Latest news with #Ars
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Australian Rocket Launch Thwarted by Premature Payload Ejection
Sometimes you try to get to outer space — but then the top of your rocket falls off. It happens. No, really: on Thursday, Australian startup Gilmour Space was forced to call off the maiden launch of its Eris rocket when, just hours before it was supposed to lift off, the nose cone that protects its payload unexpectedly deployed and toppled to the ground, Ars Technica reports. (There aren't photos of the disastrous scene, unfortunately.) "During final launch preparations last night, an electrical fault triggered the system that opens the rocket's nose cone," Gilmour posted on LinkedIn, as quoted by Ars. "This happened before any fuel was loaded into the vehicle. Most importantly, no one was injured, and early checks show no damage to the rocket or the launch pad." Standing around 82 feet tall, Eris is a modestly sized, three-stage rocket designed to carry small satellites to space, with a maximum payload capacity of around 1,100 pounds. It was set to lift off from a private spaceport in Queensland early Friday morning, local time. It was a highly unfortunate setback for the startup. Had the launch been successful, the feat would've marked the first all-Australian rocket to ever reach orbit. A rocket's nose cone, specifically a payload fairing, is designed to protect the top of the vehicle where its payload is stored as it barrels through the Earth's atmosphere. Once the rocket reaches space, the fairing, if it follows a conventional clamshell design, splits into two halves before getting jettisoned. Payload fairing failures aren't very common, and when they happen, it's usually because the nose cones don't separate properly. One of the most infamous examples occurred during NASA's Gemini 9 mission in 1966, when astronauts were attempting to dock the spacecraft with a practice target. As it approached, one half of the clamshell fairing got stuck partially open, resembling, as one astronaut remarked, the gaping maw of an "Angry Alligator." For a nose cone to screw-up because it was deployed before even leaving the launchpad is pretty bizarre. Thankfully, Gilmour told Ars in a statement that it has a replacement ready at its factory in Gold Coast. But it's waiting for a "full investigation" into the incident to conclude before sending it over and installing it on the rocket, which appears to be undamaged. "While we're disappointed by the delay, our team is already working on a solution and we expect to be back at the pad soon," Gilmour told Ars. No official timeline has been given on how long that will take. More on spaceflight: NASA Spacecraft Runs Into Thruster Trouble En Route to Zillion-Dollar Asteroid
WIRED
22-04-2025
- WIRED
Teen Coder Shuts Down Free Mac App Whisky, Encourages Supporting the Paid Alternative
Kevin Purdy, Ars Technica The developer says his open source app could 'seriously threaten' the viability of CrossOver, the popular paid app. Both programs help macOS users get Windows games running on their Macs. Photo-Illustration:Whisky, a gaming-focused front-end for Wine's Windows compatibility tools on macOS, is no longer receiving updates. As one of the most useful and well-regarded tools in a Mac gamer's toolkit, it could be seen as a great loss, but its developer hopes you'll move on with what he considers a better option: supporting CodeWeavers' CrossOver product. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. Also, Whisky's creator is an 18-year-old college student, and he could use a break. "I am 18, yes, and attending Northeastern University, so it's always a balancing act between my school work and dev work," Isaac Marovitz wrote to Ars Technica. The Whisky project has "been more or less in this state for a few months, I posted the notice mostly to clarify and formally announce it," Marovitz says, having received "a lot of questions" about the project status. Contributing 'Practically Zero' Marovitz is no slacker, having previously worked on the Switch emulator Ryujinx, which shut down after an agreement with Nintendo, and other gaming projects, including PlayCover. So while a break is a good thing, there is another big reason: "Whisky, in my opinion, has not been a positive on the Wine community as a whole," Marovitz wrote on the Whisky site. He advised that Whisky users buy a CrossOver license, and noted that while CodeWeavers and Valve's work on Proton have had a big impact on the Wine project, 'the amount that Whisky as a whole contributes to Wine is practically zero.' Fixes for Wine running Mac games 'have to come from people who are not only incredibly knowledgeable on C, Wine, Windows, but also macOS,' Marovitz wrote, and 'the pool of developers with those skills is very limited.' While Marovitz tells Ars that he's had 'some contact with CodeWeavers' in making Whisky, 'they were always curious and never told me what I should or should not do.' It became clear to him, though, 'from what [CodeWeavers] could tell me as well as observing the attitude of the wider community that Whisky could seriously threaten CrossOver's viability.' The center of Whisky's homepage now carries a persistent notice that 'Whisky is no longer actively maintained. Apps and games may break at any time.' A Tipped-Cap Moment CodeWeavers' CEO wrote on the company's blog late last week about the Whisky shutdown, topped with an image of a glass of the spirit clinking against a glass of wine. 'Whisky may have been a CrossOver competitor, but that's not how we feel today,' wrote James B. Ramey. 'Our response is simply one of empathy, understanding, and acknowledgement for Isaac's situation.' Ramey noted that Whisky was a free packaging of an open source project, crafted by someone who, like CrossOver, did it as 'a labor of love built by people who care deeply about giving users more choices.' But Marovitz faced "an avalanche of user expectations," Ramey wrote, regarding game compatibility, performance, and features. 'The reality is that testing, support, and development take real resources … if CodeWeavers were not viable because of CrossOver not being sustainable, it would likely dampen the future development of WINE and Proton and support for macOS gaming,' Ramey wrote. 