9u50fv – Page 29

Trump targets Mexico and Canada with tariffs, plus an extra 10% for China

Canada, china, Donald Trump, mexico, Policy, syndication, tariffs / 9u50fv / November 26, 2024

Trump had in particular targeted Mexico on the campaign trail, threatening to impose “whatever tariffs are required—100 percent, 200 percent, 1,000 percent” to stop Chinese cars from crossing the southern border.

He has also warned Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, he would impose tariffs of 25 percent if she did not crack down on the “onslaught of criminals and drugs” crossing the border.

The levies could be imposed using executive powers that would override the USMCA, the free trade agreement Trump signed with Canada and Mexico during his first term as president.

“There’s a lot of integration of North American manufacturing in a lot of sectors, particularly autos, so this would be pretty disruptive for a lot of US companies and industries,” said Warren Maruyama, former general counsel at the Office of the US Trade Representative. “Tariffs are inflationary and will drive up prices,” he added.

Ricardo Monreal, leader of Mexico’s ruling party in the lower house of congress, said tariffs would “not solve the underlying issue” at the border. “Escalating trade retaliation would only hurt people’s pockets,” he wrote on X.

Diego Marroquín Bitar at the Wilson Center think tank warned that unilateral tariffs “would shatter confidence in USMCA and harm all three economies.”

In a joint statement, Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, and public safety minister Dominic LeBlanc hailed the bilateral relationship with the US as “one of the strongest and closest… particularly when it comes to trade and border security.”

They also noted that Canada “buys more from the United States than China, Japan, France, and the UK combined,” and last year supplied “60 percent of US crude oil imports.”

“Even if this is a negotiating strategy, I don’t see what Canada has to offer that Trump is not already getting,” said Carlo Dade at the Canada West Foundation.

While Trump put tariffs at the center of his economic pitch to voters, President Joe Biden has also increased levies on Chinese imports. In May, Biden’s administration sharply increased tariffs on a range of imported clean-energy technologies, including boosting tariffs on electric vehicles from China to 100 percent.

Biden’s administration has also pushed Beijing for several years to crack down on the production of ingredients for fentanyl, which it estimated claimed the lives of almost 75,000 Americans in 2023. Beijing this year agreed to impose controls on chemicals crucial to manufacturing fentanyl following meetings with senior US officials.

Additional reporting by William Sandlund and Haohsiang Ko in Hong Kong, Christine Murray in Mexico City, Ilya Gridneff in Toronto, Joe Leahy in Beijing, and Alex Rogers in Washington.

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DOJ wraps up ad tech trial: Google is “three times” a monopolist

advertising exchange, Antitrust law, Google, google ad manager, google ad tech, google adx, online advertising, Policy / 9u50fv / November 25, 2024

One of the fastest monopoly trials on record wound down Monday, as US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema heard closing arguments on Google’s alleged monopoly in a case over the company’s ad tech.

Department of Justice lawyer Aaron Teitelbaum kicked things off by telling Brinkema that Google “rigged” ad auctions, allegedly controlling “multiple parts” of services used to place ads all over the Internet, unfairly advantaging itself in three markets, The New York Times reported.

“Google is once, twice, three times a monopolist,” Teitelbaum said, while reinforcing that “these are the markets that make the free and open Internet possible.”

Teitelbaum likened Google to a “predator,” preying on publishers that allegedly had no viable other options for ad revenue but to stick with Google’s products. An executive for News Corp. testified that the news organization felt it was being held “hostage” because it risked losing $9 million in 2017 if it walked away from Google’s advertising platform.

Brinkema, who wasted no time and frequently urged lawyers to avoid repeating themselves or dragging out litigation with unnecessary testimony throughout the trial, reportedly pushed back.

In one instance she asked, “What would happen if a company had produced the best product,” but Teitelbaum rejected the idea that Google’s ad tech platform had competed on the merits.

“The problem is Google hasn’t done that,” Teitelbaum said, alleging that instead better emerging products “died out,” unable to compete on the merits.

According to Vidushi Dyall, the director of legal analysis for the Chamber of Progress (a trade group representing Google), this lack of advertiser testimony or evidence of better products could be key flaws in the DOJ’s argument. When Brinkema asked what better products Google had stamped out, the DOJ came up blank, Dyall posted in a thread on X (formerly Twitter).

Further, Dyall wrote, Brinkema “noted that the DOJ’s case was notably absent of direct testimony from advertisers.” The judge apparently criticized the DOJ for focusing too much on how publishers were harmed while providing “no direct evidence about advertisers and how satisfied/dissatisfied they are with the system,” Dyall wrote.

