing websites using a prominent WordPress plugin with millions of attempts to exploit a high-severity vulnerability that allows complete takeover, researchers said.
The vulnerability resides in WordPress Automatic, a plugin with more than 38,000 paying customers. Websites running the WordPress content management system use it to incorporate content from other sites. Researchers from security firm Patchstack disclosed last month that WP Automatic versions 3.92.0 and below had a vulnerability with a severity rating of 9.9 out of a possible 10. The plugin developer, ValvePress, silently published a patch, which is available in versions 3.92.1 and beyond.
Researchers have classified the flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-27956, as a SQL injection, a class of vulnerability that stems from a failure by a web application to query backend databases properly. SQL syntax uses apostrophes to indicate the beginning and end of a data string. By entering strings with specially positioned apostrophes into vulnerable website fields, attackers can execute code that performs various sensitive actions, including returning confidential data, giving administrative system privileges, or subverting how the web app works.
US’s power grid continues to lower emissions—everything else, not so much
On Thursday, the US Department of Energy released its preliminary estimate for the nation's carbon emissions in the previous year. Any drop in emissions puts us on a path that would avoid some of the catastrophic warming scenarios that were still on the table at the turn of the century. But if we're to have a chance of meeting the Paris Agreement goal of keeping the planet from warming beyond 2° C, we'll need to see emissions drop dramatically in the near future.
So, how is the US doing? Emissions continue to trend downward, but there's no sign the drop has accelerated. And most of the drop has come from a single sector: changes in the power grid.
Off the grid, on the roadUS carbon emissions have been trending downward since roughly 2007, when they peaked at about six gigatonnes. In recent years, the pandemic produced a dramatic drop in emissions in 2020, lowering them to under five gigatonnes for the first time since before 1990, when the EIA's data started. Carbon dioxide release went up a bit afterward, with 2023 marking the first post-pandemic decline, with emissions again clearly below five gigatonnes.
Message-scraping, user-tracking service Spy Pet shut down by Discord
Enlarge (credit: Discord)
Spy Pet, a service that sold access to a rich database of allegedly more than 3 billion Discord messages and details on more than 600 million users, has seemingly been shut down.
404 Media, which broke the story of Spy Pet's offerings, reports that Spy Pet seems mostly shut down. Spy Pet's website was unavailable as of this writing. A Discord spokesperson told Ars that the company's safety team had been "diligently investigating" Spy Pet and that it had banned accounts affiliated with it.
"Scraping our services and self-botting are violations of our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines," the spokesperson wrote. "In addition to banning the affiliated accounts, we are considering appropriate legal action." The spokesperson noted that Discord server administrators can adjust server permissions to prevent future such monitoring on otherwise public servers.
TikTok owner has strong First Amendment case against US ban, professors say
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)
TikTok owner ByteDance is preparing to sue the US government now that President Biden has signed into law a bill that will ban TikTok in the US if its Chinese owner doesn't sell the company within 270 days. While it's impossible to predict the outcome with certainty, law professors speaking to Ars believe that ByteDance will have a strong First Amendment case in its lawsuit against the US.
One reason for this belief is that just a few months ago, a US District Court judge blocked a Montana state law that attempted to ban TikTok. In October 2020, another federal judge in Pennsylvania blocked a Trump administration order that would have banned TikTok from operating inside the US. TikTok also won a preliminary injunction against Trump in US District Court for the District of Columbia in September 2020.
"Courts have said that a TikTok ban is a First Amendment problem," Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, who writes frequent analysis of legal cases involving technology, told Ars this week. "And Congress didn't really try to navigate away from that. They just went ahead and disregarded the court rulings to date."
Microsoft open-sources infamously weird, RAM-hungry MS-DOS 4.00 release
Enlarge / A DOS prompt.
Microsoft has open-sourced another bit of computing history this week: The company teamed up with IBM to release the source code of 1988's MS-DOS 4.00, a version better known for its unpopularity, bugginess, and convoluted development history than its utility as a computer operating system.
The MS-DOS 4.00 code is available on Microsoft's MS-DOS GitHub page along with versions 1.25 and 2.0, which Microsoft open-sourced in cooperation with the Computer History Museum back in 2014. All open-source versions of DOS have been released under the MIT License.
Initially, MS-DOS 4.00 was slated to include new multitasking features that allow software to run in the background. This release of DOS, also sometimes called "MT-DOS" or "Mutitasking MS-DOS" to distinguish it from other releases, was only released through a few European PC OEMs and never as a standalone retail product.
