Features

windows-recall-demands-an-extraordinary-level-of-trust-that-microsoft-hasn’t-earned

Windows Recall demands an extraordinary level of trust that Microsoft hasn’t earned

AI, copilot, copilot+ PC, Features, microsoft, NPU, Tech, Windows, Windows 11, windows 11 24h2 / /
The Recall feature as it currently exists in Windows 11 24H2 preview builds.

Enlarge / The Recall feature as it currently exists in Windows 11 24H2 preview builds.

Andrew Cunningham

Microsoft’s Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs come with quite a few new AI and machine learning-driven features, but the tentpole is Recall. Described by Microsoft as a comprehensive record of everything you do on your PC, the feature is pitched as a way to help users remember where they’ve been and to provide Windows extra contextual information that can help it better understand requests from and meet the needs of individual users.

This, as many users in infosec communities on social media immediately pointed out, sounds like a potential security nightmare. That’s doubly true because Microsoft says that by default, Recall’s screenshots take no pains to redact sensitive information, from usernames and passwords to health care information to NSFW site visits. By default, on a PC with 256GB of storage, Recall can store a couple dozen gigabytes of data across three months of PC usage, a huge amount of personal data.

The line between “potential security nightmare” and “actual security nightmare” is at least partly about the implementation, and Microsoft has been saying things that are at least superficially reassuring. Copilot+ PCs are required to have a fast neural processing unit (NPU) so that processing can be performed locally rather than sending data to the cloud; local snapshots are protected at rest by Windows’ disk encryption technologies, which are generally on by default if you’ve signed into a Microsoft account; neither Microsoft nor other users on the PC are supposed to be able to access any particular user’s Recall snapshots; and users can choose to exclude apps or (in most browsers) individual websites to exclude from Recall’s snapshots.

This all sounds good in theory, but some users are beginning to use Recall now that the Windows 11 24H2 update is available in preview form, and the actual implementation has serious problems.

“Fundamentally breaks the promise of security in Windows”

This is Recall, as seen on a PC running a preview build of Windows 11 24H2. It takes and saves periodic screenshots, which can then be searched for and viewed in various ways.

Enlarge / This is Recall, as seen on a PC running a preview build of Windows 11 24H2. It takes and saves periodic screenshots, which can then be searched for and viewed in various ways.

Andrew Cunningham

Security researcher Kevin Beaumont, first in a thread on Mastodon and later in a more detailed blog post, has written about some of the potential implementation issues after enabling Recall on an unsupported system (which is currently the only way to try Recall since Copilot+ PCs that officially support the feature won’t ship until later this month). We’ve also given this early version of Recall a try on a Windows Dev Kit 2023, which we’ve used for all our recent Windows-on-Arm testing, and we’ve independently verified Beaumont’s claims about how easy it is to find and view raw Recall data once you have access to a user’s PC.

To test Recall yourself, developer and Windows enthusiast Albacore has published a tool called AmperageKit that will enable it on Arm-based Windows PCs running Windows 11 24H2 build 26100.712 (the build currently available in the Windows Insider Release Preview channel). Other Windows 11 24H2 versions are missing the underlying code necessary to enable Recall.

  • Windows uses OCR on all the text in all the screenshots it takes. That text is also saved to an SQLite database to facilitate faster searches.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • Searching for “iCloud,” for example, brings up every single screenshot with the word “iCloud” in it, including the app itself and its entry in the Microsoft Store. If I had visited websites that mentioned it, they would show up here, too.

    Andrew Cunningham

The short version is this: In its current form, Recall takes screenshots and uses OCR to grab the information on your screen; it then writes the contents of windows plus records of different user interactions in a locally stored SQLite database to track your activity. Data is stored on a per-app basis, presumably to make it easier for Microsoft’s app-exclusion feature to work. Beaumont says “several days” of data amounted to a database around 90KB in size. In our usage, screenshots taken by Recall on a PC with a 2560×1440 screen come in at 500KB or 600KB apiece (Recall saves screenshots at your PC’s native resolution, minus the taskbar area).

Recall works locally thanks to Azure AI code that runs on your device, and it works without Internet connectivity and without a Microsoft account. Data is encrypted at rest, sort of, at least insofar as your entire drive is generally encrypted when your PC is either signed into a Microsoft account or has Bitlocker turned on. But in its current form, Beaumont says Recall has “gaps you can drive a plane through” that make it trivially easy to grab and scan through a user’s Recall database if you either (1) have local access to the machine and can log into any account (not just the account of the user whose database you’re trying to see), or (2) are using a PC infected with some kind of info-stealer virus that can quickly transfer the SQLite database to another system.

Windows Recall demands an extraordinary level of trust that Microsoft hasn’t earned Read More »

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No physics? No problem. AI weather forecasting is already making huge strides.

AI, AIFS, ecmwf, Features, Science, weather forecasting / /
AI weather models are arriving just in time for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season.

Enlarge / AI weather models are arriving just in time for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season.

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Much like the invigorating passage of a strong cold front, major changes are afoot in the weather forecasting community. And the end game is nothing short of revolutionary: an entirely new way to forecast weather based on artificial intelligence that can run on a desktop computer.

Today’s artificial intelligence systems require one resource more than any other to operate—data. For example, large language models such as ChatGPT voraciously consume data to improve answers to queries. The more and higher quality data, the better their training, and the sharper the results.

However, there is a finite limit to quality data, even on the Internet. These large language models have hoovered up so much data that they’re being sued widely for copyright infringement. And as they’re running out of data, the operators of these AI models are turning to ideas such as synthetic data to keep feeding the beast and produce ever more capable results for users.