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Raw milk recalled for containing bird flu virus, California reports

bird flu, California, H5N1, health, Infectious disease, influenza, pasteurization, raw milk, Science / 9u50fv / November 25, 2024

Pasteurization

The milk-related risk of H5N1 is only from raw milk; pasteurized milk does not contain live virus and is safe to drink. Pasteurization, which heats milk to a specific temperature for a specified amount of time, kills a variety of bacteria and viruses, including bird flu. Influenza viruses, generally, are considered susceptible to heat treatments because they have an outer layer called an envelope, which can be destabilized by heat. Studies that have specifically looked at the effectiveness of heat-killing treatments against H5N1 have repeatedly found that pasteurization effectively inactivates the virus.

The advent of pasteurization is considered a public health triumph. Its adoption of a safe milk supply contributed to a dramatic reduction in infant deaths in the early 20th century. Before that, milkborne infections—including human and bovine tuberculosis, brucellosis, salmonellosis, streptococcal infections, diphtheria, and “summer diarrhea”—were common killers of infants.

As such, public health officials have long advised people against consuming raw milk, which has no evidence-based health benefits. Raw milk consumption, meanwhile, is linked to higher rates of outbreaks from pathogens including Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes, toxin-producing E. coli, Brucella, Campylobacter, and many other bacteria.

Risky drinking

Since H5N1 was found spreading among dairy cows in March, health experts have warned about the additional risk of consuming raw milk. Still, consumption of raw milk has continued, and surprisingly increased, as supporters of the dangerous practice have accused health officials of “fearmongering.”

When the retail sampling of Raw Farm’s milk came back positive, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) conducted testing at the company’s locations, which were negative for the virus. The CDFA will now begin testing Raw Farm’s milk for bird flu twice a week.

The recalled milk has lot code 20241109 and a “best by” date of November 27, 2024, printed on the packaging.

“Drinking or accidentally inhaling raw milk containing bird flu virus may lead to illness,” California’s public health department said. “In addition, touching your eyes, nose, or mouth with unwashed hands after touching raw milk with bird flu virus may also lead to infection.”

Some US dairy workers who contracted the virus from infected cows reported having had milk splash in their eyes and face. A common symptom of H5N1 infections in humans during the dairy outbreak has been conjunctivitis, aka eye inflammation.

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NASA is stacking the Artemis II rocket, implying a simple heat shield fix

artemis, artemis II, human spaceflight, Kennedy Space Center, NASA, orion, Science, Space, space launch system, vehicle assembly building / 9u50fv / November 21, 2024

A good sign

The readiness of the Orion crew capsule, where the four Artemis II astronauts will live during their voyage around the Moon, is driving NASA’s schedule for the mission. Officially, Artemis II is projected to launch in September of next year, but there’s little chance of meeting that schedule.

At the beginning of this year, NASA officials ruled out any opportunity to launch Artemis II in 2024 due to several technical issues with the Orion spacecraft. Several of these issues are now resolved, but NASA has not released any meaningful updates on the most significant problem.

This problem involves the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield. During atmospheric reentry at the end of the uncrewed Artemis I test flight in 2022, the Orion capsule’s heat shield eroded and cracked in unexpected ways, prompting investigations by NASA engineers and an independent panel.

NASA’s Orion heat shield inquiry ran for nearly two years. The investigation has wrapped up, two NASA officials said last month, but they declined to discuss any details of the root cause of the heat shield issue or the actions required to resolve the problem on Artemis II.

These corrective options ranged from doing nothing to changing the Orion spacecraft’s reentry angle to mitigate heating or physically modifying the Artemis II heat shield. In the latter scenario, NASA would have to disassemble the Orion spacecraft, which is already put together and is undergoing environmental testing at Kennedy Space Center. This would likely delay the Artemis II launch by a couple of years.

In August, NASA’s top human exploration official told Ars that the agency would hold off on stacking the SLS rocket until engineers had a good handle on the heat shield problem. There are limits to how long the solid rocket boosters can remain stacked vertically. The joints connecting each segment of the rocket motors are certified for one year. This clock doesn’t actually start ticking until NASA stacks the next booster segments on top of the lowermost segments.

However, NASA waived this rule on Artemis I when the boosters were stacked nearly two years before the successful launch.

A NASA spokesperson told Ars on Wednesday that the agency had nothing new to share on the Orion heat shield or what changes, if any, are required for the Artemis II mission. This information should be released before the end of the year, she said. At the same time, NASA could announce a new target launch date for Artemis II at the end of 2025, or more likely in 2026.

But because NASA gave the “go” for SLS stacking now, it seems safe to rule out any major hardware changes on the Orion heat shield for Artemis II.

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Microsoft pushes full-screen ads for Copilot+ PCs on Windows 10 users

Tech, Windows 10, Windows 11, windows 11 24h2 / 9u50fv / November 20, 2024

Windows 10’s free, guaranteed security updates stop in October 2025, less than a year from now. Windows 10 users with supported PCs have been offered the Windows 11 upgrade plenty of times before. But now Microsoft is apparently making a fresh push to get users to upgrade, sending them full-screen reminders recommending they buy new computers.

