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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[...] For Danny Glavin, a senior sample scientist, he wanted to solve a relentless mystery in his life's work: Why are all known living things only based on the left-handed forms of amino acids, the molecules that build proteins? 

His moment arrived nearly a decade later. Glavin and a team of researchers probed the grit from Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid made of loosely bound boulders, but what they found threw them a curveball. Rather than supporting one of the leading hypotheses — that the early solar system favored the left-handed variety and brought those ingredients to primitive Earth — it showed no favoritism at all. 

[...] Many amino acids, whether they're used in biology or not, come in two mirror-image forms. Each molecule has a central carbon atom with other atom groups attached, oriented in one direction or the reverse. This property, called chirality, is like a left and right hand: They're similar, but if you stacked them, the thumbs would be hitchhiking opposite ways.

In Earth life, the amino acids are always "left-handed," and sugars, which partly make up the backbone of DNA, are always right-handed, giving the double helix its signature twist to the right. The homogeneity found among both is especially confounding to scientists because the left and right-handed versions of all these molecules are equally available in nonliving chemical mixes. 

Practically speaking, if all biological molecules took the reverse form, that might work just fine. So if life could have taken the other path, why didn't it? Is uniform "handedness" a secret ingredient in the recipe for life, and more specifically, did it have to turn left? Did the bias toward left-handed amino acids begin in the cosmos, or did it happen later on this planet?

"A fundamental question for all of us is whether life had to be the way it is," said Iris Chen, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UCLA, who wasn't involved in the asteroid study. "Is the universe predisposed to our kind of life, or is our biology the result of accidents and chance?"

Scientists knew early on they would use the material collected by NASA's $800 million OSIRIS-Rex mission, short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer, to analyze the "handedness" of individual amino acids. Bennu's mineral fragments could be older than the 4.6 billion-year-old solar system. These grains of stardust could have come from dying stars or supernovas that eventually led to the creation of the sun and planets.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/07/apple-encryption-backdoor-uk/ [Paywalled]

"Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

"The British government's undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies. Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive issues."

From the BBC:

The UK government has demanded to be able to access encrypted data stored by Apple users worldwide in its cloud service.

Currently only the Apple account holder can access data stored in this way - the tech giant itself cannot view it.

The demand has been served by the Home Office under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), which compels firms to provide information to law enforcement agencies. Apple declined to comment, but says on its website that it views privacy as a "fundamental human right". Under the law, the demand cannot be made public.

The Home Office said: "We do not comment on operational matters, including for example confirming or denying the existence of any such notices."

Privacy International called it an "unprecedented attack" on the private data of individuals. "This is a fight the UK should not have picked," said the charity's legal director Caroline Wilson Palow. "This overreach sets a hugely damaging precedent and will embolden abusive regimes the world over."

owl writes:

http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

If you're reading this page, chances are that you're already well aware that E.T. for the Atari 2600 is one of the most reviled games ever made. I never understood why. As a child, it was one of my favorite games. I still think it's a good game. Apparently, I'm not alone.

On this page I'm going to briefly explore why people hate E.T., and how the game can be fixed.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Law enforcement officers across Europe assembled again to collectively disrupt major facilitators of cybercrime, with at least one of those cuffed apparently a fan of the dramedy series The Gilmore Girls.

Two crime forums, Cracked and Nulled, were pulled offline.

Together, the platforms amassed more than 9 million users and were often budding e-miscreants' first foray into pursuing a life of cybercrime.

Similar to BreachForums, which was briefly taken down by law enforcement last year, Cracked and Nulled offered users a platform to discuss all things devious and a marketplace to sell their tools and ill-gotten wares.

The collective takedown action was led by German authorities in a campaign dubbed Operation Talent and took place between January 28-30.

It led to two arrests following the search of seven properties. Law enforcement seized 17 servers, 12 domains, 50 devices, and around €300,000 ($311,279) worth of cash and cryptocurrency tokens. Given that Cracked and Nulled generated millions in revenue, the amount seized is just a fraction - but still a notable disruption to their operations.

Lucas Sohn, a 29-year-old Argentine, was the only named suspect. A video released by Europol showed Sohn, who resides in Spain, being arrested and his devices combed through by the Guardia Civil. The video also showed the arrest of a second, unnamed individual.

[...] The Justice Department said Cracked had been on the scene since 2018 and raked in $4 million in the process. Its primary offering was a marketplace that offered access to stolen credentials, hacking tools, and servers to host malware and stolen data.

