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Apple Quadrupled Its Autonomous Driving Testing Miles Last Year

Apple Quadrupled Its Autonomous Driving Testing Miles Last Year

Apple’s secretive vehicle project doesn’t have much to show for its six years of work, at least publicly. But records submitted by the company to a California agency show that Apple went on an autonomous testing jag last year, almost quadrupling the number of miles it tested on public roads compared to 2022 and jumping 2021’s total by a factor of more than 30.

The data covers December 2022 to November 2023. The majority of the testing miles were in the second half of the reporting period, with miles tested peaking in August at 83,900.

Apple has a permit to test autonomous vehicle tech on California’s public roads only if the company has a safety driver behind the wheel—a first step that allows autonomous vehicle companies to collect more data on streets and determine how their software handles itself in traffic.

A handful of other companies, including Alphabet’s Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox, have the state’s permission to test without safety drivers. California allows just two companies—Waymo and autonomous delivery firm Nuro—to deploy commercial self-driving technology in California.

Apple’s testing totals are well below those of more advanced autonomous vehicle developers’, though the state’s reporting guidelines make them difficult to compare directly. Waymo drove 3.7 million testing miles in California with a safety driver behind the wheel and 1.2 million testing miles with no one behind the wheel. The company drove more than 1.6 million additional miles with passengers in the car, according to separate government documents. (Waymo is also operating a driverless service in Phoenix and is testing in Austin, Texas; its operations in those cities aren’t covered in this data.)

Even Cruise, General Motors’ troubled autonomous vehicle division, which had its permit to deploy in California suspended in October and halted nationwide testing soon after, drove almost 2.65 million testing miles in the state in 2023—almost 2.2 million more than Apple.

TikTok’s Missing Music Is Making Users Very Upset

TikTok’s Missing Music Is Making Users Very Upset

#SwiftTok had a rough day. Early Thursday, after Universal Music Group and TikTok failed to reach an agreement on licensing music from UMG artists on the app, sounds from those artists—including Taylor Swift, Drake, and others—went silent.

“Some of my most viewed videos are ones talking about Taylor Swift that have Taylor Swift songs in the background,” says Savannah Delullo, a Wordle influencer on TikTok and a Swiftie. “So, them being muted is pretty sad, because we put in all of that work.”

Delullo notes that creators might switch over to alternative versions of the official songs or experiment with ways to avoid copyrighted music altogether, but still the mood on #SwiftTok is far from light.

“Half my drafts are muted now,” says Madeline Macrae, a Swift fan and TikTok creator. While initially frustrated by the change, Macrae thinks there might be positive impacts. Even though many ardent fans value the online community built through social media, some are also uncomfortable with the flattening of poetic songs into 60-second memes. “Songs that Swifties would usually gatekeep aren’t going to be TikTok-ified now,” she says.

It’s not just Swifties who are missing music on TikTok. Multiple videos posted on Olivia Rodrigo’s official account, including one with over 50 million views, are now quiet. Similarly, TikToks with UMG licensed music posted by Billie Eilish to promote her album display the message “This sound isn’t available.”

During recent years, UMG and other labels have built marketing strategies around getting songs to go viral with the TikTok algorithm. Younger users see the platform as a great way to discover their next favorite song and build out cool playlists. If TikTok and UMG don’t reach a new deal soon, the prohibition could dramatically alter how artists tease new music and connect with fans through social media.

In an email to WIRED, Barney Hooper, a global head of music communications at TikTok, indicated that the change impacts only music from UMG and confirmed that videos with previously licensed music will stay muted until another deal is closed. Soon, TikTok might also take steps to remove songs in the Universal Music Publishing Group catalog, which would increase the number of impacted artists.

So, licensed music from UMG artists is gone from TikTok, for now, but it remains unclear what will happen to unofficial remixes and mashups as the catalog is wiped from the platform. Viral sounds on TikTok are sometimes warped versions of an original song, with vocals frequently sped up, and while some of those sounds remained on the platform Thursday, they may not for much longer.