The reminders, which users have seen within the last few days, all mention the end of Windows 10 support but otherwise seem to differ from computer to computer. My Ars colleague Kyle Orland got one focused on Windows 11’s gaming features, while posters on X (formerly Twitter) got screens that emphasized the ease of migrating from old PCs to new ones and other Windows 11 features. One specifically recommended upgrading to a Copilot+ PC, which supports a handful of extra AI features that other Windows 11 PCs don’t, but other messages didn’t mention Copilot+ specifically.

None of the messages mention upgrading to Windows 11 directly, though Kyle said his PC meets Windows 11’s requirements. These messages may be intended mostly for people using older PCs that can’t officially install the Windows 11 update.

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The key moment came 38 minutes after Starship roared off the launch pad

Donald Trump, elon musk, Features, launch, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship, Starship Flight 6, super heavy, texas, US Space Force / 9u50fv / November 20, 2024

SpaceX wasn’t able to catch the Super Heavy booster, but Starship is on the cusp of orbital flight.

The sixth flight of Starship lifts off from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site at Boca Chica Beach, Texas. Credit: SpaceX.

SpaceX launched its sixth Starship rocket Tuesday, proving for the first time that the stainless steel ship can maneuver in space and paving the way for an even larger, upgraded vehicle slated to debut on the next test flight.

The only hiccup was an abortive attempt to catch the rocket’s Super Heavy booster back at the launch site in South Texas, something SpaceX achieved on the previous flight on October 13. The Starship upper stage flew halfway around the world, reaching an altitude of 118 miles (190 kilometers) before plunging through the atmosphere for a pinpoint slow-speed splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The sixth flight of the world’s largest launcher—standing 398 feet (121.3 meters) tall—began with a lumbering liftoff from SpaceX’s Starbase facility near the US-Mexico border at 4 pm CST (22: 00 UTC) Tuesday. The rocket headed east over the Gulf of Mexico, propelled by 33 Raptor engines clustered on the bottom of its Super Heavy first stage.

A few miles away, President-elect Donald Trump joined SpaceX founder Elon Musk to witness the launch. The SpaceX boss became one of Trump’s closest allies in this year’s presidential election, giving the world’s richest man extraordinary influence in US space policy. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was there, too, among other lawmakers. Gen. Chance Saltzman, the top commander in the US Space Force, stood nearby, chatting with Trump and other VIPs.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, President-elect Donald Trump, and Gen. Chance Saltzman of the US Space Force watch the sixth launch of Starship Tuesday. Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

From their viewing platform, they watched Starship climb into a clear autumn sky. At full power, the 33 Raptors chugged more than 40,000 pounds of super-cold liquid methane and liquid oxygen per second. The engines generated 16.7 million pounds of thrust, 60 percent more than the Soviet N1, the second-largest rocket in history.

Eight minutes later, the rocket’s upper stage, itself also known as Starship, was in space, completing the program’s fourth straight near-flawless launch. The first two test flights faltered before reaching their planned trajectory.

A brief but crucial demo

As exciting as it was, we’ve seen all that before. One of the most important new things engineers wanted to test on this flight occurred about 38 minutes after liftoff.

That’s when Starship reignited one of its six Raptor engines for a brief burn to make a slight adjustment to its flight path. The burn lasted only a few seconds, and the impulse was small—just a 48 mph (77 km/hour) change in velocity, or delta-V—but it demonstrated that the ship can safely deorbit itself on future missions.

With this achievement, Starship will likely soon be cleared to travel into orbit around Earth and deploy Starlink Internet satellites or conduct in-space refueling experiments, two of the near-term objectives on SpaceX’s Starship development roadmap.

Launching Starlinks aboard Starship will allow SpaceX to expand the capacity and reach of its commercial consumer broadband network, which, in turn, provides revenue for Musk to reinvest into Starship. Orbital refueling enables Starship voyages beyond low-Earth orbit, fulfilling SpaceX’s multibillion-dollar contract with NASA to provide a human-rated Moon lander for the agency’s Artemis program. Likewise, transferring cryogenic propellants in orbit is a prerequisite for sending Starships to Mars, making real Musk’s dream of creating a settlement on the red planet.

Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX

Until now, SpaceX has intentionally launched Starships to speeds just shy of the blistering velocities needed to maintain orbit. Engineers wanted to test the Raptor’s ability to reignite in space on the third Starship test flight in March, but the ship lost control of its orientation, and SpaceX canceled the engine firing.

Before going for a full orbital flight, officials needed to confirm that Starship could steer itself back into the atmosphere for reentry, ensuring it wouldn’t present any risk to the public with an unguided descent over a populated area. After Tuesday, SpaceX can check this off its to-do list.

“Congrats to SpaceX on Starship’s sixth test flight,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson posted on X. “Exciting to see the Raptor engine restart in space—major progress towards orbital flight. Starship’s success is Artemis’ success. Together, we will return humanity to the Moon & set our sights on Mars.”