If data is king, what about other applications for AI technology similar to large language models? Are there untapped pools of data? One of the most promising that has emerged in the last 18 months is weather forecasting, and recent advances have sent shockwaves through the field of meteorology.

That’s because there’s a secret weapon: an extremely rich data set. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the premiere organization in the world for numerical weather prediction, maintains a set of data about atmospheric, land, and oceanic weather data for every day, at points around the world, every few hours, going back to 1940. The last 50 years of data, after the advent of global satellite coverage, is especially rich. This dataset is known as ERA5, and it is publicly available.

It was not created to fuel AI applications, but ERA5 has turned out to be incredibly useful for this purpose. Computer scientists only really got serious about using this data to train AI models to forecast the weather in 2022. Since then, the technology has made rapid strides. In some cases, the output of these models is already superior to global weather models that scientists have labored decades to design and build, and they require some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world to run.

“It is clear that machine learning is a significant part of the future of weather forecasting,” said Matthew Chantry, who leads AI forecasting efforts at the European weather center known as ECMWF, in an interview with Ars.

It’s moving fast

John Dean and Kai Marshland met as undergraduates at Stanford University in the late 2010s. Dean, an electrical engineer, interned at SpaceX during the summer of 2017. Marshland, a computer scientist, interned at the launch company the next summer. Both graduated in 2019 and were trying to figure out what to do with their lives.

“We decided we wanted to solve the problem of weather uncertainty,” Marshland said, so they co-founded a company called WindBorne Systems.

The premise of the company was simple: For about 85 percent of the Earth and its atmosphere, we have no good data about weather conditions there. A lack of quality data, which establishes initial conditions, represents a major handicap for global weather forecast models. The company’s proposed solution was in its name—wind borne.

Dean and Marshland set about designing small weather balloons they could release into the atmosphere and which would fly around the world for up to 40 days, relaying useful atmospheric data that could be packaged and sold to large, government-funded weather models.

Weather balloons provide invaluable data about atmospheric conditions—readings such as temperature, dewpoints, and pressures—that cannot be captured by surface observations or satellites. Such atmospheric “profiles” are helpful in setting the initial conditions models start with. The problem is that traditional weather balloons are cumbersome and only operate for a few hours. Because of this, the National Weather Service only launches them twice daily from about 100 locations in the United States.

No physics? No problem. AI weather forecasting is already making huge strides. Read More »

driverless-racing-is-real,-terrible,-and-strangely-exciting

Driverless racing is real, terrible, and strangely exciting

A2RL, Abu Dhabi, auto racing, autonomous cars, Autonomous Driving, Cars, Features / /

people showed up to watch —

The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League proves it’s possible, just very hard.

–

Several brightly colored race cars are parked at a race course

Enlarge / No one’s entirely sure if driverless racing will be any good to watch, but before we find that out, people have to actually develop driverless race cars. A2RL in Abu Dhabi is the latest step down that path.

A2RL

ABU DHABI—We live in a weird time for autonomous vehicles. Ambitions come and go, but genuinely autonomous cars are further off than solid-state vehicle batteries. Part of the problem with developing autonomous cars is that teaching road cars to take risks is unacceptable.

A race track, though, is a decent place to potentially crash a car. You can take risks there, with every brutal crunch becoming a learning exercise. (You’d be hard-pressed to find a top racing driver without a few wrecks smoldering in their junior career records.)

That’s why 10,000 people descended on the Yas Marina race track in Abu Dhabi to watch the first four-car driverless race.

Test lab

The organizers of the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL) event didn’t brief me on what to expect, so I wasn’t sure if we would see much car movement. Not because the project was likely to fail—it certainly had a lot of hardware and software engineering behind it, not to mention plenty of money. But creating a high-speed, high-maneuverability vehicle that makes its own choices is an immense challenge.

Just running a Super Formula car—the chassis modified for the series—is a big task for any race team, even with an expert driver in the cockpit. I was ready to be impressed if teams got out of the pit lane without the engine stalling.

But the cars did run. Lap times weren’t close to those of a human driver or competitive across the field, but the cars did repeatedly negotiate the track. Not every car was able to do quick laps, but the ones that did looked like actual race cars being driven on a race track. Even the size of the crashes showed that the teams were finding the confidence to begin pushing limits.

Each of these Dallara Super Formula cars has been modified by its team to operate without a human driver onboard or in control.

Enlarge / Each of these Dallara Super Formula cars has been modified by its team to operate without a human driver onboard or in control.

A2RL

Is it the future of motorsport? Probably not. But it was an interesting test lab. After a year of development, six weeks of code-jam crunch, 14 days of practice, and one event, teams are going home with suitcases full of data and lessons they can use next year.

The track and the cars

A2RL is one of three competitions being run by Aspire, the “technology transition pillar” of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council.

Yas is an artificial island built as a leisure attraction, housing theme parks and hotels alongside the circuit, with an influencer photo opportunity around every corner. The island was the focus of the Emirate restyling itself for tourism, and its facilities now play secondary host to another image makeover as a technology hub. An F1 track is now finding a second use as a testing lab, and it’s probably the only track in the region that could afford the kind of excess that two weeks of round-the-clock, floodlit, robotic testing represents.

Although the early ambition was to use Formula 1 cars to reflect Yas Marina’s purpose as a circuit, the cost compared to a Super Formula car was absurd. Plus, it would have required eight identical F1 chassis. Even in the days of unrestricted F1 budgets, few teams could afford that many chassis in a season.

So Aspire’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) went to the manufacturer Dallara, which supplies almost every high-level single-seater chassis, including parts of some F1 cars, but also every IndyCar, Super Formula, Formula E, Formula 2, and Formula 3 car, plus a whole array of endurance prototypes. Dallara was also involved in the 2021 Indy Autonomous Challenge via the IndyNXT chassis.

