Technology News

A cybercriminal gang called RansomHub claims to be selling highly sensitive patient information stolen from Change Healthcare following a ransomware attack by another group in February.

From Black Swan to The Zone of Interest, here are our favorite movies on the streaming service.

Enlarge / The Marina Palms condo development in Miami recently added an ADS-TEC ChargeBox DC fast charger for its residents. (credit: ADS-TEC)

Right now, the electric vehicle ownership experience is optimized for the owner who lives in a single-family home. A level 2 home AC charger costs a few hundred dollars, and with a garage or carport, an EV that gets plugged in each night is an EV that starts each day with a 100 percent charged battery pack. Plenty of Ars readers have told us that a 120 V outlet even works for their needs, although perhaps better for Chevy Bolt-sized batteries rather than a Hummer EV.

However, about a third of Americans live in large multifamily developments, often in cities that stand to benefit the most from a switch to electrification. And electrifying the parking lots of existing developments is often easier said than done. Some developments will allow individuals to install their own dedicated charger, and newly built developments may even have planned ahead and put conduits in place already.

For many others, the parking spaces will be owned by the condo association or co-op, complicating the idea of giving each EV driver their own plug. Here, shared solutions make more sense, perhaps starting with one or two shared level 2 chargers as a pilot—often this won't even require extra work to the electrical panel. Costs are a little higher than for a home level 2 charger—between $7,500–$15,000 per charger, perhaps.

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Enlarge / O.B., aka Ouroboros, in Marvel's Loki show, which streams on Disney+. (credit: Marvel)

Despite promises of new and improved TV and movie viewing experiences, streaming services remain focused on growing revenue and app usage. As a result of that focus, streaming companies are mimicking the industry they sought to replace—cable.

On Monday, The Information reported that Disney plans to add "a series" of channels to the Disney+ app. Those channels would still be streamed and require a Disney+ subscription to access. But they would work very much like traditional TV channels, featuring set programming that runs 24/7 with commercials. Disney hasn't commented on the report.

Disney is exploring adding channels to Disney+ with "programming in specific genres, including either Star Wars or Marvel-branded shows," The Information said, citing anonymous "people involved in the planning." It's unknown when the Disney+ channels are expected to launch.

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Get your fix of tech, true crime, pop culture, or comedy with these audio adventures.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Chris McGrath )

YouTube is putting third-party ad-blocking apps on notice. An ominous post on the official YouTube Community Help forum titled "Enforcement on Third Party Apps" says the company is "strengthening our enforcement on third-party apps that violate YouTube’s Terms of Service, specifically ad-blocking apps." Google would really like it if you all paid for YouTube Premium.

YouTube has been coming down on third-party apps, which often enable YouTube ad blocking. The company shut down one of the most popular third-party apps, "YouTube Vanced," in 2022. Vanced was open source, though, so new alternatives sprung up almost immediately. Vanced takes the official YouTube Android client and installs a duplicate, alternative version with a bunch of patches. It turns on all the YouTube Premium features like ad-blocking, background playback, and downloading without paying for the Premium sub. It also adds features the official app doesn't have, like additional themes and accessibility features, "repeat" and "dislike" buttons, and the ability to turn off addictive "suggestions" that appear all over the app.

Another popular option is "NewPipe," a from-scratch YouTube player that follows the open source ethos and is available on the FOSS-only store F-Droid. NewPipe wants a lightweight client without the proprietary code and million permissions that YouTube needs, but it also blocks ads.

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Enlarge (credit: IAN HOOTON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY | Science Photo Library)

Meta continues to slowly adapt Facebook and Instagram policies to account for increasing AI harms, this week confronting how it handles explicit deepfakes spreading on its platforms.

On Tuesday, the Meta Oversight Board announced it will be reviewing two cases involving AI-generated sexualized images of female celebrities that Meta initially handled unevenly to "assess whether Meta’s policies and its enforcement practices are effective at addressing explicit AI-generated imagery."

The board is not naming the famous women whose deepfakes are being reviewed in hopes of mitigating "risks of furthering harassment," the board said.

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Google employees are staging sit-ins and protests at company offices in New York and California over “Project Nimbus,” a cloud contract with Israel's government, as the country's war with Hamas continues.

Google employees are staging sit-ins and protests at company offices in New York and California over “Project Nimbus,” a cloud contract with Israel's government, as the country's war with Hamas continues.

A controversial bill reauthorizing the Section 702 spy program may force whole new categories of businesses to eavesdrop on the US government’s behalf, including on fellow Americans.

Google Cloud Next ‘24 was filled with news and launches across Google Cloud — here’s five moments you might have missed.Google Cloud Next ‘24 was filled with news and launches across Google Cloud — here’s five moments you might have missed.

These are the titles that make the most of your big, burly Microsoft console.