While it lacks the pizzazz of a fiery launch or landing, the engine relight unlocks a new phase of Starship development. SpaceX has now proven that the rocket is capable of reaching space with a fair measure of reliability. Next, engineers will fine-tune how to reliably recover the booster and the ship and learn how to use them.

Acid test

SpaceX appears well on its way to doing this. While SpaceX didn’t catch the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower’s mechanical arms Tuesday, engineers have shown they can do it. The challenge of catching Starship itself back at the launch pad is more daunting. The ship starts its reentry thousands of miles from Starbase, traveling approximately 17,000 mph (27,000 km/hour), and must thread the gap between the tower’s catch arms within a matter of inches.

The good news is that SpaceX has now twice proven it can bring Starship back to a precision splashdown in the Indian Ocean. In October, the ship settled into the sea in darkness. SpaceX moved the launch time for Tuesday’s flight to the late afternoon, setting up for splashdown shortly after sunrise northwest of Australia.

The shift in time paid off with some stunning new visuals. Cameras mounted on the outside of Starship beamed dazzling live views back to SpaceX through the Starlink network, showing a now-familiar glow of plasma encasing the spacecraft as it plowed deeper into the atmosphere. But this time, daylight revealed the ship’s flaps moving to control its belly-first descent toward the ocean. After passing through a deck of low clouds, Starship reignited its Raptor engines and tilted from horizontal to vertical, making contact with the water tail-first within view of a floating buoy and a nearby aircraft in position to observe the moment.

Here’s a replay of the spacecraft’s splashdown around 65 minutes after launch.

Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting sixth flight test of Starship! pic.twitter.com/bf98Va9qmL

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 19, 2024

The ship made it through reentry despite flying with a substandard heat shield. Starship’s thermal protection system is made up of thousands of ceramic tiles to protect the ship from temperatures as high as 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius).

Kate Tice, a SpaceX engineer hosting the company’s live broadcast of the mission, said teams at Starbase removed 2,100 heat shield tiles from Starship ahead of Tuesday’s launch. Their removal exposed wider swaths of the ship’s stainless steel skin to super-heated plasma, and SpaceX teams were eager to see how well the spacecraft held up during reentry. In the language of flight testing, this approach is called exploring the corners of the envelope, where engineers evaluate how a new airplane or rocket performs in extreme conditions.

“Don’t be surprised if we see some wackadoodle stuff happen here,” Tice said. There was nothing of the sort. One of the ship’s flaps appeared to suffer some heating damage, but it remained intact and functional, and the harm looked to be less substantial than damage seen on previous flights.

Many of the removed tiles came from the sides of Starship where SpaceX plans to place catch fittings on future vehicles. These are the hardware protuberances that will catch on the top side of the launch tower’s mechanical arms, similar to fittings used on the Super Heavy booster.

“The next flight, we want to better understand where we can install catch hardware, not necessarily to actually do the catch but to see how that hardware holds up in those spots,” Tice said. “Today’s flight will help inform ‘does the stainless steel hold up like we think it may, based on experiments that we conducted on Flight 5?'”

Musk wrote on his social media platform X that SpaceX could try to bring Starship back to Starbase for a catch on the eighth test flight, which is likely to occur in the first half of 2025.

“We will do one more ocean landing of the ship,” Musk said. “If that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower.”

The heat shield, Musk added, is a focal point of SpaceX’s attention. The delicate heat-absorbing tiles used on the belly of the space shuttle proved vexing to NASA technicians. Early in the shuttle’s development, NASA had trouble keeping tiles adhered to the shuttle’s aluminum skin. Each of the shuttle tiles was custom-machined to fit on a specific location on the orbiter, complicating refurbishment between flights. Starship’s tiles are all hexagonal in shape and agnostic to where technicians place them on the vehicle.

“The biggest technology challenge remaining for Starship is a fully & immediately reusable heat shield,” Musk wrote on X. “Being able to land the ship, refill propellant & launch right away with no refurbishment or laborious inspection. That is the acid test.”

This photo of the Starship vehicle for Flight 6, numbered Ship 31, shows exposed portions of the vehicle’s stainless steel skin after tile removal. Credit: SpaceX

There were no details available Tuesday night on what caused the Super Heavy booster to divert from its planned catch on the launch tower. After detaching from the Starship upper stage less than three minutes into the flight, the booster reversed course to begin the journey back to Starbase.

Then SpaceX’s flight director announced the rocket would fly itself into the Gulf rather than back to the launch site: “Booster offshore divert.”

The booster finished its descent with a seemingly perfect landing burn using a subset of its Raptor engines. As expected after the water landing, the booster—itself 233 feet (71 meters) tall—toppled and broke apart in a dramatic fireball visible to onshore spectators.

In an update posted to its website after the launch, SpaceX said automated health checks of hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered the aborted catch attempt. The company did not say what system failed the health check. As a safety measure, SpaceX must send a manual command for the booster to come back to land in order to prevent a malfunction from endangering people or property.

