Former Rockstar North developer Obbe Vermeij had been enjoying a few weeks of sharing some decades-old tales. Reminiscing on his many years with the GTA developer, Vermeij took to his personal blog to recall revealing inside stories behind games like San Andreas and Vice City, and everyone was having a good time. Until Rockstar North came along.
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In the last few weeks, on his very old-school Blogger blog, Vermeij had been sharing some stories about the development processes behind the games, seemingly without any malice or ill-intent.
These included interesting insights into the original GTA and GTA 2, like how much the PC versions of the games had to be compromised so it would run on the PS1. “I remember one particular time when all of the textures for the PS version had been cut down to 16 colours,” Vermeij writes. “When the artists saw the results there was cursing. There was no choice though. Difficult choices had to be made to get the game to run on a PS.”
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It seems the line was crossed for some at Rockstar after a couple of weeks of these lovely anecdotes and insights. On November 22, Vermeij removed most of the posts from the site, and added a new one explaining that after receiving an email from Rockstar North, “some of the OGs there are upset by my blog.”
I genuinely didn’t think anyone would mind me talking about 20 year old games but I was wrong. Something about ruining the Rockstar mystique or something.
Anyway,
This blog isn’t important enough to me to piss off my former colleagues in Edinburgh so I’m winding it down.
Given that the overwhelming majority of DMCA takedown notices are generated by copyright bots that are only moderately good at their job, at best, perhaps it’s not terribly surprising that these bots keep finding new and interesting ways to cause collateral damage unintentionally.
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a Tumblr site, called “Mapping La Sirena.” If you’re a fan of Star Trek: Picard, you will know that’s the name of the main starship in that series. But if you’re a copyright enforcer for a certain industry, the bots you’ve set up for yourself apparently aren’t programmed with Star Trek fandom.
Transparency.automattic reports Tumblr has received numerous DMCA takedown notices from DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc, a third-party copyright monitoring service used frequently by content creators to prevent infringement of their original work. And these complaints occurred all because of the name La Sirena which also happens to be the name of an adult content creator, La Sirena 69 who is one of Piracy Prevention’s customers.
In one copyright claim over 90 Tumblr posts were targeted by the monitoring service because of the keyword match to “la sirena.” But instead of Automattic being alerted to La Sirena 69’s potentially infringed content, the company reported many of mappinglasirena.tumblr.com’s original posts.
Pure collateral damage. While not intentional per se, this is obviously still a problem. One of two things has to be the case: either we stop allowing copyright enforcement to be farmed out to a bunch of dumb bots that suck at their jobs or we insist that the bots stop sucking, which ain’t going to happen anytime soon. What cannot be allowed to happen is to shrug this sort of thing off as an innocent accident and oh well, too bad, so sad for the impact on the speech rights of the innocent.
There was nothing that remotely infringed La Sirena 69’s content. Everything about the complaints and takedown notices was wrong.
Every clock has two fundamental properties: a certain precision and a certain time resolution. The time resolution indicates how small the time intervals are that can be measured—i.e., how quickly the clock ticks. Precision tells you how much inaccuracy you have to expect with every single tick.
The research team was able to show that since no clock has an infinite amount of energy available (or generates an infinite amount of entropy), it can never have perfect resolution and perfect precision at the same time. This sets fundamental limits to the possibilities of quantum computers.
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Marcus Huber and his team investigated in general which laws must always apply to every conceivable clock. “Time measurement always has to do with entropy,” explains Marcus Huber. In every closed physical system, entropy increases and it becomes more and more disordered. It is precisely this development that determines the direction of time: the future is where the entropy is higher, and the past is where the entropy is even lower.
As can be shown, every measurement of time is inevitably associated with an increase in entropy: a clock, for example, needs a battery, the energy of which is ultimately converted into frictional heat and audible ticking via the clock’s mechanics—a process in which a fairly ordered state occurs the battery is converted into a rather disordered state of heat radiation and sound.
On this basis, the research team was able to create a mathematical model that basically every conceivable clock must obey. “For a given increase in entropy, there is a tradeoff between time resolution and precision,” says Florian Meier, first author of the second paper, now posted to the arXiv preprint server. “That means: Either the clock works quickly or it works precisely—both are not possible at the same time.”
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“Currently, the accuracy of quantum computers is still limited by other factors, for example, the precision of the components used or electromagnetic fields. But our calculations also show that today we are not far from the regime in which the fundamental limits of time measurement play the decisive role.”
