Brian Barrett

Enlarge / Killing Floor 2. (credit: Tripwire Interactive)

Over Labor Day weekend, a social media firestorm began when Tripwire CEO John Gibson tweeted his endorsement of a recent Texas anti-abortion law that prohibits abortions at six weeks. The controversy ended with Gibson's swift departure from his company, following disavowals from multiple associated studios.

Tripwire Interactive, the Georgia-based studio and publisher responsible for games like Maneater, Chivalry 2, and the Killing Floor series, confirmed Monday that CEO John Gibson has been replaced by Vice President Alan Wilson, who will lead the company as it searches for a new head executive.

"The comments given by John Gibson are of his own opinion and do not reflect those of Tripwire Interactive as a company," the developer said in a statement. "His comments disregarded the values of our whole team, our partners, and much of our broader community. Our leadership team at Tripwire are deeply sorry and are unified in our commitment to take swift action and to foster a more positive environment."

Enlarge / ProtonMail offers end-to-end encryption and a stated focus on privacy for its email service—which offers a user interface quite similar to those of more mainstream services such as Gmail. (credit: Jim Salter)

This weekend, news broke that security/privacy-focused anonymous email service ProtonMail turned over a French climate activist's IP address and browser fingerprint to Swiss authorities. This move seemingly ran counter to the well-known service's policies, which as recently as last week stated that "by default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account."

After providing the activist's metadata to Swiss authorities, ProtonMail removed the section that had promised no IP logs, replacing it with one saying, "ProtonMail is email that respects privacy and puts people (not advertisers) first."

No logging “by default”

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  The phrase "by default" did a lot of heavy lifting in ProtonMail's old front page. [credit: Jim Salter ]

As usual, the devil is in the details—ProtonMail's original policy simply said that the service does not keep IP logs "by default." However, as a Swiss company itself, ProtonMail was obliged to comply with a Swiss court's injunction demanding that it begin logging IP address and browser fingerprint information for a particular ProtonMail account.

Enlarge / Male musk duck (Biziura lobata) captured in camera chillaxing in the wild in Sandford, Tasmania, Australia. Not the same duck recorded 30 years ago saying "You bloody fool!" (credit: JJ Harrison /CC BY 3.0)

In 1987, a researcher in Australia recorded a male musk duck named Ripper producing a vocalization that sounded very much like "You bloody fool," along with sounds resembling a slamming door and a soft mumbling. A second duck in the region was recorded in 2000 imitating a Pacific black duck's call. Both recordings survived, but they were never analyzed in any detail, and most of the accompanying records were destroyed in a wildfire that swept through the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve in 2003.

Now retired, that original researcher, Peter J. Fullagar, has teamed up with Carel ten Cate, a biologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, to perform the first in-depth analysis of those recordings. That analysis confirmed that Ripper's distinctive vocalizations are indeed a form of mimicry—likely the first comprehensively documented example of musk ducks being able to mimic sounds. The researchers described their findings in a new paper published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, part of a special issue on vocal learning in animals and humans.

Definitions of what constitutes so-called vocal-production learning can vary, but if an animal reared in isolation produces vocalizations that deviate sharply from what is typical of the species or is able to imitate the sounds of other species, those are deemed evidence for the phenomenon. Vocal-production learning is critical to human speech and language development, but there have only been a handful of confirmed reports of this in animal species—most notably, whales, dolphins, bats, elephants, songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds.

Enlarge / Former Florida Senator Bill Nelson was confirmed as NASA administrator earlier this year. (credit: NASA)

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he is not upset with Blue Origin for pursuing all legal avenues after the company lost a space agency contract for a lunar lander.

"We are a nation of laws and as such we want to follow the law," Nelson said in response to a question from Ars. "They have a right of appeal, and they have chosen to exercise that right. They have every right under the law to do that, and there will be a determination. And then we will move on."

Nearly five months have passed since NASA selected SpaceX to build a Human Landing System for its lunar program, named Artemis. After the decision, both Blue Origin and another bidder, Dynetics, protested the award to the US Government Accountability Office, and in late July the protest was rejected.

Enlarge / The splash image and header copy on the event invitation Apple emailed to press. (credit: Apple)

Apple will stream a new product-unveiling event this coming Tuesday, September 14, at 10 am PDT, the company announced today. Invitations went out to press this morning, and marketing SVP Greg Joswiak tweeted a short video teasing the event as well.