'We 'tip our cap' to Isaac and the impact he made to macOS gaming,' Ramey wrote, strangely choosing that colloquial salute instead of the more obvious beverage analogy for the two projects. Marovitz tells Ars that while user expectations were 'definitely an issue,' they were not the major reason for ceasing development. 'I've worked on other big projects before and during Whisky's development, so I'm not a stranger to tuning out the noise of constant user expectations.' Open source projects shutting down because of the tremendous pressure they put on their unpaid coders is a kind of 'dog bites man' story in the coding world. It's something else entirely when a prolific coder sees a larger ecosystem as not really benefiting from their otherwise very neat tool, and chooses deference. Still, during its run, the Whisky app drew attention to Mac gaming and the possibilities of Wine, and by extension Apple's own Game Porting Toolkit, itself based on CrossOver. And likely gave a few Mac owners some great times with games they couldn't get on their favorite platform. Marovitz, while stepping back, is not done with Mac gaming, however. 'Right now I'm working on the recompilation of Sonic Unleashed and bringing it fully to Mac, alongside other folks, but for the most part my goals and passions have remained the same,' Marovitz tells Ars. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
WIRED
14-04-2025
- WIRED
Microsoft's Recall AI Tool Is Making an Unwelcome Return
Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica Apr 14, 2025 4:35 PM Microsoft held off on releasing the privacy-unfriendly feature after a swell of pushback last year. Now it's trying again, with a few improvements that skeptics say still aren't enough. Photograph:Security and privacy advocates are girding themselves for another uphill battle against Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store everything a user does every three seconds. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. When Recall was introduced in May 2024, security practitioners roundly castigated it for creating a gold mine for malicious insiders, criminals, or nation-state spies if they managed to gain even brief administrative access to a Windows device. Privacy advocates warned that Recall was ripe for abuse in intimate partner violence settings. They also noted that there was nothing stopping Recall from preserving sensitive disappearing content sent through privacy-protecting messengers such as Signal. Total Recall Following months of backlash, Microsoft later suspended Recall. On Thursday, the company said it was reintroducing Recall. It currently is available only to insiders with access to the Windows 11 Build 26100.3902 preview version. Over time, the feature will be rolled out more broadly. Microsoft officials wrote: Recall (preview)* saves you time by offering an entirely new way to search for things you've seen or done on your PC securely. With the AI capabilities of Copilot+ PCs, it's now possible to quickly find and get back to any app, website, image, or document just by describing its content. To use Recall, you will need to opt-in to saving snapshots, which are images of your activity, and enroll in Windows Hello to confirm your presence so only you can access your snapshots. You are always in control of what snapshots are saved and can pause saving snapshots at any time. As you use your Copilot+ PC throughout the day working on documents or presentations, taking video calls, and context switching across activities, Recall will take regular snapshots and help you find things faster and easier. When you need to find or get back to something you've done previously, open Recall and authenticate with Windows Hello. When you've found what you were looking for, you can reopen the application, website, or document, or use Click to Do to act on any image or text in the snapshot you found. Microsoft is hoping that the concessions requiring opt-in and the ability to pause Recall will help quell the collective revolt that broke out last year. It likely won't for various reasons. First, even if User A never opts in to Recall, they have no control over the setting on the machines of Users B through Z. That means anything User A sends them will be screenshotted, processed with optical character recognition and Copilot AI, and then stored in an indexed database on the other users' devices. That would indiscriminately hoover up all kinds of User A's sensitive material, including photos, passwords, medical conditions, and encrypted videos and messages. As Privacy Guides writer Em wrote on Mastodon: This feature will unfortunately extract your information from whatever secure software you might have used and store it on this person's computer in a possibly less secure way. Of course this person could manually take a screenshot of all of this anyway, but this feature makes it that even a well-intentioned person might either not be aware it is on, or might wrongly assume it is secure enough. This feature isn't fully released yet, but it might be soon. The presence of an easily searchable database capturing a machine's every waking moment would also be a bonanza for others who don't have users' best interests at heart. That level of detailed archival material will undoubtedly be subject to subpoena by lawyers and governments. Threat actors who manage to get their spyware installed on a device will no longer have to scour it for the most sensitive data stored there. Instead they will mine Recall just as they do browser databases storing passwords now. Microsoft didn't immediately respond to a message asking why it's reintroducing Recall less than a year after the feature got such a chilly reception. For critics, Recall is likely to remain one of the most pernicious examples of enshittification, the recently minted term for the shoehorning of unwanted AI and other features into existing products when there is negligible benefit to users. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Astronaut Insists the Mushrooms He's Growing in Space Are "Not the Ones You're Thinking"
