Peter's Quasi-Daily Blah-g

Valve has updated its old Steam Family Sharing program and replaced it with Steam Families, a new and improved way to share games across multiple accounts that is available now.

Steam Families allows up to six users to essentially link their accounts into one, with each user gaining access to all of the games on each of the linked accounts. Whereas the old Steam Family Sharing system (first introduced in 2013) required the owner of a game to be offline in order for those sharing the account to play, that isn’t the case with Steam Families. Multiple users can access a family member’s game library and play different games at the same time.

Each user will have their own save files and Steam achievements. However, in order to play the same game together, multiple users on the Steam Family will need a copy. Once two copies of the same game are accessible via the shared accounts, any two members of the Steam Family will be able to play.

Those looking to create a Steam Family will want to put some thought into it. While it is possible to leave a Steam family once you’ve joined, doing so comes with a one-year wait time before you are able to join another Steam Family, as well as a one-year wait before that slot in the Steam Family you left can be filled. The owner of the Steam Family can also kick out unwanted family members. If someone playing a game on your account gets banned, the owner of the game will be banned as well, so make sure everyone in your Steam Family is playing nice.

The new and improved Steam Families also comes with a plethora of Parental Control features, allowing parents to block off access to specific games, restrict certain content, set playtime limits, approve or deny requests from child accounts, and easily approve game purchases requested by child members.

To set up a Steam Family, find your Account Details on Steam, then click on the Family Management section. From there you can "Create a Family," invite members, and choose whether added members will be Adult or Child accounts. Invited users will then need to accept the Steam Family invitation to join.

Valve notes that not all games will support Family Sharing, as developers can opt out of the program. Some games, like those that require subscriptions, can’t be shared between accounts.

"We want as many games as possible to be accessible via Family Sharing, but we realize some games might have special cases where this feature isn’t feasible or doesn’t give users a good experience," Valve writes in a blog post. "Developers who have these concerns can reach out to us via the partner support page to get help with options and solutions."

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For 15 days last December, a complex quantum operation took place deep under New York City. Photons of light streamed around an area stretching from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to Corona, Queens, forming a 21-mile-long (34-kilometer-long) quantum network beneath the metropolis.

Quantum hardware company Qunnect ran the experiment on its GothamQ testbed. The quantum network operated on existing optical fibers that make up some of New York’s telecommunications infrastructure. The key difference between traditional subterranean telecoms and the recent experiment is that, instead of ordinary photons traveling through the cables, the Qunnect team transmitted entangled, polarized photons—that is, photons in a quantum state. The team’s research is currently hosted on the preprint server arXiv.

“It’s always hard to explain what a next-generation infrastructure is going to do for you. Often the people inventing the infrastructure don’t know,” said Mehdi Namazi, a quantum physicist and the Chief Science Officer at Qunnect, in a video call with Gizmodo. “It’s very hard to say what will be the use case, because that’s like defining what would’ve been the application of the internet.”

Namazi said that much of the team’s work was “by far the state-of-the-art in quantum networking.” To run its quantum network, the team generated pairs of photons—particles of light—using a vapor cell of rubidium-87. The photon pairs were entangled, meaning that the properties of one of the photons was defined by the other, and vice versa. Entanglement is a quantum property; therefore, the team used photons as a quantum bit (or qubit) for communication. Qubits are the bedrock of quantum computers. Often made up of atoms in an array, the qubits are kept very cold so that they can enter a quantum state, which endows them with properties that make them useful for complex computations.

The recent project sent half a million photon pairs per second through the cable infrastructure, meaning 648 billion photon pairs were shot through the system over the course of the 15-day experiment. Previous experiments using similar infrastructure only achieved rates of about 10,000 to 20,000 photon pairs per second.

Unlike quantum computers, which need to be kept at supercooled temperatures to remain in a quantum state, photons can carry quantum information at ambient temperatures. Thanks to this unique property of light particles, the team was able to use existing, large-scale infrastructure under New York for their work instead of a smaller experiment in a carefully managed laboratory setting.

The network remained operational for 99.84% of the experiment’s duration, which merely ended because there were other fish to fry. In other words, the network showed no signs of losing its entangled state if the experiment were to continue.

Part of the team’s innovation was pausing the operation for very short spans of time (we’re talking milliseconds) to send pulses of classical light through the system as a reference to gauge the system and check for perturbations that could disrupt the quantum operation of the photons. Those interruptions—a process called time multiplexing—only took the operation offline for 0.16% of the 15-day experiment, leading to the previously noted 99.84% uptime.

“Our work paves the way for practical deployment of 24/7 entanglement-based networks with rates and fidelity adequate for many current and future use-cases,” the team wrote in its paper.

“Everything we’ve been trying to develop is around this idea of ‘is it practical?’,” Namazi said. “Can it practically distribute entanglement in a way that is so robust, stable, and high-quality that you can always be sure it’s useful in applications, whether it’s for cybersecurity or a larger vision of what the quantum internet could look like?”

