Tuesday, January 09, 2024
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Sunday, January 07, 2024
Uranus and Neptune Reveal Their True Colors - The New York Times
Uranus and Neptune Reveal Their True Colors
"Neptune is not as blue as you’ve been led to believe, and Uranus’s shifting colors are better explained, in new research.
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Think of Uranus and Neptune, the solar system’s outermost planets, and you may picture two distinct hues: pale turquoise and cobalt blue. But astronomers say that the true colors of these distant ice giants are more similar than their popular depictions.
Neptune is a touch bluer than Uranus, but the difference in shade is not nearly as great as it appears in common images, according to a study published on Friday in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The results help to “set the record straight,” said Leigh Fletcher, a professor of planetary science at the University of Leicester in England and an author of the study. “There is a subtle difference in the blue shade between Uranus and Neptune, but subtle is the operative word there.”
The deep blue attributed to Neptune dates back to an artificial enhancement in the 1980s, when NASA’s Voyager 2 became the first (and still the only) spacecraft to visit the two planets.
Scientists at that time cranked up the blue in images of Neptune made by Voyager’s cameras to highlight the planet’s many curiosities, such as its south polar wave and dark spots. But as many sky watchers have known for decades, both Neptune and Uranus appear pale greenish-blue to the human eye.
“Uranus, as seen by Voyager, was pretty bland, so they made it as near to true color as we can,” said Patrick Irwin, a professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford and an author of the study. “But with Neptune, there’s all sorts of weird things,” he said, that “get a bit washed out” with proper color correction.
Enhanced images of Neptune often include captions that address the artificial color, but the vision of a deep blue planet has endured.
Dr. Irwin and his colleagues used advanced instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope and on the Very Large Telescope in Chile to resolve the colors of the planets as accurately as possible.
They also reviewed an immense observational record of both planets captured by Lowell Observatory in Arizona between 1950 and 2016.
The results confirm that Uranus is only slightly paler than Neptune, because of the thicker layer of aerosol haze that lightens its color.
The Lowell data set also shed new light on the mysterious color shifts that Uranus experiences over its extreme seasons.
For years, astronomers have puzzled over why Uranus is tinted green during its solstices but radiates a bluer glow at its equinoxes. The pattern is linked to Uranus’s odd position — tilted almost entirely on its side. Over the course of an 84-year orbit around the sun, Uranus’s poles are plunged into decades of perpetual light or darkness in the summers and winters, while the equatorial regions face the sun near the equinoxes.
Uranus’s shifting colors can be partly explained by atmospheric methane. Because methane absorbs red and green light, the equator ends up reflecting more blue light; by contrast, the poles, which have half as much methane, are tinted slightly green. The new study confirms this dynamic, and shows that a “hood” of ice particles coalesces over the sunlit poles of Uranian summer, boosting the greening effect.
The study “opens the door to many future studies aiming at understanding Uranus’s atmosphere and its seasons,” said Ravit Helled, a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Zurich who was not involved in the research. This work, she added, can “improve our understanding of the internal structure and thermal evolution of the planet.”
For Heidi Hammel, an astronomer who worked on Voyager’s imaging team in 1989, the new study is the latest chapter in a longstanding quest to bring the planet’s real color to light.
“For the public, I hope that this paper can help undo the decades of misinformation about Neptune’s color,” said Dr. Hammel, who now serves as vice president for science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. “Strike the word ‘azure’ from your vocabulary when discussing Neptune!”
The gap between the public perception and the reality of Neptune illustrates just one of the many ways data is manipulated to emphasize certain features or enhance the appeal of astronomical visualizations. For instance, the stunning images released from the James Webb Space Telescope are composite false-color versions of the original infrared observations.
“There’s never been an attempt to deceive,” Dr. Fletcher said, “but there has been an attempt to tell a story with these images by making them aesthetically pleasing to the eye so that people can enjoy these beautiful scenes in a way that is, maybe, more meaningful than a fuzzy, gray, amorphous blob in the distance.”
Saturday, January 06, 2024
NASA Spacecraft Takes New Images of Jupiter’s Volcanic Moon - The New York Times
New Images of Jupiter’s Moon Io Capture Infernal Volcanic Landscape
"Juno, a NASA mission designed to study Jupiter’s origins, sent back new views of the most eruptive world in the solar system.
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A NASA spacecraft swooped past Io, one of Jupiter’s largest moons and the most volcanically active world in our solar system. The spacecraft, the Juno orbiter, made its closest flyby yet of Io’s turbulent landscape, and sent back snapshots speckled with sharp cliffs, edgy mountain peaks, lakes of pooled lava and even a volcanic plume.