TII in Abu Dhabi was also involved in the Indy Autonomous Challenge as part of a university’s team, so it got to see how the cars had been rapidly adapted to accommodate a robotic “driver.”

  • The computer that controls the driving and interprets the sensor stack, situated in the cockpit—almost like a human driver.

    Hazel Southwell

  • The Meccanica42 actuators that operate throttle, brake, and steering onboard the adjusted SF23 chassis.

    Hazel Southwell

  • L-R: The robotic array that sits lower in the car’s cockpit for the actuators to operate the car, and the computer that sits above it for maximum ventilation.

    Hazel Southwell

  • A look at one of the car’s sensor pods.

    A2RL

Driverless racing is real, terrible, and strangely exciting Read More »

small,-cheap,-and-weird:-a-history-of-the-microcar

Small, cheap, and weird: A history of the microcar

Cars, Citroen, Features, microcars, Morgan Motor Company, Peel, Renault / /
Small, cheap, and weird: A history of the microcar

Aurich Lawson

European car manufacturers are currently tripping over themselves to figure out how personal transport and “last mile” solutions will look in the years to come. The solutions are always electric, and they’re also tiny. What most companies (bar Citroen, Renault, and Fiat) seem to have forgotten is that we’ve had an answer to this problem all along: the microcar.

The microcar is a singular little thing—its job is to frugally take one person (or maybe two people) where they need to go while taking up as little space as possible. A few have broken their way into the public consciousness—Top Gear made a global megastar of Peel’s cars, BMW’s Isetta remains a design icon, and the Messerschmitt KR200 is just plain cool—but where did these tiny wonders come from? And do they have a future?

Well, without the microcar’s predecessors, we may not have the modern motorcar as we know it. Sort of.

Let’s roll back to the genesis of the car: the Mercedes-Benz Patent Motorwagen. While not a microcar by any means (though it seats only two people and has a tiny engine and only three wheels), it got plenty of people thinking.

While Karl Benz was inventing the car and his wife was road-tripping it in 1885, a French inventor named Léon Bollée put his thinking cap on. He was 15 at the time, but it gave him time to be with his thoughts. At that age, he had a keen brain—one that invented a pedal boat of sorts. Bollée was smart, to say the least—he built calculators to help his father’s business, one of which won an award at the 1889 Paris Exposition and went on to be patented all over the world.

  • Most people agree that the 1885 Mercedes-Benz Patent Motorwagen was the first automobile.

    Newspress

  • By 1898, Louis Renault had created the Renault Voiturette.

    Newspress

  • The 1905 Laurent and Klement Voiturette.

    Skoda

In 1895, Bollée and his father created “La Novelle,” a steam-powered trike, and in the same year, Bollée created a gasoline-powered… thing as well. A year later, Bollée founded Léon Bollée Automobiles to mass-produce his tiny cars, dubbing them “Voiturette”—a mashup of the French for automobile (voiture) and the suffix you throw on a word to make it small (ette). Small car, basically.

A few years later, Renault (maker of tiny hatchbacks and the gloriously silly Avantime and popularizer of the people carrier in Europe) became a car manufacturer with the release of its descriptively named Voiturette. Louis Renault’s small mechanical wonder was built in 1898, and the first was sold on Christmas Eve of the same year to a friend of Louis’ father—he liked the fuel economy from its one-cylinder De Dion-Bouton 273 cc 1.75 hp (1.3 kW) engine and the fact that it could get around town with ease.

That same night, the story goes, Renault sold a further twelve cars. Over its mere five-year production run, the first Renault went from open-top two-seater to a four-seat covered wagon capable of over 35 mph (56 km/h). Bear in mind that less than a century earlier, Stephenson’s Rocket and its almost 30 mph (48 km/h) top speed caused great concern about whether human physiology could withstand such speeds. 35 mph was quite the achievement.

Voiturettes and their less “ette” siblings were very successful, but they were a bit too much for some people. That’s where the cyclecar came in.

First appearing around 1910, cyclecars took small engines—single cylinders, V-twins, the odd four-pot—and attached them to simple, lightweight four-wheeled bodies. To be a cyclecar, a vehicle had to have a gearbox and clutch. A huge industry popped up around them, and for good reason—regular cars were expensive to tax and run, whereas a cyclecar wasn’t.

Small, cheap, and weird: A history of the microcar Read More »

google’s-“ai-overview”-can-give-false,-misleading,-and-dangerous-answers

Google’s “AI Overview” can give false, misleading, and dangerous answers

AI, ai overview, Biz & IT, Features, Gemini, Google, Google Gemini, large language models, machine learning / /
This is fine.

Enlarge / This is fine.

Getty Images

If you use Google regularly, you may have noticed the company’s new AI Overviews providing summarized answers to some of your questions in recent days. If you use social media regularly, you may have come across many examples of those AI Overviews being hilariously or even dangerously wrong.

Factual errors can pop up in existing LLM chatbots as well, of course. But the potential damage that can be caused by AI inaccuracy gets multiplied when those errors appear atop the ultra-valuable web real estate of the Google search results page.

“The examples we’ve seen are generally very uncommon queries and aren’t representative of most people’s experiences,” a Google spokesperson told Ars. “The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web.”

After looking through dozens of examples of Google AI Overview mistakes (and replicating many ourselves for the galleries below), we’ve noticed a few broad categories of errors that seemed to show up again and again. Consider this a crash course in some of the current weak points of Google’s AI Overviews and a look at areas of concern for the company to improve as the system continues to roll out.

