Month: February 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A couple of days after the FBI warned that a ransomware group called BlackByte had compromised critical infrastructure in the US, the group hacked servers belonging to the San Francisco 49ers football team and held some of the team’s data for ransom.

Media representatives for the NFL franchise confirmed a security breach in an emailed statement following a post on BlackByte’s dark web site, on which the hacker group attempts to shame and scare victims into making big payouts in exchange for a promise not to leak the data and to provide a decryption key that allows the data to be recovered. The recent post made available for download a 379MB file named “2020 Invoices” that appeared to show hundreds of billing statements the 49ers had sent partners including AT&T, Pepsi, and the city of Santa Clara, where the 49ers play home games.

A busy three months

In an emailed statement, franchise representatives said investigators were still assessing the breach.

Enlarge / Nvidia showed off the RTX 3090 Ti at CES 2022 in January.

At CES back in January, Nvidia announced two new desktop graphics cards. One of them, the lower-midrange RTX 3050, got pricing and a release date, and the reviews have already come and gone. The other, the tippy-top-end RTX 3090 Ti, had some of its specs announced, but the company said it would have more specifics “by the end of the month.”

But we’re now halfway into February, and the company still doesn’t have any news to share. An Nvidia spokesperson told The Verge that the company does not “currently have more info to share” on the speedy-but-almost-certainly-pricey flagship GPU.

This follows reports from mid-January that the company and its partners had halted production on the 3090 Ti due to alleged issues with the GPU’s BIOS and the hardware itself. Whether fixes can be applied to GPUs that have already been manufactured is unclear, but if the GPU die itself needs to be revised in some way, limited manufacturing capacity amid the ongoing global chip shortage could cause substantial delays.

Enlarge / Will Aibo owners feel a touch of nostalgia watching the Kia Super Bowl LVI ad? (credit: Aurich Lawson | Kia)

For some people—mostly those who aren’t football fans—the commercials that accompany the Super Bowl are as important as the game itself. In 2022, we got a conflicting vision of the future—almost all the automakers showed off new electric vehicles as they try to wean themselves off dirty fossil fuels, a move surely counteracted by all the energy-sucking crypto startups also shilling their wares with on-screen QR codes between downs.

What follows is one automotive editor’s ranking of the various Super Bowl LVI car commercials.

First place goes to Kia for its Robo Dog commercial that advertises the new Kia EV6 electric crossover. It’s a heartwarming story of a robot dachshund that goes on an adventure chasing an EV6, with a little demonstration of that car’s vehicle-to-load function that allows its giant battery to power AC devices, all set to Bonnie Tyler’s best hair-rock.

Enlarge / Gov. Mike Parson at a press conference on May 29, 2019, in Jefferson City, Missouri. (credit: Getty Images | Jacob Moscovitch )

A Cole County prosecutor has rebuffed Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s request to file criminal charges against a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who identified a major security flaw in a government website by viewing publicly available HTML code.

Post-Dispatch reporter Josh Renaud had been facing the threat of prosecution since his discovery that the state website’s HTML source code exposed the full Social Security numbers of teachers and other school employees in unencrypted form. Renaud merely viewed the website’s HTML and converted the Social Security numbers into plain text, and he gave the state time to close the gaping security hole before publishing his findings. Despite Renaud helping the state improve its security, Parson called the journalist a “hacker,” sought criminal charges, and threatened a civil suit.

On Friday, Cole County Prosecutor Locke Thompson issued a statement saying he has closed the investigation without charges:

Enlarge / Could this guy’s mental abilities be staving off some of the impact of climate change? (credit: Andrew Howe)

Many bird species are slowly but surely getting smaller. One study from 2019 looked at more than 70,000 North American migratory birds across 52 species that met untimely ends by flying into Chicago buildings from 1978 to 2016. It suggests that birds in this diverse set had consistently grown smaller as the summers had grown hotter through climate change over the past 40 years.

While this shrinking was observed across these migratory species, new research suggests that birds with bigger brains—relative to their body size—aren’t shrinking like their smaller-brained kin. The research posits that birds like corvids may be better able to survive climate change simply because they are “smarter” in some sense.

Justin Baldwin, a PhD candidate at Washington University and one of the authors of the paper, said that brain size isn’t always a useful proxy for intelligence. But—and we’re not sure why—it does appear to hold true for many birds. “The birds with big brains are basically the ones that build tools, live in complex social groups, live and remain in harsh environments, live longer, [put] more time and energy into raising babies, and [survive] better in the wild,” he told Ars.

Enlarge / Vapor rises from the cooling towers of the nuclear plant of Dampierre-en-Burly near Orleans, central France, on October 23, 2018. (credit: GUILLAUME SOUVANT/AFP/Getty Images)

France is planning to build up to 14 nuclear reactors in an attempt to shore up the country’s aging nuclear fleet while also reducing the country’s carbon emissions. And while the first reactors won’t open for years, the announcement could serve to undercut Russia’s attempts to keep Europe dependent on natural gas.

President Emmanuel Macron announced the decision last week, saying that state-backed Électricité de France, also known as EDF, will build six new plants starting in 2028, with the option to build another eight by 2050. EDF estimates that six next-generation pressurized water reactors will cost around €50 billion ($57 billion). The first could be commissioned as early as 2035.

The move is a sharp reversal of Macron’s earlier pledge to close several reactors over the next decade or so. National politics almost certainly play a role—the nuclear power sector in France employs around 220,000 people, according to one estimate. “What our country needs is the rebirth of France’s nuclear industry,” Macron said at a nuclear turbine factory that EDF had just purchased from GE. “The time has come for a nuclear renaissance,” he said.

Enlarge / The Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, with S-Pen and outrageously slim bezels. (credit: Samsung)

People like Android tablets? That is the bizarro world presented to us by the latest news from Samsung. The company made the Galaxy Tab S8 lineup available for preorder last week, and now Samsung says the tablet is so popular that it had to stop taking preorders.

XDA Developers noticed preorders were shut down for some models and got the following statement from Samsung:

We are thrilled by the consumer response to our new Galaxy Tab S8 lineup. Due to the overwhelming demand in the last 48 hours, we will be pausing preorders at Samsung.com for the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra and Galaxy Tab S8. We are working quickly to meet consumer excitement and demand. Please stay tuned for more updates

Samsung launched three models of the S8 last week: the base model Tab S8, the Tab S8+, and the Tab S8 Ultra. Only the Tab S8+ is still up for sale, with the $699 Tab S8 and $1,099 Ultra model listed as “sold out.”

Enlarge / The white areas on the walls near Lake Mead provide an indication of how much its waters have dropped. (credit: Lingqi Xie)

About half of the contiguous US is currently experiencing moderate to extreme drought—including almost all of the West. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, as widely pervasive drought has been present for quite a while now in this region, where major reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead are hovering around all-time low-water levels. But how does this ongoing drought compare to the past? After all, the region is no stranger to dry stretches.

A 2020 paper examined the 2000-2018 data in the context of a tree ring reconstruction going back to the year 800 and stretching from Southern California to Wyoming. That team found that this was likely the second-driest period in the record, beat out only by a megadrought in the late 1500s.

At the time, the paper’s authors guessed that good precipitation in 2019 would be enough to end the extended drought. But instead, a particularly wicked 2021 kept the drought alive. As a result, three of those researchers—UCLA’s Park Williams and NASA’s Benjamin Cook and Jason Smerdon—decided to update the numbers through 2021.