“Widely used Daemon Tools disc app backdoored in monthlong supply-chain attack.”
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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.com).
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Today
Daemon Tools, a widely used app for mounting disk images, has been backdoored in a monthlong compromise that has pushed malicious updates from the servers of its developer, researchers said Tuesday. Kaspersky, the security firm reporting the supply-chain attack, said it began on April 8 and remained active as of the time its post went live. Installers that are signed by the developer’s official d
In a brief appearance at a Make America Healthy Again Institute event Monday, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced new federal initiatives to curb prescribing of antidepressants, which he has long attacked with false and dangerous claims. Mental health experts have previously condemned his rhetoric and are already pushing back on his new efforts. The MAHA event was focuse
Google launched its big AI-fueled redesign of Google Home late last year, and it has been adding features here and there ever since. Today, the company announced a bigger update that might take care of some of your smart home woes. Camera feeds will be easier to navigate, and the AI event labeling should be more straightforward. The move to Gemini 3.1 for Home voice assistance should also mean th
The Trump administration is letting Elon Musk pay a $1.5 million fine to settle a lawsuit that originally sought at least $150 million. If approved by a federal court, the proposed settlement submitted yesterday would require a trust in Musk’s name to pay a $1.5 million civil penalty to the government. The January 2025 lawsuit , filed in the last days of the Biden administration, relates to how M
LONG BEACH, Calif.—2026 is a strange time for electric vehicles in the US. The current administration has no desire to push for their adoption and has rescinded the federal tax credit on which EV sales have depended for years. Tariffs have made vehicles and their constituent components even more expensive , making switching to an EV for the first time an even harder pill to swallow. Manufacturers
Over the last year, Christopher Nolan and Universal Pictures have been trickling out sneak peeks and teasers for Nolan’s forthcoming film version of The Odyssey , adapting Homer’s classic poem. The studio recently dropped a new two-and-a-half-minute trailer stuffed with the glorious visuals, high emotions, and soaring music befitting such an epic saga. As previously reported , most of us read som
Following last year’s Tesla shareholder vote, CEO Elon Musk’s near-incomprehensible wealth is now inextricably linked in part to the number of active “FSD” subscriptions his electric car company can sign up. And last month, the Dutch vehicle regulator RDW made that a little easier by approving FSD for use on its roads. Now, the RDW will ask the rest of the European Union to follow suit, opening u
The Department of Homeland Security tried to obtain a Canadian man’s location information, activity logs, and other identifying information from Google after he criticized the Trump administration online following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis early this year. Lawyers for the man, who has not been named, are alarmed in part because they sa
I’ve recently developed a daily habit—perhaps one I should cut back on—of visiting several subreddits to keep up on things like audio production and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But I was surprised this weekend to suddenly find myself cut off; Reddit simply would not let me visit the site on my mobile phone. Instead, a new overlay popped up, saying, “Get the app to keep using Reddit.” There w
Yesterday
As its name implies, the venerable Notepad++ text editor began as a more capable version of the classic Windows Notepad, with features such as line numbering and syntax highlighting. It was created in 2003 by Don Ho, who continues to be its primary author and maintainer, and it has been a Windows-exclusive app throughout its existence (older Notepad++ versions support OSes as old as Windows 95; t
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In a world awash in high-tech security tools like passkeys, quantum-safe algorithms, and public-key cryptography, it can be refreshing to get back to the simple things… like a good old-fashioned canary trap. The canary trap is a simple tool often used to identify leakers or double agents. To make one, you simply share a document, image, or database but make tiny changes that are unique to each
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A study that claimed OpenAI’s ChatGPT can positively impact student learning has been retracted nearly one year after publication. The journal publisher, Springer Nature, cited “discrepancies” in the analysis and a lack of confidence in the conclusions—but not before the paper racked up hundreds of citations and made the rounds on social media. “The paper’s authors made some very attention-grabbi
GameStop yesterday made an unsolicited offer to buy eBay for $55.5 billion. GameStop claims that eBay has underperformed and spends too much on sales and marketing and argues that it would become a stronger company if it cuts costs and is combined with GameStop’s physical retail locations. “GameStop’s ~1,600 US locations give eBay a national network for authentication, intake, fulfillment, and li
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After an unanticipated five-week break in the season, Formula One resumed action this past weekend in Miami. Held at a temporary circuit around Hard Rock Stadium, the event is emblematic of the Liberty era of F1: a turbocharged marketing extravaganza crammed full of hospitality suites with ticket prices as high as $95,000 . It might be miles from the sea—the original plans to race across a bridge
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Last year, we noted how the long-standing vagaries of HDMI licensing and open source AMD driver development combined to prevent the upcoming Steam Machine from receiving official support for the HDMI 2.1 display standard . Now, though, it seems that AMD is making real progress on adding full HDMI 2.1 compliance to its Linux amdgpu driver in the near future. In patch series notes for an amdgpu dri
Just days before the trial started, Elon Musk tried to settle his lawsuit, which alleges that under Sam Altman’s direction, OpenAI abandoned its mission to serve as a nonprofit making AI to benefit humanity. According to a Sunday court filing from OpenAI, Musk messaged OpenAI President Greg Brockman two days ahead of the trial to “gauge interest” in a possible settlement. Brockman promptly respon
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The Trump administration has brought US onshore wind development to a halt citing national security concerns, representing a major escalation in the president’s crusade against renewable energy. Approvals for about 165 onshore wind projects on private lands are being stalled by the Department of Defense, including wind farms that were awaiting final sign-off, others in the middle of negotiations,