“I was in awe,” said Scott Bolton, a physicist at the Southwest Research Institute and principal investigator of the Juno mission. Dr. Bolton noted how “incredibly colorful” Io is — tinted in orangy browns and yellows because of the presence of sulfur and flowing lava. He likened the moon to a pepperoni pizza.
Studying these features can help scientists figure out what drives Io’s volcanoes, some of which shoot lava dozens of miles into space, and confirm that this activity comes from an ocean of magma hidden beneath the moon’s crust. Deciphering the secrets of the volcanoes may eventually reveal the influence Jupiter has over its eruptions, which could be a clue to how the gas giant and its satellites formed.
The Juno spacecraft, designed to study the origin and evolution of Jupiter, arrived at the planet in 2016. NASA extended the mission in 2021, and the orbiter has since captured photos of the Jovian moons Ganymede, Europa and most recently Io.
It’s not the first time a NASA spacecraft has flown by Io. In 1979, Voyager 1 discovered Io was volcanically active during its journey to interstellar space. Two decades later, NASA’s Galileo mission sent back what Dr. Bolton calls “postage stamps,” or close-ups of specific features on Io’s surface.
Juno conducted a number of more distant observations of Io in recent years. Its latest flyby occurred on Dec. 30, when the spacecraft came within 932 miles of the moon. The images captured during this visit were made with an instrument called JunoCam and are in visible wavelengths. They are some of the highest resolution views of Io’s global structure. The mission’s managers shared six images of Io on the mission’s website, and members of the public have since uploaded digitally enhanced versions that highlight features on Io’s surface.
Dr. Bolton said he was struck by the sharpness of the edges on some of the mountains in the images, which left him pondering how they get shaped and what it would be like to visit such a place.
“I wonder what it’s like to hike there,” he said, “or to snowboard off that peak.”
Mission scientists are already at work analyzing these images, searching for differences across Io’s surface to learn how often its volcanoes erupt, how bright and hot those eruptions are and how the resulting lava flows. According to Dr. Bolton, the team will also compare Juno’s images to older views of the Jovian moon to determine what has changed on Io over a variety of encounters.
And they’ll get a second set of data to work with in a month, when Juno completes another close flyby of the explosive world on Feb. 3.:
Friday, January 05, 2024
A girl was allegedly raped in the metaverse. Is this the beginning of a dark new future? | Nancy Jo Sales | The Guardian
A girl was allegedly raped in the metaverse. Is this the beginning of a dark new future? | Nancy Jo Sales
"The cheerful language with which tech companies describe their platforms is often in stark contrast to the dark possibilities lurking within them. Meta, for example, describes its virtual world, the metaverse, as “the next evolution in social connection and the successor to the mobile internet”, a place where “virtual reality lets you explore new worlds and shared experiences”. But for a young girl in the UK recently, that “shared experience” was an alleged gang rape perpetrated by several adult men.
British police are investigating the sexual assault of the girl, identified only as being under the age of 16, in what is said to be the first investigation of its kind in the UK. The girl was reportedly wearing a virtual reality headset and playing an immersive game in the metaverse when her avatar was attacked.
Was this really rape? some have asked. The comments on an Instagram post for a storyabout the case in the New York Post were characteristically skeptical: “Couldn’t she have just turned it off?” “Can we focus on real-life crime please?” “I was killed in [the war video game Call of Duty],” one person said sarcastically: “Been waiting for my killer to be brought to justice.”
The difference, of course, is that while Call of Duty players can expect to be virtually killed sometimes as part of the game, the girl had no reason to expect that she would be raped. It isn’t yet known what game she was playing when the alleged assault occurred, but obviously there isn’t an online game where the goal for adult players is to rape children. The fact that they are able to in the metaverse is the issue at the heart of this case, which has attracted international attention.
The question of whether virtual rape is “really rape” goes back to at least 1993, when the Village Voice published an article by Julian Dibbell about “a rape in cyberspace”. Dibbell’s piece reported on how the people behind avatars that were sexually assaulted in a virtual community felt emotions similar to those of victims of physical rape.
As did the girl whose avatar was attacked in the metaverse, according to a senior police officer familiar with the case; he told the Daily Mail: “There is an emotional and psychological impact on the victim that is longer-term than any physical injuries.” In addition, the immersive quality of the metaverse experience makes it all the more difficult for a child, especially, to distinguish between what’s real and what is make-believe.
