Day: February 16, 2022

The New York Times’ acquisition of Wordle has already stirred up a few controversies, from players’ streaks being wiped to removing offensive words from the valid word list. Today we have confirmation that it’s not just the valid word list that the NYT has changed–it’s the solutions as well.

Wordle 241, which is the puzzle for February 15th, has a different answer depending on whether you’re playing on the live NYT site, or on a downloaded or cached version of the original powerlanguage.co.uk site. The NYT hasn’t fully changed the solution list, it’s just removed a few select answers, which means players who are sticking to the original version of Wordle will now be one day behind everyone else’s solutions.

The following will contain spoilers for the original, cached version of Wordle:

The word that was intended for Wordle 241 was “AGORA,” a word originating from Ancient Greek that refers to a city’s central public space. That word has been removed from the NYT version of the game, and instead the original solution for Wordle 242 has been moved up a day. Contrary to claims that the publication would make Wordle harder, the NYT has said in a statement that it has chosen to remove obscure words from the answer list, as well as “insensitive or offensive” words.

“AGORA” was removed from the solution list due to its obscurity, along with future solutions “PUPAL” and the British-spelled “FIBRE.” The NYT has also removed future answers “SLAVE,” “LYNCH,” and “WENCH” under its “insensitive or offensive” rule.

For players who continue to use the original version of Wordle, whether by having a browser tab open to the original site, or by having the webpage downloaded, the diverging solution list constitutes a problem.

Part of the appeal of Wordle has been that everyone around the world shares the same daily answer. The social appeal of the game starts to wane when people have different solutions to the same puzzles, which can lead to arguments and accusations of cheating, as NBA star Karl-Anthony Towns recently found out.

For what its worth, those with the old word list can update quite easily if they choose to do so. The word list will update automatically if players refresh their browser window, or they can move to a live version of the site rather than a downloaded one. This solution isn’t all that useful to those who are making the choice to play the pre-NYT version of the game, however.

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

Cryptocurrency was everywhere this week, funding anti-Russian resistance groups and hacktivists in Ukraine and being seized by the US Department of Justice in a massive trove of laundered bitcoin worth $3.6 billion. If you’re just wading into crypto yourself and need a place to store your digital dough, we’ve got a guide for picking and setting up a cryptocurrency wallet.

Microsoft took a huge security step this week by announcing that it will disable its often-abused macros feature by default in Microsoft Excel and Word files downloaded from the internet. Health privacy researchers published findings about medical and genetic-testing companies that left details about their third-party ad tracking and lead generation methods out of their privacy policies. And pro-democracy activists, many of whom are in hiding after Myanmar’s 2021 coup, fear that their phone records—and by extension the identities of their loved ones and resistance networks—could be at risk of falling into the junta’s hands.

And if you’re getting freaked out about the possibility of being tracked using Apple AirTags, here’s our guide to scoping things out and protecting yourself.

And there’s more. We’ve rounded up all the news here that we didn’t break or cover in depth this week. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Partially redacted documents released on Thursday night by the US intelligence community reveal a secret CIA surveillance dragnet that has collected some Americans’ data under a program that did not have congressional approval or oversight. Senate Intelligence Committee members Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) sent a letter to the director of national intelligence and CIA director on April 13, 2021, demanding that information about the program be declassified. “Among the many details the public deserves to know are the nature of the CIA’s relationship with its sources and the legal framework for the collection,” the senators wrote in their letter.

The program was authorized under the 1981 presidential executive order “United States Intelligence Activities.” Referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the senators said in a statement on Thursday that “FISA gets all the attention because of the periodic congressional reauthorizations and the release of DOJ, ODNI, and FISA Court documents” and the data-collection programs Congress authorizes under the law. “But what these documents demonstrate is that many of the same concerns that Americans have about their privacy and civil liberties also apply to how the CIA collects and handles information under executive order and outside the FISA law.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a familiar bill, the EARN IT Act, on Thursday. The legislation aims to increase tech company responsibility for child sexual abuse materials posted or distributed through their services. Technologists and privacy advocates have repeatedly and urgently warned that EARN IT would have significant cybersecurity and human rights implications by disincentivizing tech companies from implementing end-to-end encryption schemes. The legislation would force online services to “earn” some of the Section 230 protections that currently shield them from liability for material posted by their users. The bill was first introduced in 2020 and also advanced out of committee then, but it did not receive a floor vote before the end of the congressional session.

