Brian Barrett

Halloween might be the furthest thing on people's minds in the dog days of August, but a new first look teaser for Netflix's new anthology series, Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities—plus the release of several simultaneously gorgeous and horrific images—are putting us in a much more frisson-seeking frame of mind. Nobody does horror quite like del Toro and this anthology very much looks worthy of his reputation.

The series was first announced in 2018 and features eight episodes written and directed by filmmakers handpicked by del Toro. "In this anthology we gave ownership of each episode to the directors," he says in the first look teaser. "Each of the episodes has a whole world. They present you with different delights. Some are savory, some are sweet. You get a surprise from each of the bites."

The list of directors includes Jennifer Kent, who directed 2014's phenomenal The Babadook; her episode, "The Murmuring," is based on an original story by del Toro and features Babadook star, Essie Davis (aka Miss Fisher). "Dreams in the Witch House," based on an H.P. Lovecraft short story, is directed by Catherine Hardwicke (Lords of Dogtown, Twilight).

Enlarge / Former president Donald Trump, right, listens to Deborah Birx, former coronavirus response coordinator, as she speaks during a news conference in the White House in Washington, DC, on Thursday, April 23, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

This December, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will finally regain control of national COVID-19 hospital data—which the agency abruptly lost early in the pandemic to an inexperienced private company with ties to then-President Donald Trump.

As SARS-CoV-2 raged in the summer of 2020, the Trump administration was busy sabotaging the once-premier public health agency. The administration's meddling included stripping the CDC of its power to collect critical data on COVID-19 patients and pandemic resources in hospitals around the country.

According to multiple investigative reports at the time, then-White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Deborah Birx was frustrated by the CDC's slow and somewhat messy process of collecting and tidying the data submitted by thousands of hospitals. The data included stats on admissions, patient demographics, bed availability, ventilator use, discharges, and personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies.

Enlarge (credit: INDRANIL MUKHERJEE / Contributor | AFP via Getty Images)

To help combat caste-based discrimination, the Indian government saves spots at the best Indian universities for lower-caste students, who often take that opportunity and turn it into a tech job in Silicon Valley. In the US, discrimination laws don’t specifically protect citizens based on caste, though that is changing. Reuters reports that, out of all the Big Tech companies relying on India’s skilled workers, Apple has been most explicit about preventing discrimination by caste among its US employees.

Reported this week for the first time publicly, Apple updated its employee conduct policy in 2020 to “explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of caste,” the same way it prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age, and ancestry.

The decision came after “the first US employment lawsuit about alleged casteism” was filed in June 2020 by a California employment regulator defending a low-caste engineer working at Cisco Systems. The engineer alleged that two of his Cisco bosses were higher-caste and impeded his advancement opportunities at the tech company.

Enlarge / Signal's security-minded messaging app is dealing with a third-party phishing attempt that exposed a small number of users' phone numbers. (credit: Getty Images)

A successful phishing attack at SMS services company Twilio may have exposed the phone numbers of roughly 1,900 users of the secure messaging app Signal—but that's about the extent of the breach, says Signal, noting that no further user data could be accessed.

In a Twitter thread and support document, Signal states that a recent successful (and deeply resourced) phishing attack on Twilio allowed access to the phone numbers linked with 1,900 users. That's "a very small percentage of Signal's total users," Signal writes, and all 1,900 affected users will be notified (via SMS) to re-register their devices. Signal, like many app companies, uses Twilio to send SMS verification codes to users registering their Signal app.

With momentary access to Twilio's customer support console, attackers could have potentially used the verification codes sent by Twilio to activate Signal on another device and thereby send or receive new Signal messages. Or an attacker could confirm that these 1,900 phone numbers were actually registered to Signal devices.

Enlarge / Researchers manipulated light with liquid crystals to create a sculpted laser beam capable of producing this photorealistic image of a cat. (credit: P.F. Silva & S.R. Muniz, 2022)

Every cat owner knows how their feline companions delight in chasing a tiny pinpoint of light from a simple laser pointer. Now, Brazilian physicists have figured out how to trap and bend laser light into intricate shapes, producing the impressive photorealistic image of a cat pictured above. Among other potential applications, their method—described in a recent paper posted to the physics arXiv—could prove useful for building better optical traps to create clouds of ultra-cold atoms for a variety of quantum experiments.