You can see the image and copy that accompanied the invitation above. As usual, the invitation doesn't reveal much about what to expect. It does note that the event will be an online video stream and not an in-person gathering.

That said, we know more or less what to expect. Apple has held an event like this during the same week every year for a while now, and the announcements have always focused primarily on two products: the iPhone and the Apple Watch. This year, rumors abound of an updated version of Apple's AirPods wireless earbuds, too.

Enlarge / Pro-choice protesters march outside the Texas State Capitol on Sept. 1, 2021, in Austin, Texas. (credit: Getty Images | The Washington Post )

Epik, the domain registrar for controversial sites such as Gab and Parler, says that the Texas abortion-whistleblower website violates its terms of use.

The Texas Right to Life group's prolifewhistleblower.com website was booted by GoDaddy on Friday for violating its rules, including one that prohibits sites from using GoDaddy to "collect or harvest... non-public or personally identifiable information" without people's prior written consent. The website switched its domain registration from GoDaddy to Epik and switched its name servers from GoDaddy to hosting provider Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean quickly cut off service, and the abortion-whistleblower site's domain records now list Epik as both the registrar and name servers.

But the website—which encouraged people to report violations of the restrictive new anti-abortion law in Texas—is offline, and the domain now redirects to Texas Right to Life's homepage. The group says it plans to get the site back online.

Enlarge / Windows 11 sports built-in Microsoft Teams integration that may have brought down the desktop and taskbar in a recent preview build. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Microsoft released a new build of Windows 11 to Windows Insiders late last week as it prepares for the operating system's release on October 5, but the first testers to install the new build quickly ran into problems—the taskbar, desktop, Settings app, and other core OS components were refusing to load. Microsoft quickly published a registry edit that resolved the problem, but the company didn't go into more detail on what went wrong.

The most thorough examination of the problem comes from developer Daniel Aleksandersen's Ctrl blog. As he explains, the "IrisService" mentioned in Microsoft's registry edit is part of the Windows Spotlight service, which is responsible for fetching new lock screen wallpapers and other suggestions and advertisements. From Aleksandersen's post:

Based on the Microsoft-provided workaround, I narrowed the problem down to a registry key that contained a serialized JSON blob. The blob contained an advertisement for Microsoft Teams. The messaging and imagery in the promotion were identical to the panel you get when you press the Windows key + C on a Windows account not already set up with Teams.

In other words, it looks like an ad for one of Windows 11's built-in apps went wrong, and most of the operating system's user interface stopped working as a result.

Enlarge / Tablets of ivermectin. (credit: Getty | Nurphoto)

An Ohio judge has overturned an order by one of his colleagues that required a Cincinnati hospital to give the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin to a critically ill COVID-19 patient.

The order to force the use of ivermectin—dubbed "unethical" and "extraordinarily dangerous" by experts— was the result of a lawsuit brought by the patient's wife, Julie Smith, on August 20.

In a September 6 ruling overturning the order to use ivermectin, Butler County Judge Michael Oster Jr. wrote, "While this court is sympathetic to the Plaintiff and understands the idea of wanting to do anything to help her loved one, public policy should not and does not support allowing a physician to try 'any' type of treatment on human beings."

Enlarge / TikTok headquarters in Culver City, California. (credit: AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

The bite-sized video site TikTok is gaining on Google's video juggernaut, YouTube. A new report from the BBC says that TikTok has overtaken YouTube in average watch time per user in the US and UK. While YouTube is still the bigger video site in terms of users and total video watched, the average US TikTok user watches more video than the average US YouTube viewer. The youths are addicted.

The BBC cites numbers from App Annie, an app analytics firm. These numbers are only from Android phones, but there's no reason to think the situation would be different on iOS devices. App Annie lists TikTok as the most downloaded app last year (though pre-loaded Android Google apps like YouTube don't need to be downloaded) and says the average TikTok watch time per user passed that of YouTube in April.