[...] Meanwhile, in a separate crackdown, the US and Dutch Politie jointly announced the disruption of a Pakistan-based fraud network.

The network was comprised of websites devoted to selling products like phishing kits, which were later used to carry out Business Email Compromise (BEC) schemes – the most economically damaging cybercrime in the US, the FBI reckons.

Run by a group known as Saim Raza, aka HeartSender, a total of 39 domains and their associated servers were seized by the US and Netherlands.

Authorities didn't specify victim numbers, only that 'numerous' US-based cases resulted in over $3 million in losses.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-radiation-belts-detected-around-earth-after-epic-solar-storm

In May 2024, an epic solar storm rattled Earth so powerfully that its effects were felt even at the bottom of the ocean.

In the wake of a torrent of flare activity on the Sun, our planet was buffeted by a powerful blast of solar particles that shook our magnetic field, and bathed our skies with a panoply of shimmering colors as auroras reached far lower latitudes than usual.

But its effects were way more far-reaching, as scientists now reveal. In the months following the storm, Earth was girded by two new, temporary radiation belts of high-energy particles, trapped by the planet's magnetic field.

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JA033504

Original Submission

upstart writes:

This year will decide if Horizon Worlds "will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure," according to a Meta executive:

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth is giving the metaverse a year to become a hit, according to an internal forum post reported by Business Insider. That time period will determine whether Reality Labs' mixed reality efforts are "the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure," he writes.

Bosworth details his expectations early in the post:

We have the best portfolio of products we've ever had in market and are pushing our advantage by launching half a dozen more AI powered wearables. We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR [Mixed Reality]. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.

The post comes days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's recently leaked comments in an all-hands meeting, in which he predicted an "intense year" and emphasized the need to stay in the lead with its smart glasses, which have taken the spotlight away from Reality Labs' Quest headsets.

Bosworth says that despite 2024 being the department's best year, Reality Labs hasn't "actually made a dent in the world yet." The group is smaller now in the wake of layoffs and the success of Meta's Ray-bans and AI efforts, but Bosworth wrote that it doesn't "need big teams to do great work" and that he thinks smaller teams have moved faster and produce better results.

He closes out the post saying the team doesn't need "a bunch of new ideas," but that most in the group "just need to execute on the work laid out before them to succeed." As for what happens if Horizon Worlds doesn't become a hit in the next year, Bosworth doesn't get more specific than his "legendary misadventure" comment. But it seems unlikely that it'll take off now, making his post feel more like an expiration date than anything else.

Do you think Mixed Reality will take off and, if not, why has it failed to become as popular as Meta believes it eventually will? What do you see as the future for MR?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Platinum, a metal that helps craft aesthetically pleasing jewelry, also finds use in a car's exhaust for entirely non-aesthetic reasons. The catalytic converter is required on nearly every car to remove harmful gases, such as nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide, from your exhaust. Platinum and other heavy metals such as palladium and rhodium in the catalytic converter act a catalyst in detoxifying these gases.

However, the presence of such precious metals and catalytic converters' easy accessibility makes converters a sought-after target for thieves known as "cutters." Catalytic converter theft witnessed an exponential rise during the pandemic, peaking in 2022, when State Farm alone saw 45,000 claims for stolen converters. Cutters often sell the stolen converters to scrap recyclers, who then extract the pure platinum and palladium. 

So how much platinum and palladium does your catalytic converter contain? Also, why exactly does the mostly inert platinum find its use in a catalytic converter? 

[...] The major reason why catalytic converter theft skyrocketed after the pandemic was the sudden price rise of the catalyst, especially platinum and palladium. During their peak, platinum sold for $1,289 per ounce and palladium sold for $3,307 per ounce, making a typical catalytic converter worth at least $128 of platinum and $231 of palladium. With metal prices settling since the pandemic, a typical catalytic converter now contains upward of $90 worth of platinum and $68 worth of palladium. The massive drop in prices and government efforts to end catalytic converter theft have been a key reason they've declined in recent times.

[...] While numerous other metals such as copper, nickel, manganese, cerium, and iron can all behave as catalysts for the these reactions, they often lack the stability and heat tolerance needed to withstand the high temperatures and elemental exposure in a car's exhaust. As a result, metals like platinum, palladium, and rhodium become the perfect fit for catalytic converters, helping reduce harmful exhausts that can have detrimental environmental effects such as acid rain and formation of ground-level ozone.

