Spy Pet, a service that sold access to a rich database of allegedly more than 3 billion Discord messages and details on more than 600 million users, has seemingly been shut down.
404 Media, which broke the story of Spy Pet’s offerings, reports that Spy Pet seems mostly shut down. Spy Pet’s website was unavailable as of this writing. A Discord spokesperson told Ars that the company’s safety team had been “diligently investigating” Spy Pet and that it had banned accounts affiliated with it.
“Scraping our services and self-botting are violations of our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines,” the spokesperson wrote. “In addition to banning the affiliated accounts, we are considering appropriate legal action.” The spokesperson noted that Discord server administrators can adjust server permissions to prevent future such monitoring on otherwise public servers.
Kiwi Farms ties, GDPR violations
The number of servers monitored by Spy Pet had been fluctuating in recent days. The site’s administrator told 404 Media’s Joseph Cox that they were rewriting part of the service while admitting that Discord had banned a number of bots. The administrator had also told 404 Media that he did not “intend for my tool to be used for harassment,” despite a likely related user offering Spy Pet data on Kiwi Farms, a notorious hub for doxxing and online harassment campaigns that frequently targets trans and non-binary people, members of the LGBTQ community, and women.
Even if Spy Pet can somehow work past Discord’s bans or survive legal action, the site’s very nature runs against a number of other Internet regulations across the globe. It’s almost certainly in violation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As pointed out by StackDiary, Spy Pet and services like it seem to violate at least three articles of the GDPR, including the “right to be forgotten” in Article 17.
Ars was unsuccessful in reaching the administrator of Spy Pet by email and Telegram message. Their last message on Telegram stated that their domain had been suspended and a backup domain was being set up. “TL;DR: Never trust the Germans,” they wrote.
Microsoft has open-sourced another bit of computing history this week: The company teamed up with IBM to release the source code of 1988’s MS-DOS 4.00, a version better known for its unpopularity, bugginess, and convoluted development history than its utility as a computer operating system.
The MS-DOS 4.00 code is available on Microsoft’s MS-DOS GitHub page along with versions 1.25 and 2.0, which Microsoft open-sourced in cooperation with the Computer History Museum back in 2014. All open-source versions of DOS have been released under the MIT License.
Initially, MS-DOS 4.00 was slated to include new multitasking features that allow software to run in the background. This release of DOS, also sometimes called “MT-DOS” or “Mutitasking MS-DOS” to distinguish it from other releases, was only released through a few European PC OEMs and never as a standalone retail product.
The source code Microsoft released this week is not for that multitasking version of DOS 4.00, and Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office was “unable to find the full source code” for MT-DOS when it went to look. Rather, Microsoft and IBM have released the source code for a totally separate version of DOS 4.00, primarily developed by IBM to add more features to the existing non-multitasking version of DOS that ran on most IBM PCs and PC clones of the day.
Microsoft never returned to its multitasking DOS idea in subsequent releases. Multitasking would become the purview of graphical operating systems like Windows and OS/2, while MS-DOS versions 5.x and 6.x continued with the old one-app-at-a-time model of earlier releases.
Microsoft has released some documentation and binary files for MT-DOS and “may update this release if more is discovered.” The company credits English researcher Connor “Starfrost” Hyde for shaking all of this source code loose as part of an ongoing examination of MT-DOS that he is documenting on his website. Hyde has posted many screenshots of a 1984-era build of MT-DOS, including of the “session manager” that it used to track and switch between running applications.
Confidential copies of the obscure, abandoned multitasking-capable version of MS-DOS 4.00. Microsoft has been unable to locate source code for this release, sometimes referred to as “MT-DOS” or “Multitasking MS-DOS.”
Microsoft
The publicly released version of MS-DOS 4.00 is known less for its new features than for its high memory usage; the 4.00 release could consume as much as 92KB of RAM, way up from the roughly 56KB used by MS-DOS 3.31, and the 4.01 release reduced this to about 86KB. The later MS-DOS 5.0 and 6.0 releases maxed out at 72 or 73KB, and even IBM’s PC DOS 2000 only wanted around 64KB.
