Author: easyfilo

Enlarge (credit: BTC Keychain)

Nvidia began releasing LHR (or “Lite Hash Rate”) graphics cards last year to slow down their cryptocurrency mining performance and make them less appealing to non-gamers. Late last week, crypto-mining platform NiceHash announced that it had finally found a way around those limitations and released an update for its QuickMiner software that promises full Ethereum mining performance on nearly all of the LHR-enabled GeForce RTX 3000-series GPUs.

Unlike past attempts to disable the LHR protections, NiceHash’s workaround appears to be the real deal—Tom’s Hardware was able to confirm the performance boosts using QuickMiner and a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.

For now, NiceHash says that the LHR workaround will only work in Windows, with “no Linux support yet.” The more flexible NiceHash Miner software doesn’t include the workarounds yet, though it will soon. NiceHash also says that the software won’t accelerate mining performance on newer GeForce cards that use version 3 of the LHR algorithm, a list that (for now) includes the RTX 3050 and the 12GB version of the RTX 3080 but which will presumably grow as Nvidia releases new GPUs and updated revisions for older GPUs.

Enlarge / Yatskov worked near Tesla’s headquarters in Fremont, California. (credit: Michael Vi / Getty)

Tesla on Friday sued a former thermal engineer for trade-secret theft. The company accused its ex-employee, Alexander Yatskov, of transferring confidential information from Tesla’s network to his personal laptop.

Yatskov was hired in January to work on Dojo, the supercomputer Tesla is building to train its self-driving software. Through its customers’ vehicles, Tesla gathers vast quantities of real-world camera data. Dojo will use this data to train the neural networks that power Autopilot, Tesla’s self-driving software.

According to Tesla, Yatskov was assigned to a team that “runs complex simulations of how different thermal designs affect heat distribution, and in turn, affect the balancing of speed, power, safety, cost and environmental concerns.”

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

The New York Times has altered the Wordle solutions list to avoid an answer for today’s puzzle that would have “seem[ed] closely connected to a major recent news event,” as the company put it in a public note this morning.

Today’s originally intended solution, FETUS, was first added to the game’s word list last year, when Wordle creator Josh Wardle included it among the randomly ordered list of roughly 2,300 five-letter words intended to define the daily word game for years to come. The New York Times has pushed that term to the end of the game’s solutions list, where it is now scheduled to appear sometime in late 2027 (it remains to be seen if today’s news focus on the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision will still be as much of a concern by then).

Copies of the Wordle webpage on the Internet Archive show the Times making the change for today’s puzzle sometime on May 6. As such, players who have not refreshed the Wordle webpage in the last few days “may see an outdated answer that seems closely connected to a major recent news event,” as the Times wrote.

Enlarge / Apparent footage from a 2001 build of Duke Nukem Forever has leaked, 21 years later. As this version of the Mona Lisa might say, deal with it. (credit: 3D Realms)

The story of Duke Nukem Forever’s development appeared to be tied up in a bow when the game finally launched in 2011, a whopping 14 years after it had been announced. But the first-person shooter that was eventually cobbled together by Gearbox Software, crappy as it was, didn’t necessarily show the game’s whole story.

Arguably the game’s most famous trailer came at E3 2001; it showed off a bombastic, explosion-filled romp through Las Vegas that actually looked like a playable video game, apparently rendered in that era’s version of Unreal Engine. This week, we’ve learned just how playable that version of the game was—with at least one of Duke Nukem Forever‘s original creators backing up its authenticity.

“A smattering of test levels”

• 

  Selections from a video released in May 2022 of an apparent Duke Nukem Forever build made in 2001. Here’s the weapon-selection interface. [credit:
  3D Realms ]

The game’s latest leak, posted to 4chan on Sunday and widely shared by Duke Nukem fansite duke4.net, appears to be made of original 2001 code and assets. It includes a one-minute video of first-person carnage in a very Duke-appropriate environment of a strip club called “Slick Willy.” The sequence was apparently played and captured by the build’s leaker.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

We made it! After announcing our inaugural conference and providing you with updates, we’re ready to get things started. We’ve been planning this event for months, and as some of your favorite Ars staffers start hopping on planes to meet up in Washington, DC, later in the week, we’ll be kicking things off with a series of livestreams before the main event on Thursday.

Today: Making critical infrastructure safer

We’ll get things rolling today with a conversation between security researcher Lesley Carhart and Ars alum Sean Gallagher on Twitter Live at 1 pm ET. Lesley and Sean will be discussing how we should be thinking about cybersecurity when it comes to our critical infrastructure and how we continue to build a talent pipeline prepared to address the ever-increasingly complex challenges of keeping our digital society running.

Tuesday: How COVID is shaping virology research

We heard your requests for a Beth Mole-moderated COVID discussion (thank you!), and she and Dr. Angela Rasmussen will be with us on Tuesday to talk about how the pandemic is altering the field of virology—particularly in terms of future pandemic preparedness—and how COVID has given the public a first-hand look at the unknowns and long-term effects of viral infections. Join us Tuesday on Twitter at 3:30 pm ET.

Enlarge / NASA’s Mars Ingenuity helicopter has been flying across the red planet for more than a year. (credit: NASA)

The achievement of powered flight on another world is one of the great spaceflight feats of the last decade. Since its first brief hop on April 19, 2021, the Mars Ingenuity helicopter has subsequently made an additional 27 flights, traveling nearly 7 km across the surface of the red planet and scouting ahead of NASA’s Perseverance rover. It has wildly exceeded the expectations and hopes of its scientists and engineers.

But recently, the small, automated helicopter has had problems with dust accumulating on its solar panels, NASA says. This dust reduces the ability of the vehicle to recharge its six lithium-ion batteries. And just as the helicopter needs all of the solar energy it can get, the northern hemisphere of Mars is approaching the dead of winter, which comes in a little more than two months.

Due to these battery issues, the helicopter’s team of flight controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory lost contact with the helicopter on May 3. They had been closely monitoring the health of their tiny spacecraft, particularly the charge state of its batteries. After losing contact, the engineers figured that the Ingenuity‘s field-programmable gate array—essentially, its flight computer—entered into shutdown mode due to a lack of power. In such a situation, virtually all of the helicopter’s on-board electronics turned off to protect them from the cold nighttime temperatures, more than 100° Fahrenheit below freezing. This included the internal clock.