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Violin makers, aka luthiers, traditionally learn from hands-on experience how to craft parts and select materials to shape an instrument’s final sound. MIT engineers hope to streamline that painstaking process with their new virtual violin. It’s a computer simulation tool that can capture the precise physics of the instrument and even reproduce a realistic sound of a plucked string, according to
Toyota provided flights from Albany, New York, to Tokyo and accommodation so Ars could visit Woven City. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. At the Consumer Electronics Show in 2020, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda pledged to build a city of the future, a place where researchers, engineers, and scientists could live and work together. It was framed as the start of a transformation for the world’s
May 2, 2026
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It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. April’s list includes tracking Roman ship repairs, the discovery that mushrooms can detect human urine, crushing soda cans for science, and the physics of why dolphins can swim
In a makeshift demonstration kitchen in Concord, California, cooking oil splatters in and around a frying pan, which catches fire on an unattended gas stove. Within moments, a smoke detector wails. But in this demonstration, something less common happens: An AI-driven sensor activates and wall emitters blast infrasound waves toward the source of the fire in an attempt to put it out. The science o
May 1, 2026
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In human-to-human communication, the desire to be empathetic or polite often conflicts with the need to be truthful—hence terms like “being brutally honest” for situations where you value the truth over sparing someone’s feelings. Now, new research suggests that large language models can sometimes show a similar tendency when specifically trained to present a “warmer” tone for the user. In a new
Valve and its SteamOS operating system have already done what a bunch of companies (including Apple) have been trying to do for decades: make a dent in Windows’ dominance in PC gaming. I mean, sure, according to Valve’s own statistics, Microsoft remains dominant. Over 92 percent of PCs in the Steam Hardware Survey run some version of Windows. But five years ago, this number was just over 96 perce
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Over the course of six months, black lesions and deep ulcers formed over the body of a 78-year-old man, puzzling doctors. His face was covered in dark scabs. A lesion had destroyed his left eyelid, and one had created a hole between the roof of his mouth and his nasal cavity. It wasn’t until he was transferred to a Yale School of Medicine hospital for higher-level care that doctors finally identi
Servers operated by Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical were knocked offline on Thursday morning and have remained down ever since, a situation that’s preventing the OS provider from communicating normally following the botched disclosure of a major vulnerability. Attempts to connect to most Ubuntu and Canonical webpages and download OS updates from Ubuntu servers have consistently failed ove
US senators voted unanimously to ban themselves from making bets on prediction markets yesterday, about a week after Kalshi said it caught three congressional candidates betting on their own campaigns. The resolution to prohibit senators from trading on prediction markets passed yesterday by unanimous consent. The action amends the Senate’s conflict-of-interest rules and does not require approval
This week, Minnesota became the first state to pass a law banning nudification apps that make it easy to “undress” or sexualize images of real people. Under the law , developers of websites, apps, software, or other services designed to “nudify” images risk extensive damages, including punitive damages, if a victim decides to sue. Their offending products could also be blocked in the state. Addit
Amazon’s cloud customers will need to wait several more months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—meaning that full recovery from the cloud disruption could take nearly half a year in
Scorpions are armed with dual front pincers (technically known as chelae or pedipalp appendages) and a venom-injecting telson, or stinger, on the posterior of their tail. These things look dangerous enough on their own, but a chemical examination showed they contain metals like zinc, manganese, and iron. “That the metals are there has been known since the 1990s,” said Sam Campbell, a biologist at
Last month, Anthropic made a big deal about the supposedly outsize cybersecurity threat represented by its Mythos Preview model, leading the company to restrict the initial release to “critical industry partners.” But new research from the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) suggests that OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, which launched publicly last week , reached “a similar level of performance on our cyber eval
Did you know that SUVs now account for 6 in 10 new vehicles sold in Europe? That’s even higher than in the US or China, where market share for lifted hatchbacks currently runs at about 40 percent. So the fact that Ferrari decided to enter the segment with the Purosangue in 2023 should be seen clearly in that context. Anyway, Four-seat Ferraris aren’t entirely unheard of: I remain a big fan of the
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On Thursday, the publicly traded spaceflight company Virgin Galactic shared on social media a new photo of its next-generation spaceship being towed outside of its factory in Mesa, Arizona. You remember Virgin Galactic, right? The space tourism company was founded 22 years ago by Sir Richard Branson to bring spaceflight to the masses. Hundreds of people began buying tickets to space nearly two de
Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops have been increasingly difficult to buy over the course of the year—multiple configurations are listed on Apple’s site as “currently unavailable,” which almost never happens, and others will take weeks or months to ship if you order them today. A top-end version of the Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM was delisted from Apple’s store entirely . Now, the $599 en
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A little over a year ago, MG was leading the relatively normal life of a twentysomething in Scottsdale, Arizona. She worked as a personal assistant and supplemented her income by waiting tables on the weekends. Like most women her age, she had an Instagram account, where she’d occasionally post Stories and photos of herself getting matcha and hanging out by the pool with her friends, or going to
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Welcome to Edition 8.39 of the Rocket Report! There’s a lot of news to share in the universe of powerful rockets this week, and we’re delighted to sum it up in this week’s edition. The biggest rocket of them all, Starship, had a relatively quiet week as SpaceX aims to launch the vehicle’s next test flight, perhaps sometime in May. The results of that flight and the outcome of Blue Origin’s first
The Beijing Auto Show is currently taking place in China, offering those of us behind the Trump tariff curtain a peek at what’s increasingly being dubbed the world’s most advanced car market. Chinese EVs leave everyone else in the dust, we’re told, with