Turning it up to 11

There will be plenty more opportunities for more booster catches in the coming months as SpaceX ramps up its launch cadence at Starbase. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, hinted at the scale of the company’s ambitions last week.

“We just passed 400 launches on Falcon, and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years,” she said at the Barron Investment Conference.

The next batch of test flights will use an improved version of Starship designated Block 2, or V2. Starship Block 2 comes with larger propellant tanks, redesigned forward flaps, and a better heat shield.

The new-generation Starship will hold more than 11 million pounds of fuel and oxidizer, about a million pounds more than the capacity of Starship Block 1. The booster and ship will produce more thrust, and Block 2 will measure 408 feet (124.4 meters) tall, stretching the height of the full stack by a little more than 10 feet.

Put together, these modifications should give Starship the ability to heave a payload of up to 220,000 pounds (100 metric tons) into low-Earth orbit, about twice the carrying capacity of the first-generation ship. Further down the line, SpaceX plans to introduce Starship Block 3 to again double the ship’s payload capacity.

Just as importantly, these changes are designed to make it easier for SpaceX to recover and reuse the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage. SpaceX’s goal of fielding a fully reusable launcher builds on the partial reuse SpaceX pioneered with its Falcon 9 rocket. This should dramatically bring down launch costs, according to SpaceX’s vision.

With Tuesday’s flight, it’s clear Starship works. Now it’s time to see what it can do.

Updated with additional details, quotes, and images.

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Scientist behind superconductivity claims ousted

Physics, Ranga Dias, retractions, Science, superconductivity / 9u50fv / November 19, 2024

University of Rochester physicist Ranga Dias made headlines with his controversial claims of high-temperature superconductivity—and made headlines again when the two papers reporting the breakthroughs were later retracted under suspicion of scientific misconduct, although Dias denied any wrongdoing. The university conducted a formal investigation over the past year and has now terminated Dias’ employment, The Wall Street Journal reported.

“In the past year, the university completed a fair and thorough investigation—conducted by a panel of nationally and internationally known physicists—into data reliability concerns within several retracted papers in which Dias served as a senior and corresponding author,” a spokesperson for the University of Rochester said in a statement to the WSJ, confirming his termination. “The final report concluded that he engaged in research misconduct while a faculty member here.”

The spokesperson declined to elaborate further on the details of his departure, and Dias did not respond to the WSJ’s request for comment. Dias did not have tenure, so the final decision rested with the Board of Trustees after a recommendation from university President Sarah Mangelsdorf. Mangelsdorf had called for terminating his position in an August letter to the chair and vice chair of the Board of Trustees, so the decision should not come as a surprise. Dias’ lawsuit claiming that the investigation was biased was dismissed by a judge in April.

Ars has been following this story ever since Dias first burst onto the scene with reports of a high-pressure, room-temperature superconductor, published in Nature in 2020. Even as that paper was being retracted due to concerns about the validity of some of its data, Dias published a second paper in Nature claiming a similar breakthrough: a superconductor that works at high temperatures but somewhat lower pressures. Shortly afterward, that paper was retracted as well. As Ars Science Editor John Timmer reported previously:

Dias’ lab was focused on high-pressure superconductivity. At extreme pressures, the orbitals where electrons hang out get distorted, which can alter the chemistry and electronic properties of materials. This can mean the formation of chemical compounds that don’t exist at normal pressures, along with distinct conductivity. In a number of cases, these changes enabled superconductivity at unusually high temperatures, although still well below the freezing point of water.

Dias, however, supposedly found a combination of chemicals that would boost the transition to superconductivity to near room temperature, although only at extreme pressures. While the results were plausible, the details regarding how some of the data was processed to produce one of the paper’s key graphs were lacking, and Dias didn’t provide a clear explanation.

The ensuing investigation cleared Dias of misconduct for that first paper. Then came the second paper, which reported another high-temperature superconductor forming at less extreme pressures. However, potential problems soon became apparent, with many of the authors calling for its retraction, although Dias did not.

Scientist behind superconductivity claims ousted Read More »

Valve developers discuss why Half Life 2: Episode 3 was abandoned

gaming, half life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 3 / 9u50fv / November 18, 2024

Despite the new weapons and mechanics that were already in the works for Episode 3, many developers quoted in the documentary cite a kind of fatigue that had set in after so much time and effort focused on a single franchise. “A lot of us had been doing Half-Life for eight-plus years” designer and composer Kelly Bailey noted.

That lengthy focus on a single franchise helps explain why some Valve developers were eager to work on anything else by that time in their careers. “I think everybody that worked on Half-Life misses working on that thing,” Engineer Scott Dalton said. “But it’s also hard not to be like, ‘Man, I’ve kind of seen every way that you can fight an Antlion,’ or whatever. And so you wanna get some space away from it until you can come back to it with fresh eyes.”