The ability to produce and precisely control the shape of laser beams with high fidelity is vital for many segments of research and industry, according to co-authors Pedro Silva and Sergio Muniz of the University of Sao Paolo. They group most wavefront engineering approaches into two basic categories.

The first includes such approaches as digital micro mirrors (DMDs) and acoustic optical modulators (AOMs), which are easy to implement and boast a fast response for near real-time feedback control. But they have a limited ability to control the phase of the light field and can't create certain kinds of structured light. They are also prone to speckle, diffraction, or other distortions.

Enlarge / Apple's HQ, as seen in Apple Maps. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple is looking into significantly ramping up its ads business, according to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, and has already internally explored adding ads to the iPhone's Maps app, with other potential expansions also on the horizon.

The shift may be driven in part by a recent change within the company's reporting structure: Gurman wrote in his email newsletter this week that Apple advertising VP Todd Teresi began reporting directly to Apple services head Eddie Cue a few months back. He also wrote that Teresi plans to increase Apple's advertising revenue from $4 billion annually to billions in the double digits.

As Gurman notes, advertising is already a part of Apple's strategy, but it's limited in scope and to certain places. The most traditional advertisements you'll see in an Apple-made app are the ones in the Stocks and News apps. There, you'll see display ads just like those you see on news websites—both outside of stories and inside of them.

Enlarge (credit: spukkato | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

In 2018, Google was first confronted by media reports investigating why crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs)—often religious, non-medical organizations that do not provide abortion services or referrals for abortion services—frequently dominate Google Maps search results for “abortion clinics.” Now, four years later, the tech company seems to be making some moves to potentially change the quality of these sorts of search results.

In response to a Bloomberg report that “Google Maps routinely misleads people looking for abortion providers,” Google says it is “actively” seeking to improve the relevancy of search results of categories of businesses like “abortion clinics.” It seems that currently, search results based on business categories aren’t as relevant as the similar business results displayed following searches for specific business names.

The question being aimed at Google is whether its ongoing practice of displaying CPCs in results for abortion clinics qualifies as spreading health misinformation. Women claiming they were misled by Google Maps say the CPCs they visited went to extremes to dissuade them from seeking an abortion. That included relaying “misinformation about the abortion procedure, including risk to life, risk of breast cancer, risk to mental health, risk to future fertility, and fetal pain.”

Enlarge / Team Fortress 2 is one of several still-popular games that use the DirectX9 API instead of a more modern version. (credit: Valve)

Intel's graphics marketing team is currently in the middle of an expectations-setting PR blitz around its upcoming Arc GPUs. Partly because of immature drivers, the new graphics cards generally perform much better in newer games using the DirectX12 and Vulkan APIs than they do in older DirectX and OpenGL games. The problem for Intel is that not all games use the latest APIs, especially competitive multiplayer titles that have been around for a while.

For older games using the DirectX9 API, the company has come up with a unique solution. Tom's Hardware reports that Intel's latest GPUs will no longer support DirectX9 natively, instead relying on a Microsoft-provided software translation layer called D3D9On12 to convert Direct3D9 API calls into Direct3D12 ones (Direct3D is the name for the 3D graphics-related parts of DirectX).

Intel's support page, dated August 10, says that D3D9On12 will be used on all Arc GPUs and the integrated GPUs in 12th-generation Core processors. Despite being nearly identical to their 12th-gen counterparts, the integrated GPUs in 11th-generation CPUs will continue to support DirectX9 natively unless they're in a PC with an Arc GPU present.

Enlarge / NASA's Space Launch System rocket, reflected in the turn basin at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, rolls out for a fourth attempt at a wet dress rehearsal on June 6, 2022. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

It's actually happening. NASA is finally set to launch its massive Space Launch System rocket, and barring catastrophe, the Orion spacecraft is going to fly to the Moon and back.