YouTube has been doing its best to fight off TikTok. YouTube's TikTok clone, YouTube Shorts, launched in the US in May, offering 60-second video clips in a mobile-first, swipeable interface. Firing up the photocopier is always YouTube's go-to move when an upstart video service comes along. To compete with Twitch, Google rolled out livestreaming and chat features under "YouTube Gaming," and the auto-expiring videos of "YouTube Stories" were Google's answer to Snapchat.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launched a GPS III satellite in November 2020. Then, the same first stage launched another GPS III satellite in June 2021. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

In June, a previously flown Falcon 9 booster lofted a new-generation Global Positioning Satellite for the US Space Force. This marked a watershed moment for the US military and the concept of reusable rockets, as the Space Force entrusted a satellite worth about half a billion dollars to the new technology.

Now, thanks to a recent news release from the US Space Force, we have a little more insight into why the Space Force is leaning into reusable rockets and other technology from innovative companies such as SpaceX.

Using a refurbished booster—this particular first stage had launched a GPS III satellite in November 2020—did save the Space Force money. By agreeing to launch two of its new GPS III satellites on used rockets, essentially, the US government pocketed $52 million in cost savings. This was certainly welcome, Space Force officials said, and it's nice to have the potential to increase launch tempo.

Enlarge (credit: Drew Angerer | Getty Images)

If you receive an email from someone@arstechnіca.com, is it really from someone at Ars? Most definitely not—the domain in that email address is not the same arstechnica.com that you know. The 'і' character in there is from the Cyrillic script and not the Latin alphabet.

This isn't a novel problem, either. Up until a few years ago (but not anymore), modern browsers did not make any visible distinction when domains containing mixed character sets were typed into the address bar.

And it turns out Microsoft Outlook is no exception, but the problem just got worse: emails originating from a lookalike domain in Outlook would show the contact card of a real person, who is actually registered to the legitimate domain, not the lookalike address.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Update 9/6 10:45 am EDT: We've updated our Labor Day Dealmaster for the holiday itself, adding a few NEW deals, striking out expired offers, and updating prices. The roundup now includes a larger-than-usual price drop on Apple's noise-canceling AirPods Pro earphones, a $30 discount on Amazon's budget-friendly Fire HD 8 tablet, the joint-lowest price we've tracked on Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales for the PS4 and PS5, deals on indoor security cameras and LEGO kits we like, and a few other discounts. The original post is below.

Original post 9/4 10:15 am EDT: It's Labor Day Weekend in the US, which means the Dealmaster has once again been busy picking through a barrage of sales to help you find the best tech deals currently available. In general, Labor Day sales won't top Black Friday or Cyber Monday when it comes to the quality or quantity, but if you can't wait another couple of months to pick up your gadget of choice, this year's holiday brings a few deals of note.

Our roundup includes a number of strong prices on Apple products, for one, including the "Product Red" edition of the Apple Watch Series 6 for $249. Apple is expected to launch the Series 7 in the coming months, the discount only applies to the red model, and you may see shipping delays at Amazon. Still, this deal matches the lowest price we've tracked for what we consider the best all-around smartwatch you can buy right now.

Enlarge / The 2021 Blix Vika+ foldable ebike, as posed in a neighbor's fancypants garden. Thanks, neighbor. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

As the ebike universe explodes with options and brands all vying for a piece of the burgeoning market, I keep coming back to a company that I have liked but rarely heard much about: Blix. My first brush with the California e-bike manufacturer came in 2018 when I was offered a test ride of its then-$1,599 Vika folding ebike model. I enjoyed my time with the Vika, but as a relatively new ebike tester, I opted not to write up a novice review.

Since then, however, Ars' bike-savviest staffers have been testing and reviewing a number of high-quality e-bikes. In my case, I've had a few e-bike tests come and go, sometimes with vehicles not quite meriting Ars coverage. Most recently I reviewed the handsome VanMoof X3 in 2020, and I both appreciated its best aspects and described how it didn't fit some potential ebike use cases.

When the time came for me to buy a new bike this year, I opted for an ebike, largely because I want the freedom to ride farther in a single day without feeling worn out or sweaty—especially in a hilly city like Seattle. I soon circled back to Blix—that was a good bike at a good price, I kept thinking, and I found a used Blix cruiser (the 2018 Aveny) for an even better price. It became my daily rider at the outset of this summer.