[…]
More information: Florian Meier et al, Fundamental accuracy-resolution trade-off for timekeeping devices, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2301.05173
Hardware security hackers have detailed how it’s possible to bypass Windows Hello’s fingerprint authentication and login as someone else – if you can steal or be left alone with their vulnerable device.
The research was carried out by Blackwing Intelligence, primarily Jesse D’Aguanno and Timo Teräs, and was commissioned and sponsored by Microsoft’s Offensive Research and Security Engineering group. The pair’s findings were presented at the IT giant’s BlueHat conference last month, and made public this week. You can watch the duo’s talk below, or dive into the details in their write-up here.
For users and administrators: be aware your laptop hardware may be physically insecure and allow fingerprint authentication to be bypassed if the equipment falls into the wrong hands. We’re not sure how that can be fixed without replacing the electronics or perhaps updating the drivers and/or firmware within the fingerprint sensors. One of the researchers told us: “It’s my understanding from Microsoft that the issues were addressed by the vendors.” So check for updates or errata. We’ve asked the manufacturers named below for comment, and we will keep you updated.
For device makers: check out the above report to make sure you’re not building these design flaws into your products. Oh, and answer our emails.
The research focuses on bypassing Windows Hello’s fingerprint authentication on three laptops: a Dell Inspiron 15, a Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and a Microsoft Surface Pro 8/X, which were using fingerprint sensors from Goodix, Synaptics, and ELAN, respectively. All three were vulnerable in different ways. As far as we can tell, this isn’t so much a problem with Windows Hello or using fingerprints. It’s more due to shortcomings or oversights with the communications between the software side and the hardware.
Windows Hello allows users to log into the OS using their fingerprint. This fingerprint is stored within the sensor chipset. What’s supposed to happen, simply put, is that when you want to set up your laptop to use your print, the OS generates an ID and passes that to the sensor chip. The chip reads the user’s fingerprint, and stores the print internally, associating it with the ID number. The OS then links that ID with your user account.
Then when you come to login, the OS asks you to present your finger, the sensor reads it, and if it matches a known print, the chips sends the corresponding ID to the operating system, which then grants you access to the account connected to that ID number. The physical communication between the chip and OS involves cryptography to, ideally, secure this authentication method from attackers.
But blunders in implementing this system have left at least the above named devices vulnerable to unlocking – provided one can nab the gear long enough to connect some electronics.
“In all, this research took approximately three months and resulted in three 100 percent reliable bypasses of Windows Hello authentication,” Blackwing’s D’Aguanno and Teräs wrote on Tuesday.
Here’s a summary of the techniques used and described by the infosec pair:
Model: Dell Inspiron 15
Method: If someone can boot the laptop into Linux, they can use the sensor’s Linux driver to enumerate from the sensor chip the ID numbers associated with known fingerprints. That miscreant can then store in the chip their own fingerprint with an ID number identical to the ID number of the Windows user they want to login as. The chip stores this new print-ID association in an internal database associated with Linux; it doesn’t overwrite the existing print-ID association in its internal database for Windows.
The attacker then attaches a man-in-the-middle (MITM) device between the laptop and the sensor, and boots into Windows. The Microsoft OS sends some non-authenticated configuration data to the chip. Crucially, the MITM electronics rewrites that config data on the fly to tell the chip to use the Linux database, and not the Windows database, for fingerprints. Thus when the miscreant next touches their finger to the reader, the chip will recognize the print, return the ID number for that print from the Linux database, which is the same ID number associated with a Windows user, and Windows will log the attacker in as that user.
Model: Lenovo ThinkPad T14
Method: The attack used against the ThinkPad is similar to the one above. While the Dell machine uses Microsoft’s Secure Device Connection Protocol (SDCP) between the OS and the chip, the T14 uses TLS to secure the connection. This can be undermined to again, using Linux, add a fingerprint with an ID associated with a Windows user, and once booted back into Windows, login as that user using the new fingerprint.
Model: Microsoft Surface Pro 8 / X Type Cover with Fingerprint ID
Method: This is the worst. There is no security between the chip and OS at all, so the sensor can be replaced with anything that can masquerade as the chip and simply send a message to Windows saying: Yup, log that user in. And it works. Thus an attacker can log in without even presenting a fingerprint.