The space agency's final pre-launch preparations for this Artemis I mission are going so well, in fact, that NASA now plans to roll the rocket to Launch Pad 39B as soon as Tuesday, August 16, at 9 pm ET (01:00 UTC Wednesday). This is two days ahead of the previously announced rollout schedule.

This earlier date for the rocket's rollout follows completion of a flight termination system test over the weekend. This was the final major test of the launch system and spacecraft prior to rollout and marks the completion of all major pre-launch activities. NASA continues to target three dates to attempt the Artemis I launch: August 29, September 2, and September 5.

Enlarge / The two reactors of the Diablo Canyon facility. (credit: Tracey Adams)

On Friday, California Governor Gavin Newsom sent a series of aggressive climate proposals to the state legislature. And, in a separate but related move, his administration is circulating potential legislation that would allow the state's last nuclear power plant to continue operating past its planned shutdown in 2025. The proposed legislation is remarkably complicated despite its seemingly simple goal and is already facing a backlash from environmental groups, yet it has to be passed by the end of the month when the current legislative session expires.

California already has one of the most ambitious sets of climate goals among the US states. But Newsom's plan would accelerate the targets already in place. It would set 2045 as the latest date by which the state would reach net carbon neutrality and make that target legally binding. To make that easier, it would boost the 2030 greenhouse gas emissions cuts from 45 percent to 55 percent relative to the 1990 baseline.

As part of that, California will rapidly cut carbon emissions from electrical generation, with 90 percent clean energy in 2035, and 95 percent in 2040. Concurrently, it will put more areas in the state off-limits to oil extraction and start supporting carbon capture and sequestration.

Enlarge / A Lola Mk1 in the foreground and a Lola B12/60 from 2012 in the background. (credit: Lola Cars)

When I first heard of the plan to revive Lola Cars, I had some trepidation. In these days of SPAC-powered exuberance and blockchain hype, it would be pretty easy for a company to take the cynical approach: Design (if not necessarily ever build) a ludicrously expensive electric hypercar and maybe some NFTs and wait for the hype to roll in. Thankfully, those ideas couldn't be further from the new owner's plans.

"Simply put, our plan is to bring Lola back to a former version of itself. To me, that means being a design and engineering force in modern motorsport," explained Till Bechtolsheimer, an investor and amateur racing driver who bought the company's assets in June.

Older racing fans will know the Lola name. The company was founded in the UK in 1958 by Eric Broadley, and by 1962, it had entered Formula 1 as a constructor, though never with much success. A pair of second-place finishes for John Surtees that year were the best results Lola-built F1 cars could muster, and the company's planned return to the sport in 1997 with the backing of MasterCard was a complete fiasco that ended when neither of the company's cars qualified for that year's opening race in Australia.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Google has begun its rollout of Android 13, the company announced today. The update is now shipping to Pixel phones, and Google is also releasing Android 13 to its Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

According to Google's blog post, Android 13 will come to Android devices from Samsung's Galaxy line and to devices from Asus, Nokia (via HMD), iQOO, Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Sharp, Sony, Tecno, Vivo, Xiaomi, and others "later this year."

Android 13 doesn't come with many groundbreaking features, but it includes enhancements to customization options, audio, and security. Google is also expanding the Material You UI it introduced with Android 12 so that even non-Google apps can coordinate with the colors of your wallpaper and theme.

Enlarge / A critical vulnerability in Zoom for Mac OS allowed unauthorized users to downgrade Zoom or even gain root access. It has been fixed, and users should update now. (credit: Getty Images)

If you're using Zoom on a Mac, it's time for a manual update. The video conferencing software's latest update fixes an auto-update vulnerability that could have allowed malicious programs to use its elevated installing powers, granting escalated privileges and control of the system.

The vulnerability was first discovered by Patrick Wardle, founder of the Objective-See Foundation, a nonprofit Mac OS security group. Wardle detailed in a talk at Def Con last week how Zoom's installer asks for a user password when installing or uninstalling, but its auto-update function, enabled by default, doesn't need one. Wardle found that Zoom's updater is owned by and runs as the root user.