These RAM numbers would be rounding errors on any modern computer, but in the days when RAM was pricey, systems maxed out at 640KB, and virtual memory wasn’t a thing, such a huge jump in system requirements was a big deal. Today’s retro-computing enthusiasts still tend to skip over MS-DOS 4.00, recommending either 3.31 for its lower memory usage or later versions for their expanded feature sets.
Microsoft has open-sourced some other legacy code over the years, including those older MS-DOS versions, Word for Windows 1.1a, 1983-era GW-BASIC, and the original Windows File Manager. While most of these have been released in their original forms without any updates or changes, the Windows File Manager is actually actively maintained. It was initially just changed enough to run natively on modern 64-bit and Arm PCs running Windows 10 and 11, but it’s been updated with new fixes and features as recently as March 2024.
The release of the MS-DOS 4.0 code isn’t the only new thing that DOS historians have gotten their hands on this year. One of the earliest known versions of 86-DOS, the software that Microsoft would buy and turn into the operating system for the original IBM PC, was discovered and uploaded to the Internet Archive in January. An early version of the abandoned Microsoft-developed version of OS/2 was also unearthed in March.
Enlarge/ Tech brands love hollering about the purported thrills of AI these days.
Logitech announced a new mouse last week. A company rep reached out to inform Ars of Logitech’s “newest wireless mouse.” The gadget’s product page reads the same as of this writing.
I’ve had good experience with Logitech mice, especially wireless ones, one of which I’m using now. So I was keen to learn what Logitech might have done to improve on its previous wireless mouse designs. A quieter click? A new shape to better accommodate my overworked right hand? Multiple onboard profiles in a business-ready design?
I was disappointed to learn that the most distinct feature of the Logitech Signature AI Edition M750 is a button located south of the scroll wheel. This button is preprogrammed to launch the ChatGPT prompt builder, which Logitech recently added to its peripherals configuration app Options+.
That’s pretty much it.
Beyond that, the M750 looks just like the Logitech Signature M650, which came out in January 2022. Also, the new mouse’s forward button (on the left side of the mouse) is preprogrammed to launch Windows or macOS dictation, and the back button opens ChatGPT within Options+. As of this writing, the new mouse’s MSRP is $10 higher ($50) than the M650’s.
The new M750 (pictured) is 4.26×2.4×1.52 inches and 3.57 ounces.
Logitech
The M650 (pictured) comes in 3 sizes. The medium size is 4.26×2.4×1.52 inches and 3.58 ounces.
Logitech
I asked Logitech about the M750 appearing to be the M650 but with an extra button, and a spokesperson responded by saying:
M750 is indeed not the same mouse as M650. It has an extra button that has been preprogrammed to trigger the Logi AI Prompt Builder once the user installs Logi Options+ app. Without Options+, the button does DPI toggle between 1,000 and 1,600 DPI.
However, a reprogrammable button south of a mouse’s scroll wheel that can be set to launch an app or toggle DPI out of the box is pretty common, including among Logitech mice. Logitech’s rep further claimed to me that the two mice use different electronic components, which Logitech refers to as the mouse’s platform. Logitech can reuse platforms for different models, the spokesperson said.
Logitech’s rep declined to comment on why the M650 didn’t have a button south of its scroll wheel. Price is a potential reason, but Logitech also sells cheaper mice with this feature.
Still, the minimal differences between the two suggest that the M750 isn’t worth a whole product release. I suspect that if it weren’t for Logitech’s trendy new software feature, the M750 wouldn’t have been promoted as a new product.
The M750 also raises the question of how many computer input devices need to be equipped with some sort of buzzy, generative AI-related feature.
Logitech’s ChatGPT prompt builder
Logitech’s much bigger release last week wasn’t a peripheral but an addition to its Options+ app. You don’t need the “new” M750 mouse to use Logitech’s AI Prompt Builder; I was able to program my MX Master 3S to launch it. Several Logitech mice and keyboards support AI Prompt Builder.
When you press a button that launches the prompt builder, an Options+ window appears. There, you can input text that Options+ will use to create a ChatGPT-appropriate prompt based on your needs:
Enlarge/ A Logitech-provided image depicting its AI Prompt Builder software feature.
Logitech
After you make your choices, another window opens with ChatGPT’s response. Logitech said the prompt builder requires a ChatGPT account, but I was able to use GPT-3.5 without entering one (the feature can also work with GPT-4).