Treating jokes as facts

  • The bit about using glue on pizza can be traced back to an 11-year-old troll post on Reddit. (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

  • This wasn’t funny when the guys at Pep Boys said it, either. (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

  • Weird Al recommends “running with scissors” as well! (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

Some of the funniest example of Google’s AI Overview failing come, ironically enough, when the system doesn’t realize a source online was trying to be funny. An AI answer that suggested using “1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to stop cheese from sliding off pizza can be traced back to someone who was obviously trying to troll an ongoing thread. A response recommending “blinker fluid” for a turn signal that doesn’t make noise can similarly be traced back to a troll on the Good Sam advice forums, which Google’s AI Overview apparently trusts as a reliable source.

In regular Google searches, these jokey posts from random Internet users probably wouldn’t be among the first answers someone saw when clicking through a list of web links. But with AI Overviews, those trolls were integrated into the authoritative-sounding data summary presented right at the top of the results page.

What’s more, there’s nothing in the tiny “source link” boxes below Google’s AI summary to suggest either of these forum trolls are anything other than good sources of information. Sometimes, though, glancing at the source can save you some grief, such as when you see a response calling running with scissors “cardio exercise that some say is effective” (that came from a 2022 post from Little Old Lady Comedy).

Bad sourcing

  • Washington University in St. Louis says this ratio is accurate, but others disagree. (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

  • Man, we wish this fantasy remake was real. (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

Sometimes Google’s AI Overview offers an accurate summary of a non-joke source that happens to be wrong. When asking about how many Declaration of Independence signers owned slaves, for instance, Google’s AI Overview accurately summarizes a Washington University of St. Louis library page saying that one-third “were personally enslavers.” But the response ignores contradictory sources like a Chicago Sun-Times article saying the real answer is closer to three-quarters. I’m not enough of a history expert to judge which authoritative-seeming source is right, but at least one historian online took issue with the Google AI’s answer sourcing.

Other times, a source that Google trusts as authoritative is really just fan fiction. That’s the case for a response that imagined a 2022 remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by George Lucas. A savvy web user would probably do a double-take before citing citing Fandom’s “Idea Wiki” as a reliable source, but a careless AI Overview user might not notice where the AI got its information.

Google’s “AI Overview” can give false, misleading, and dangerous answers Read More »

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On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers

Cars, Features, self driving cars, Tesla, waymo / /
A Waymo autonomous taxi in San Francisco.

Enlarge / A Waymo autonomous taxi in San Francisco.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Tesla fans—and CEO Elon Musk himself—are excited about the prospects for Tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD) software. Tesla released a major upgrade—version 12.3—of the software in March. Then, last month, Musk announced that Tesla would unveil a purpose-built robotaxi on August 8. Last week, Musk announced that a new version of FSD—12.4—will come out in the coming days and will have a “5X to 10X improvement in miles per intervention.”

But I think fans expecting Tesla to launch a driverless taxi service in the near future will be disappointed.

During a late March trip to San Francisco, I had a chance to try the latest self-driving technology from both Tesla and Google’s Waymo.

During a 45-minute test drive in a Tesla Model X, I had to intervene twice to correct mistakes by the FSD software. In contrast, I rode in driverless Waymo vehicles for more than two hours and didn’t notice a single mistake.

So while Tesla’s FSD version 12.3 seems like a significant improvement over previous versions of FSD, it still lags behind Waymo’s technology.

However, Waymo’s impressive performance comes with an asterisk. While no one was behind the wheel during my rides, Waymo has remote operators that sometimes provide guidance to its vehicles (Waymo declined to tell me whether—or how often—remote operators intervened during my rides). And while Tesla’s FSD works on all road types, Waymo’s taxis avoid freeways.

Many Tesla fans see these limitations as signs that Waymo is headed for a technological dead end. They see Tesla’s FSD, with its capacity to operate in all cities and on all road types, as a more general technology that will soon surpass Waymo.

But this fundamentally misunderstands the situation.

Safely operating driverless vehicles on public roads is hard. With no one in the driver’s seat, a single mistake can be deadly—especially at freeway speeds. So Waymo launched its driverless service in 2020 in the easiest environment it could find—residential streets in the Phoenix suburbs—and has been gradually ratcheting up the difficulty level as it gains confidence in its technology.

In contrast, Tesla hasn’t started driverless testing because its software isn’t ready. For now, geographic restrictions and remote assistance aren’t needed because there’s always a human being behind the wheel. But I predict that when Tesla begins its driverless transition, it will realize that safety requires a Waymo-style incremental rollout.

So Tesla hasn’t found a different, better way to bring driverless technology to market. Waymo is just so far ahead that it’s dealing with challenges Tesla hasn’t even started thinking about. Waymo is playing chess while Tesla is still playing checkers.

The current excitement around Tesla’s FSD reminds me of the hype that surrounded Waymo in 2018. Early that year, Waymo announced deals to purchase 20,000 I-Pace sedans from Jaguar and 62,000 Pacifica minivans from Fiat Chrysler.

But the service Waymo launched in December 2018 was a disappointment. There were still safety drivers behind the wheel on most rides, and access was limited to a handpicked group of passengers.

It wasn’t until October 2020 that Waymo finally launched a fully driverless taxi service in the Phoenix area that was open to the general public. And even after that, Waymo expanded slowly.

Waymo began offering commercial service in San Francisco in 2023 and is now expanding to Los Angeles and Austin. Today, the company has only a few hundred vehicles in its commercial fleet—far fewer than the 82,000 vehicles it was planning to purchase six years ago.