A well-known musician for almost two decades, Swift has seen her popularity skyrocket in recent years. Her Eras Tour is so massive it has the power to impact local economies and her appearances at NFL games to watch her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, play have altered football viewership this season. Losing her music as well as tunes from Drake and others in UMG’s lineup could alter the fabric of TikTok itself.

Swift’s songs may no longer be all over the platform, but music remains core to the user experience of scrolling through TikTok. The cascade of snippets from huge artists disappearing could even usher in a new era on the For You Page feed. “I feel like a silver lining to this is that smaller or independent artists can have their chance to go viral,” says Macrae.

YouTube, Discord, and ‘Lord of the Rings’ Led Police to a Teen Accused of a US Swatting Spree

YouTube, Discord, and ‘Lord of the Rings’ Led Police to a Teen Accused of a US Swatting Spree

A California teenager prosecutors say is responsible for hundreds of swatting attacks around the United States was exposed after law enforcement pieced together a digital trail left on some of the internet’s largest platforms, according to court records released this week.

Alan Winston Filion, a 17-year-old from Lancaster, California, faces four felony charges in Florida’s Seminole County related to swatting, or fake threats called into the police to provoke a forceful response, according to Florida state prosecutors. Police arrested Filion on January 18, and he was extradited to Seminole County this week.

Filion’s arrest, first reported by WIRED on January 26, marks the culmination of a multi-agency manhunt for the person police claim is responsible for swatting attacks on high schools, historically black colleges and universities, mosques, and federal agents, and for threats to bomb the Pentagon, members of the United States Senate, and the US Supreme Court. Ultimately, a YouTube channel, Discord chats, and usernames related to The Lord of the Rings helped lead authorities to Filion’s doorstep.

Florida prosecutors charged Filion with four felony counts, including three related to allegedly making false reports to law enforcement and one for unlawful use of a two-way radio for “facilitating or furthering an act of terrorism” that authorities say targeted people based on race, religion, or other protected classes. While prosecutors alleged that Filion “is responsible for hundreds of swatting and bomb threat incidents throughout the United States,” the charges Filion faces relate to a single May 12, 2023, swatting attack against the Masjid Al Hayy Mosque in Sanford, Florida.

An attorney for Filion was not immediately available to respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

More than a year before the swatting attack on the Florida mosque, agents with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewed Filion’s father, William, at his home in Lancaster, California, according to court documents made public on Wednesday. The interview took place on April 21, 2022, the same day the owner of a Telegram channel linked to swatting activity posted, “SOMEONE JUST REPORTED ME TO THE FBI… LOL!”

In October 2022, authorities investigating swatting incidents involving calls made to a school in Anacortes, Washington, came across a Telegram user associated with multiple swatting and doxing channels. The user, “Nazgul Swattings,” had claimed responsibility in one of these channels for the threats to the Washington schools, according to the same court documents.

Over the following months, court records say, the FBI monitored channels linked to this user. One of those, a channel called Torswats (formerly Nazgul Swats), had shared recordings of nearly 20 hoax calls threatening locations around the country, including schools in Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

As the FBI tracked Torswats’ public channels, Brad “Cafrozed” Dennis, a private investigator, was running his own parallel investigation on behalf of high-profile Twitch streamers who’d been swatted. In December, Dennis reached out to a user behind Torswats and asked to chat on a peer-to-peer chatting service called Tox under the guise of ordering a swat. According to records shared with WIRED, not mentioned in the arrest warrant, while interacting on Tox, Dennis used Wireshark to monitor his network traffic. In the process, he uncovered an IP address and the username “Paimon Arnum,” which was previously unknown to law enforcement.

