Over the years, hackers and modders at large have made it their mission to port classic first-person shooter Doom to practically anything with a display. Recently, though, coder Arin Sarkisan has taken the "Can it Run Doom?" idea in an unlikely direction: wireless earbuds that aren't designed to output graphics at all.

To be clear, this hack doesn't apply to any generic set of earbuds. The "Doombuds" project is designed specifically for the PineBuds Pro, which are unique in featuring completely open source firmware and a community-maintained SDK.

That means Sarkisan was able to code up a JavaScript interface that uses the earbuds' UART contact pads to send a heavily compressed MJPEG video stream to a web server (via a serial server). The 2.4 MB/s data stream from the UART connection can put out about 22 to 27 frames per second in this format, which is more than enough for a CPU that can only run the game at a maximum of 18 fps anyway.

Squeezing the entirety of Doom onto modern earbuds wasn't an easy task, either. The 4.2MB of game data won't quite fit on the PineBuds' 4MB of flash memory, for instance. That means the project needed to use a 1.7MB "squashware" build of Doom, which eliminates some animation frames and shortens some music tracks to make the game even more portable.

The earbuds also have just under 1MB of RAM, requiring the coding of a new version of the game that optimizes away many of the bits that usually fill up a full 4MB of RAM in the standard game. "Pre-generating lookup tables, making variables const, reading const variables from flash, disabling DOOM's caching system, removing unneeded variables... it all adds up," Sarkisan writes.

For those without their own PineBuds to test this wild idea, Sarkisan has set up an interactive Twitch stream that players can queue up to control for 45-second sessions via doombuds.com. It's a great little break-time diversion, especially for people ready to marvel that a set of $70 earbuds can now run a game that required a $1,000-plus computer tower a few decades ago.

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Love it or hate it, Tesla has been responsible for helping to shape the tastes of automotive consumers over the past decade-plus. Over-the-air updates that add more features, an all-touchscreen human-machine interface, large castings, and hands-free driver assists were all introduced or popularized by Tesla's electric vehicles, prompting other automakers to copy them, mostly in the hopes of seeing the same stratospheric gains in their stock prices. But starting on Valentine's Day, if you want your Tesla to steer itself, you'll have to pay a $99 monthly subscription fee.

Tesla currently offers a pair of so-called "level 2" partially automated driver assist systems. Autopilot is the older of these, combining Tesla's adaptive cruise control (Tesla calls this TACC) and lane-keeping assist (Tesla calls this Autosteer). FSD is the newer system, meant to be more capable and for use on surface streets and divided-lane highways. Although the company and Tesla CEO Elon Musk regularly tout these systems' capabilities, both still require the human driver to provide situational awareness.

But Autopilot has been under fire from regulators and the courts. Multiple wrongful death lawsuits are in the works, and after a high-profile loss resulting in a $329 million judgment against Tesla, expect many of these suits to be settled. Both the federal government and California have investigated whether Tesla misled customers, and in December, an administrative law judge ruled that Tesla indeed engaged in deceptive marketing by implying that its cars could drive themselves. The judge suspended Tesla's license to sell cars in California, a decision that the California Department of Motor Vehicles stayed for 60 days.

No Tesla sales in California

Tesla was told that if it couldn't resolve the deceptive marketing within those 60 days, the sales suspension would take effect. That would be bad for the automaker, as California is far and away its largest market in the US, albeit one that is shrinking each quarter. Having to suspend sales entirely in the state would be disastrous. Some had speculated that Tesla could change Autopilot's name to something less misleading, but the company chose a more drastic approach.

Now, if you want your new Tesla to steer itself—while you pay attention to the road—you will have to pay for FSD. Until the middle of February, that can be done for a one-time fee of $8,000. But starting on February 14, that option goes away, too, and the sole choice will be a $99/month FSD subscription.

But probably not for very long. Last night, Musk revealed on his social media platform that "the $99/month for supervised FSD will rise as FSD’s capabilities improve. The massive value jump is when you can be on your phone or sleeping for the entire ride (unsupervised FSD)."

The quest for recurring revenue streams is becoming something of a holy grail in the automotive industry as OEMs that previously treated their customers as a single sale now hope to make themselves more attractive to investors by encouraging customers to give them regular payouts.