In a report this week, Google’s Project Zero bug hunting team said that companies are getting faster at patching after the group discloses a vulnerability to them. Project Zero is known for setting deadlines for developers to release fixes for their products, anywhere from seven to 90 days depending on the severity of the bug. Once the deadline expires, sometimes with an additional grace period of up to 14 days, the group publicly discloses the flaws. Project Zero said this week that it took companies an average of 52 days to fix vulnerabilities in 2021, down from an average of about 80 days in 2018. Additionally, it has become very rare for organizations to miss a Project Zero time limit. Only one bug exceeded its deadline in 2021, though the group noted that 14 percent of bugs do use the grace period. The group emphasized that the findings may not be generalizable across the industry, because Project Zero is well known and has a particular reputation for being strict and effective at getting bugs fixed. Companies may be more likely to take swift action when Project Zero shows up. Nonetheless, the trends are promising and show that there is more mainstream understanding of the vulnerability disclosure process.

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As climate change continues to progress, so will its effects. In a new collaborative report, NASA and other U.S. government agencies have found that sea levels will rise up to a foot by 2050. 

The report, which comes from a sea level rise task force that includes a number of government agencies including NASA as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has concluded that sea levels along U.S. coastlines will, on average, rise between 10 and 12 inches (25 to 30 centimeters) above today’s levels by 2050. This means that, in just 30 years, ocean height could rise as much as it has risen in the past 100 years. 

This new report includes “the most up-to-date, long term sea level rise projections for all of the United States and Territories,” NOAA Administrator Rich Spinrad said during a news conference Tuesday (Feb. 15), adding that “what we’re reporting out today is historic.”

“The science is very clear,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during the same news conference, “and that means it’s past time to take action to address this climate crisis.”

Nelson didn’t skirt around the problem and its source, specifying that “the science of the last 20 years has settled the question of human behavior that is driving this climate change.”

Related: Climate change is making Earth dimmer

“It’s important to underscore that this report supports previous studies and confirms what we’ve known all along,” Nelson said. “Sea levels are continuing to rise at a very alarming rate, and it’s endangering communities around the world.”

“Climate change is causing sea levels to rise, ocean surface temperatures to warm and moisture to build in the atmosphere. And all of these facts are leading to more intense and destructive storms,” Nelson added. 

This report is the update to a 2017 report and it forecasts sea levels all the way to 2150. However, this is the first time that the report has projected sea levels just 30 years into the future; earlier reports have only examined the effects over longer timescales. 

“Agencies at the federal, state and local levels use these reports to inform their plans on anticipating and coping with the effects of sea level rise,” a statement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California reads.

Nelson shared how NASA is working on issues related to climate change.

“NASA is steadfast in our commitment to protecting our home planet by expanding our monitoring capabilities and continuing to ensure our climate data is not only accessible but understandable,” Nelson said in the statement.

“Over the next decade, NASA is going to put up five great observatories … to give us precision in our understanding of what’s happening to the atmosphere, to the ice, to the landmasses and to the waters,” Nelson said.

Nelson highlighted the agency’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography, or SWOT, mission that will “for the first time give us the elevation of our lakes, rivers and streams, in addition to what we know on the elevation of the seas.” NASA is currently planning to launch SWOT in November, using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. 

He added that the other agencies on the task force, as well as the president’s administration, are serious about continuing to collect important data and working to combat the effects of climate change.

“This administration, the Biden-Harris administration’s response to climate change, it matches this threat,” Nelson said, adding that this moment requires “all hands on deck.”

Spinrad echoed Nelson’s “all hands on deck” sentiment, stating that “This report is a wake up call for the United States, but it’s a wake-up call that comes with a silver lining. It provides us with information needed to act now to best position ourselves for the future. It’s going to take all of us — government, businesses, academia, community citizens — to make a difference in the future.”

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Before he was outed as a criminal, few were seen as more respectable or smarter than Bernie Madoff. His is a quintessentially American rags-t0-riches story— except for the part with all the crimes.

The son of a plumber, Madoff founded an investment company at 22, partly with money he’d saved from working as a lifeguard, and climbed the ladder of Wall Street until he was named chairman of the NASDAQ. For decades, rich people begged to be included among the select few he counted as clients, because he was such a genius, he could make money even when the market took a crap!

Except Madoff never invested his clients’ money. He put their deposits in an account, sent falsified returns, and paid any withdrawals with newer investors’ dough. It was an unimaginative, dull-as-dirt Ponzi scheme, notable mainly for its scale: At Madoff’s sentencing, Judge Denny Chin remarked that the accused’s crimes were literally “off the charts,” as federal sentencing guidelines for fraud top out at $400 million in losses. Madoff’s scheme was worth about $64.8 billion. Not bad for a plumber’s son, eh?