Tesla’s 2 million car Autopilot recall is now under federal scrutiny
Enlarge / A 2014 Tesla Model S driving on Autopilot rear-ended a Culver City fire truck that was parked in the high-occupancy vehicle lane on Interstate 405. (credit: Culver City Firefighters Local 1927 / Facebook)
Tesla's lousy week continues. On Tuesday, the electric car maker posted its quarterly results showing precipitous falls in sales and profitability. Today, we've learned that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is concerned that Tesla's massive recall to fix its Autopilot driver assist—which was pushed out to more than 2 million cars last December—has not actually made the system that much safer.
NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation has been scrutinizing Tesla Autopilot since August 2021, when it opened a preliminary investigation in response to a spate of Teslas crashing into parked emergency responder vehicles while operating under Autopilot.
In June 2022, the ODI upgraded that investigation into an engineering analysis, and in December 2023, Tesla was forced to recall more than 2 million cars after the analysis found that the car company had inadequate driver-monitoring systems and had designed a system with the potential for "foreseeable misuse."
Switch 2 reportedly replaces slide-in Joy-Cons with magnetic attachment
Enlarge / The slide-on Joy-Con connection point shown in the center of the image may be a thing of the past on the Switch 2
The iconic slide-in "click" of the Switch Joy-Cons may be replaced with a magnetic attachment mechanism in the Switch 2, according to a report from Spanish-language gaming news site Vandal.
The site notes that this new design could make direct Switch 2 backward compatibility with existing Switch Joy-Cons "difficult." Even so, we can envision some sort of optional magnetic shim that could make older Joy-Cons attachable with the new system's magnetic connection points. Current Switch Pro Controllers, which do not physically attach to the Switch, should be fully compatible with the Switch 2, according to the report.
Vandal cites several unnamed accessory and peripheral makers who reportedly got to touch the new console inside of an opaque box, which was used to balance design secrecy with the need to provide general knowledge of the unit's dimensions. According to those sources, the Switch 2 will be "larger than the Switch, although without reaching the size of the Steam Deck."
20% of grocery store milk has traces of bird flu, suggesting wider outbreak
Enlarge (credit: Getty | Jeffrey Greenberg)
The Food and Drug Administration reported late Thursday that about 20 percent of retail milk samples from around the country tested positive for genetic fragments of the bird flu, aka highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus H5N1. While retail milk is still considered to be safe, the finding suggests that the spread of the virus in cows is more extensive than is currently known.
The FDA used a test called quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), which can only detect the presence of genetic fragments. In pasteurized retail milk, it is highly likely that those genetic snippets are merely remnants of virus particles destroyed during pasteurization. The FDA is currently conducting additional testing using egg inoculation tests, a gold standard for detecting a live virus, to confirm the effectiveness of pasteurization. Meanwhile, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Jeanne Marrazzo, told reporters Wednesday that tests at the agency's federal labs so far did not identify live virus from any of its sampling. Additionally, several previous studies have found that pasteurization of eggs—which is done at a lower temperature than it is for milk—was effective at destroying H5N1.
While experts are largely unconcerned with the safety of commercial milk, the potential for wide, unrecognized spread of bird flu in dairy herds is alarming. To date, the US Department of Agriculture has only confirmed infections in 33 herds in eight states. The FDA acknowledged that of its positive samples, "a greater proportion of positive results [are] coming from milk in areas with infected herds." But with tens of thousands of dairy herds in the US, the finding suggests that infections are being missed. It does not necessarily suggest that 20 percent of all cows are affected, since milk is pooled for commercial distribution. But 33 herds alone are unlikely to explain the high prevalence.
Nixon administration could’ve started monitoring CO2 levels but didn’t
Enlarge / A newly revealed research proposal from 1971 shows that Richard Nixon’s science advisors embarked on an extensive analysis of the potential risks of climate change. (credit: Oliver Atkins/National Archives)
In 1971, President Richard Nixon’s science advisers proposed a multimillion dollar climate change research project with benefits they said were too “immense” to be quantified, since they involved “ensuring man’s survival,” according to a White House document newly obtained by the nonprofit National Security Archive and shared exclusively with Inside Climate News.
The plan would have established six global and 10 regional monitoring stations in remote locations to collect data on carbon dioxide, solar radiation, aerosols and other factors that exert influence on the atmosphere. It would have engaged five government agencies in a six-year initiative, with spending of $23 million in the project’s peak year of 1974—the equivalent of $172 million in today’s dollars. It would have used then-cutting-edge technology, some of which is only now being widely implemented in carbon monitoring more than 50 years later.
But it stands as yet another lost opportunity early on the road to the climate crisis. Researchers at the National Security Archive, based at the George Washington University, could find no documentation of what happened to the proposal, and it was never implemented.