The most immediate applications of the tech, he said, are in cybersecurity. “If you can use these to send your 0s and 1s, or use them as a way to create a key for your encryption, it’s much, much harder to hack them,” Namazi said. “If something happened to one of your photons, the other one immediately knows. And there’s nothing a hacker can do about that because there is no way to replicate this kind of connection.”

There’s still a long way to go towards practical applications, and even longer for still-abstract concepts like a quantum internet. Namazi said the photon transmission rate was “not 5G, nowhere close” but at least “10 times better than dial-up internet.”

Though many of the applications—indeed, some of the most far-reaching and significant implications of the work—are still beyond the horizon, the experiment is a great reminder of the science being done all around us. The next time you’re stuck on the subway, at least you’ll be able to ponder the remarkable physics happening, also underground, somewhere near you. Of course, the photons are getting to where they’re going way faster than you are.

Two Mars-bound smallsats that will fly on the highly anticipated debut of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket have arrived at their launch site in Florida.

The satellite duo, known as ESCAPADE ("Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers"), are set to launch atop New Glenn no earlier than Oct. 13 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. They’ll arrive in Mars orbit in September 2025, on a NASA mission to study how incoming charged particles from the sun interact with and alter the planet’s magnetic environment. 

The two coordinated robotic explorers could paint a more detailed picture of how Mars’ interaction with the solar wind influences the leaking of the planet’s thin atmosphere, and how its climate evolved over time to lose what scientists think was once a plentiful reserve of liquid water on the surface.

On Aug. 18, the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft arrived at the Astrotech Space Operations Facility in Titusville, Florida, to prepare for launch. At the facility, which is owned by Lockheed Martin, teams will check various aspects of the satellites in a dedicated cleanroom, including their electrical circuits and potential leaks in their tanks before carrying out the final assembly.

The spacecraft will be fueled next month, NASA said in a recent statement. 

Related: New Glenn: Blue Origin’s big new reusable rocket

"The successful delivery of the spacecraft marks a significant milestone and the culmination of over three years of dedicated teamwork from individuals across the project," ESCAPADE Principal Investigator Rob Lillis, of the University of California, Berkeley, said in the NASA statement. "Now, we’re thrilled to embark on this first step of our journey to Mars!"

The two small satellites were built by California-based Rocket Lab and UC Berkeley, which is leading the mission and has dubbed the satellites "Blue" and "Gold" after the school’s traditional colors. Each probe weighs under 198 pounds (90 kilograms) and carries three science instruments. The total cost for the mission is less than $80 million, according to the mission website. 

The value of the launch contract that NASA signed with Blue Origin is $20 million, SpaceNews reported.

ESCAPADE is among a wave of low-cost, high-risk NASA missions to other planets, which otherwise typically demand over a decade of development and exceed $1 billion in costs. "Sending two spacecraft to Mars for the total cost of $80 million is just unheard of, but current NASA leadership is taking the risk," Lillis said in a previous press release. "Instead of spending $800 million for a 95% chance of success, can we spend $80 million for an 80% chance? This is what NASA is trying to find out with these missions, and we are lucky to be one of the guinea pigs."

The satellites were initially scheduled to piggyback on the same SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket that would loft the Psyche asteroid mission in August 2022. They were removed, however, after delays to the Psyche mission resulted in a new trajectory that didn’t support dropping ESCAPADE off at Mars. (Psyche ended up launching successfully in October 2023.) The satellite duo then became the primary payload onboard Blue Origin’s first orbital rocket, New Glenn, which is a two-stage heavy-lift rocket named after NASA astronaut John Glenn, who in 1962 became the first American to circle Earth.

New Glenn is 322 feet (98 meters) tall, roughly the height of a 30-story building, and is capable of launching roughly 45 metric tons into low Earth orbit. Its maiden flight will come after more than a decade of development by Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and over three years later than the company hoped for.  

Once the ESCAPADE satellites reach Mars in September 2025, "the mission team will need several months to configure their orbits for science observations," NASA said in the recent news release. Their orbit will be adjusted over several months such that by early 2026 they’ll follow each other in a "string of pearls" formation, which will allow them to gather data on Mars’ rapidly changing response to the solar wind. 

They will later break into different orbits such that they can observe both the solar wind and Mars’ upper atmosphere in real time, according to the space agency. The science mission is designed to last 11 months in Mars orbit, until March 2027. 

Meanwhile, the New Glenn first stage is expected to return to Earth shortly after liftoff, demonstrating its reusability. Blue Origin has said that the first stage will operate like a commercial airliner but with cleaner fuel, leading to less waste and lower launch costs.

In recent weeks, portions of other New Glenn rockets scheduled for future flights have suffered damage, Bloomberg reported on Aug. 21. In one incident, the top of Blue Origin’s second New Glenn rocket crumpled "like a crushed Coke can," partly due to an error by factory workers who had moved the section into a chilled storage hangar but didn’t monitor the hardware afterward. In the second incident, a part of the third New Glenn rocket failed during stress testing and exploded inside a building.

No injuries were reported in either incident, according to Bloomberg, which first broke the news about the recent failures. The issues haven’t affected New Glenn’s planned debut launch in October, a Blue Origin spokesperson told GeekWire’s Alan Boyle.