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It started, like so many overwrought home optimization projects, during the pandemic. My wife and I, like many people stuck inside, were ordering takeout more frequently. We wanted to support local restaurants, reduce the dish load, and live a little. It became clear early on that app-based delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats were not the best way to support local businesses. If a restaurant had its own ordering site or a preferred service, we wanted to use that—or...

about 9 hours ago

Ars Technica - All content

It's been a wild year in tech thanks to the intersection between humans and artificial intelligence. 2024 brought a parade of AI oddities, mishaps, and wacky moments that inspired odd behavior from both machines and man. From AI-generated rat genitals to search engines telling people to eat rocks, this year proved that AI has been having a weird impact on the world. Why the weirdness? If we had to guess, it may be due to the novelty of it all....

about 9 hours ago

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Hey, look at that! Another year has flown by, and I suspect many people would say "good riddance" to 2024. The 2020s have been quite the decade so far. No matter what insanity has transpired by a particular December 31, the following year has shown up and promptly said, "Hold my beer." The biggest news at Ars in 2024 was our first site redesign in nearly a decade. We're proud of Ars 9.0 (we're up to 9.0.3 now), and we...

1 day ago

Ars Technica - All content

Everyone has their favorite film that serves as alternative Christmas movie fare, with Die Hard (1988) and Lethal Weapon (1987) typically topping the list—at least when all you want for Christmas is buddy-cop banter, car chases, shootouts, and glorious explosions. (Massive gratuitous property damage is a given.) I love me some Lethal Weapon but it's high time to give some holiday love to another great action flick set during the Christmas season: The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), starring Geena Davis...

2 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

Editor's note: Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything major, please note this list does include a few specific references to several of the listed shows that some might consider spoiler-y. This was another good year for television, with established favorites sharing space on our list with some intriguing new shows. Really, 2024 had a little of everything, from wacky crime capers (Bad Monkey) and Satanic Panic (Hysteria) to dystopian video game adaptations (Fallout) and sweeping historical...

2 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

If you've been too busy fixing your video drivers to take part in this year's Ars Technica Charity Drive sweepstakes, don't worry. You still have time to donate to a good cause and get a chance to win your share of over $4,000 worth of swag (no purchase necessary to win). In the first week or so of the drive, hundreds of readers have contributed well over $16,000 to either the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Child's Play as part of...

3 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

At this point, any serious retro gamer knows that a bulky cathode ray tube (CRT) TV provides the most authentic, lag-free experience for game consoles that predate the era of flat-panel HDTVs (i.e,. before the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era). But modern gamers used to massive flat panel HD displays might balk at the display size of the most common CRTs, which tend to average in the 20- to 30-inch range (depending on the era they were made). For those who...

3 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

For $2,100, you could buy over a dozen upper-quality mechanical keyboards. Alternatively, you could buy just one mechanical keyboard kit. Costing the same as a desktop computer, The Icebreaker keyboard commands one of the highest price tags you'll see for a keyboard, and that's more due to its appearance than its capabilities. The Icebreaker, spotted by Tom's Hardware, became available for preorder on Thursday. The prohibitively priced peripheral is the primary product from Serene Industries, which founder Denis Agarkov describes...

3 days ago

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Flu season is ramping up across the US, but Louisiana—the state that has reportedly barred its health department from promoting flu shots, as well as COVID-19 and mpox vaccines—is leading the country with an early and strong surge. Louisiana's flu activity has reached the "Very High" category set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the latest data. The 13-category scale is based on the percentage of doctor's visits that were for influenza-like illnesses (ILIs) in the...

3 days ago

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Health care company Ascension lost sensitive data for nearly 5.6 million individuals in a cyberattack that was attributed to a notorious ransomware gang, according to documents filed with the attorney general of Maine. Ascension owns 140 hospitals and scores of assisted living facilities. In May, the organization was hit with an attack that caused mass disruptions as staff was forced to move to manual processes that caused errors, delayed or lost lab results, and diversions of ambulances to other hospitals....

3 days ago

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Director Denis Villeneuve's stunning two-part film adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune has received many well-deserved accolades—with Dune: Part 2 being crowned Ars Technica's top movie of 2024. The films also spawned a lavish HBO spinoff TV series, Dune: Prophecy, just renewed for a second season right before a momentous season finale. (Some spoilers below for S1 of Dune: Prophecy, but no major plot reveals.) Dune: Prophecy is a prequel series inspired by the novel Sisterhood of Dune, written by Brian...

3 days ago

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Under Joe Biden's direction, the US Trade Representative (USTR) launched a probe Monday into China's plans to globally dominate markets for legacy chips—alleging that China's unfair trade practices threaten US national security and could thwart US efforts to build up a domestic semiconductor supply chain. Unlike the most advanced chips used to power artificial intelligence that are currently in short supply, these legacy chips rely on older manufacturing processes and are more ubiquitous in mass-market products. They're used in tech...