After the first two Half-Life 2 episodes were received less well than the base game itself, many developers cited in the documentary also said they felt pressure to go “much bigger” for Episode 3. Living up to that pressure, and doing justice to the fan expectations for the conclusion of the three-episode saga, proved to be too much for the team.

“You can’t get lazy and say, ‘Oh, we’re moving the story forward,’ Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said of the pressure. “That’s copping out of your obligation to gamers, right? Yes, of course they love the story. They love many, many aspects of it. But sort of saying that your reason to do it is because people want to know what happens next… you know, we could’ve shipped it, like, it wouldn’t have been that hard.

“You know, the failure was—my personal failure was being stumped,” Newell continued. “Like, I couldn’t figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward.”

Valve developers discuss why Half Life 2: Episode 3 was abandoned Read More »

Apple’s headphone adapter for older iPhones sells out, possibly never to return

3.5mm, Apple, Apple Store, headphone jack, IPhone, Lightning, Tech / 9u50fv / November 18, 2024

When Apple infamously ditched the headphone jack with the launch of the iPhone 7, it at least provided customers with a Lightning-to-3.5 mm adapter either right in the box or as a $9 standalone purchase in its online store. Now it looks like that adapter is being retired.

As MacRumors first noted, the adapter is showing as sold out in most regions, along with a few other Lightning accessories, like the even-more-archaic-seeming Lightning-to-VGA adapter. That includes the United States, where it is not possible to order the headphone adapter from Apple’s store.

Inventory has run out, and it seems unlikely Apple will make more to refill it.

This is likely part of a general phasing out of products related to the proprietary Lightning port, which was used in many Apple devices (including the iPhone) for years but has been replaced by USB-C in all of the company’s major products. A couple of older iPhone models offered at cheaper prices—the iPhone SE and the iPhone 14—are available today, but they will likely be replaced in just a couple of months.

Apple is selling a similar adapter for connecting 3.5 mm headphones to USB-C iPhones and iPads.

Nonetheless, many people out there still have older Lightning iPhones but haven’t yet made the jump to wireless headphones. Third-party options are out there that they can use—at least for now—but the popular Apple adapter seems to be following a similar script as other deprecated Apple accessories have upon their retirement.

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Explicit deepfake scandal shuts down Pennsylvania school

ai child sex images, ai csam, ai deepfakes, AI image generators, child sex abuse materials, csam, Policy / 9u50fv / November 18, 2024

An AI-generated nude photo scandal has shut down a Pennsylvania private school. On Monday, classes were canceled after parents forced leaders to either resign or face a lawsuit potentially seeking criminal penalties and accusing the school of skipping mandatory reporting of the harmful images.

The outcry erupted after a single student created sexually explicit AI images of nearly 50 female classmates at Lancaster Country Day School, Lancaster Online reported.

Head of School Matt Micciche seemingly first learned of the problem in November 2023, when a student anonymously reported the explicit deepfakes through a school portal run by the state attorney’s general office called “Safe2Say Something.” But Micciche allegedly did nothing, allowing more students to be targeted for months until police were tipped off in mid-2024.

Cops arrested the student accused of creating the harmful content in August. The student’s phone was seized as cops investigated the origins of the AI-generated images. But that arrest was not enough justice for parents who were shocked by the school’s failure to uphold mandatory reporting responsibilities following any suspicion of child abuse. They filed a court summons threatening to sue last week unless the school leaders responsible for the mishandled response resigned within 48 hours.

This tactic successfully pushed Micciche and the school board’s president, Angela Ang-Alhadeff, to “part ways” with the school, both resigning effective late Friday, Lancaster Online reported.

In a statement announcing that classes were canceled Monday, Lancaster Country Day School—which, according to Wikipedia, serves about 600 students in pre-kindergarten through high school—offered support during this “difficult time” for the community.

Parents do not seem ready to drop the suit, as the school leaders seemingly dragged their feet and resigned two days after their deadline. The parents’ lawyer, Matthew Faranda-Diedrich, told Lancaster Online Monday that “the lawsuit would still be pursued despite executive changes.”

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These are the lasting things that Half-Life 2 gave us, besides headcrabs and crowbars

gabe newell, gaming, half life 2, Half-Life 3, marc laidlaw, portal, portal 2, source code leak, Source Engine, steam, Team Fortress 2, valve / 9u50fv / November 16, 2024

Beyond the game itself (which rocks), Half-Life 2 had a big impact on PC gaming.

This article is part of our 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2 series. Credit: Aurich Lawson

It’s Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we’ll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

“Well, I just hate the idea that our games might waste people’s time. Why spend four years of your life building something that isn’t innovative and is basically pointless?”

Valve software founder Gabe Newell is quoted by Geoff Keighley—yes, the Game Awards guy, back then a GameSpot writer—as saying this in June 1999, six months after the original Half-Life launched. Newell gave his team no real budget or deadline, only the assignment to “follow up the best PC game of all time” and redefine the genre.