The typical Arsian probably doesn’t need help creating a ChatGPT prompt, and Logitech’s new capability doesn’t work with any other chatbots. The prompt builder could be interesting to less technically savvy people interested in some handholding for early ChatGPT experiences. However, I doubt if people with an elementary understanding of generative AI need instant access to ChatGPT.
The point, though, is instant access to ChatGPT capabilities, something that Logitech is arguing is worthwhile for its professional users. Some Logitech customers, though, seem to disagree, especially with the AI Prompt Builder, meaning that Options+ has even more resources in the background.
But Logitech isn’t the only gadget company eager to tie one-touch AI access to a hardware button.
Pinching your earbuds to talk to ChatGPT
Similarly to Logitech, Nothing is trying to give its customers access to ChatGPT quickly. In this case, access occurs by pinching the device. This month, Nothing announced that it “integrated Nothing earbuds and Nothing OS with ChatGPT to offer users instant access to knowledge directly from the devices they use most, earbuds and smartphones.” The feature requires the latest Nothing OS and for the users to have a Nothing phone with ChatGPT installed. ChatGPT gestures work with Nothing’s Phone (2) and Nothing Ear and Nothing Ear (a), but Nothing plans to expand to additional phones via software updates.
Nothing also said it would embed “system-level entry points” to ChatGPT, like screenshot sharing and “Nothing-styled widgets,” to Nothing smartphone OSes.
Enlarge/ A peek at setting up ChatGPT integration on the Nothing X app.
Nothing’s ChatGPT integration may be a bit less intrusive than Logitech’s since users who don’t have ChatGPT on their phones won’t be affected. But, again, you may wonder how many people asked for this feature and how reliably it will function.
The “Plus” version doesn’t have any discernible differences.
HMD
The Pro model has … bigger bezels?
HMD
HMD has been known as the manufacturer of Nokia-branded phones for years now, but now the company wants to start selling phones under its own brand. The first is the “HMD Pulse” line, a series of three low-end phones that are headed for Europe. The US is getting an HMD-branded phone, too—the HMD Vibe—but that won’t be out until May.
Europe’s getting the 140-euro HMD Pulse, 160-euro Pulse+, and the 180-euro Pulse Pro. If you can’t tell from the prices, these are destined for Europe for now, but if you convert them to USD, that’s about $150, $170, and $190, respectively. With only $20 between tiers, there isn’t a huge difference from one model to the next. They all have bottom-of-the-barrel Unisoc T606 SoCs. That’s a 12 nm chip with two Cortex A75 Arm cores, two A55 cores, an ARM Mali-G57 MP1, and it’s 4G only. Previously, HMD used this chip in the 2023 HMD Nokia G22. They also all have 90 Hz, 6.65-inch, 1612×720 LCDs, 128GB of storage, and 5,000 mAh batteries.
As for the differences, the base model has 4GB of RAM, a 13 MP main rear camera, an 8 MP front camera, and 10 W wired charging. The Plus model upgrades to a 50 MP main camera, while the Pro model has 6GB of RAM, a 50 MP main camera, 50 MP front camera, and 20 W wired charging. There is a second lens camera on the back, but it appears to be only a 2 MP “depth sensor” on all models.
Oddly, the Pro design is slightly worse than the cheaper phones, with thicker bezels and a bottom chin. Other than that, the phones have near-identical designs, and they all look good for a phone at this price. The Pulse phones, and only the Pulse phones, apparently, are marketed as “built to be repairable” and will have parts that will be available at iFixit. It’s hard to say exactly what “repairable” means since none of that information is out yet, but HMD’s last “repairable” phone didn’t contain any repair-focused innovations. It just seemed like a normal, non-waterproof cheap phone with a new marketing angle.
The US is getting the closely related “HMD Vibe,” which sounds like a more capable device with a Snapdragon 680. It’s old as far as Qualcomm chips go (from 2021), but it’s not a Unisoc. This is a 6 nm chip with four Cortex A73 cores and four Cortex A53 cores. It has 6GB of RAM, the same screen as the other devices, and only a 4,000 mAh battery for $150. The camera sounds like a low-end loadout, with only a 13 MP main shooter and a 5 MP front. All the phones have NFC, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, a Micro SD slot, USB-C ports, and they come with Android 14 and two OS upgrades. The European phones all have side fingerprint readers, and the real deal-breaker for the US seems to be that it doesn’t have a fingerprint reader at all.