Rocket Report: SLS workforce cuts; New Glenn launch to launch in the early fall
Enlarge / The flight hardware core stage for Europe’s new rocket, Ariane 6, is moved onto the launch pad for the first time this week. A launch is possible some time this summer. (credit: ESA-M. Pédoussaut)
Welcome to Edition 6.41 of the Rocket Report! As I finish up this edition I'm listening to the post-Flight Readiness Review news conference for Boeing's Crew Flight Test. It sounds like everything remains on track for a launch attempt on May 6, at 10:34 pm ET. It's exciting to see this important milestone for Boeing and the US human spaceflight program so near to hand.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Shetland spaceport advancing toward launch. SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland is on track to launch the United Kingdom’s first vertical rocket into orbit, the BBC reports. The Civil Aviation Authority has granted a range license to the Scottish spaceport, which will allow the company to control the sea and airspace during launch. Previously, the site received a spaceport license in December 2023. Ambitiously, the facility aims to launch up to 30 rockets every year.
Russia stands alone in vetoing UN resolution on nuclear weapons in space
Enlarge / A meeting of the UN Security Council on April 14. (credit: Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution Wednesday that would have reaffirmed a nearly 50-year-old ban on placing weapons of mass destruction into orbit, two months after reports Russia has plans to do just that.
Russia's vote against the resolution was no surprise. As one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, Russia has veto power over any resolution that comes before the body. China abstained from the vote, and 13 other members of the Security Council voted in favor of the resolution.
If it passed, the resolution would have affirmed a binding obligation in Article IV of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which says nations are "not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction."
Tech brands are forcing AI into your gadgets—whether you asked for it or not
Enlarge / Tech brands love hollering about the purported thrills of AI these days. (credit: Getty)
Logitech announced a new mouse last week. A company rep reached out to inform Ars of Logitech’s “newest wireless mouse.” The gadget’s product page reads the same as of this writing.
I’ve had good experience with Logitech mice, especially wireless ones, one of which I'm using now. So I was keen to learn what Logitech might have done to improve on its previous wireless mouse designs. A quieter click? A new shape to better accommodate my overworked right hand? Multiple onboard profiles in a business-ready design?
I was disappointed to learn that the most distinct feature of the Logitech Signature AI Edition M750 is a button located south of the scroll wheel. This button is preprogrammed to launch the ChatGPT prompt builder, which Logitech recently added to its peripherals configuration app Options+.
Three women contract HIV from dirty “vampire facials” at unlicensed spa
Enlarge / Drops of the blood going onto an HIV quick test. (credit: Getty | BRITTA PEDERSEN)
Trendy, unproven "vampire facials" performed at an unlicensed spa in New Mexico left at least three women with HIV infections. This marks the first time that cosmetic procedures have been associated with an HIV outbreak, according to a detailed report of the outbreak investigation published today.
Ars reported on the cluster last year when state health officials announced they were still identifying cases linked to the spa despite it being shut down in September 2018. But today's investigation report offers more insight into the unprecedented outbreak, which linked five people with HIV infections to the spa and spurred investigators to contact and test nearly 200 other spa clients. The report appears in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The investigation began when a woman between the ages of 40 and 50 turned up positive on a rapid HIV test taken while she was traveling abroad in the summer of 2018. She had a stage 1 acute infection. It was a result that was as dumbfounding as it was likely distressing. The woman had no clear risk factors for acquiring the infection: no injection drug use, no blood transfusions, and her current and only recent sexual partner tested negative. But, she did report getting a vampire facial in the spring of 2018 at a spa in Albuquerque called VIP Spa.
HMD’s first self-branded phones are all under $200
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The HMD Pulse base model. [credit: HMD ]
HMD has been known as the manufacturer of Nokia-branded phones for years now, but now the company wants to start selling phones under its own brand. The first is the "HMD Pulse" line, a series of three low-end phones that are headed for Europe. The US is getting an HMD-branded phone, too—the HMD Vibe—but that won't be out until May.
Europe's getting the 140-euro HMD Pulse, 160-euro Pulse+, and the 180-euro Pulse Pro. If you can't tell from the prices, these are destined for Europe for now, but if you convert them to USD, that's about $150, $170, and $190, respectively. With only $20 between tiers, there isn't a huge difference from one model to the next. They all have bottom-of-the-barrel Unisoc T606 SoCs. That's a 12 nm chip with two Cortex A75 Arm cores, two A55 cores, an ARM Mali-G57 MP1, and it's 4G only. Previously, HMD used this chip in the 2023 HMD Nokia G22. They also all have 90 Hz, 6.65-inch, 1612×720 LCDs, 128GB of storage, and 5,000 mAh batteries.
As for the differences, the base model has 4GB of RAM, a 13 MP main rear camera, an 8 MP front camera, and 10 W wired charging. The Plus model upgrades to a 50 MP main camera, while the Pro model has 6GB of RAM, a 50 MP main camera, 50 MP front camera, and 20 W wired charging. There is a second lens camera on the back, but it appears to be only a 2 MP "depth sensor" on all models.
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