Original Submission

digitalaudiorock writes:

For what is apparently the fifth time in recent years, changes to the Cloudflare browser integrity check are blocking the Palemoon browser as well as other non-mainstream browsers from any sites that use it. Every time this has happened before it's taken at least two weeks for them to address it. This one has gone on for a week and Cloudflare has yet to even acknowledge it. Here's the original post on the Palemoon forum:

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=32045

The following post was then made on the Cloudflare community forum. Oddly, the thread was apparently closed because forum users flagged it as spam. It's pretty clear that these were pro-Cloudflare trolls on the forum that Cloudflare themselves is apparently OK with...likely because they troll on Cloudflare's side:

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/access-denied-to-pale-moon-desktop-browser/764330

This was later started on Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42953508

It's bad enough that many sites get coded so as to only work on mainstream browsers. However it's a much bigger issue when a company that's becoming the gateway to the web does so. In addition to the countless things that are wrong with this, I also agree with this post from user "Deadgye" on the Palemoon forum, making a case for false advertising on their part:

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=32045&start=100#p259382

The cynic in me wonders if every time I get blocked from a site, I might be doing a $blocked_bots++ to some statistics Clouldflare may brag about.

Original Submission

TheReaperD writes:

News of mass immigration arrests has swept across the US over the past couple of weeks. Reports from Massachusetts to Idaho have described agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) spreading through communities and rounding people up. Quick Google searches for Ice operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases. Headlines include "ICE arrests 85 during 4-day Colorado operation", "New Orleans focuses targeted operations on 123 criminal noncitizens", and in Wisconsin, "ICE arrests 83 criminal aliens".

But The Guardian took a closer look at these Ice reports tells a different story.

All the archived Ice press releases soaring to the top of Google search results were marked with the same timestamp and read: "Updated: 01/24/2025".

So, it looks like rather than actually doing any immigration raids, they're simply changing the timestamps on [some] raids dating back to 2008 to claim credit again for raids they did long [ago]. Once again, hype over substance.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Piecing together the puzzle of the world's earliest datable rune stone:

Piecing together fragments of the world's earliest known rune stone shows they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and may have been separated intentionally, shedding light on the varied pragmatic and ritual aspects of early Germanic rune stones.

Runes were the letters used to write Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet, the oldest of which were in use until about AD 700. However, how these runes originated and were used is unclear.

"The development of runic writing and the practice of inscribing runes on stone are difficult to trace," says Dr. Kristel Zilmer, professor in runology at the University of Oslo, and member of the research team behind a new publication in Antiquity.

Thus, the discovery of several sandstone fragments inscribed with runes at the grave field of Svingerud, Norway, is exciting, as they shed light on early use of runic writing on stone and feature multiple intriguing sequences of runes alongside other puzzling markings. The archaeological contexts of the finds provide excellent opportunities for dating the rune stone by radiocarbon dates.

The pieces of stone were found in separate graves. Through meticulous archaeological investigations over three field seasons and analysis of the fragments in the lab, the research team found that they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. By piecing together the fragments, the team were able to detect several runic inscriptions.

[...] This suggests that the original, large stone was intentionally fragmented, scattered and incorporated into later burials. Perhaps the stone was initially intended to mark one grave, but was fragmented to commemorate subsequent burials.

This invites a different perspective on the rune stone: could some of the unidentified symbols bridge the gap between ornamental script and early writing? Was the fragmentation and scattering of rune stones a means to connect different graves across the grave field?

Journal Reference: Inscribed sandstone fragments of Hole, Norway: radiocarbon dates provide insight into rune-stone traditions, Antiquity (2025). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2024.225

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Deepfake videos are getting shockingly good:

Researchers from TikTok owner ByteDance have demoed a new AI system, OmniHuman-1, that can generate perhaps the most realistic deepfake videos to date.

Deepfaking AI is a commodity. There's no shortage of apps that can insert someone into a photo, or make a person appear to say something they didn't actually say. But most deepfakes — and video deepfakes in particular — fail to clear the uncanny valley. There's usually some tell or obvious sign that AI was involved somewhere.

Not so with OmniHuman-1 — at least from the cherry-picked samples the ByteDance team released. [Ed Note: The source contains some examples if you wish to enable it's access to your computer.]

According to the ByteDance researchers, OmniHuman-1 only needs a single reference image and audio, like speech or vocals, to generate a clip of an arbitrary length. The output video's aspect ratio is adjustable, as is the subject's "body proportion" — i.e. how much of their body is shown in the fake footage.

Trained on 19,000 hours of video content from undisclosed sources, OmniHuman-1 can also edit existing videos — even modifying the movements of a person's limbs. It's truly astonishing how convincing the result can be.