HMD’s desire to step away from the Nokia brand is an odd one. Lots of historic phone companies that washed out of the phone market have licensed their brand to a third party, giving rise to the “zombie brand” trend. Blackberry, Palm, and Motorola all come to mind. HMD was different, though; at launch, it was more of a spiritual successor to Nokia rather than a random manufacturer licensing the brand. Both companies are Finnish, and HMD’s headquarters are right across the street from Nokia. The company’s leadership is filled with former Nokia executives. Nokia even owns 10 percent of HMD, while FIH Mobile, a division of Chinese manufacturing juggernaut Foxconn, owns 14 percent.
Despite all that, HMD is stepping out of the shadow of Nokia and trying to start its own brand. The company plans to go with a “multi-brand” strategy now, so Nokia phones will stick around, but expect to see more HMD-branded phones in the future. The company is also open to other brand partnerships. It just released a bizarre “Heineken” dumbphone in partnership with the beer brand and is planning a “Barbie flip phone” with Mattel this summer.
Enlarge/ Ubuntu has come a long way over nearly 20 years, to the point where you can now render 3D Ubuntu coffee mugs and family pictures in a video announcing the 2024 spring release.
Betas, and the final release of Ubuntu 24.04, a long-term support (LTS) release of the venerable Linux distribution, were delayed, as backing firm Canonical worked in early April 2024 to rebuild every binary included in the release. xz Utils, an almost ubiquitous data-compression package on Unix-like systems, had been compromised through a long-term and elaborate supply-chain attack, discovered only because a Microsoft engineer noted some oddities with SSH performance on a Debian system. Ubuntu, along with just about every other regularly updating software platform, had a lot of work to do this month.
Canonical’s Ubuntu 24.04 release video, noting 20 years of Ubuntu releases. I always liked the brown.
What is actually new in Ubuntu 24.04, or “Noble Numbat?” Quite a bit, especially if you’re the type who sticks to LTS releases. The big new changes are a very slick new installer, using the same Subiquity back-end as the Server releases, and redesigned with a whole new front-end in Flutter. ZFS encryption is back as a default install option, along with hardware-backed (i.e., TPM) full-disk encryption, plus more guidance for people looking to dual-boot with Windows setups and BitLocker. Netplan 1.0 is the default network configuration tool now. And the default installation is “Minimal,” as introduced in 23.10.
endangered species, and I think we should save it.” data-height=”1414″ data-width=”2121″ href=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GettyImages-1472552858.jpg”>endangered species, and I think we should save it.” height=”200″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GettyImages-1472552858-300×200.jpg” width=”300″>
Raspberry Pi gets some attention, too, with an edition of 24.04 (64-bit only) available for the popular single-board computer, including the now-supported Raspberry Pi 5 model. That edition includes power supply utility Pemmican and enables 3D acceleration in the Firefox Snap. Ubuntu also tweaked the GNOME (version 46) desktop included in this release, such that it should see better performance on Raspberry Pi graphics drivers.
What else? Lots of little things:
Support for autoinstall, i.e., YAML-based installation workflows
A separate, less background-memory-eating firmware updating tool
Additional support for Group Policy Objects (GPOs) in Active Directory environments
Security improvements to Personal Package Archives (PPA) software setups
Restrictions to unprivileged user namespace through apparmor, which may impact some third-party apps downloaded from the web
A new Ubuntu App Center, replacing the Snap Store that defaults to Snaps but still offers traditional .deb installs (and numerous angles of critique for Snap partisans)
Firefox is a native Wayland application, and Thunderbird is a Snap package only
More fingerprint reader support
Improved Power Profiles Manager, especially for portable AMD devices
Support for Apple’s preferred HEIF/HEIC files, with thumbnail previews
Snapshot replaces Cheese, and GNOME games has been removed
Virtual memory mapping changes that make many modern games run better through Proton, per OMG Ubuntu
Linux kernel 6.8, which, among other things, improves Intel Meteor Lake CPU performance and supports Nintendo Switch Online controllers.