The gist of how Zoom's auto-update utility allows for privilege escalation exploits, from Patrick Wardle's Def Con talk.

It seemed secure, as only Zoom clients could connect to the privileged daemon, and only packages signed by Zoom could be extracted. The problem is that by simply passing the verification checker the name of the package it was looking for ("Zoom Video ... Certification Authority Apple Root CA.pkg"), this check could be bypassed. That meant malicious actors could force Zoom to downgrade to a buggier, less-secure version or even pass it an entirely different package that could give them root access to the system.

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  NFL Blitz returns in three-quarters scale. [credit: Arcade1Up ]

The good news is that NFL Blitz's golden era of arcade games is coming back. The bad news is how limited this collection of beloved games will be.

Games from the earliest Blitz era, which ended with NFL Blitz 2000: Gold Edition, will soon be available to buy and play in your home once more—for the steep price of $599.99 as part of a three-game collection on an Arcade1Up three-fourths scale arcade cabinet. The collection, dubbed NFL Blitz Legends, is available for preorder (Arcade1Up, Best Buy) as of Monday, August 15, and is scheduled to ship to customers in October.

Sadly, these games have been edited in the years since their late-'90s heyday, and the changes may well be dealbreakers for those who grew up loving the original series' over-the-top, WWE-like mayhem in arcades and early 3D consoles like the N64 and Dreamcast. Arcade1Up has confirmed that this NFL game will no longer feature "a specific set of tackles," with roughly 15 percent of football player collisions edited out. Additionally, all after-the-whistle hits have been disabled. Smaller apparent changes thus far include new textures drawn on the field and sidelines to insert Arcade1Up's logo into the action.

Enlarge / Stacey Morgan and her four children watch Drew Morgan launch in July 2019. (credit: Stacey Morgan)

One of the very first things that a new NASA astronaut learns is that there is no "I" in team. As part of their nearly two years of training before becoming eligible for flight assignments, prospective astronauts are told not to use the space agency, or their spaceflight status, for self-promotion.

The mission comes first, and while astronauts may be the most visible part of the NASA team, they are there to represent the agency and not themselves. Some recent astronauts who used their spaceflights to successfully boost their public profiles—such a Chris Hadfield and Scott Kelly—did so knowing they never intended to fly again. That's not to say that Hadfield and Kelly were not great astronauts, nor team players. It's just that astronauts who want to earn future flight assignments don't call attention to themselves.

This ironclad rule makes the recent publication of a book by Stacey Morgan, The Astronaut's Wife, notable. In the book Morgan tells the story of her relationship with her husband, Drew Morgan, whom she met at West Point when they were both undergraduates. The narrative includes stories about their four children, life lessons, and Scripture references; but the centerpiece of the book concerns Morgan's spaceflight from July 2019 to April 2020.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

I am not a data scientist. And while I know my way around a Jupyter notebook and have written a good amount of Python code, I do not profess to be anything close to a machine learning expert. So when I performed the first part of our no-code/low-code machine learning experiment and got better than a 90 percent accuracy rate on a model, I suspected I had done something wrong.

If you haven't been following along thus far, here's a quick review before I direct you back to the first two articles in this series. To see how much machine learning tools for the rest of us had advanced—and to redeem myself for the unwinnable task I had been assigned with machine learning last year—I took a well-worn heart attack data set from an archive at the University of California-Irvine and tried to outperform data science students' results using the "easy button" of Amazon Web Services' low-code and no-code tools.

The whole point of this experiment was to see:

Enlarge (credit: HUM Images | Getty)

Farmers around the world have turned to tractor hacking so they can bypass the digital locks that manufacturers impose on their vehicles. Like insulin pump “looping” and iPhone jailbreaking, this allows farmers to modify and repair the expensive equipment that’s vital to their work, the way they could with analog tractors. At the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas on Saturday, the hacker known as Sick Codes is presenting a new jailbreak for John Deere & Co. tractors that allows him to take control of multiple models through their touchscreens.

