All of my opinions are italicized and sources are in blue.
It turns out bots are both faster and more accurate at completing CAPTCHA tests widely used by websites to filter out the machines from human users.
The upsides to human verification tests, including the various CAPTCHA implementations (that’s Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, if you were wondering), are obvious enough. They prevent the bot hordes from scraping content, posting fake comments and dodgy links, setting up fraudulent accounts and all that bad stuff.
Obviously there’s a trade off in terms of the inconvenience of repeatedly pecking away at often confusing images of buses, bicycles, fire hydrants and crosswalks or deciphering and then transcribing squiggly text. But it’s worth it to keep our machine overlords at bay.
Of course, it’s only worth it if it works. Which, apparently, it doesn’t. So says new research conducted by Gene Tsudik and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine.
According to the New Scientist, Tsudik and co. parsed the world’s 200 most popular websites, finding 120 of them using CAPTCHA tests. Next, they recruited 1,000 human candidates of varied age, sex, location and education to take 10 CAPTCHA tests each.
Humans in the UC Irvine tests were between 50 and 84 percent accurate in the distorted text test, taking between nine and 15 seconds to complete the task. The bots? They were 99.8 percent accurate and did the job in less than a second.
The freshly announced Red Dead Redemption port has been turning heads since it was unveiled, mainly due to how much Rockstar is asking for.
As the developer reveals, the PS4 and Nintendo Switch “conversion” of the popular cowboy game will set you back $50. While it’s worth mentioning that the price covers the popular Undead Nightmares DLC, fans haven’t been won over.
A huge reason for that is that the conversion sounds like more of a port than the remake fans have been pining for. To some, the fee is largely for the convenience of having Red Dead on PlayStation and Switch – that’s about it. Had the port been a remaster at the least, fans feel they might have been given something new to the versions already out there.
“A $50 price tag for a simple Red Dead Redemption port is crazy,” one fan says. “The game is 13 years old, there’s no multiplayer included, there aren’t many visual improvements, and it isn’t even releasing for PC or PS5 directly. What is Rockstar thinking.”
Another adds: “I would have gladly paid $60/$70 for a proper remaster/remake of Red Dead Redemption/Undead Nightmare for PS5. Rockstar decided to release a straight port for $50 for…PS4. It’s a hard pass for me honestly.”
Another thing that several fans have pointed out is that you can buy Red Dead Redemption on Xbox with all the bells and whistles – including multiplayer and DLC – featured for $30.
The Red Dead Redemption port is due to be released on August 17.
Confidence in the UK’s electoral regulator has been thrown into question after it emerged a hostile cyber-attack accessing the data of 40 million voters went undetected for a year and the public was not told for another 10 months.
The Electoral Commission apologized for the security breach in which the names and addresses of all voters registered between 2014 and 2022 were open to “hostile actors” as far back as August 2021.
The attack was discovered last October and reported within 72 hours to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), as well as the National Crime Agency. However, the public has only now been informed that the electoral registers containing the data of millions of voters may have been accessible throughout that time.
The watchdog said “much of the data” was already in the public domain and insisted it would be difficult for anyone to influence the outcome of the UK’s largely paper-based electoral system, but it acknowledged that voters would still be concerned.
Vjeran, who is part of The Verge, lost 3TB of video because the drive is no longer readable. This isn’t a drive he purchased many months or years ago — it’s the supposedly safe replacement that Western Digital recently sent after his original wiped his data all by itself. SanDisk issued a firmware fix for a variety of drives in late May, shortly after our story. They sent out Vjeran’s replacement in early June.
Honestly, it feels like WD has been trying to sweep this under the rug while it tries to offload its remaining inventory at a deep discount — they’re still 66 percent off at Amazon, for example. As far as I’m aware, WD has yet to even acknowledge the possibility of massive data loss. Here, it merely says that the drives have a “firmware issue” where they might “unexpectedly disconnect from a computer.” Doesn’t sound all that urgent?
Meanwhile, the drive has 4.7 out of 5 stars at Amazon, at least partially due to astroturfing: despite being listed as a “verified purchase,” the top two Amazon reviews are clearly working off the same playbook.
As reported by AnandTech, Samsung teased the industry’s first 256 TB solid-state drive at the Flash Memory Summit 2023. The new drive features unprecedented storage density and is aimed primarily at hyper-scale data centers where storage density and reduced power consumption matter the most.
Samsung’s 256 TB SSD is based on 3D QLC NAND memory and probably uses innovative packaging to cram multiple 3D QLC NAND devices into stacks. The company does not disclose which form factor the drive uses. For now, the only thing that Samsung discloses about its 256 TB SSD is that it is several times more energy efficient than existing drives that carry 32 TB of raw NAND.
“Compared to stacking eight 32 TB SSDs, one 256 TB SSD consumes approximately seven times less power, despite storing the same amount of data,”
Samsung
If you believe the hype, LK-99 could be revolutionary. It’s supposed to be a perfect superconductor that could help nuclear fusion become a reality and make levitating trains an easy way to commute. At least that’s the story that’s drummed up on social media — but it’s not what many experts think of the new discovery.
LK-99 is a polycrystalline material made out of lead, oxygen, and phosphorus that’s been “doped” — or infused — with copper. A group of researchers kicked off a frenzy in late July when they published a set of papers about the discovery of LK-99 and called it “a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind.”
There are other superconductors today. They’re used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, quantum computers, and nuclear fusion devices. But those superconductors only work under very low temperatures or high pressures. That makes them too difficult and expensive to use in most everyday applications.
As of Tuesday evening, more than a dozen follow-up studies took place on LK-99. One group in China claims to see zero resistance in the material, but only at temperatures below 100 K—cooler than some known superconductors. Three others report no sign of superconductivity.
Several theoretical papers suggest the material may have an electrical structure promising for, but far from guaranteeing, superconductivity.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of the best selling games of the year and Nintnedo has been busy filing patents in Japan to protect the various systems that make the game such a joy. Abilities such as Fuse, Ultrahand—which lets the player build things using items from the world—Riju’s lightning attack, and even the game’s loading screens are cited in various Japanese patents.
As first spotted by Automaton, Nintendo has filed 31 Tears of the Kingdom related patents this year, most of them related to various game mechanics.
As interesting as the patents are, they do feel odd. We typically think of patents as a system designed for protecting physical inventions, not bits of code and gameplay systems. But video game companies have long used the system to protect what they consider their most unique selling points. The Shadow of War franchise is a middling Ubisoft-style open world game elevated by an incredible dynamic “nemesis” system that generates personalized villains for the player to interact with. Warner Bros. Interactive patented the Nemesis system and no one has been able to riff on it for almost a decade.