The suggested system requirements for Ubuntu 24.04 are a 2 GHz dual-core processor, 4GB memory, and 25GB free storage space. There is a dedicated WSL edition of 24.04 out for Windows systems.
Reddit has made it clear that it’s an ad-first business. Today, it expanded on that practice with a new ad format that looks to sell things to Reddit users. Simultaneously, Reddit has marketers who are interested in pushing products to users through seemingly legitimate accounts.
In a blog post today, Reddit announced that its Dynamic Product Ads are entering public beta globally. The ad format uses “shopping signals,” aka discussions with people looking to try a product or brand, machine learning, and advertiser product catalogs in order to post relevant ads. Reddit shared an image in the blog post that shows ads, including with products and pricing, that seem to relate to a posted question. User responses to the Reddit post appear under the ad.
A somewhat blurry depiction of the new type of ads Reddit is testing.
A (still blurry) example of a more targeted approach to Reddit’s new ad format.
Reddit’s Dynamic Product Ads can automatically show users ads “based on the products they’ve previously engaged with on the advertiser’s site” and/or “based on what people engage with on Reddit or advertiser sites,” per the blog.
Reddit is an ad business
Reddit’s blog didn’t imply that Dynamic Product Ads means users would see more ads than they do currently. However, today’s blog highlighted the newly public company’s focus on ad sales.
“With Dynamic Product Ads, brands can tap into the rich, high-intent product conversations that people come to Reddit for,” Reddit EVP of Business Marketing and Growth Jim Squires said in a statement.
The blog also noted that “Reddit’s communities are naturally commercial,” adding:
Reddit is where people come to make shopping decisions, and we’re focused on bringing brands into these interactions in a way that adds value for people and drives growth for businesses.
The stance has been increasingly clear over the past year, as Reddit became rather vocal about the fact that it’s never been profitable. In June, the company started charging for API access, resulting in numerous valued third-party Reddit apps closing and messy user protests that left a bad taste in countless long-time users’ and moderators’ mouths. While Reddit initially announced the change as a way to prevent large language models from using its data for free training, it was also seen as a way to drive users to Reddit’s website and mobile app, where it can serve users ads.
Per Reddit’s February SEC filing (PDF), ads made up 98 percent of Reddit’s revenues in 2023 and 2022. That filing included a note from CEO Steve Huffman, saying: “Advertising is our first business” and that Reddit’s ad business is “still in the early phases of growing.”
In September, the company started preventing users from opting out of personalized ads. In June, Reddit introduced a new tool to advertisers that uses natural language processing to look through Reddit user comments for keywords that signal potential interest for a brand.
Reddit’s blog post today hinted at some future evolutions focused on showing Reddit users ads, including “tools and features such as new shopping ads formats like collection ads that enhance the shopper experience while driving performance” and “merchant platform integrations that welcome smaller merchants.”
The Polestar Phone. Someday it will unlock your Polestar car.
Polestar
There are a few Polestar decorations, like the logo on the back and camera specs on each of the lenses.
Polestar
There’s a side Polestar logo too.
Polestar
The box. It comes with a charger.
Polestar
The Polestar UI.
Polestar
This is the “Polestar Link” picture. It looks like three of the phone’s home screen pages are now on the car display?
Polestar
The Polestar Phone is perfect for watching videos about your Polestar car.
Polestar
Polestar, the Volvo offshoot EV company, has made a smartphone. It’s called, predictably, the Polestar Phone, and it’s only available in China. There have been a lot of car-brand smartphones out there (it’s often Lamborghini), but usually, these are licensing deals that the car company ignores. Polestar seems to be proud of this phone, though, making it a bit more involved than the usual car-brand licensing deal. Just look at the new navigation drawer on the polestar.cn site, which has four main items: “Polestar 2”, “Polestar 3”, “Polestar 4” and now “Polestar Phone.”
Why would a niche EV brand make a phone? Maybe all that work on the Android Automotive OS made Polestar’s engineers really enthusiastic about Android device development. The website, through machine translation, promises the phone was “jointly designed by the Polestar global design team and the Xingji Meizu team in Gothenburg, Sweden, and is decorated with Swedish gold details that symbolize high performance.” “Decorated” is probably the best way you could describe Polestar’s contributions to this phone since it seems to be a bog standard Meizu 21 Pro with some Polestar branding. It does look beautiful, with a no-nonsense minimal rectangular design and all-screen front, but the same can be said for the Meizu phone this is based on.