The finding underscores the security implications of the right-to-repair movement. The tractor exploitation that Sick Codes uncovered isn't a remote attack, but the vulnerabilities involved represent fundamental insecurities in the devices that could be exploited by malicious actors or potentially chained with other vulnerabilities. Securing the agriculture industry and food supply chain is crucial, as incidents like the 2021 JBS Meat ransomware attack have shown. At the same time, though, vulnerabilities like the ones that Sick Codes found help farmers do what they need to do with their own equipment.

John Deere did not respond to WIRED's request for comment about the research.

Enlarge (credit: KATERYNA KON)

Vertebrates such as ourselves rely on a complicated, multi-layer immune system to limit the impact of pathogens. Specialized B and T cells play a central role by recognizing specific pathogens and providing a memory of past infections.

Obviously, single-celled organisms like bacteria and archaea can't take the same approach. But that doesn't mean they're defenseless. They also have an adaptive defense system that maintains a memory of past infections (and happens to make a great gene editing tool). Now, researchers have found that a family of related proteins is used to fight viruses in organisms ranging from bacteria to humans. While the effects it triggers vary among organisms, it appears to be capable of recognizing a wide range of viruses.

Mammals have a family of immune proteins called STAND (for reasons that are unimportant) that are part of what calls the innate immune system. This arm of our immune system doesn't recognize specific pathogens; instead, it recognizes general features of infection, such as molecules that are found on the surface of most bacteria.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It's the weekend, which means it's time for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a nice discount on Apple's entry-level MacBook Air, which is currently down to $850 at Best Buy. That's about $150 off Apple's MSRP and tied for the lowest price we've seen from a major retailer since the laptop briefly dropped to $800 last December.

Note that this deal applies to the MacBook Air model that launched in 2020, not the variant that arrived earlier this year with a refreshed design and a faster M2 system-on-a-chip. If money is no object, we now recommend the latter as the best Apple laptop for most people. That said, the M1-based Air is still a fine alternative for those who need a Mac but can't afford the $1,199 starting price of the M2 model. For the money, it's still plenty performant, with excellent battery life, a sturdy yet lightweight design, and a comfortable keyboard and trackpad. Just be aware that the 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD in this entry-level configuration is only really suitable for more casual needs. There's still only two USB-C ports, too, and the built-in webcam remains mediocre. But for students or those who only need a laptop for lighter browsing, editing, and everyday work, there's still value to be had at this deal price.

Besides MacBooks, our roundup also includes a notable Humble game bundle that packages 10 Resident Evil games—as well as a 50 percent off coupon for the newest entry in the series, Resident Evil Village—for $30. Not every RE game is a winner: RE4, RE7, 2019's RE2 remake, and 2002's remake of the original RE are excellent, but we were just lukewarm on Village, and the action-heavy excursions of RE5 and RE6 are, let's say, a more acquired taste. Still, this is a great price for the majority of gaming's most popular survival-horror franchise. If you already own some of these games, you can pay $1 or $10 to get a smaller selection of titles. And as with most Humble bundles, a portion of any purchases here will help support a charity. In this case, Humble says they'll partially go toward Direct Relief and their efforts to provide humanitarian aid to the people of Ukraine affected by the ongoing invasion by Russia.

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If the spectacular images from the NASA James Webb Space Telescope have you hankering to learn more about what’s Out There—or at least to see more pretty pictures of it—The Short Story of the Universe arrives just in time to sate your craving.

Like all of the books in the Short Story of... series, Gemma Lavender's The Short Story of the Universe (Amazon, Bookshop) is organized into four cross-referenced sections. First is Structure, which begins with the Universe and ends with subatomic particles. Next is History and Future. It begins “Before the Beginning” (the "beginning" being the Big Bang, T=0, 13.8 billion years ago) and ends with “The Fate of the Universe” at T > 10100 years.

The shape of that future depends on how dark energy behaves. If dark energy weakens over time, “it may cause gravity to lead the Universe slowly to contract back on itself in a Big Crunch.” Alternatively, if dark energy strengthens or even stays the same over time, the Universe will just keep on expanding forever until either all matter entropically decays into radiation or the fabric of space-time gets torn in a Big Rip. We don’t know which path dark energy will take because we don’t yet know what dark energy is.