A mile below ground, a sign hangs over the door to the LUX dark matter experiment telling visitors how far to Wall Drug—in both dimensions. (credit: Matthew R. Francis)

Update, Sept. 6, 2021: It's Labor Day Weekend in the US, and even though most of us are continuing to call home "the office," Ars staff is taking a long weekend to rest and relax. And given we can't travel like we could during Labor Day Weekends past, we thought we'd revisit one of our favorite trips from the archives. This story on our adventure to the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment in South Dakota originally ran in July 2014, and it appears unchanged below.

One of the quietest, darkest places in the cosmos isn’t out in the depths of space. It’s at the center of a tank of cold liquid xenon in a gold mine deep under the Black Hills of South Dakota. It needs to be that quiet: any stray particles could confuse the detectors lining the outside of the tank. Those detectors are looking for faint, rare signals, ones that could reveal the presence of dark matter.

The whole assembly—the container of liquid and gaseous xenon, the water tank enveloping that, and all the detectors—is called the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment. So far, LUX hasn’t found anything, but the days of its operation are just beginning: the detector was installed and started operations just last year.

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  Life is Strange: True Colors wears its heart on its sleeve as Alex Chen strums a plaintive rendition of Radiohead's "Creep" on the guitar. [credit: Square Enix ]

This preview is based on limited impressions of the game as tested on the PS5 and made available by Square Enix ahead of the game's September 10 launch.

With four games released over the past six years (including one mini-spinoff, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit), the Life is Strange series has established a reputation as an unlikely type of narrative adventure. Its YA protagonists, hipster-slanted coming-of-age stories, and proximity to trauma make it part of a specific genre, and the series has proven unexpectedly adept at mostly reinventing itself from entry to entry.

In theory, these underpinnings might suggest a (hear us out) Silent Hill-style problem that the series has so far managed to avoid. But where Konami's survival horror series punished its protagonists through unique, hellish manifestations reflecting their specific inner demons, Life is Strange's supernatural abilities empower its characters. Our protagonists aren't defined by their tragedies. They could be anything, which allows series developers much more freedom to try new ideas.

Enlarge / Cars sit abandoned on the flooded Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx following a night of heavy wind and rain from the remnants of Hurricane Ida on September 02, 2021, in New York City. (credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

In just a few hours on Wednesday night, between 6 and 10 inches of rain fell on New York City—more than has fallen on San Jose, California, in the past year. Water rose in basement apartments and leaked through roofs. Rain streamed into subway stations and pooled on the tracks. The remains of Hurricane Ida, which had thrashed the Gulf Coast earlier in the week, brought floods to the Northeast. Across the region, the death toll reached 40 by Thursday evening. Subway delays and suspensions continue.

The city’s infrastructure, you see, was built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to withstand the sort of storm that comes every five to 10 years. Now brutal, record-breaking storms are an annual occurrence. What was left of Ida transformed the scene of everyday commutes into a disturbing reminder that climate change comes for us all. Wildfire thunderclouds in the West, blackouts in Texas, hurricanes in the South, torrential downpours in the East: “It’s all the stuff we said would happen 20 years ago,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute. “It’s just a little crazy to see it all happening at once.”

The storm flooded roadways. But it also inundated the alternatives aimed at getting people out of their cars: bike lanes, sidewalks, and public transit systems. For a time in New York on Thursday, all that was underwater. The images of water spilling into subway stations brought the crisis home. “You don’t have to be a person with a great understanding of infrastructure to know that that is a problem,” says Michael Horodniceanu, former president of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Capital Construction Company and now the chair of the Institute of Construction Innovations at NYU. “We’re starting to see the results of what is, in my view, a certain amount of lax attention to what our infrastructure is doing.”

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  This is the BMW I Vision Circular concept. It imagines the compact BMW of 2040, but the company says that the car's approach to sustainability will inform the forthcoming Neue Klasse, due in 2025. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

BMW provided flights to Munich and seven nights in hotels so we could attend IAA Mobility and then later this week drive its two new electric cars, the i4 and iX (which you'll be able to read about in the next few weeks). Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

MUNICH, GERMANY—The BMW i Vision Circular is not the company's new Neue Klasse. But the new concept, revealed this morning at IAA Mobility, explores idea which the company says will inform that electric vehicle, due in 2025.