So, how exactly is the Polestar Phone related to a Polestar car? Well, both run Android and have all-electric power systems. The phone has a slightly smaller battery than the EV, at only 5,050 mAh (that’s something like 18 Wh) compared to the 100 kWh battery of something like a Polestar 4. The car also has the phone beat on-screen size, with the phone packing a pocketable 120 Hz 6.79-inch, 3192×1368 OLED, and the Polestars all sporting big tablet screens.
Enlarge/ It’s very pretty, but Polestar can thank Meizu for that.
Polestar
A spec comparison is not a clean sweep for the cars, though. The sad thing about the state of the car infotainment market is that the computer in this ~$1,000 (7,388 yuan) phone is dramatically faster than what powers any of the infotainment systems in Polestar’s $50,000–$75,000 vehicles. The Polestar Phone ships with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. That’s a flagship mobile SoC from 2023 built on a 4 nm process. All the Polestar cars in the Google Play Developer console (which lists all Android devices in the world) are built around an Intel Atom A3960 SoC. This is an absolutely ancient, bottom-of-the-barrel 14 nm x86 desktop CPU released around 2016. This chip was bad eight years ago when it came out, yet is still shipping today. The cars all have 4GB or 8GB of RAM, and the Polestar 2 I looked at had 128GB of storage, all clear wins for the phone spec sheet.
The Polestar Phone and Polestar Car (specifically, the Polestar 4) will talk to each other. Polestar promises that someday the phone will support Android’s digital car key functionality, but not at launch. The Polestar Phone’s “Polestar UI” promises a “rich application icon design [that] is consistent with the Polestar OS in the car.” Something called “Polestar Link” apparently lets you see multiple pages of the phone’s home screen on the big car tablet display, and it sounds like maybe apps will float between the two devices? It’s hard to know too many details because 1) there just haven’t been that many details published yet, and 2) the details that exist are all in Chinese.
There is a chance this phone will be sold outside of China. Like the cars, it is on the Google Play Dev Console, and since there is no Google Play in China, the phone’s registration with Google suggests a plan for international sales.
Will Chrome, the world’s most popular browser, ever kill third-party cookies? Apple and Mozilla both killed off the user-tracking technology in 2020. Google, the world’s largest advertising company, originally said it wouldn’t kill third-party cookies until 2022. Then in 2021, it delayed the change until 2023. In 2022, it delayed everything again, until 2024. It’s 2024 now, and guess what? Another delay. Now Google says it won’t turn off third-party cookies until 2025, five years after the competition.
A new blog post cites UK regulations as the reason for the delay, saying, “We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem.” The post comes as part of the quarterly reports the company is producing with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
Interestingly, the UK’s CMA isn’t concerned about user privacy but instead is worried about other web advertisers that compete with Google. The UK wants to make sure that Google isn’t making changes to Chrome to prop up its advertising business at the expense of competitors. While other browser vendors shut down third-party cookies without a second thought, Google said it wouldn’t turn off the user-tracking feature until it built an alternative advertising feature directly into Chrome, so it can track user interests to serve them relevant ads. The new advertising system, called the Topics API and “Privacy Sandbox,” launched in Chrome in 2023. Google AdSense is already compatible.
The UK is worried that Chrome’s new ad system might give Google’s ad division an unfair advantage. Google and the UK CMA are talking it out, and Google says it’s “critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence, including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June.” Google has a public testing suite for Chrome’s new ad system to allow for feedback. Given all the testing data that needs to be pored over, Google says, “We will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4.” We’ll check back next year!
Enlarge/ I have hundreds of UUIDs and I must scream.
Getty Images
The modern “smart” TV asks a lot of us. In exchange for connecting you to a few streaming services you use, a TV will collect data, show ads, and serve as another vector for bad actors. In a few reported cases, though, a modern connected TV has been blamed for attacks not on privacy, eyeballs, or passwords but on an entirely different computer.