So while it is necessary for the police to investigate this case – with the courts to decide on the appropriate punishment for the alleged offenders – it is equally important for Meta to be held accountable.
Meta has a notoriously bad track record when it comes to protecting children and teenagers. In 2021, the whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that Facebook’s own internal research showed how using Instagram (which the company owns) adversely affects teen girls’ confidence and body image. In October of last year, a bipartisan coalition of 33 attorneys general filed a lawsuit against Meta in California, alleging that Facebook and Instagram are responsible for a “national youth mental health crisis”.
If gone unchecked, sex crimes in the metaverse, against both children and adults, will become more common. A police investigator told the Daily Mail that the metaverse is already “rife” with sexual offenses. The Meta game Horizon Worlds has reportedly been the site of several sexual assaults. In 2022, the psychotherapist Nina Jane Patel, who does research on the metaverse, wrote of the “surreal nightmare” of being gang-raped in Horizon Venues (now Horizon Worlds). “Unlike in the physical world, there’s a lack of clear and enforceable rules in the metaverse,” said Patel.
A spokesman for Meta has said that users in the metaverse have “an automatic protection called personal boundary, which keeps people you don’t know a few feet away from you”. But apparently this feature isn’t doing enough to protect users from harm. This recent rape of a girl in the metaverse will be an important test for the UK’s new Online Safety Bill, a year-old set of laws to protect children and adults online. Some experts have expressed concerns that the bill doesn’t go far enough, focusing more on the content users publish rather than their actions.
The next generation of kids will spend an estimated 10 years in virtual reality over the course of their lifetimes – close to three hours a day – new research suggests. It may be that lawmakers need to add further protections to keep them safe. In the meantime, Meta could surprise everyone by stepping up and making the metaverse a place that lives up to its upbeat marketing.
Nancy Jo Sales is the author, most recently, of Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno"
Thursday, January 04, 2024
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Wednesday, December 27, 2023
Tuesday, December 26, 2023
Apple’s Newest Headache: An App That Upended Its Control Over Messaging
Apple’s Newest Headache: An App That Upended Its Control Over Messaging
“Beeper Mini, which offers iPhone messaging on Android phones, has grown fast and its duel with the tech giant has gotten the attention of antitrust regulators.
For years, Ben Black’s phone annoyed his family. It was the only Android device in a family message group with eight iPhones. Because of him, videos and photos would arrive in low resolution and there would be green bubbles of text amid bubbles of blue.
But a new app called Beeper Mini gave him the ability to change that.
Mr. Black, 25, used the app to create an account for Apple’s messaging service, iMessage, with his Google Pixel phone number. For the first time, every message the family exchanged had a blue bubble and members were able to use perks like emojis and animations.
Since it was introduced on Dec. 5, Beeper Mini has quickly become a headache and potential antitrust problem for Apple. It has poked a hole in Apple’s messaging system, while critics say it has demonstrated how Apple bullies potential competitors.
Apple was caught by surprise when Beeper Mini gave Android devices access to its modern, iPhone-only service. Less than a week after Beeper Mini’s launch, Apple blocked the app by changing its iMessage system. It said the app created a security and privacy risk.
Apple’s reaction set off a game of Whac-a-Mole, with Beeper Mini finding alternative ways to operate and Apple finding new ways to block the app in response.
The duel has raised questions in Washington about whether Apple has used its market dominance over iMessage to block competition and force consumers to spend more on iPhones than lower-priced alternatives.
The Justice Department has taken interest in the case. Beeper Mini met with the department’s antitrust lawyers on Dec. 12, two people familiar with the meeting said. Eric Migicovsky, a co-founder of the app’s parent company, Beeper, declined to comment on the meeting, but the department is in the middle of a four-year-old investigation into Apple’s anticompetitive behavior.
The Federal Trade Commission said in a blog post on Thursday that it would scrutinize “dominant” players that “use privacy and security as a justification to disallow interoperability” between services. The post did not name any companies.
The battle also caught the attention of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. The committee’s leadership — Senators Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah — wrote a letter to the Justice Department expressing concern that Apple was snuffing out competition.
Apple declined to comment on the letter.
The questions coming from Washington cut to the heart of today’s smartphone competition. Rival smartphone makers credit iMessage with helping Apple expand its smartphone market share in the United States to more than 50 percent of smartphones sold, up from 41 percent in 2018, according to Counterpoint Research, a technology firm.