The title character of Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley scares cops and destroys park signs in the latest game adaptation of Tove Jansson’s creation.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Tuesday, the UK government announced a new law targeting the creation of AI-generated sexually explicit deepfake images. Under the legislation, which has not yet been passed, offenders would face prosecution and an unlimited fine, even if they do not widely share the images but create them with the intent to distress the victim. The government positions the law as part of a broader effort to enhance legal protections for women.

Over the past decade, the rise of deep learning image synthesis technology has made it increasingly easy for people with a consumer PC to create misleading pornography by swapping out the faces of the performers with someone else who has not consented to the act. That practice spawned the term "deepfake" around 2017, named after a Reddit user named "deepfakes" that shared AI-faked porn on the service. Since then, the term has grown to encompass completely new images and video synthesized entirely from scratch, created from neural networks that have been trained on images of the victim.

The problem isn't unique to the UK. In March, deepfake nudes of female middle school classmates in Florida led to charges against two boys ages 13 and 14. The rise of open source image synthesis models like Stable Diffusion since 2022 has increased the urgency among regulators in the US to attempt to contain (or at least punish) the act of creating non-consensual deepfakes. The UK government is on a similar mission.

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Enlarge / Vladimir Putin meets with Roscosmos Director General Yuri Borisov on June 30, 2023. (credit: The Kremlin)

Russia's once-vaunted launch industry has been much in decline due to a combination of factors, including an aging fleet of rockets, a reduction in government investment, and the country's war in Ukraine driving away Western customers.

However, it is has been difficult for the country's leaders to explain these difficult facts to the Russian people. Russians are justifiably proud of their country's heritage of space firsts and dominant position in spaceflight. So typically, officials bluster.

This is what Roscosmos chief Yuri Borisov did recently during a lecture at the Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics. Located south of Moscow, this is the world's first museum devoted solely to spaceflight. Borisov heads the country's main space corporation, and thus is the leader of the country's space activities.

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Enlarge (credit: Joan Cros via Getty)

When Microsoft revealed in January that foreign government hackers had once again breached its systems, the news prompted another round of recriminations about the security posture of the world’s largest tech company.

Despite the angst among policymakers, security experts, and competitors, Microsoft faced no consequences for its latest embarrassing failure. The United States government kept buying and using Microsoft products, and senior officials refused to publicly rebuke the tech giant. It was another reminder of how insulated Microsoft has become from virtually any government accountability, even as the Biden administration vows to make powerful tech firms take more responsibility for America’s cyber defense.

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Enlarge / NASA's existing plan for Mars Sample Return involves a large lander the size of a two-car garage, two helicopters, a two-stage bespoke rocket, a European-built Earth return vehicle, and the Perseverance rover already operating on the red planet. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA's $11 billion plan to robotically bring rock samples from Mars back to Earth is too expensive and will take too long, the agency's administrator said Monday, so officials are tasking government and private sector engineers to come up with a better plan.

The agency's decision on how to move forward with the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program follows an independent review last year that found ballooning costs and delays threatened the mission's viability. The effort would likely cost NASA between $8 billion and $11 billion, and the launch would be delayed at least two years until 2030, with samples getting back to Earth a few years later, the review board concluded.

But that's not the whole story. Like all federal agencies, NASA faces new spending restrictions imposed by the Fiscal Responsibility Act, a bipartisan budget deal struck last year between the White House and congressional Republicans. With these new budget headwinds, NASA officials determined the agency's plan for Mars Sample Return would not get specimens from the red planet back to Earth until 2040.

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New generative image tools are coming to Demand Gen to help you create a variety of high-quality, stunning image assets with ease.New generative image tools are coming to Demand Gen to help you create a variety of high-quality, stunning image assets with ease.

The DJI Avata 2 is the brilliant FPV drone we’ve been waiting for.

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I’d wager a guess that we are, as a species, rather fond of our home planet (our wanton carbon emissions notwithstanding). But the ugly truth is that the Earth is doomed. Someday, the Sun will enter a stage that will make life impossible on the Earth’s surface and eventually reduce the planet to nothing more than a sad, lonely chunk of iron and nickel.

The good news is that if we really put our minds to it—and don’t worry, we’ll have hundreds of millions of years to plan—we can keep our home world hospitable, even long after our Sun goes haywire.

A waking nightmare

The Sun is slowly but inexorably getting brighter, hotter, and larger with time. Billions of years ago, when collections of molecules first began to dance together and call themselves alive, the Sun was roughly 20 percent dimmer than it is today. Even the dinosaurs knew a weaker, smaller star. And while the Sun is only halfway through the main hydrogen-burning phase of its life, with 4-billion-and-change years before it begins its death throes, the peculiar combination of temperature and brightness that make life possible on this little world of ours will erode in only a few hundred million years. A blink of an eye, astronomically speaking.

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