This may have contributed to General Motors' decision to drop Apple CarPlay and Android Automotive. BMW has also experimented with subscription services. Tesla's stock price remains so high that such games are probably unnecessary here, but with falling profit margins, declining sales, and the loss of emissions credits to bolster the bottom line, one can see why regular cash infusions from Tesla drivers would be desirable.

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The British crown, as it turns out:

The British crown and the navy expanded and protected the trade in enslaved African people for hundreds of years, unprecedented research into the monarchy’s historical ties to slavery has found.

The Crown’s Silence, a book by the historian Brooke Newman, follows the Guardian’s 2023 Cost of the crown report, which explored the British monarchy’s hidden ties to transatlantic slavery.

The book reveals that by 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade in its empire, the British crown had become the world’s largest buyer of enslaved people, buying 13,000 men for the army for £900,000.

Buckingham Palace does not comment on books, but a source said King Charles, who has previously spoken of “personal sorrow” at the suffering caused by slavery, took the matter “profoundly seriously”.

Newman said she had started working on the book 10 years ago, having found “secret correspondence” detailing George IV’s fears of an uprising like the Haitian Revolution happening in Jamaica. She made the discovery while researching an earlier work about the Caribbean island, which was a British colony for more than 300 years.

Newman, who is an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the US, researched royal archives and manuscripts relating to the Royal Navy, colonial officers, government officials, the Royal African Company and the South Sea Company for The Crown’s Silence.

She said: “The crown used to trumpet their connections to the transatlantic slave trade. They put the royal brand on this practice and literally on people’s bodies.”

The post Who Bought Slaves? appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

On Thursday, Ilya Lichtenstein, who was at the center of a massive 2016 crypto heist worth billions at the time, wrote online that he is now out of prison and has changed his ways.

“Ten years ago, I decided that I would hack the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world,” Lichtenstein wrote on LinkedIn, detailing a time when his startup was barely making money and he decided to steal some instead.

“This was a terrible idea. It was the worst thing I had ever done,” he added. “It upended my life, the lives of people close to me, and affected thousands of users of the exchange. I know I disappointed a lot of people who believed in me and grossly misused my talents.”

In 2023, Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather Morgan, pleaded guilty to money laundering conspiracy in a wild 2016 scheme to steal 120,000 bitcoins (worth over $10 billion today) from Bitfinex, a cryptocurrency exchange. The pair were arrested at their Manhattan home in 2022.

Lichtenstein quickly flipped, helping the government recover the assets he had stolen and then helping the feds “on a variety of crypto cases.” He says that he enjoyed working with the government.

“When I was a black hat hacker, I was isolated and paranoid,” he wrote. “Working with the good guys, being part of a team solving a bigger problem felt surprisingly good. I realized that I could use my technical skills to make a difference.

Lichtenstein, who did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment, noted that he was sentenced to 60 months in prison and spent “nearly [four] years in some of the harshest jails in the country.” While in prison, Lichtenstein says that he spent as much time as he could in the prison library studying math books to engage his mind and distract himself from his surroundings.

The 38-year-old added that he was “released to home confinement earlier this month.”

Convicted hackers cooperating with federal authorities or turning their lives around is not without precedent.

One notable example is the late Kevin Mitnick, who was convicted of multiple phone and computer crime cases in the 1980s and 1990s. Mitnick eventually started his own security consulting company and became a penetration tester and public speaker for many years before his death in 2023.

“Now begins the real challenge of regaining the community’s trust,” Lichtenstein concluded, noting that he wants to work in cybersecurity.

“I think like an adversary,” he said. “I’ve been an adversary. Now I can use those same skills to stop the next billion-dollar hack.”

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The project developer for one of the Internet’s most popular networking tools is scrapping its vulnerability reward program after being overrun by a spike in the submission of low-quality reports, much of it AI-generated slop.

“We are just a small single open source project with a small number of active maintainers,” Daniel Stenberg, the founder and lead developer of the open source app cURL, said Thursday. “It is not in our power to change how all these people and their slop machines work. We need to make moves to ensure our survival and intact mental health.”

Manufacturing bogus bugs

His comments came as cURL users complained that the move was treating the symptoms caused by AI slop without addressing the cause. The users said they were concerned the move would eliminate a key means for ensuring and maintaining the security of the tool. Stenberg largely agreed, but indicated his team had little choice.