Messaging has been a key part of Apple’s strategy to sell more iPhones. For years, it has made exchanges between iPhones and Android devices as basic as the texts between decades-old flip phones. Texts between iPhone users appear in blue and can be tapped to give a thumbs up, but texts with Android users appear in green and have no simple perks.
Android companies have tried to fight back. An Android smartphone maker, Nothing, has collaborated with an app called Sunbird to offer iMessage. Google, which has developed the Android operating system, has pressured Apple to adopt a technology called rich communication services, which would make it possible to send high-resolution video and images between competing smartphones.
But their efforts have not made much of a dent. Last month, Apple said it would adopt the technology in the coming year. The move means Android users will enjoy benefits like sharing higher-resolution videos but be stuck with the green bubbles for text messages, which have become stigmatized and associated with less wealth.
“Everyone is watching to see what kind of response Apple is going to have to Beeper Mini,” said Cory Doctorow, a special adviser to the digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation who has written a book about interoperability across different technologies. “We can’t tell how worried they are internally, but their response could have a huge impact on how messaging works.”
Protecting iMessage is a decade-old strategy at Apple. In 2013, Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software, opposed making iMessage workable on competitors’ devices because it would “remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” according to emails released during the company’s courtroom fight with Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite.
Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has resisted calls to change that position. He told an iPhone owner at a conference last year that the solution to green text messages was to buy iPhones for friends and family members.
Beeper brought a different approach to messaging. Mr. Migicovsky created the company in 2020 to build a single messaging app that could send texts across multiple services, including WhatsApp and Signal.
Mr. Migicovsky managed to integrate most messaging services, except iMessage. Unlike its peers, Apple did not offer a web app, making it difficult to connect with its service. The only way Beeper could integrate iMessage was to route messages through Mac computers and then to an iPhone. The process delayed messages and made them less secure.
As Beeper struggled with iMessage, a teenager in Bethlehem, Pa., found an alternative solution. James Gill, a 16-year-old computer hobbyist, made it his personal goal to figure out how iMessage worked. He used software to decrypt his iMessages and determined that Apple used its push notification system — the same one that delivers news alerts — to ferry messages between devices.
“It wasn’t genius insight,” said Mr. Gill, a junior at Saucon Valley High School. “I was just poking at it for a long time.”
In June, Mr. Gill published his findings on GitHub, a software platform where programmers share code. When Mr. Migicovsky saw the post, he thought it could help Beeper solve its iMessage problem. He offered Mr. Gill a job making $100 an hour, a major increase from the $11 an hour the high schooler was making as a cashier at McDonald’s.
The job has been more involved than Mr. Migicovsky or Mr. Gill expected. Since Beeper Mini’s release this month, Apple has changed iMessage about three times, Mr. Migicovsky said.
Each change by Apple required an adjustment by Beeper. Its latest solution involves routing registration information to Beeper Mini users through their personal Mac computers.
“To block it entirely, they’ll have to come up with a way to require an iPhone serial number,” Mr. Gill said. “Beeper will still come up with a workaround.”
An Apple spokeswoman said it would continue to update iMessage because it could not verify that Beeper kept its messages encrypted. “These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks,” she said in a statement.
Mr. Migicovsky disagrees. Instead of allowing Android customers to send encrypted messages to iPhone customers, he said, Apple is trying to force them to exchange unencrypted text messages. He has posted Beeper’s software code on the web and encouraged Apple and cybersecurity experts to review it.
Matthew Green, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said Apple had some legitimate security concerns and warned that an extended fight between the two companies could potentially introduce vulnerabilities that criminals could exploit.
“A world where Apple works with third-party clients in a supported way is a good one,” Mr. Green said. “A world where Beeper and Apple try to fight each other in a tit-for-tat arms race is a bad one.”
In an attempt to end the standoff, Mr. Migicovsky said, he emailed Mr. Cook, but Apple’s chief has not responded.
“This wasn’t our intention,” Mr. Migicovsky said. “We’re trying to make it work, within our control, for the good of the chat world.”
Dec. 22, 2023
:An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a computer hobbyist in Bethlehem, Pa., who determined how iMessage worked. He is James Gill, not McGill.
Dec. 25, 2023
:An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Google’s relationship to Android. Google acquired Android in 2005 and has since developed it; it did not create Android.
Tripp Mickle reports on Apple and Silicon Valley for The Times and is based in San Francisco. His focus on Apple includes product launches, manufacturing issues and political challenges. He also writes about trends across the tech industry, including layoffs, generative A.I. and robot taxis.“