When Half-Life 2 arrived in November 2004, the Collector’s Edition contained about 2.6GB of files. The game, however, contained so many things that would seem brand new in gaming, or just brave, that it’s hard to even list them.

Except I’m going to try that right here. Some will be hard to pin definitively in time to Half-Life 2 (HL2). But like many great games, HL2 refined existing ideas, borrowed others, and had a few of its own to show off.

Note that some aspects of the game itself, its status as Steam’s big push title, and what it’s like to play it today, are covered by other writers during Ars’ multi-day celebration of the game’s 20th anniversary. That includes the Gravity Gun.

How many film and gaming careers were launched by people learning how to make the Scout do something goofy? Credit: Valve

The Source Engine

It’s hard to imagine another game developer building an engine with such a forward-thinking mission as Source. Rather than just build the thing that runs their next game, Valve crafted Source to be modular, such that its core could be continually improved (and shipped out over Steam), and newer technologies could be optionally ported into games both new and old, while not breaking any older titles working perfectly fine.

Source started development during the late stages of the original Half-Life, but its impact goes far beyond the series. Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Portal 1/2, and Left 4 Dead, from Valve alone, take up multiple slots on lists of the all-time best games. The Stanley Parable, Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, and a whole lot of other games used Source, too. Countless future game developers, level designers, and mod makers cut their teeth on the very open and freely available Source code tools.

And then, of course, where would we be as a society were it not for Source Filmmaker and Garry’s Mod, without which we would never have Save as .dmx and Skibidi Toilet.

*Half-Life: Alyx* is a technical marvel of the VR age, but it’s pulled along by the emotional bonds of Alyx and Russell, and the quest to save Eli Vance. Credit: Valve

A shooter with family dynamics

Novelist Marc Laidlaw has made it clear, multiple times, that he did not truly create the Half-Life story when he joined Valve; it was “all there when I got there, in embryo,” he told Rock Paper Shotgun. Laidlaw helped the developers tell their story through level design and wrote short, funny, unnerving dialogue.

For Half-Life 2, Laidlaw and the devs were tasked with creating some honest-to-goodness characters, something you didn’t get very often in first-person shooters (they were all dead in 1994’s System Shock). So in walked that father/daughter team of Eli and Alyx Vance, and the extended Black Mesa family, including folks like Dr. Kleiner.

These real and makeshift family members gave the mute protagonist Gordon Freeman stakes in wanting to fix the future. And Laidlaw’s “basic dramatic unit” set a precedent for lots of shooty-yet-soft-hearted games down the road: Mass Effect, The Last of Us, Gears of War, Red Dead Redemption, and far more.

Remember when a Boston-area medical manufacturing firm, run by a Half-Life fan, got everyone thinking a sequel was coming? Fun times. Credit: Black Mesa

Intense speculation about what Valve is actually doing

Another unique thing Laidlaw helped develop in PC gaming: intense grief and longing for a sequel that both does and does not exist, channeled through endless speculation about Valve’s processes and general radio silence.

Half-Life 2 got “Episodes” but never a true numbered Half-Life 3 sequel. The likelihood of 3 took a hit when Laidlaw unexpectedly announced his retirement in January 2016. Then it got even less likely, or maybe just sad, when Laidlaw posted a barely disguised “snapshot of a dream” of “Epistle 3” to his blog (since deleted and later transposed on Pastebin).

Laidlaw has expressed regret about this move. Fans have expressed regret that Half-Life 3 somehow seems even less likely, having seen Valve’s premiere writer post such a seemingly despondent bit of primary source fan fiction.

“Fans of popular game eager for sequel” isn’t itself a unique thing, but it is for Half-Life 3’s quantum existence. Valve published its new employee handbook from around 2012 on the web, and in it, you can read about the company’s boldly flat structure. To summarize greatly: Projects only get started if someone can get enough fellow employees to wheel their desks over and work on it with them. The company doesn’t take canceled or stalled games to heart; in its handbook, it’s almost celebrated that it killed Prospero as one of its first major decisions.

So the fact that Half-Life 3 exists only as something that hasn’t been formally canceled is uniquely frustrating. HL2’s last (chronological) chapter left off on a global-scale cliffhanger, and the only reason a sequel doesn’t exist is because too many other things are more appealing than developing a new first-person shooter. If you worked at Valve, you tell yourself, maybe you could change this! Maybe.

What, you’re telling me now it’s illegal to break in, take source code, and then ask for a job? This is a police state! Credit: Valve

Source code leak drama

The Wikipedia pages “List of commercial video games with available source code” and its cousin “Later released source code” show that, up until 2003, most of the notable games whose source code became publicly available were either altruistic efforts at preservation or, for some reason, accidental inclusions of source code on demos or in dummy files on the game disc.