One of the Internet’s Oldest Software Archives Is Shutting Down

One of the Internet’s Oldest Software Archives Is Shutting Down

In a move that marks the end of an era, New Mexico State University (NMSU) recently announced the impending closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024. For over three decades, the archive has been a key resource for users of the IBM OS/2 operating system and its successors, which once competed fiercely with Microsoft Windows.

In a statement made to The Register, a representative of NMSU wrote, “We have made the difficult decision to no longer host these files on hobbes.nmsu.edu. Although I am unable to go into specifics, we had to evaluate our priorities and had to make the difficult decision to discontinue the service.”

Hobbes is hosted by the Department of Information & Communication Technologies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. In the official announcement, the site reads, “After many years of service, hobbes.nmsu.edu will be decommissioned and will no longer be available. As of April 15th, 2024, this site will no longer exist.”

We reached out to New Mexico State University to inquire about the history of the Hobbes archive but did not receive a response. The earliest record we’ve found of the Hobbes archive online is this 1992 Walnut Creek CD-ROM collection that gathered up the contents of the archive for offline distribution. At around 32 years old, minimum, that makes Hobbes one of the oldest software archives on the internet, akin to the University of Michigan’s archives and ibiblio at UNC.

Archivists such as Jason Scott of the Internet Archive have stepped up to say that the files hosted on Hobbes are safe and already mirrored elsewhere. “Nobody should worry about Hobbes, I’ve got Hobbes handled,” wrote Scott on Mastodon in early January. OS/2 World.com also published a statement about making a mirror. But it’s still notable whenever such an old and important piece of internet history bites the dust.

Like many archives, Hobbes started as an FTP site. “The primary distribution of files on the internet were via FTP servers,” Scott tells Ars Technica. “And as FTP servers went down, they would also be mirrored as subdirectories in other FTP servers. Companies like CDROM.COM / Walnut Creek became ways to just get a CD-ROM of the items, but they would often make the data available at http://ftp.cdrom.com to download.”

The Hobbes site is a priceless digital time capsule. You can still find the Top 50 Downloads page, which includes sound and image editors, and OS/2 builds of the Thunderbird email client. The archive contains thousands of OS/2 games, applications, utilities, software development tools, documentation, and server software dating back to the launch of OS/2 in 1987. There’s a certain charm in running across OS/2 wallpapers from 1990, and even the archive’s Update Policy is a historical gem—last updated on March 12, 1999.

The legacy of OS/2

OS/2 began as a joint venture between IBM and Microsoft, undertaken as a planned replacement for IBM PC DOS (also called “MS-DOS” in the form sold by Microsoft for PC clones). Despite advanced capabilities like 32-bit processing and multitasking, OS/2 later competed with and struggled to gain traction against Windows. The partnership between IBM and Microsoft dissolved after the success of Windows 3.0, leading to divergent paths in OS strategies for the two companies.

Through iterations like the Warp series, OS/2 established a key presence in niche markets that required high stability, such as ATMs and the New York subway system. Today, its legacy continues in specialized applications and in newer versions (like eComStation) maintained by third-party vendors—despite being overshadowed in the broader market by Linux and Windows.

A footprint like that is worth preserving, and a loss of one of OS/2’s primary archives, even if mirrored elsewhere, is a cultural blow. Apparently, Hobbes has reportedly almost disappeared before but received a stay of execution. In the comments section for an article on The Register, someone named “TrevorH” wrote, “This is not the first time that Hobbes has announced it’s going away. Last time it was rescued after a lot of complaints and a number of students or faculty came forward to continue to maintain it.”

As the final shutdown approaches in April, the legacy of Hobbes is a reminder of the importance of preserving the digital heritage of software for future generations—so that decades from now, historians can look back and see how things got to where they are today.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

Elon Musk Says a Human Patient Has Received Neuralink’s Brain Implant

Elon Musk Says a Human Patient Has Received Neuralink’s Brain Implant

Elon Musk said on the social media platform X on Monday that the first human patient has received a brain implant developed by his company Neuralink.