What went wrong? In an August 2018 article, journalist Amir Efrati reported on the limitations of Waymo’s technology. Efrati wrote that “Waymo vans have trouble with many unprotected left turns and with merging into heavy traffic in the Phoenix area.” In addition, “the cars have trouble separating people, or cyclists, who are in groups, especially people near shopping centers or in parking lots.”

On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers Read More »

we-take-a-stab-at-decoding-spacex’s-ever-changing-plans-for-starship-in-florida

We take a stab at decoding SpaceX’s ever-changing plans for Starship in Florida

artemis, cape canaveral, Commercial space, Features, Federal Aviation Administration, Kennedy Space Center, launch, launch complex 39a, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, starship / /
SpaceX's Starship tower (left) at Launch Complex 39A dwarfs the launch pad for the Falcon 9 rocket (right).

Enlarge / SpaceX’s Starship tower (left) at Launch Complex 39A dwarfs the launch pad for the Falcon 9 rocket (right).

There are a couple of ways to read the announcement from the Federal Aviation Administration that it’s kicking off a new environmental review of SpaceX’s plan to launch the most powerful rocket in the world from Florida.

The FAA said on May 10 that it plans to develop an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for SpaceX’s proposal to launch Starships from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The FAA ordered this review after SpaceX updated the regulatory agency on the projected Starship launch rate and the design of the ground infrastructure needed at Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A), the historic launch pad once used for Apollo and Space Shuttle missions.

Dual environmental reviews

At the same time, the US Space Force is overseeing a similar EIS for SpaceX’s proposal to take over a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a few miles south of LC-39A. This launch pad, designated Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37), is available for use after United Launch Alliance’s last Delta rocket lifted off there in April.

On the one hand, these environmental reviews often take a while and could cloud Elon Musk’s goal of having Starship launch sites in Florida ready for service by the end of 2025. “A couple of years would not be a surprise,” said George Nield, an aerospace industry consultant and former head of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.

Another way to look at the recent FAA and Space Force announcements of pending environmental reviews is that SpaceX finally appears to be cementing its plans to launch Starship from Florida. These plans have changed quite a bit in the last five years.

The environmental reviews will culminate in a decision on whether to approve SpaceX’s proposals for Starship launches at LC-39A and SLC-37. The FAA will then go through a separate licensing process, similar to the framework used to license the first three Starship test launches from South Texas.

NASA has contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a human-rated version of Starship to land astronauts on the Moon on the first two Artemis lunar landing flights later this decade. To do that, SpaceX must stage a fuel depot in low-Earth orbit to refuel the Starship lunar lander before it heads for the Moon. It will take a series of Starship tanker flights—perhaps 10 to 15—to fill the depot with cryogenic propellants.

Launching that many Starships over the course of a month or two will require SpaceX to alternate between at least two launch pads. NASA and SpaceX officials say the best way to do this is by launching Starships from one pad in Texas and another in Florida.

Earlier this week, Ars spoke with Lisa Watson-Morgan, who manages NASA’s human-rated lunar lander program. She was at Kennedy Space Center this week for briefings on the Starship lander and a competing lander from Blue Origin. One of the topics, she said, was the FAA’s new environmental review before Starship can launch from LC-39A.

“I would say we’re doing all we can to pull the schedule to where it needs to be, and we are working with SpaceX to make sure that their timeline, the EIS timeline, and NASA’s all work in parallel as much as we can to achieve our objectives,” she said. “When you’re writing it down on paper just as it is, it looks like there could be some tight areas, but I would say we’re collectively working through it.”

Officially, SpaceX plans to perform a dress rehearsal for the Starship lunar landing in late 2025. This will be a full demonstration, with refueling missions, an uncrewed landing of Starship on the lunar surface, then a takeoff from the Moon, before NASA commits to putting people on Starship on the Artemis III mission, currently slated for September 2026.

So you can see that schedules are already tight for the Starship lunar landing demonstration if SpaceX activates launch pads in Florida late next year.

We take a stab at decoding SpaceX’s ever-changing plans for Starship in Florida Read More »

how-i-upgraded-my-water-heater-and-discovered-how-bad-smart-home-security-can-be

How I upgraded my water heater and discovered how bad smart home security can be

esp32, Features, GitHub, home assistant, home automation, iot, journalism, rinnai, Smart Home, tankless water heater, Tech, Zigbee / /
The bottom half of a tankless water heater, with lots of pipes connected, in a tight space

Enlarge / This is essentially the kind of water heater the author has hooked up, minus the Wi-Fi module that led him down a rabbit hole. Also, not 140-degrees F—yikes.

Getty Images

The hot water took too long to come out of the tap. That is what I was trying to solve. I did not intend to discover that, for a while there, water heaters like mine may have been open to anybody. That, with some API tinkering and an email address, a bad actor could possibly set its temperature or make it run constantly. That’s just how it happened.

Let’s take a step back. My wife and I moved into a new home last year. It had a Rinnai tankless water heater tucked into a utility closet in the garage. The builder and home inspector didn’t say much about it, just to run a yearly cleaning cycle on it.

Because it doesn’t keep a big tank of water heated and ready to be delivered to any house tap, tankless water heaters save energy—up to 34 percent, according to the Department of Energy. But they’re also, by default, slower. Opening a tap triggers the exchanger, heats up the water (with natural gas, in my case), and the device has to push it through the line to where it’s needed.

That led to me routinely holding my hand under cold water in the sink or shower, waiting longer than felt right for reasonably warm water to appear. I understood the water-for-energy trade-off I was making. But the setup wasted time, in addition to potable water, however plentiful and relatively cheap it was. It just irked me.

Little did I know the solution was just around the corner.

Hot water hotspot

  • Attention!

    Kevin Purdy

  • Nothing’ll happen. Just touch it. It’s what you wanna do. It’s there for you to touch.

