Month: April 2022

Enlarge / Ukrainian soldiers sit on an armored military vehicle in Sievierodonetsk on April 7, 2022, amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (credit: Getty Images | Fadel Senna)

Facebook today reported an increase in attacks on accounts run by Ukraine military personnel. In some cases, attackers took over accounts and posted “videos calling on the Army to surrender,” but Facebook said it blocked sharing of the videos.

Specifically, Facebook owner Meta’s Q1 2022 Adversarial Threat Report said it has “seen a further spike in compromise attempts aimed at members of the Ukrainian military by Ghostwriter,” a hacking campaign that “typically targets people through email compromise and then uses that to gain access to their social media accounts across the Internet.” Ghostwriter has been linked to the Belarusian government.

“Since our last public update [on February 27], this group has attempted to hack into the Facebook accounts of dozens of Ukrainian military personnel,” Meta wrote today. Ghostwriter successfully hacked into the accounts in “a handful of cases” in which “they posted videos calling on the Army to surrender as if these posts were coming from the legitimate account owners. We blocked these videos from being shared.”

Enlarge / US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, April 6, 2022. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

A growing number of high-ranking officials, lawmakers, aides, and journalists have tested positive for COVID-19 this week amid an outbreak of the ultratransmissible omicron variant among the elite of Washington, DC.

In the past three days, Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), Greg Meeks (D-NY), Scott Peters (D-Calif.), and Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.) reported positive COVID-19 tests. Two Cabinet members—Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Attorney General Merrick Garland—also reported positive tests, along with Vice President Kamala Harris’ communications director, Jamal Simmons, and, President Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens. Several staff members for the White House and National Security Council have also tested positive, The Washington Post reports.

On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s spokesperson announced that Pelosi, too, was infected. “After testing negative this week, Speaker Pelosi received a positive test result for COVID-19 and is currently asymptomatic. The Speaker is fully vaccinated and boosted and is thankful for the robust protection the vaccine has provided, ” spokesperson Drew Hammill tweeted.

Enlarge / Meet Big John. (credit: Zoic Limited Liability Company)

It’s difficult to tell which feature of the triceratops is more striking: the two large horns that jut from its forehead or the large frill that extends out from the back of its skull. In the minds of many paleontologists, the two features appear to be related. Scars found in the bones supporting the frill also seem to suggest that the animals engaged in combat with their horns, much like modern animals such as moose—fights that regularly resulted in injuries.

But it’s difficult to rule out alternative explanations for some of the holes found in the fossil remains of frills. Some of the holes could have been a result of decay with age or damage after death. Now, an analysis of a triceratops skeleton known as “Big John” eliminates a couple of possibilities by showing that a hole punched through one of the bones of the frill seems to have started healing before the animal died.

Hole in one

The large frill at the back of a triceratops’ head is made from large, bony plates that are fused with the bones that do the things we normally associate with skulls, like protecting the brain. They were present in early species in this lineage that lacked pronounced horns and so are thought to have originally evolved for display purposes.

Enlarge / The RTX 3080 Ti. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Graphics card prices remain hugely inflated compared to a few years ago, but the good news is that things finally seem to be getting consistently better and not worse.

To quantify this, Jarred Walton at Tom’s Hardware and analyst Jon Peddie pulled together data on current and historical GPU pricing. The only modern card consistently tracking close to its manufacturer-suggested retail price of $199 is the harshly reviewed AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT, which is currently selling for an average of $220, according to Peddie’s data, and $237 according to Walton’s. But across the board, prices are way down from their 2021 peaks.

Data from Graphic Speak’s Jon Peddie, comparing the current and peak prices for a handful of current-generation GPUs. Note that the RTX 3050 and RTX 6500 XT launched in early 2022; their prices were never as inflated as some of the higher-end models. (credit: Graphic Speak)

Pricing for Nvidia’s RTX 3080 demonstrates where the market sits right now—the card is currently selling for between $1,200 and $1,300 on average, and you can buy some models on retail sites like Newegg for as low as $1,000. The cost is still way up from the card’s MSRP of $699, but it’s down nearly a third from its peak price of $1,800.

Enlarge / Illustration of a candidate event for a W boson decaying into one muon and one neutrino from proton-proton collisions, recorded by the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS detector in 2018. (credit: ATLAS Collaboration/CERN)

The Standard Model of Particle Physics has withstood rigorous test after test over many decades, and the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 provided the last observational piece of the puzzle. But that hasn’t kept physicists from doggedly searching for new physics beyond what the model predicts. In fact, we know the model must be incomplete because it doesn’t incorporate gravity or account for the presence of dark matter in the Universe. Nor can it account for the accelerating rate of expansion of the Universe, which many physicists attribute to dark energy.

The latest hint as to how the Standard Model might need revising comes from a new precise measurement of the W boson by Fermilab’s CDF II collaboration. That measurement yielded a statistically significant higher mass for the W boson than predicted by the Standard Model—on the order of seven standard deviations, according to the collaboration’s new paper published in the journal Science. It also conflicts with prior precision measurements of the W boson’s mass.

“The surprisingly high value of the W boson mass reported by the CDF Collaboration directly challenges a fundamental element at the heart of the Standard Model, where both experimental observables and theoretical predictions were thought to have been firmly established and well understood,” Claudio Campagnari (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Martijn Mulders (CERN) wrote in an accompanying perspective. “The finding … offers an exciting new perspective on the present understanding of the most basic structures of matter and forces in the universe.”

Enlarge (credit: Google Play Store)

Google Play is moving forward in its war on old, un-updated apps. The Play Store has had a rolling minimum level for Android version support for a while now; developers have to use a “target API level” that is one year old or newer, or they will be unable to update their apps. Now, Google is announcing a second rolling minimum—if an app’s target API level is two years old, the app will be hidden from the Play Store listings. That means users searching for a new app to install won’t see abandoned apps.

Android’s “target API level” system is sort of like a backward-compatibility setting for Android apps. Every new version of Android is identified by a new API level, which goes up by one with every release. Currently, Android 12L is API level 32, and Android 13 will be API level 33. Every version of Android comes with new features and security restrictions for app developers, but because Google doesn’t want to break old apps with every release, the API level system lets app developers “target” the version of the Android features and restrictions they would like to run under.

The target API level doesn’t have anything to do with the minimum version of Android that an app will run on (that would be the second big app setting, the “minimum API level”); it just lets apps say, “I am coded with compatibility for Android 12 features and restrictions, if they are available.” In this case, the app would get access to the Android 12 features and have the Android 12 security restrictions applied to it, and it would run normally on older versions.

Enlarge / New funds to replace Sky Mavis’ hacked funds are… in the cards.

Sky Mavis, the developer of non-fungible token-based game Axie Infinity, announced Wednesday that it has raised an additional $150 million in venture funding. The company says the money “will be used to reimburse user funds affected by the Ronin Validator Hack,” which purged over $625 million worth of crypto from the Axie Infinity ecosystem last month.

The new funding round is being led by major crypto exchange Binance, which has also stepped in to provide Ethereum withdrawals and deposits to Axie Infinity players for the time being. The “bridge” between Axie Infinity‘s Ronin sidechain and the decentralized Ethereum blockchain remains closed, however, pending “a security upgrade and several audits, which can take several weeks,” Sky Mavis wrote.

Beyond the $150 million cash infusion, Sky Mavis said it will use “Sky Mavis and Axie balance sheet funds [to] ensure that all users are reimbursed.” The remaining $475 million needed to make the marketplace whole could be a significant drag for Sky Mavis, which raised $152 million last October in a deal that valued the company at nearly $3 billion.