And then, in late 2003, Valve and Half-Life superfan Axel Gembe hacked into Valve’s servers, grabbed the Half-Life 2 source code that existed at the time and posted it to the web. It not only showed off parts of the game Valve wanted to keep under wraps, but it showed just how far behind the game’s development was relative to the release date that had blown by weeks earlier. Valve’s response was typically atypical: they acknowledged the source code as real, asked their biggest fans for help, and then released the game a year later, to critical and commercial success.

The leak further ensconced Valve as a different kind of company, one with a particularly dedicated fanbase. It also seems to have taught companies a lesson about hardening their servers and development environments. Early builds of games still leak—witness Space Marine 2 this past July—but full source code leaks, coming from network intrusions, are something you don’t see quite so often.

Pre-loading a game before release

It would be hard to go back in time and tell our pre-broadband selves about pre-loading. You download entire games, over the Internet, and then they’re ready to play one second after the release time—no store lines, no drive back home, no stuffed servers or crashed discs. It seems like a remarkable bit of trust, though it’s really just a way to lessen server load on release day.

It’s hard to pin down which game first offered pre-loading in the modern sense, but HL2, being a major launch title for Valve’s Steam service and a title with heavy demand, definitely popularized the concept.

Always-online for single-player games

Here’s one way that Half-Life 2 moved the industry forward that some folks might want to move back.

Technically, you can play HL2 without an Internet connection, and maybe for long periods of time. But for most people, playing HL2 without a persistent net connection involves activating the game on Steam, letting it fully update, and then turning on Steam’s “Offline Mode” to play it. There’s no time limit, but you need to keep Steam active while playing.

It’s not so much the particular connection demands of HL2 that make it notable, but the pathway that it, and Steam, created on which other companies moved ahead, treating gaming as something that, by default, happens with at least a connection, and preferably a persistent one.

It’s Game of the Year. Which year? Most of them, really (until *Disco Elysium* shows up). Credit: Valve

A place on “All-time” video game rankings forever

Half-Life 2 introduced many ground-breaking things at once—deep facial animations and expressions, an accessible physics engine, a compelling global-scale but family-minded story—while also being tremendously enjoyable game to play through. This has made it hard for anyone to suggest another game to go above it on any “All-time greatest games” list, especially those with a PC focus.

Not that they don’t try. PC Gamer has HL2 at 7 out of 100, mostly because it has lost an understandable amount of “Hotness” in 20 years. IGN has it at No. 9 (while its descendant Portal 2 takes third place). Metacritic, however fallible, slots it in universal second place for PC games.

So give Half-Life 2 even more credit for fostering innovation in the “arbitrary ranked list of games” genre. Rock Paper Shotgun’s top 100 is cited as the best “to play on PC today,” as they have “paid no mind to what was important or influential.” And yet, Half-Life 2, as a game you can play in 2024, is still on that list. It’s really something, that game.

Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering open-source software, PC gaming, home automation, repairability, e-bikes, and tech history. He has previously worked at Lifehacker, Wirecutter, iFixit, and Carbon Switch.

These are the lasting things that Half-Life 2 gave us, besides headcrabs and crowbars Read More »

As ABL Space departs launch, the 1-ton rocket wars have a clear winner

Science, Space / 9u50fv / November 15, 2024

“Take a look around,” Piemont wrote. “US rockets fly every couple of days, with perfect success. It’s revolutionary. While there is still a need for more providers in certain market segments, those opportunities are decreasing. To succeed in such a demanding effort as scaling up an orbital launch program, you need deep motivation around your mission and potential impact, from many stakeholders. As the launch market matured, those motivations thinned and our path to making a big contribution as a commercial launch company narrowed considerably.”

Over the last half decade or so, three US companies have credibly vied to develop rockets in the 1-ton class in terms of lift capacity. ABL has been competing alongside Relativity Space and Firefly to bring its rockets to market. ABL never took off. In March 2023, Relativity reached space with the Terran 1 rocket, but, due to second-stage issues, failed to reach orbit. Within weeks, Relativity announced it was shifting its focus to a medium-lift rocket, Terran R. Since then, the California-based launch company has moved along, but there are persistent rumors that it faces a cash crunch.

Of the three, only Firefly has enjoyed success. The company’s Alpha rocket has reached orbit on multiple occasions, and just this week Firefly announced that it completed a $175 million Series D fundraising round, resulting in a valuation of more than $2 billion. The 1-ton rocket wars are over: Firefly has won.

Focusing on defense

Just as Relativity pivoted away from this class of rocket, ABL will now also shift its focus—this time in an even more radical direction.

US Defense spending on missile production and defense has skyrocketed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and ABL will now seek to tap into this potentially lucrative market.

“We have made the decision to focus our efforts on national defense, and specifically on missile defense technologies,” Piemont said. “We’ll have more to share soon on our roadmap and traction in this area. For now, suffice to say we see considerable opportunity to leverage RS1, GS0, the E2 engine, and the rest of the technology we’ve developed to date to enable a new type of research effort around missile defense technologies.”

As ABL Space departs launch, the 1-ton rocket wars have a clear winner Read More »

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