    Kevin Purdy

  • The Rinnai Central app. It does this “Control failed” bit quite often.

    Rinnai

I mean that literally. When I went into the utility closet to shut off the hose bibbs for winter, I noticed a plastic bag magnetically stuck to the back side of the water heater. “Attention! The Control-R Wi-Fi Module must be installed for recirculation to operate,” read the intense yellow warning label. The water heater would not “recirculate” without it, it noted.

The Rinnai Control-R module, out of bag.

Enlarge / The Rinnai Control-R module, out of bag.

Rinnai

Recirculation means that the heater would start pulling water and heating it on demand, rather than waiting for enough negative pressure from the pipes. To trigger this, Rinnai offered smartphone apps that could connect through its servers to the module.

I found the manual, unplugged the water heater, and opened it up. The tone of the language inside (“DO NOT TOUCH,” unless you are “a properly trained technician”) did not match that of the can-do manual (“get the most from your new module”). But, having read the manual and slotted little beige nubs before, I felt trained and technical. I installed the device, went through the typical “Connect your phone to this weirdly named hotspot” process, and—it worked.

I now had an app that could start recirculation. I could get my shower hot while still in bed, or get started on the dinner dishes from the couch. And yet pulling out my phone whenever I wanted hot water felt like trading one inconvenience for another.

How I upgraded my water heater and discovered how bad smart home security can be Read More »

m4-ipad-pro-review:-well,-now-you’re-just-showing-off

M4 iPad Pro review: Well, now you’re just showing off

11-inch iPad Pro, 13-inch iPad Pro, Apple, apple m4, Apple Magic Keyboard, apple pencil, Apple Pencil Pro, Features, ipad, ipad pro, oled, Reviews, tablet, Tech / /
The back of an iPad with its Apple logo centered

Enlarge / The 2024, M4-equipped 13-inch iPad Pro.

Samuel Axon

The new iPad Pro is a technical marvel, with one of the best screens I’ve ever seen, performance that few other machines can touch, and a new, thinner design that no one expected.

It’s a prime example of Apple flexing its engineering and design muscles for all to see. Since it marks the company’s first foray into OLED beyond the iPhone or Watch, and the first time a new M-series chip has debuted on something other than a Mac, it comes across as a tech demo for where the company is headed beyond just tablets.

Still, it remains unclear why most people would spend one, two, or even three thousand dollars on a tablet that, despite its amazing hardware, does less than a comparably priced laptop—or at least does it a little more awkwardly, even if it’s impressively quick and has a gorgeous screen.

Specifications

There are some notable design changes in the 2024 iPad Pro, but really, it’s all about the specs—and it’s a more notable specs jump than usual in a couple of areas.

M4

First up, there’s the M4 chip. The previous iPad Pro had an M2 chip, and the latest Mac chip is the M3, so not only did the iPad Pro jump two whole generations, but this is the first time it has debuted the newest iteration of Apple Silicon. (Previously, new M-series chips launched on the Mac first and came to the iPad Pro a few months later.)

Using second-generation 3 nm tech, the M4’s top configuration has a 10-core CPU, a 10-core GPU, and a 16-core NPU. In that configuration, the 10-core CPU has four performance cores and six efficiency cores.

A lower configuration of the M4 has just nine CPU cores—three performance and six efficiency. Which one you get is tied to how much storage you buy. 256GB and 512GB models get nine CPU cores, while 1TB and 2TB get 10. Additionally, the two smaller storage sizes have 8GB of RAM to the larger ones’ 16GB.

This isn’t the first time Apple has tied RAM to storage configurations, but doing that with CPU cores is new for the iPad. Fortunately, the company is upfront about all this in its specs sheet, whereas the RAM differentiation wasn’t always clear to buyers in the past. (Both configurations claim 120GB/s memory bandwidth, though.)

Can the M4 help the iPad Pro bridge the gap between laptop and tablet? Mostly, it made me excited to see the M4 in a laptop.

Enlarge / Can the M4 help the iPad Pro bridge the gap between laptop and tablet? Mostly, it made me excited to see the M4 in a laptop.

Samuel Axon

Regardless of the specific configuration, the M4 promises substantially better CPU and GPU performance than the M2, and it supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing via Metal, which some games and applications can take advantage of if developers put in the work to make it happen. (It looked great in a demo of Diablo Immortal I saw, but it’s unclear how often we’ll actually see it in the wild.)

Apple claims 1.5x faster CPU performance than the M2 and up to 4x faster graphics performance specifically on applications that involve new features like ray-tracing or hardware-accelerated mesh shading. It hasn’t made any specific GPU performance claims beyond those narrow cases.

A lot of both Apple’s attention and that of the media is focused on the Neural Engine, which is what Apple calls the NPU in the M-series chips. That’s because the company is expected to announce several large language model-based AI features in iOS, macOS, and iPadOS at its developer conference next month, and this is the chip that will power some of that on the iPad and Mac.

Some neat machine-learning features are already possible on the M4—you can generate audio tracks using certain instruments in your Logic Pro projects, apply tons of image optimizations to photos with just a click or two, and so on.

M4 iPad Pro review: Well, now you’re just showing off Read More »

m2-ipad-air-review:-the-everything-ipad

M2 iPad Air review: The everything iPad

Apple, Apple M2, Apple silicon, Features, ipad, iPad Air, iPadOS, Tech / /

breath of fresh air —

M2 Air won’t draw new buyers in, but if you like iPads, these do all you need.