3 days ago

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Beleaguered automaker Nissan is going to throw its lot in with Honda. The two Japanese OEMs want to merge by 2026, creating the world's third-largest car company in the process. In fact, earlier this year the two signed memorandums of understanding to create a strategic partnership focused on software and electrification. Now, the changing business environment calls for deeper integration, they say. "Today marks a pivotal moment as we begin discussions on business integration that has the potential to shape...

3 days ago

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Although the details remain in flux, the transition team reviewing NASA and its activities has begun to draft potential executive orders for changes to space policy under the Trump Administration. Sources familiar with the five people on the team, who have spent the last six weeks assessing the space agency and its exploration plans, were careful to note that such teams are advisory in nature. They do not formally set policy nor is their work always indicative of the direction...

3 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

Editor's note: Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything too major, please note this list does include a few specific references to several of the listed films that some might consider spoiler-y. This was the year that Marvel Studios hit the pause button on its deluge of blockbuster superhero movies, after rather saturating the market in recent years. It proved to be a smart move: the only Marvel theatrical release was the R-rated Deadpool & Wolverine, a...

3 days ago

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A2RL provided flights from San Francisco to Tokyo and accommodation so Ars could attend its race. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. TOKYO—Racing is hard. It's hard on the teams, it's hard on the owner's bank account, it's hard on the cars, and it's especially hard on the drivers. Driving at the edge for a few hours in a vehicle cockpit that's only slightly wider than your frame can take a toll. The A2RL (Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League)...

4 days ago

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When we introduced last year's annual list of the best games in this space, we focused on how COVID delays led to a 2023 packed with excellent big-name blockbusters and intriguing indies that seemed to come out of nowhere. The resulting flood of great titles made it difficult to winnow the year's best down to our traditional list of 20 titles. In 2024 we had something close to the opposite problem. While there were definitely a few standout titles that...

4 days ago

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Charlotte, a green sea turtle, was hit by a boat back in 2008. This left it with an affliction colloquially referred to as the “bubble butt,” a kind of floating syndrome that makes it impossible for a turtle to dive. Most sea turtles suffering from issues like this simply die at sea, since the condition leaves them stranded at the surface where they can’t forage, sleep, and avoid predators like sharks. But fate had other plans for Charlotte. Charlotte didn’t...

5 days ago

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On May 2, 2008, the Chaitén volcano in Chile awoke with unexpected fury after more than 9,000 years of dormancy. The eruption blasted rocks and ash a dozen miles into the air, and then heavy rainfall swept the fallen debris up in immense mudflows. A river of rubble carved a destructive path through the nearby town of Chaitén before surging into the sea. The town, practically split in two by the torrent that cut through its middle, was evacuated as...

5 days ago

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Over the past 12 business days, OpenAI has announced a new product or demoed an AI feature every weekday, calling the PR event "12 days of OpenAI." We've covered some of the major announcements, but we thought a look at each announcement might be useful for people seeking a comprehensive look at each day's developments. The timing and rapid pace of these announcements—particularly in light of Google's competing releases—illustrates the intensifying competition in AI development. What might normally have been...

6 days ago

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At their best, "remastered" video games keep terrific older titles viable on new generations of hardware and for new generations of fans. At their worst, they can feel like a cash-in. So it was with some trepidation that I recently fired up the "remastered" Horizon: Zero Dawn, a game which won me over years ago with its PS4 version due to the simple fact that it was ONE OF THE BEST VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME and featured ONE OF...

6 days ago

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Welcome to Edition 7.24 of the Rocket Report! This is the last Rocket Report of the year, and what a year it's been. So far, there have been 244 rocket launches to successfully reach orbit this year, a record for annual launch activity. And there are still a couple of weeks to go before the calendar turns to 2025. Time is running out for Blue Origin to launch its first heavy-lift New Glenn rocket this year, but if it flies...

6 days ago

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On Friday, during Day 12 of its "12 days of OpenAI," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced its latest AI "reasoning" models, o3 and o3-mini, which build upon the o1 models launched earlier this year. The company is not releasing them yet but will make these models available for public safety testing and research access today. The models use what OpenAI calls "private chain of thought," where the model pauses to examine its internal dialog and plan ahead before responding, which...

6 days ago

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Earlier this month, startup Embodied announced that it is going out of business and taking its Moxie robot with it. The $800 robots, aimed at providing emotional support for kids ages 5 to 10, would soon be bricked, the company said, because they can’t perform their core features without the cloud. Following customer backlash, Embodied is trying to create a way for the robots to live an open sourced second life. Embodied CEO Paolo Pirjanian shared a document via a...