Granted, OmniHuman-1 isn't perfect. The ByteDance team says that "low-quality" reference images won't yield the best videos, and the system seems to struggle with certain poses.

Also look at: OmniHuman-1: Rethinking the Scaling-Up of One-Stage Conditioned Human Animation Models

Original Submission

Freeman, and an Anonymous Coward submitted the same story:

As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders:

Two years ago, a Canadian writer named Cory Doctorow coined the phrase "enshittification" to describe the decay of online platforms. The word immediately set the Internet ablaze, as it captured the growing malaise regarding how almost everything about the web seemed to be getting worse.

"It's my theory explaining how the Internet was colonized by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters, and what we can do about it," Doctorow explained in a follow-up article. "We're all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying."

Doctorow believes there are four basic forces that might constrain companies from getting worse: competition, regulation, self-help, and tech workers. One by one, he says, these constraints have been eroded as large corporations squeeze the Internet and its denizens for dollars.

If you want a real-world, literal example of enshittification, let's look at actual poop. When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100 million on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until Diapers.com folded. With another competitor tossed aside, Amazon was then free to sell diapers at its price from wherever it wanted to source them.

Anyway, we at Ars have covered a lot of things that have been enshittified. Here are some of the worst examples we've come across. Hopefully, you'll share some of your own experiences in the comments. We might even do a follow-up story based on those.

upstart writes:

Russia VPN Crackdown Revelation - VPN Sites Hide Their IP Addresses:

Reports concerning the Russian government's growing intolerance of VPNs, often refer to the technology or associated services as "banned" or otherwise outlawed.

While technically inaccurate, amendments to local law effectively place VPN services into two groups. The first group contains the VPN providers officially registered with the authorities. The second group contains the illegal services, whose owners haven't yet agreed to provide the authorities with unfettered access, when that becomes necessary.

Illegal VPN services are unsurprisingly illegal to sell. Under more recent amendments, it's also illegal to promote or encourage illegal VPN use, or provide tutorials or similar assistance to others. These are crimes punishable under law but at least for now, Russian authorities seem more likely to block offending websites, to prevent Russians from viewing illegal information.

Thanks to the tireless work of digital rights group Roskomsvoboda, blocking orders issued by many government departments, courts, and less easily defined entities that seem to come and go, can be accessed much more easily.

A Verstka.Media review of the blocking data published this week, found a fivefold increase in persistent site blocking in 2024, when compared to data for 2022.

AnonTechie writes:

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development have identified who is most susceptible to online misinformation and why. Their meta-analysis reveals surprising patterns on how demographic and psychological factors—including age, education, political identity, analytical thinking, and motivated reflection—affect people's ability to assess the accuracy of information. For instance, individuals with higher levels of education are just as likely to fall for misinformation as those with a lower level of education. The work, published in the journal PNAS, provides important information for theory building and designing interventions.

[...] The researchers found no significant impact of education on people's ability to distinguish between true and false information. This contradicts the widespread belief that more educated individuals are likely to be less susceptible to misinformation, especially as higher education teaches us critical thinking. The study also challenges assumptions about age and misinformation. While older adults are often portrayed as more vulnerable to fake news, the analysis found that they were actually better than younger adults at distinguishing between true and false headlines. Older adults were also more skeptical and tended to label headlines as false more often. Paradoxically, however, previous research has consistently shown that older adults engage with and share more misinformation online. The study distinguishes between three age groups: 18-31 years, 32-47 years and 48-88 years.

[...] Political identity also played a key role. The meta-analysis confirmed previous research showing that individuals who identify as Republicans are more likely to fall for misinformation than those who identify as Democrats. Republicans were less accurate at assessing the veracity of news and tended to label more headlines as true, whereas Democrats were more skeptical.

Individuals with higher analytical thinking skills—that is, who are better at logically evaluating information, identifying patterns, and systematically solving problems—performed better overall and were more skeptical (tending to classify news as false). People were more likely to believe that news that aligned with their political identity was true and to disregard news that was not aligned with their political identity—a phenomenon known as partisan bias.

Frosty Piss writes:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/04/google-removes-pledge-to-not-use-ai-for-weapons-from-website/

Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company appears to have updated its public AI principles page, erasing a section titled "applications we will not pursue," which was still included as recently as last week.

Asked for comment, the company pointed TechCrunch to a new blog post on "responsible AI." It notes, in part, "we believe that companies, governments, and organizations sharing these values should work together to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security."

Original Submission