A crypto billionaire and a filthy rich ketamine user have launched a trip to the stars — stop us if you've heard this one before. We promise it's not quite as Silicon Valley as it sounds, though as Australian explorer and freshman astronaut Eric Phillips told Ars Technica, there are shrooms involved. Alongside Norwegian filmmaker Jannicke Mikkelsen, German roboticist Rabea Rogge, and Chinese crypto billionaire Chun Wang, Philips is a member of SpaceX's Fram2 mission. The first private flight of its kind, the four-person team launched in a Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket for the first-ever civilian mission flying over Earth's poles. Chartered by Chun — and, of course, greenlit by SpaceX owner and resident White House psychonaut Elon Musk — the four-person crew launched on March 31 and are currently in orbit, working on nearly two dozen scientific experiments they have planned for their short journey. Among them, as Ars noted, is the plan to become the first mushroom growers in space — but "they're not the ones you're thinking," Philips told the website. Instead, per a Fram2 statement released ahead of the launch, they'll be growing delectable oyster mushrooms. FOODiQ Global, the Australian company behind the "Mission MushVroom" experiment aboard Fram2, said in the press release that "oyster mushrooms are the perfect space crop" because they grow rapidly and have tons of nutrients. They even have "the unique ability to make vitamin D," the statement noted. Along with all those nutritional benefits, those yummy shrooms will almost certainly taste better than space food — if top space minds can figure out a way to cook them in orbit, that is. In an op-ed for Business Insider, FOODiQ founder and CEO Flávia Fayet-Moore said that she identified mushrooms as an ideal in-orbit crop, particularly for years-long missions to Mars and other planets. "Can you imagine eating thermostabilized, dehydrated food for five years?" the space nutritionist — yes, that is apparently a real thing — wrote. "I can't." We won't know how well the shrooms grew in microgravity until Fram2 gets back to Earth this week. More on space life: Boeing's Starliner Disaster Was Even Worse Than We Thought, Astronaut Reveals
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Boeing's Starliner Disaster Was Even Worse Than We Thought, Astronaut Reveals
It's been ten months since NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams traveled to the International Space Station on board Boeing's issues-riddled Starliner spacecraft. After years of delays, Starliner finally launched from Space Launch Complex-41 at NASA's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on June 5, 2024, following three separate scrubs and the discovery of several helium leaks. Things didn't improve once the capsule reached space. Docking procedures with the ISS proved harrowing due to reaction-control thruster malfunctions. And according to a new Ars Technica interview with the two astronauts, the situation was even more terrifying than was reported at the time. "I don't know that we can come back to Earth at that point," Wilmore told Ars' Eric Berger. "I don't know if we can. And matter of fact, I'm thinking we probably can't." News that NASA had actively bent flight rules to allow Starliner to continue attempting to dock with the station — despite multiple thrusters failing — highlights the real danger Wilmore and Williams were in, and how close they were to simply turning around. It's a damning new revelation, especially considering how much of a disaster Boeing's Starliner project has already been. The aerospace giant has poured billions of dollars into the project and has yet to complete a single, successful crewed mission to and from the station. While the pair said the launch atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas rocket went more smoothly than anticipated, things started to go haywire when reaction control system thrusters started failing one by one, making docking procedures a lot more difficult. During briefings preceding the launch, Wilmore had already been made aware that thruster issues could land them in a "situation where we're in space and can't control it," as he told Ars. While trying to dock with the ISS, Wilmore recounted that the crew became single fault tolerant, meaning that the mission was one failing thruster away from losing full control of the capsule's movement. "We're single fault tolerant, and I'm thinking, 'Wow, we're supposed to leave the space station,'" Wilmore told Ars. "Because I know the flight rules." However, heated conversations back at NASA's headquarters led to the space agency deciding it was still worth the risk, waiving flight rules about the loss of thrusters. "I did not know that the flight directors were already in discussions about waiving the flight rule because we've lost two thrusters," the astronaut added. "We didn't know why. [The flight rules] just dropped." "We're already past the point where we were supposed to leave, and now we're zero-fault tolerant and I'm manual control," Wilmore recalled. "And, oh my, the control is sluggish. Compared to the first day, it is not the same spacecraft. Am I able to maintain control? I am. But it is not the same." "There was a lot of unsaid communication, like, 'Hey, this is a very precarious situation we're in,'" Williams added. "I think both of us overwhelmingly felt like it would be really nice to dock to that space station that's right in front of us." All told, four out of the 28 reaction control system thrusters failed. Two of them came back online after NASA remotely reset the system. The pair returned on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule earlier this month after being stranded on board the space station for nine months. Their original mission was meant to last a mere week. NASA is still working to get Starliner — which returned without the pair on board in September — back off the ground. In an update last week, the agency revealed that NASA and Boeing are "making progress toward crew certification of the company's CST-100 Starliner," with teams "working to resolve Starliner's in-flight anomalies and preparing for propulsion system testing in the months ahead." When or if the plagued spacecraft will again attempt to journey to the space station remains unclear. According to NASA's Commercial Crew Program manager Steve Stich, the next flight likely won't happen before late 2025 or "early next year." More on Starliner: NASA Is Investigating Boeing Starliner's "In-Flight Anomalies"