Not so much in the way it looks, which is a shame since this compact one-box shape—described by a fellow journalist as a Cyber Twingo—is a refreshing break from oversized SUVs. Instead, it's the car's approach to sustainability that BMW is running with—"Circular" refers to the car's lifecycle, which aims to use entirely recycled materials resulting in a vehicle that is entirely recyclable too. Currently, BMW says that across its brands (which include Mini and Rolls-Royce), it's already at 30 percent recycled and reused materials.

"The BMW i Vision Circular illustrates our all-encompassing, meticulous way of thinking when it comes to sustainable mobility. It symbolises our ambition to be a pioneering force in the development of a circular economy," said BMW Chairman Oliver Zipse. "We lead the way for resource efficiency in production and we are seeking to extend this status to all stages of the vehicle life cycle. This is a question of economic sustainability too, as the current trend in commodity prices clearly shows the financial consequences in store for any industry that is reliant on finite resources."

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  Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars as Anthony McCoy, a visual artist who moves into the gentrified Cabrini-Green neighborhood in Chicago. [credit: YouTube/Universal Pictures ]

With thought-provoking films like Get Out and Us, writer/director Jordan Peele has already cemented his status as a master of smart, socially relevant modern horror. His influence is even broader as a producer, bringing fresh voices, directorial visions, and diverse perspectives to a genre badly in need of all three. His latest production is Candyman, director Nia DaCosta's imaginative sequel (of sorts) to the 1992 horror classic Candyman. This is only DaCosta's second feature film, yet she handles the material deftly and transforms the singular slasher known as Candyman into an ageless malevolence whose curse reverberates through time.

(Spoilers for the 1992 film below; mostly mild spoilers for the new film.)

As I've written previously, the original 1992 Candyman was based on the Clive Barker short story "The Forbidden." The film starred Virginia Madsen as a Chicago graduate student in sociology/semiotics whose thesis deals with urban legends. She hears about a series of brutal murders in the Cabrini-Green public housing project. The killer is rumored to be the ghost of a late 19th-century artist named Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd) who was lynched because he fathered an illegitimate child with a white woman. The mob cut off his right hand and smeared him with honey to attract bees to sting him to death before burning his corpse and scattering his ashes over what is now the project's grounds. 

Enlarge (credit: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/trader-works-in-front-of-a-board-displaying-germanys-share-news-photo/1234893457?adppopup=true)

There's extensive academic literature on the risks faced by investors who are overly confident of their ability to beat the market. They tend to trade more often, even if they're losing money doing so. They take on too much debt and don't diversify their holdings. When the market makes a sudden lurch, they tend to overreact to it. Yet, despite all that evidence, there's no hard data on what makes investors overconfident in the first place.

With the cost of going wrong, you'd think that people who risk money in stocks would learn from their past mistakes. But a new study suggests that our memory's tendency to take an optimistic past gets in the way, with people inflating their gains and forgetting their losses.

Selective memory

The lack of real-world data is a bit surprising, considering there are a number of reasons to suspect a happy nostalgia might be involved here. There's previous research that shows college students remember their grades as being better than they actually were. Other research shows that people quickly forget their actual cholesterol levels and remember tests as indicating a healthier one.

Enlarge / Behold: It is both desk and bike. (credit: Corey Gaskin)

If you work from home, it's a good idea to spice up the home office from time to time. Some of us have been living the telecommuting life for longer than others, and while we at Ars have some extensive experience (and an equally comprehensive guide on the best gear for home offices), we still like to periodically change things up to meet our dynamic needs. That's how I found the Desk Bike.

Well, that, and I'm recovering from a foot injury that recently got me into biking as a mode of low-impact exercise. Nevertheless, Flexispot's V9 Desk Bike now sits in my room and gets consistent use. You (or your kids) might have seen this very bike make waves on TikTok recently—Flexispot's ad campaign proved a savvy and fruitful move, garnering over 2.5 million likes and coverage from many media outlets.

It's well-known that exercise, even in the form of a 30-minute daily walk, produces a wide range of positive impacts on physical and mental health. But as of 2018, 80% of American adults don't meet that daily threshold. It can be hard to peel ourselves away from the computer and actually move our bodies, but not doing so is literally killing us. The Desk Bike isn't a magic bullet for healthy living, but it can help you be more active and get out pent-up, fidgety energy during the day.