The TV in question is a Hisense TV, and the computer is a Windows PC, specifically one belonging to Priscilla Snow, a musician and audio designer in Montréal, Quebec. Her post about her Hisense experience reads like a mystery. Of course, because you already know the crime and the culprit, it’s more like a Columbo episode. Either way, it’s thrilling in a very specific I-can’t-believe-that-fixed-it kind of thrill.
Disappearing Settings, keyboards, remote desktops, and eventually taskbars
Snow’s Windows PC had “a few hiccups over the past couple of years,” Snow wrote on April 19. She couldn’t open display settings, for one. A MIDI keyboard interface stopped working. Task manager would start to hang until force-closed. Video capture cards had trouble connecting. As Snow notes, any veteran of a Windows computer that has had lots of stuff installed on it can mentally write off most of these things, or at least stash them away until the next reinstall.
Then, while trying to figure out why a remote desktop session wasn’t working, the task bars on Snow’s PC disappeared. The PC refused to launch any settings panels. After updating drivers and restarting the PC, the taskbars returned, but only for six days. Snow hunted for solutions, and after using “the exact right string in my search,” she found a Reddit thread that led to a Microsoft support question, all describing the same kinds of seemingly spectral problems her computer was having over time, with no clear cause.
User Narayan B wrote in Microsoft’s forum that the issue is the Hisense TV generating “random UUIDs for UPNP network discovery every few minutes.” Windows, seemingly not knowing why any device would routinely do this, sees and adds those alternate Hisense devices to its Device Association Framework, or DAF. This service being stuffed full of attention-grabbing devices can hang up Task Manager, Bluetooth, the Settings apps, File Explorer, and more.
The fix is deleting hundreds of keys from the registry. Narayan B wrote that noticed his Hisense TV flooding Windows’ device discovery systems before but “didn’t think Windows would go for a toss due to this.” Snow did the same, and everything—Task Manager, MIDI keyboard, remote desktop, even a CRT monitor she had assumed was broken—started working again.
UUID, UPNP, DAF, and hundreds of Registry keys
Along with deleting hundreds of keys with maniacal keyboard pounding, Snow notes in chats attached to her post that she disabled “Set up network connected devices automatically” on her “Private networks” settings in Windows. And, of course, she recommend not buying the same Hisense 50Q8G she bought, or at least not having it on the same network.
The mystery is solved, but the culprit remains very much at large. Or culprits—plural—depending on how you think a Windows PC should react to a shapeshifting TV.
Ars reached out to Hisense to ask for comment and will update the post if we hear back.
If you’ve been wondering when you’ll be able to order the flame-throwing robot that Ohio-based Throwflame first announced last summer, that day has finally arrived. The Thermonator, what Throwflame bills as “the first-ever flamethrower-wielding robot dog” is now available for purchase. The price? $9,420.
Thermonator is a quadruped robot with an ARC flamethrower mounted to its back, fueled by gasoline or napalm. It features a one-hour battery, a 30-foot flame-throwing range, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity for remote control through a smartphone.
It also includes a LIDAR sensor for mapping and obstacle avoidance, laser sighting, and first-person view (FPV) navigation through an onboard camera. The product appears to integrate a version of the Unitree Go2 robot quadruped that retails alone for $1,600 in its base configuration.
The Robot Dog With A Flamethrower | Thermonator
The company lists possible applications of the new robot as “wildfire control and prevention,” “agricultural management,” “ecological conservation,” “snow and ice removal,” and “entertainment and SFX.” But most of all, it sets things on fire in a variety of real-world scenarios.
Back in 2018, Elon Musk made the news for offering an official Boring Company flamethrower that reportedly sold 10,000 units in 48 hours. It sparked some controversy because flamethrowers can also double as weapons or potentially start wildfires.
In the US, flamethrowers are legally unregulated in 48 states and are not considered firearms by federal agencies. Restrictions exist in Maryland, where flamethrowers require a Federal Firearms License to own, and California, where the range of flamethrowers cannot exceed 10 feet.
Even so, to state the obvious, flamethrowers can easily burn both things and people, starting fires and wreaking havoc if not used safely. Accordingly, the Thermonator might be one Christmas present you should skip for little Johnny this year.
Last year, Apple introduced the ability to set multiple timers at once in the Clock app on its various platforms.