–

  • The new 13-inch iPad Air with the Apple M2 processor inside.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • In portrait mode. The 13-inch model is a little large for dedicated tablet use, but if you do want a gigantic tablet, the $799 price is appealing.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • The Apple Pencil Pro attaches, pairs, and charges via a magnetic connection on the edge of the iPad.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • In the Magic Keyboard. This kickstand-less case is still probably the best way to make the iPad into a true laptop replacement, though it’s expensive and iPadOS is still a problem.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • The tablet’s USB-C port, used for charging and connecting to external accessories.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • Apple’s Smart Folio case. The magnets on the cover will scoot up and down the back of the iPad, allowing you a bit of flexibility when angling the screen.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • The Air’s single-lens, flash-free camera, seen here peeking through the Smart Folio case.

    Andrew Cunningham

The iPad Air has been a lot of things in the last decade-plus. In 2013 and 2014, the first iPad Airs were just The iPad, and the “Air” label simply denoted how much lighter and more streamlined they were than the initial 2010 iPad and 2011’s long-lived iPad 2. After that, the iPad Air 2 survived for years as an entry-level model, as Apple focused on introducing and building out the iPad Pro.

The Air disappeared for a while after that, but it returned in 2019 as an in-betweener model to bridge the gap between the $329 iPad (no longer called “Air,” despite reusing the first-gen Air design) and more-expensive and increasingly powerful iPad Pros. It definitely made sense to have a hardware offering to span the gap between the basic no-frills iPad and the iPad Pro, but pricing and specs could make things complicated. The main issue for the last couple of years has been the base Air’s 64GB of storage—scanty enough that memory swapping doesn’t even work on it— and the fact that stepping up to 256GB brought the Air too close to the price of the 11-inch iPad Pro.

Which brings us to the 2024 M2 iPad Air, now available in 11-inch and 13-inch models for $599 and $799, respectively. Apple solved the overlap problem this year partly by bumping the Air’s base storage to a more usable 128GB and partly by making the 11-inch iPad Pro so much more expensive that it almost entirely eliminates any pricing overlap (only the 1TB 11-inch Air, at $1,099, is more expensive than the cheapest 11-inch iPad Pro).

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call the new Airs the “default” iPad for most buyers—the now-$349 10th-gen iPad still does everything the iPad is best at for less money, and it’s still all you really need if you just want a casual gaming, video streaming, and browsing tablet (or a tablet for a kid). But the M2 Air is the iPad that best covers the totality of everything the iPad can do from its awkward perch, stuck halfway between the form and function of the iPhone and the Mac.

Not quite a last-gen iPad Pro

The new iPad Airs have a lot in common with the M2 iPad Pro from 2022. They have the same screen sizes and resolutions, the same basic design, they work with the same older Magic Keyboard accessories (not the new ones with the function rows, metal palm rests, and larger trackpads, which are reserved for the iPad Pro), and they obviously have the same Apple M2 chip.

Performance-wise, nothing we saw in the benchmarks we ran was surprising; the M2’s CPU and (especially) its GPU are a solid generational jump up from the M1, and the M1 is already generally overkill for the vast majority of iPad apps. The M3 and M4 are both significantly faster than the M2, but the M2 is still unquestionably powerful enough to do everything people currently use iPads to do.

That said, Apple’s decision to use an older chip rather than the M3 or M4 does mean the new Airs come into the world missing some capabilities that have come to other Apple products announced in the last six months or so. That list includes hardware-accelerated ray-tracing on the GPU, hardware-accelerated AV1 video codec decoding, and, most importantly, a faster Neural Engine to help power whatever AI stuff Apple’s products pick up in this fall’s big software updates.

The 13-inch Air’s screen has the same resolution and pixel density (2732×2048, 264 PPI) as the last-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro. And unlike the 13-inch Pro, which truly is a 13-inch screen, Apple’s tech specs page says the 13-inch Air is still using a 12.9-inch screen, and Apple is just rounding up to get to 13.

The 13-inch Air display does share some other things with the last-generation iPad Pro screen, including P3 color, a 600-nit peak brightness. Its display panel has been laminated to the front glass, and it has an anti-reflective coating (two of the subtle but important quality improvements the Air has that the $349 10th-gen iPad doesn’t). But otherwise it’s not the same panel as the M2 Pro; there’s no mini LED, no HDR support, and no 120 Hz ProMotion support.

M2 iPad Air review: The everything iPad Read More »

forget-aerobars:-ars-tries-out-an-entire-aerobike

Forget aerobars: Ars tries out an entire aerobike

bicycles, Cars, Features, velomobile / /

Here comes a future —

Taking to the road in a modern, high-speed version of a 40-year-old dream.

–

Image of a aerodynamic recumbent bicycle parked in front of a pickup truck.

Enlarge / The Velomobile Bülk, with its hood in place. Note the hood has an anti-fog covering on the visor (which is flipped up). The two bumps near the front of the hood are there to improve clearance for the cyclist’s knees.

JOHN TIMMER

My brain registered that I was clearly cycling. My feet were clipped in to pedals, my legs were turning crank arms, and the arms were linked via a chain to one of the wheels. But pretty much everything else about the experience felt wrong on a fundamental, almost disturbing level.

I could produce a long list of everything my mind was struggling to deal with, but two things stand out as I think back on the experience. The first is that, with the exception of my face, I didn’t feel the air flow over me as the machine surged forward down a slight slope. The second, related to the first, is that there was no indication that the surge would ever tail off if I didn’t hit the brakes.

Living the dream

My visit with a velomobile was, in some ways, a chance to reconnect with a childhood dream. I’ve always had a fascination with vehicles that don’t require fuel, like bicycles and sailboats. And during my childhood, the popular press was filled with stories about people setting human-powered speed records by putting aerodynamic fiberglass shells on recumbent bicycles. In the wake of the 1970s oil crises, I imagined a time when the roads might be filled with people cycling these pods for their commutes or covering long distances thanks to a cooler filled with drinks and snacks tucked in the back of the shell.

