Natural language processing (NLP) techniques are bridging the gap between text documents, digital twins and digital threads for manufacturing companies.Read More
How to make critical infrastructure safer—there’s a long way to go
Making critical infrastructure safer at Ars Frontiers. Click here for transcript. (video link)
In the run-up to Ars Frontiers, I had the opportunity to talk with Lesley Carhart, director of Incident Response at Dragos. Known on Twitter as @hacks4pancakes, Carhart is a veteran responder to cyber incidents affecting critical infrastructure and has been dealing with the challenges of securing industrial control systems and operational technology (OT) for years. So it seemed appropriate to get her take on what needs to be done to improve the security of critical infrastructure both in industry and government, particularly in the context of what’s going on in Ukraine.
Much of it is not new territory. “Something that we’ve noticed for years in the industrial cybersecurity space is that people from all different organizations, both military and terrorists around the world, have been pre-positioning to do things like sabotage and espionage via computers for years,” Carhart explained. But these sorts of things rarely get attention because they’re not flashy—and as a result, they don’t get attention from those holding the purse strings for investments that might correct them.
Menlo Microsystems wants to make electrical switches far more efficient
Menlo Microsystems has raised $150 million to make electrical switches much more efficient with its Ideal Switch.Read More
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving made this man so mad he’s running for Senate
Single-issue candidates for the US Senate aren’t the usual fodder for Ars’ car coverage, but it seems like an exception might exist for Dan O’Dowd. O’Dowd, an engineer and CEO of a software company, is running for one of California’s Senate seats on a platform to ban Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” feature.
Tesla’s stratospheric valuation owes a fair amount to the company’s futuristic-sounding FSD feature, which promises a truly autonomous car that could even work the streets while its owner sleeps. But the company’s progress has been rocky, switching compute platforms and ditching sensors while trying to match the functionality of older Teslas built with simpler but more robust advanced driving assistance systems.
FSD is an important money-maker for Tesla, however. In January Tesla CEO Elon Musk told investors that “full-self-driving will become the most important source of profitability for Tesla.” And the company has repeatedly raised the price for the feature—what started as a $6,000 option in 2019 is now a $12,000 option.
Xbox Game Pass adds Assassin’s Creed Origins and more for June 2022
Xbox Game Pass adds several new titles for June, including Assassin’s Creed Origins and For Honor, as well as Super Meat Boy for Gold.Read More
eBayer tries to sell prototype Pixel 7, provides lots of pictures
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You really can buy anything on eBay. [credit:
archive.org ]
Google shocked us all when it decided to reveal the Pixel 7 live at Google I/O a few weeks ago. The phone, which isn’t due out until the fall, was officially confirmed as the “Pixel 7” and “Pixel 7 Pro” with promises of next-gen Google Tensor chips, a polished aluminum camera bar, and a few official pictures of the back. We can learn a bit more about the device now, though, thanks to… an eBay listing?
Over the long weekend, some eBay seller had the bright idea to try to sell a prototype Pixel 7. The $530 listing of what is surely a stolen item has been removed from eBay, but you can still see an archive of the listing here. The seller listed the item saying it “comes with android 13 and pixel apps in development stage. Selling as is. No guarantees of any sort.” Hmmm. The seller at least scored what counts as the first in-person pictures of the Pixel 7, showing the device from all angles.
The Pixel 7 is very close to the Pixel 6, so there’s not a ton to look at, but this gives us a good look at that new camera bar. The Pixel 6 camera bar has one big sheet of glass across the entire back, while the Pixel 7’s camera bar is a big block of aluminum with a smaller glass cover for the lenses. The Pixel 7’s smaller camera glass should make it less susceptible to glare—it was easy for light to bounce around inside of the Pixel 6’s huge glass camera cover. The new look is aesthetically a downgrade, though. The Pixel 6 camera bar was a simple, continuous black strip that contrasted against the body color, while this aluminum is trying to match the glass body color, failing, and then has a black blob inside it for the camera lenses.
Updated Surface Laptop Go leaks in retailer ad, promises big GPU performance boost
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Go was originally introduced in October 2020 as a smaller, lighter, and more budget-friendly member of the Surface family, but it hasn’t been updated since then. That may change soon, according to a leaked retail ad spotted by The Verge—it said that a spruced-up version of the Surface Laptop Go could be available for preorder as soon as June 2.
Intel’s 12th-gen processors have been available for a while now, and in that context, the new Laptop Go’s hardware isn’t very exciting. The laptop was listed with a Core i5-1135G7, a quad-core CPU originally launched in late 2020 that we’ve seen in tons of other laptops in the last two years. The new Laptop Go appears to use the same 12.4-inch touchscreen, the same un-backlit keyboard and fingerprint sensor, and the same complement of ports (one USB-C, one USB-A, a headphone jack, and a Surface Connect port). The laptop will also ship with Windows 11—the current model fully supports Windows 11 but still ships with Windows 10 in S Mode out of the box.
Though it’s almost as old as the original Surface Laptop Go, the i5-1135G7 would be an interesting upgrade to the current laptop’s i5-1035G1. It has the same number of CPU cores, but there are big increases to the base and boost clock speeds. The Iris Xe integrated GPU would also be considerably faster, thanks to a newer GPU architecture, a higher GPU clock speed, and more than twice as many execution units (80, up from 32). A gaming laptop it ain’t, but, especially at the screen’s native 1536×1024 resolution, it should be fast enough to play older and less-demanding games.
AstroForge aims to succeed where other asteroid mining companies have failed
Asteroid mining was all the rage nearly a decade ago. In 2012 several billionaire entrepreneurs founded a company called Planetary Resources with the goal of harvesting water from asteroids and selling it as propellant at in-space fuel depots. A year later, another group of investors founded Deep Space Industries to harvest rare metals from asteroids.
While it seemed like the era of space mining had dawned, these commercial efforts were soon eclipsed by a harsh reality—by 2019 both companies effectively no longer existed. Neither could overcome the significant obstacles of building spacecraft capable of traveling into deep space, let alone examining asteroids and mining them for materials. Beyond the technical challenges, each of these projects also required a huge outlay of funding ahead of any profit that lay years, if not decades, into the future.
Now, a new challenger, AstroForge, has entered the arena with the goal of mining platinum on asteroids and selling it on Earth. The founders of the company, Jose Acain and Matt Gialich, said in an interview they were well aware of the challenges of deep space mining when starting AstroForge earlier this year.