“We truly live in an age of wonders,” deadpanned Apple’s Craig Federighi in the company’s official presentation, tacitly acknowledging the gap between the apparent simplicity of the feature and the amount of time that Apple took to implement it.
The next version of iPadOS may contain another of these “age of wonders” features, an apparently simple thing that Apple has chosen never to do for reasons that the company can’t or won’t explain. According to MacRumors, iPadOS 18 may finally be the update that brings a version of Apple’s first-party Calculator app to the iPad.
Calculator was one of the very first iPhone apps that shipped with the iPhone back in 2007 but was mysteriously and inexplicably absent from the iPad when it launched in 2010. It’s also the very last of those original missing apps to find its way to the iPad’s home screen—Stocks, Clock, Voice Memos, and Weather had all made the jump previously, with the Weather app coming as recently as 2022.
It’s not that the iPad is incapable of calculating; the Spotlight search feature can already handle basic off-the-cuff math and conversion questions, and third-party calculator apps like PCalc, Numerical², Calcbot, and innumerable free-to-download no-name calculator apps have stepped up to fill the gap. But it was never clear why Apple decided against shipping a first-party Calculator app with the iPad, when it had shipped one with every iPhone since 2007 and every Mac since 1984.
The new Calculator app should be more than just a straightforward port of the current iOS or macOS app. Apple is apparently planning a small overhaul of the Calculator app for macOS 15 with a history tape for tracking past calculations, a resizable window, and an updated round-button design that more closely imitates the iOS version. The iPad and macOS versions of many of Apple’s apps share a lot of code these days—Stocks, Voice Memos, News, Home, Weather, Clock, and others share essentially the same design and layout in both operating systems—so it’s a fair bet that this redesigned Mac app and the newly introduced iPad app will be the same software.
At least one developer of a prominent iPad calculator seemed undaunted by the news that his app could be Sherlocked this fall.
“Yes, I saw the MacRumors article,” wrote PCalc developer James Thomson on his Mastodon account, responding to no one in particular. “Yes, it’s fine.”
Enlarge/ The Meta Quest Pro at a Best Buy demo station in October 2022.
Meta will open up the operating system that runs on its Quest mixed reality headsets to other technology companies, it announced today.
What was previously simply called Quest software will be called Horizon OS, and the goal will be to move beyond the general-use Quest devices to more purpose-specific devices, according to an Instagram video from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
There will be headsets focused purely on watching TV and movies on virtual screens, with the emphasis on high-end OLED displays. There will also be headsets that are designed to be as light as possible at the expense of performance for productivity and exercise uses. And there will be gaming-oriented ones.
The announcement named three partners to start. Asus will produce a gaming headset under its Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand, Lenovo will make general purpose headsets with an emphasize on “productivity, learning, and entertainment,” and Xbox and Meta will team up to deliver a special edition of the Meta Quest that will come bundled with an Xbox controller and Xbox Cloud Gaming and Game Pass.
Users running Horizon OS devices from different manufacturers will be able to stay connected in the operating system’s social layer of “identities, avatars, social graphs, and friend groups” and will be able to enjoy shared virtual spaces together across devices.
The announcement comes after Meta became an early leader in the relatively small but interesting consumer mixed reality space but with diminishing returns on new devices as the market saturates.
Further, Apple recently entered the fray with its Vision Pro headset. The Vision Pro is not really a direct competitor to Meta’s Quest devices today—it’s far more expensive and loaded with higher-end tech—but it may only be the opening volley in a long competition between the companies.
Meta’s decision to make Horizon OS a more open platform for partner OEMs in the face of Apple’s usual focus on owning and integrating as much of the software, hardware, and services in its device as it can mirrors the smartphone market. There, Google’s Android (on which Horizon OS is based) runs on a variety of devices from a wide range of companies, while Apple’s iOS runs only on Apple’s own iPhones.
Meta also says it is working on a new spatial app framework to make it easier for developers with experience on mobile to start making mixed reality apps for Horizon OS and that it will start “removing the barriers between the Meta Horizon Store and App Lab, which lets any developer who meets basic technical and content requirements release software on the platform.”
Pricing, specs, and release dates have not been announced for any of the new devices. Zuckerberg admitted it’s “probably going to take a couple of years” for this ecosystem of hardware devices to roll out.