Clearview AI, the shady face recognition firm which claims to have landed contracts with federal, state, and local cops across the country, has landed a roughly $50,000 deal with the U.S. military for augmented reality glasses.

First flagged by Tech Inquiry’s Jack Poulson, Air Force procurement documents show that it awarded a $49,847 contract to Clearview AI for the purposes of “protecting airfields with augmented reality facial recognition; glasses.” The contract is designated as part of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, meaning that Clearview’s contract is to determine for the Air Force whether such applications are feasible.

The contract isn’t described further, but the most obvious possibility is that the Air Force wants to equip security personnel at its facilities with AR glasses that will enable them to verify on the fly whether someone is or isn’t authorized personnel. This theory dovetails with the way Clearview’s technology already works—users upload pictures into an app that is then compared against the company’s database of faces. Back in 2020, the New York Times reported that Clearview’s app contained code that would allow pairing with AR glasses, theoretically meaning users could walk around identifying anyone whose image had already been obtained by Clearview’s data-scraping operations.

Clearview has been the subject of massive controversy pretty much everywhere it pops up, and for good reason. The Huffington Post reported that its founder, Hoan Ton-That, and other individuals that worked for the company have “deep, longstanding ties” to far-right extremists. Whether Clearview obtained the photos it uses to populate its databases and train its face recognition algorithms legally is also a matter of dispute. Ton-That has bragged that its databases have billions of photos scraped from the public web. While mass-downloading publicly accessible data is legal in the U.S., some states have biometrics privacy laws on the books—most notably Illinois, where Clearview is battling an ACLU-backed lawsuit claiming the company was legally required to obtain the consent of people entered into its database.

In other countries, Clearview has run into more stringent opposition. In May 2021, regulators in France, Austria, Italy, Greece, and the United Kingdom collectively accused it of violating European data privacy laws. Clearview exited Canada entirely in 2020 after two federal privacy investigations, and Canadian privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien said in February 2021 that Clearview’s technology broke laws requiring consent for collection of biometrics and constituted illegal mass surveillance. Canadian authorities demanded that Clearview delete images of its nationals from its database, with Australian regulators issuing similar demands later that year.

Ton-That insisted in an email statement to Gizmodo that the technology being tested with the Air Force does not include access to its troves of scraped images.

“We value the United States Air Force, and their position in defending the nation’s security and interests,” Ton-That wrote. “We continually research and develop new technologies, processes, and platforms to meet current and future security challenges, and look forward to any opportunities that would bring us together with the Air Force in that realm.”

“This particular technology remains in R&D, with the end goal being to leverage emerging capabilities to improve overall security,” he added. “The implementation is designed around a specific and controlled dataset, rather than Clearview AI’s 10B image dataset. Once realized, we believe this technology will be an excellent fit for numerous security situations.”

Face recognition is already being used by cops and the feds. Clearview, for example, has signed contracts with the FBI and U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement. That’s despite current face recognition tech’s reputation for being unreliable, easily abused for racial profiling, and generally invasive. The idea that police could get their hands on goggles that would allow them to run everyone they see against a face recognition database, for example, is pretty dystopian.

The U.S. military has expressed interest in AR for obvious reasons—the many ways in which digital overlays could enhance the productivity, efficiency, and lethality of troops—but the technology is in its nascent stages. The Air Force is currently testing the use of AR goggles to assist in aircraft maintenance training and operations, and it has done proof of concept work related to weapons training and virtual command centers. Last year, the U.S. Army delayed a $22 billion program to equip soldiers with AR goggles, the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), saying it wouldn’t be ready for deployment until at least fall 2022.

IVAS is based on Microsoft HoloLens 2 and has been tested since 2019. According to Task and Purpose, it can be used for training, live language translation, face recognition, navigation, providing situational awareness, and projecting locations or objectives. It also contains the kind of high-resolution thermal and night sensors that previously would have been separate gear. Bloomberg reported earlier this month, however, that internal Pentagon assessments have deemed it as nowhere near ready for use in actual combat and only 5,000 goggles have actually been ordered yet. Testing to determine whether soldiers can rely on IVAS in combat scenarios won’t be carried out until May.

An Air Force Research Lab public affairs director didn’t immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment, we’ll update this piece when they do.