Interestingly enough, D’Aguanno told us restarting the PC with Linux isn’t required for exploitation – a MITM device can do the necessary probing and enrollment of a fingerprint itself while the computer is still on – so preventing the booting of non-Windows operating systems, for instance, won’t be enough to stop a thief. The equipment can be hoodwinked while it’s still up and running.
“Booting to Linux isn’t actually required for any of our attacks,” D’Aguanno told us. “On the Dell (Goodix) and ThinkPad (Synaptics), we can simply disconnect the fingerprint sensor and plug into our own gear to attack the sensors. This can also be done while the machine is on since they’re embedded USB, so they can be hot plugged.”
In that scenario, “Bitlocker wouldn’t affect the attack,” he added.
As to what happens if the stolen machine is powered off completely, and has a BIOS password, full-disk encryption, or some other pre-boot authentication, exploitation isn’t as straight forward or perhaps even possible: you’d need to get the machine booted far enough into Windows for the Blackwing team’s fingerprint bypass to work. The described techniques may work against BIOSes that check for fingerprints to proceed with the startup sequence.
“If there’s a password required to boot the machine, and the machine is off, then that could stop this just by nature of the machine not booting to the point where fingerprint authentication is available,” D’Aguanno clarified to us.
“However, at least one of the implementations allows you to use fingerprint authentication for BIOS boot authentication, too. Our focus was on the impact to Windows Hello, though, so we did not investigate that further at this point, but that may be able to be exploited too.”
The duo also urged manufacturers to use SDCP and enable to connect sensor chips to Windows: “It doesn’t help if it’s not turned on.”
They also promised to provide more details about the vulnerabilities they exploited in all three targets in future, and were obviously circumspect in giving away too many details that could be used to crack kit.
Our mouths might help keep our hunger in check. A recent study found evidence in mice that our brains rely on two separate pathways to regulate our sense of fullness and satiety—one originating from the gut and the other from cells in the mouth that let us perceive taste. The findings could help scientists better understand and develop anti-obesity drugs, the study authors say.
The experiment was conducted by researchers at the University of California San Francisco. They were hoping to definitively answer one of the most important and basic questions about our physiology: What actually makes us want to stop eating?
It’s long been known that the brainstem—the bottom part of the brain that controls many subconscious body functions—also helps govern fullness. The current theory is that neurons in the brainstem respond to signals from the stomach and gut as we’re eating a meal, which then trigger that feeling of having had enough. But scientists have only been able to indirectly study this process until now, according to lead author Zachary Knight, a UCSF professor of physiology in the Kavli Institute for Fundamental Neuroscience. His team was able to directly image and record the fullness-related neurons in the brainstem of alert mice right as they were chowing down.
“Our study is the first to observe these neurons while an animal eats,” Knight told Gizmodo in an email. “We found surprisingly that many of these cells respond to different signals and control feeding in different ways than was widely assumed.”
The team focused on two types of neurons in the brainstem thought to regulate fullness: prolactin-releasing hormone (PRLH) neurons and GCG neurons.
When they fed mice through the stomach alone, they found that PRLH neurons were activated by the gut, as expected by prior assumptions. But when the mice ate normally, these gut signals disappeared; instead, the PRLH neurons were almost instantly activated by signals from the mouth, largely from the parts responsible for taste perception. Minutes later, the GCG neurons were activated by gut signals.
The team’s findings, published Wednesday in Nature, indicate that there are two parallel tracks of satiety in the brainstem, ones that operate at different speeds with slightly different purposes.
“We found that the first pathway—which controls how fast you eat and involves PRLH neurons—is unexpectedly activated by the taste of food,” Knight said. “This was surprising, because we all know that tasty food causes us to eat more. But our findings reveal that food tastes also function to limit the pace of ingestion, through a brainstem pathway that likely functions beneath the level of our conscious awareness.”
The second pathway, governed by the gut and GCG neurons, seems to control how much we ultimately eat, Knight added.
Mice are not humans, of course. So more research will be needed to confirm whether we have a similar system.
Dirty air killed more than half a million people in the EU in 2021, estimates show, and about half of the deaths could have been avoided by cutting pollution to the limits recommended by doctors.
The researchers from the European Environment Agency attributed 253,000 early deaths to concentrations of fine particulates known as PM2.5 that breached the World Health Organization’s maximum guideline limits of 5µg/m3. A further 52,000 deaths came from excessive levels of nitrogen dioxide and 22,000 deaths from short-term exposure to excessive levels of ozone.