After years of delays, Neuralink started recruiting patients for a clinical trial in the fall after receiving approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and a hospital ethics board. The company is developing a device called a brain-computer interface.

Musk has said that Neuralink’s ultimate goal is to “achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence,” but for now he’s starting with a far more modest aim: allowing paralyzed people to control a cursor or keyboard with their brains. In a brochure about the study, Neuralink says it is recruiting participants with quadriplegia, or paralysis in all four limbs, due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and that are at least 22 years old. It anticipates the study will take six years to complete.

In its brochure, the company says it will use a surgical robot it developed to place the implant into a region of the brain that controls movement intention. Once in place, the coin-sized device is designed to record and transmit brain signals wirelessly to an app that decodes those signals.

In his post on Monday, Musk added that the patient was “recovering well” and that “initial results show promising neuron spike detection.” But it could be months before we know whether the patient can successfully use the implant to control a computer or other device. The person will have to recover from surgery, and training someone to use a BCI can take several weeks.

The Neuralink patient is far from the first to get a BCI. A few dozen people around the world have been outfitted with the devices as part of research studies. The first, Matt Nagle, did so in 2004. Over the years, these systems have allowed paralyzed people to play video games, move robotic arms, and write emails using just their thoughts.

Until recently, BCIs were largely pursued by academic labs. They required clunky setups using thick cables that made them impractical to use at home. Neuralink’s system is designed to be wireless and records neural activity through more than 1,000 electrodes distributed across 64 threads, each thinner than a human hair. The most common device used in BCI research, the Utah array, records from 100 electrodes.

The company has also been beset by controversy, particularly around its treatment of research animals. A WIRED investigation in September detailed how some of its monkeys died as a result of the company’s brain implant testing. The company is reportedly facing a federal investigation related to its treatment of animal subjects. And this month, a Reuters report revealed that Neuralink was fined for violating US Department of Transportation rules regarding the movement of hazardous materials.

Since Neuralink’s founding in 2016, a handful of companies have emerged to commercialize these systems. One competitor, New York–based Synchron, has not only beat Neuralink to implanting its BCI in people but has shown that its device is safe and allows patients with paralysis to browse the web and do online shopping and banking while at home.

Neuralink has not specified where the trial is taking place or how many patients will be included. The company has set up a patient registry for potential participants to learn whether they qualify for the study. It has not registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, a central database with information on clinical studies funded or sponsored by industry and government agencies.

Right now, the only details available on the Neuralink surgery come from a single Musk tweet. While it may not move the needle on merging humans with AI, it would represent a critical milestone for a promising device.

The 10 Best Travel Adapters (2024): Plug and Universal Adapters

The 10 Best Travel Adapters (2024): Plug and Universal Adapters

With a familiar sliding pin design, this adapter also covers more than 200 countries. Taller and heavier than our top pick, this is OneAdaptr’s most powerful release to date, and it employs gallium nitride technology to deliver up to 100 watts. Aside from the universal AC outlet, you will find two USB-C ports and two USB-A ports on the bottom. Both USB-C ports offer 100-watt charging, and both USB-A ports are 18 watts, but 100 watts is the maximum in total, so when you plug in multiple devices, it divides between them.

Almost every charging standard you can think of is supported, including PD 3.0, QC 4+, FCP, SCP, AFC, PPS, and more, so there’s a good chance you can charge your phone at the fastest rate possible. There is no grounding, so don’t plug in any gadget with a third metal pin. But there is a 10-amp fuse with a spare included, and this adapter conforms to IEC 60884, CE, and FCC standards. If you want more power or feel you can make do with less, we also tested and liked the OneWorld135 ($109) and the OneWorld30 ($39).

Note: We have tested OneAdaptr’s range extensively and found they work well, but the company has had issues fulfilling orders, and we are concerned about the volume of negative reviews online. The company assured us that it has recently taken steps to improve fulfilment and customer service, and we will continue to monitor the situation.