In a separate post on Thursday, Stenberg wrote: “We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports.” An update to cURL’s official GitHub account made the termination, which takes effect at the end of this month, official.

cURL was first released three decades ago, under the name httpget and later urlget. It has since become an indispensable tool among admins, researchers, and security professionals, among others, for a wide range of tasks, including file transfers, troubleshooting buggy web software, and automating tasks. cURL is integrated into default versions of Windows, macOS, and most distributions of Linux.

As such a widely used tool for interacting with vast amounts of data online, security is paramount. Like many other software makers, cURL project members have relied on private bug reports submitted by outside researchers. To provide an incentive and to reward high-quality submissions, the project members have paid cash bounties in return for reports of high-severity vulnerabilities.

Last May, Stenberg said the number of low-quality AI-generated reports was putting a strain on the cURL security team and was likely to metastasize, hampering other software developers.

“AI slop is overwhelming maintainers *today* and it won’t stop at curl but only starts there,” he said at the time.

The lead developer has also posted a page listing some of the specious reports submitted in recent months. In response to one such report, a cURL project member wrote: “I think you're a victim of LLM hallucination.” The member continued:

The text has some similarities to the (bogus) CVE-2020-19909 and other reports. There are plenty of clues that Bard has manufactured bogus information: that code snippet of "curl_easy_setopt" doesn't match the actual signature of the function (and wouldn't even compile), a changelog that don't match reality, and more indications that this is completely bogus. I'm curious to hear what your exploit does against a made-up vulnerability. Care to share it?

After the bug reporter complained and reiterated the risk posed by the non-existent vulnerability, Stenberg jumped in and wrote: “You were fooled by an AI into believing that. In what way did we not meet our end of the deal?

Stenberg isn’t critical of AI-assisted bug reports in all cases. In September, he publicly applauded a researcher for sending a “massive list” of bugs that were found using a set of AI-assisted tools. The reports had resulted in 22 bug fixes at the time.

In an interview, Stenberg said that the reporter, Joshua Rogers, mostly used AI-powered code analyzer called ZeroPath.

"A clever person using a powerful tool," Stenberg wrote. "I believe most of the worst reports we get are from people just asking an AI bot without caring or understanding much about what it reports."

Unfortunately, such cases seem to be the exception. AI slop has already flooded music-streaming services with so many songs—often misattributed to real artists—that the platforms are slowly becoming unusable for music discovery. cURL’s move may be an early indication that something similar is happening to bug bounty programs.

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The Helix Nebula is one of the most well-known and commonly photographed planetary nebulae because it resembles the "Eye of Sauron." It is also one of the closest bright nebulae to Earth, located approximately 655 light-years from our Solar System.

You may not know what this particular nebula looks like when reading its name, but the Hubble Space Telescope has taken some iconic images of it over the years. And almost certainly, you'll recognize a photograph of the Helix Nebula, shown below.

Like many objects in astronomy, planetary nebulae have a confusing name, since they are formed not by planets but by stars like our own Sun, though a little larger. Near the end of their lives, these stars shed large amounts of gas in an expanding shell that, however briefly in cosmological time, put on a grand show.

Now the James Webb Space Telescope has turned its sights on the Helix Nebula, and, oh my, does it have a story to tell. NASA released the new images of the nebula on Tuesday.

In this image, there are vibrant pillars of gas along the inner region of the nebula's expanding shell of gas. According to the space agency, this is what we're seeing:

A blazing white dwarf, the leftover core of the dying star, lies right at the heart of the nebula, out of the frame of the Webb image. Its intense radiation lights up the surrounding gas, creating a rainbow of features: hot ionized gas closest to the white dwarf, cooler molecular hydrogen farther out, and protective pockets where more complex molecules can begin to form within dust clouds. This interaction is vital, as it’s the raw material from which new planets may one day form in other star systems.

In Webb’s image of the Helix Nebula, color represents the temperature and chemistry. A touch of a blue hue marks the hottest gas in this field, energized by intense ultraviolet light from the white dwarf. Farther out, the gas cools into the yellow regions where hydrogen atoms join into molecules. At the outer edges, the reddish tones trace the coolest material, where gas begins to thin and dust can take shape. Together, the colors show the star’s final breath transforming into the raw ingredients for new worlds, adding to the wealth of knowledge gained from Webb about the origin of planets.

It is, in a word, phenomenal.

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