But the pods seemed to vanish from public consciousness as I got older, and I also learned that recumbent bikes are absolutely terrible on hills, which I’m now fond of climbing. The dreams had faded from my awareness when a reader, in response to one of our e-bike reviews, suggested I check out a velomobile. It turns out that my dreams weren’t dead; they had just relocated to Europe without mentioning it to me.

Marc Rosen and two of his velomobiles. The newer model, the Bülk, is closer to him.

Enlarge / Marc Rosen and two of his velomobiles. The newer model, the Bülk, is closer to him.

John Timmer

Velomobiles are a product category with a variety of designs and manufacturers producing them, most of them based in Europe. They’re also the fiberglass pods of my youth updated to current standards. Gone is the weight of fiberglass, and the one-off, hand-made hardware has been replaced by standardized models that have gone through refinements across generations. Safety features like lights, directionals, and mirrors are now standard.

But the prices, while not exorbitant (mostly in the $8,000–$10,000 range—for bicycles; you can pay more for far less carbon fiber), mean that living my childhood dream really wasn’t an option. The European Union-based companies don’t seem to have any agreements with US bike shops that would let me check one out in a showroom; I’ve heard of only two dealers in the US that keep velomobiles in stock, and neither is anywhere close to me. Fortunately, that didn’t preclude the option of trying one. One major vendor of velomobiles, Romania’s Velomobile World, has an ambassadors program, where people agree to let potential buyers take test rides in return for a discount on purchases.

That’s how I found myself setting out for a short spin near the Maryland-Pennsylvania border in a Velomobile Bülk owned by Marc Rosen, who also fielded a lot of my questions about the hardware.

Forget aerobars: Ars tries out an entire aerobike Read More »

outdoing-the-dinosaurs:-what-we-can-do-if-we-spot-a-threatening-asteroid

Outdoing the dinosaurs: What we can do if we spot a threatening asteroid

asteroids, Features, near earth object, near-earth asteroids, Science / /
We'd like to avoid this.

Enlarge / We’d like to avoid this.

Science Photo Library/Andrzej Wojcicki/Getty Images

In 2005, the United States Congress laid out a clear mandate: To protect our civilization and perhaps our very species, by 2020, the nation should be able to detect, track, catalog, and characterize no less than 90 percent of all near-Earth objects at least 140 meters across.

As of today, four years after that deadline, we have identified less than half and characterized only a small percentage of those possible threats. Even if we did have a full census of all threatening space rocks, we do not have the capabilities to rapidly respond to an Earth-intersecting asteroid (despite the success of NASA’s Double-Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission).

Some day in the finite future, an object will pose a threat to us—it’s an inevitability of life in our Solar System. The good news is that it’s not too late to do something about it. But it will take some work.

Close encounters

The dangers are, to put it bluntly, everywhere around us. The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, which maintains a list of (no points award for guessing correctly) minor planets within the Solar System, has a running tally. At the time of the writing of this article, the Center has recorded 34,152 asteroids with orbits that come within 0.05 AU of the Earth (an AU is one astronomical unit, the average distance between the Earth and the Sun).

These near-Earth asteroids (or NEAs for short, sometimes called NEOs, for near-Earth objects) aren’t necessarily going to impact the Earth. But they’re the most likely ones to do it; in all the billions of kilometers that encompass the wide expanse of our Solar System, these are the ones that live in our neighborhood.

And impact they do. The larger planets and moons of our Solar System are littered with the craterous scars of past violent collisions. The only reason the Earth doesn’t have the same amount of visible damage as, say, the Moon is that our planet constantly reshapes its surface through erosion and plate tectonics.

It’s through craters elsewhere that astronomers have built up a sense of how often a planet like the Earth experiences a serious impact and the typical sizes of those impactors.

Tiny things happen all the time. When you see a beautiful shooting star streaking across the night sky, that’s from the “impact” of an object somewhere between the size of a grain of sand and a tiny pebble striking our atmosphere at a few tens of thousands of kilometers per hour.

Every few years or so, an object 10 meters across hits us; when it does, it delivers energy roughly equivalent to that of our earliest atomic weapons. Thankfully, most of the Earth is open ocean, and most impactors of this class burst apart in the upper atmosphere, so we typically don’t have to worry too much about them.

The much larger—but thankfully much rarer—asteroids are what cause us heartburn. This is where we get into the delightful mathematics of attempting to calculate an existential risk to humanity.

At one end of the scale, we have the kind of stuff that kills dinosaurs and envelops the globe in a shroud of ash. These rocks are several kilometers across but only come into Earth-crossing trajectories every few million years. One of them would doom us—certainly our civilization and likely our species. The combination of the unimaginable scale of devastation and the incredibly small likelihood of it occurring puts this kind of threat almost beyond human comprehension—and intervention. For now, we just have to hope that our time isn’t up.

Then there are the in-betweeners. These are the space rocks starting at a hundred meters across. Upon impact, they release a minimum of 30 megatons of energy, which is capable of leaving a crater a couple of kilometers across. Those kinds of dangers present themselves roughly every 10,000 years.

That’s an interesting time scale. Our written history stretches back thousands of years, and our institutions have existed for thousands of years. We can envision our civilization, our ways of life, and our humanity continuing into the future for thousands of years.

This means that at some point, either we or our descendants will have to deal with a threat of this magnitude. Not a rock large enough to hit the big reset button on life but powerful enough to present a scale of disaster not yet seen in human history.

Outdoing the dinosaurs: What we can do if we spot a threatening asteroid Read More »