“The figures released today by the EEA remind us that air pollution is still the number one environmental health problem in the EU,” said Virginijus Sinkevičius, the EU’s environment commissioner.
Doctors say air pollution is one of the biggest killers in the world but death tolls will drop quickly if countries clean up their economies. Between 2005 and 2021, the number of deaths from PM2.5 in the EU fell 41%, and the EU aims to reach 55% by the end of the decade.
Ubisoft is blaming a “technical error” for a fullscreen pop-up ad that appeared in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey this week. Reddit users say they spotted the pop-up on Xbox and PlayStation versions of the game, with an ad appearing just when you navigate to the map screen. “This is disgusting to experience while playing,” remarked one Reddit user, summarizing the general feeling against such pop-ups in the middle of gameplay.
“We have been made aware that some players encountered pop-up ads while playing certain Assassin’s Creed titles yesterday,” says Ubisoft spokesperson Fabien Darrigues, in a statement to The Verge. “This was the result of a technical error that we addressed as soon as we learned of the issue.”
The pop-up ad appeared during the middle of gameplay.Image: triddell24 (Reddit)
While it was unclear at first why the game suddenly started showing Black Friday pop-up ads to promote Ubisoft’s latest versions of Assassin’s Creed, the publisher later explained what went wrong in a post on X (formerly Twitter). Ubisoft says it was trying to put an ad for Assassin’s Creed Mirage in the main menu of other Assassin’s Creed games. However, a “technical error” caused the promotion to show up on in-game menus instead. Ubisoft says the issue has since been fixed.
We recently saw Microsoft use fullscreen Xbox pop-up ads to promote its own games, and they’ve been annoying Xbox owners. Microsoft’s ads only appear when you boot an Xbox, and not everyone seems to be getting them. Microsoft and Ubisoft’s pop-ups are still very different to the ads we’re used to seeing on game consoles. We’ve seen games like Saints Row 2 with ads running on billboards, or plenty of in-game ads in EA Games titles in the mid-to-late 2000s.
Fullscreen pop-up ads in the middle of a game certainly aren’t common. Imagine a world full of games you’ve paid $70 for and then ads popping up in the middle of gameplay. I truly hope that Ubisoft’s “technical error” never becomes a game industry reality.
In a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of researchers led by Dion Häfner, a computer scientist at the University of Copenhagen, describe a clever way to make AI more understandable. They have managed to build a neural network, use it to solve a tricky problem, and then capture its insights in a relatively simple five-part equation that human scientists can use and understand.
The researchers were investigating “rogue waves”, those that are much bigger than expected given the sea conditions in which they form. Maritime lore is full of walls of water suddenly swallowing ships. But it took until 1995 for scientists to measure such a wave—a 26-metre monster, amid other waves averaging 12 metres—off the coast of Norway, proving these tales to be tall only in the literal sense.
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To produce something a human could follow, the researchers restricted their neural network to around a dozen inputs, each based on ocean-wave maths that scientists had already worked out. Knowing the physical meaning of each input meant the researchers could trace their paths through the network, helping them work out what the computer was up to.
The researchers trained 24 neural networks, each combining the inputs in different ways. They then chose the one that was the most consistent at making accurate predictions in a variety of circumstances, which turned out to rely on only five of the dozen inputs.
To generate a human-comprehensible equation, the researchers used a method inspired by natural selection in biology. They told a separate algorithm to come up with a slew of different equations using those five variables, with the aim of matching the neural network’s output as closely as possible. The best equations were mixed and combined, and the process was repeated. The result, eventually, was an equation that was simple and almost as accurate as the neural network. Both predicted rogue waves better than existing models.
The first part of the equation rediscovered a bit of existing theory: it is an approximation of a well-known equation in wave dynamics. Other parts included some terms that the researchers suspected might be involved in rogue-wave formation but are not in standard models. There were some puzzlers, too: the final bit of the equation includes a term that is inversely proportional to how spread out the energy of the waves is. Current human theories include a second variable that the machine did not replicate. One explanation is that the network was not trained on a wide enough selection of examples. Another is that the machine is right, and the second variable is not actually necessary.
Better methods for predicting rogue waves are certainly useful: some can sink even the biggest ships. But the real prize is the visibility that Dr Häfner’s approach offers into what the neural network was doing. That could give scientists ideas for tweaking their own theories—and should make it easier to know whether to trust the computer’s predictions.
