Today marks the 50th anniversary of Jaws , Steven Spielberg's blockbuster horror movie based on the bestselling novel by Peter Benchley. We're marking the occasion with a tribute to this classic film and its enduring impact on the popular perception of sharks, shark conservation efforts, and our culture at large.

(Many spoilers below.)

Jaws tells the story of Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), the new police chief for Amity Island, a New England beach town and prime summer tourist attraction. But that thriving industry is threatened by a series of shark attacks, although the local mayor, Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), initially dismisses the possibility, ridiculing the findings of visiting marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss). The attacks keep escalating and the body count grows, until the town hires a grizzled shark hunter named Quint (Robert Shaw) to hunt down and kill the great white shark, with the help of Brody and Hooper.

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Large-scale attacks designed to bring down Internet services by sending them more traffic than they can process keep getting bigger, with the largest one yet, measured at 7.3 terabits per second, being reported Friday by Internet security and performance provider Cloudflare.

The 7.3Tbps attack amounted to 37.4 terabytes of junk traffic that hit the target in just 45 seconds. That's an almost comprehensible amount of data, equivalent to more than 9,300 full-length HD movies or 7,500 hours of HD streaming content in well under a minute.

Indiscriminate target bombing

Cloudflare said the attackers “carpet bombed” an average of nearly 22,000 destination ports of a single IP address belonging to the target, identified only as a Cloudflare customer. A total of 34,500 ports were targeted, indicating the thoroughness and well-engineered nature of the attack.

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On Thursday, Microsoft's Azure Quantum group announced that it has settled on a plan for getting error correction on quantum computers. While the company pursues its own hardware efforts , the Azure team is a platform provider that currently gives access to several distinct types of hardware qubits. So it has chosen a scheme that is suitable for several different quantum computing technologies (notably excluding its own). The company estimates that the system it has settled on can take hardware qubits with an error rate of about 1 in 1,000 and use them to build logical qubits where errors are instead 1 in 1 million.

While it's describing the scheme in terms of mathematical proofs and simulations, it hasn't shown that it works using actual hardware yet. But one of its partners, Atom Computing, is accompanying the announcement with a description of how its machine is capable of performing all the operations that will be needed.

Arbitrary connections

There are similarities and differences between what the company is talking about today and IBM's recent update of its roadmap , which described another path to error-resistant quantum computing. In IBM's case, it makes both the software stack that will perform the error correction and the hardware needed to implement it. It uses chip-based hardware, with the connections among qubits mediated by wiring that's laid out when the chip is fabricated. Since error correction schemes require a very specific layout of connections among qubits, once IBM decides on a quantum error correction scheme, it can design chips with the wiring needed to implement that scheme.

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MIT graduate student Alex Kachkine once spent nine months meticulously restoring a damaged baroque Italian painting, which left him plenty of time to wonder if technology could speed things up. Last week, MIT News announced his solution: a technique that uses AI-generated polymer films to physically restore damaged paintings in hours rather than months. The research appears in Nature.

Kachkine's method works by printing a transparent "mask" containing thousands of precisely color-matched regions that conservators can apply directly to an original artwork. Unlike traditional restoration, which permanently alters the painting, these masks can reportedly be removed whenever needed. So it's a reversible process that does not permanently change a painting.

"Because there's a digital record of what mask was used, in 100 years, the next time someone is working with this, they'll have an extremely clear understanding of what was done to the painting," Kachkine told MIT News. "And that's never really been possible in conservation before."

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About two months after receiving a donated kidney, a 61-year-old man ended up back in the hospital. He was tired, nauseous, and vomiting. He was also excessively thirsty and producing too much urine. Over the next 10 days, things only got worse. The oxygen levels in his blood began to fall. His lungs filled with fluid. He kept vomiting. He couldn't eat. Doctors inserted a feeding tube. His oxygen levels and blood pressure kept falling. He was admitted to the intensive care unit and put on mechanical ventilation. Still, things kept getting worse.

At that point, he was transferred to the ICU of Massachusetts General Hospital, where he had received the transplant. He was in acute respiratory failure and shock.

In a case report in this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine , doctors at Mass General explained how they determined what was wrong with the man. Their first steps were collecting more information about the man's symptoms from his wife, reviewing his family medical history, and contacting the regional organ-procurement organization that provided the kidney.

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The original Pac-Man is unquestionably a video game classic, well deserving of its position in the inaugural class of the Strong Museum of Play's World Video Game Hall of Fame . But playing the unmodified 1980 release these days can feel a little slow-paced and repetitive, given advancements in game design and taste in the intervening decades.

So when I noticed a game called Pac-Man Superfast sitting under a "YouTube Playables" heading on Google's popular video site the other day, my first thought was "Wait, how fast is 'superfast' exactly?" My second thought was, "Wait, what the heck is YouTube Playables?"

You'd be forgiven for not knowing about YouTube Playables. Few seemed to note its official announcement last year as a collection of free-to-play web games built for the web using standard rendering APIs . The seeming competitor to Netflix's mobile gaming offerings is still described in an official FAQ as "an experimental feature rolled out to select users in eligible countries/regions," which doesn't make this post-Stadia gaming effort seem like a huge priority for Google.

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Welcome to Edition 7.49 of the Rocket Report! You may have noticed we are a little late with the report this week, and that is due to the Juneteenth holiday celebrated in the United States on Thursday. But that hasn't stopped a torrent of big news this week, from exploding Starships to significant reuse milestones being reached in Asia.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Honda stamps passport to the skies with a hopper . An experimental reusable rocket developed by the research and development arm of Honda Motor Company flew to an altitude of nearly 900 feet (275 meters) Tuesday, then landed with pinpoint precision at the carmaker's test facility in northern Japan, Ars reports . Honda's hopper is the first prototype rocket outside of the United States and China to complete a flight of this kind, demonstrating vertical takeoff and vertical landing technology that could underpin the development of a reusable launch vehicle.

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Amazon Prime Video subscribers aren’t the only streaming customers being subjected to longer commercial breaks lately. Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) Max has increased the amount of commercials it shows to US subscribers from approximately four minutes per hour to about six minutes per hour.

A US support page for Max currently says that subscribers to Max with ads “can expect about 6 minutes of ads per hour.” But PCWorld noticed this week that this differs from what Max used to claim, which as recently as February was “about 4 minutes” of ads an hour, per the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine . Some of Max’s geographies have smaller ad loads. For example, WBD's support page for Saint Kitts and Nevis says Max ad subscribers should expect about four minutes of ads hourly.

A 50 percent increase in the duration of commercials that US subscribers see puts Max’s ad load on par with that of Prime Video, which AdWeek reported last week also increased its ad load from four minutes per hour to six minutes per hour. For comparison, Netflix shows four to five minutes of ads per hour, according to earlier PC World reporting, and Peacock shows to five to seven minutes of ads hourly, per The Streamable .

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Anyone whose phone number is just one digit off from a popular restaurant or community resource has long borne the burden of either screening or redirecting misdials. But now, AI chatbots could exacerbate this inconvenience by accidentally giving out private numbers when users ask for businesses' contact information.

Apparently, the AI helper that Meta created for WhatsApp may even be trained to tell white lies when users try to correct the dissemination of WhatsApp user numbers.

According to The Guardian , a record shop worker in the United Kingdom, Barry Smethurst, was attempting to ask WhatsApp's AI helper for a contact number for TransPennine Express after his morning train never showed up.

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