6 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

Craig Wright, the man who claims he invented bitcoin and has been filing lawsuits asserting intellectual property rights, was sentenced to a year in prison yesterday for committing contempt of court. The sentence is suspended and can be enforced if Wright continues violating court rulings—but he may be able to avoid imprisonment by staying away from countries that have extradition agreements with the UK. Wright defied an order to attend a court hearing in person this week and said he...

6 days ago

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If you want to watch the next two FIFA Women’s World Cups in the US, you’ll need a Netflix subscription. FIFA confirmed the news today, marking an unexpected change for the sports event, which has historically played on free-to-air broadcast channels. The shift to a streaming platform inevitably makes it more costly and hurts viewer accessibility, while likely injecting FIFA with a lot of cash. Netflix and FIFA haven’t said how much Netflix is paying for exclusive airing rights. But...

6 days ago

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On Wednesday, Elevation Lab announced TimeCapsule, a new $20 battery case purported to extend Apple AirTag battery life from one year to 10 years. The product replaces the standard CR2032 coin cell battery in the Bluetooth-based location tracker with two AA batteries to provide extended power capacity. The TimeCapsule case requires users to remove their AirTag's original back plate and battery, then place the Apple device onto contact points inside the waterproof enclosure. The company recommends using Energizer Ultimate Lithium...

6 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

Google will soon take more steps to make AI a part of search, exposing more users to its Gemini agent, according to recent reports and app teardowns. "AI Mode," shown at the top left of the web results page and inside the Google app, will provide an interface similar to a Gemini AI chat, according to The Information. This tracks with a finding from Android Authority earlier this month, which noted a dedicated "AI mode" button inside an early beta of...

6 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

Yesterday, US Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Joshua Hawley (R-MO) sent letters to the heads of Ford, General Motors, and Tesla, as well as the US heads of Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Stellantis, Subaru, Toyota, and Volkswagen, excoriating them over their opposition to the right-to-repair movement. "We need to hit the brakes on automakers stealing your data and undermining your right-to-repair," said Senator Merkley in a statement to Ars. "Time and again, these billionaire corporations have a double...

6 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

Louisiana's health department has been barred from advertising or promoting vaccines for flu, COVID-19, and mpox, according to reporting by NPR, KFF Health News, and New Orleans Public Radio WWNO. Their investigative report—based on interviews with multiple health department employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation—revealed that employees were told of the startling policy change in meetings in October and November and that the policy would be implemented quietly and not put into writing. Ars...

6 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

Over the past month, we've seen a rapid cadence of notable AI-related announcements and releases from both Google and OpenAI, and it's been making the AI community's head spin. It has also poured fuel on the fire of the OpenAI-Google rivalry, an accelerating game of one-upmanship taking place unusually close to the Christmas holiday. "How are people surviving with the firehose of AI updates that are coming out," wrote one user on X last Friday, which is still a hotbed...

6 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

In the hit virtual reality game Gorilla Tag, you swing your arms to pull your primate character around—clambering through virtual worlds, climbing up trees and, above all, trying to avoid an infectious mob of other gamers. If you’re caught, you join the horde. However, some kids playing the game claim to have found a way to cheat and easily “tag” opponents. Over the past year, teenagers have produced video tutorials showing how to side-load a virtual private network (VPN) onto...

6 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

Large language models represent text using tokens, each of which is a few characters. Short words are represented by a single token (like "the" or "it"), whereas larger words may be represented by several tokens (GPT-4o represents "indivisible" with "ind," "iv," and "isible"). When OpenAI released ChatGPT two years ago, it had a memory—known as a context window—of just 8,192 tokens. That works out to roughly 6,000 words of text. This meant that if you fed it more than about...

6 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

Almost no one ever writes about the Parker Solar Probe anymore. Sure, the spacecraft got some attention when it launched.  It is, after all, the fastest moving object that humans have ever built. At its maximum speed, goosed by the gravitational pull of the Sun, the probe reaches a velocity of 430,000 miles per hour, or more than one-sixth of 1 percent the speed of light. That kind of speed would get you from New York City to Tokyo in...

7 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

It's been a really busy month for Google as it apparently endeavors to outshine OpenAI with a blitz of AI releases. On Thursday, Google dropped its latest party trick: Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental, which is a new AI model that uses runtime "reasoning" techniques similar to OpenAI's o1 to achieve "deeper thinking" on problems fed into it. The experimental model builds on Google's newly released Gemini 2.0 Flash and runs on its AI Studio platform, but early tests conducted...

7 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

Home Assistant announced today the availability of the Voice Preview Edition, its own design of a living-room-friendly box to offer voice assistance with home automation. Having used it for a few weeks, it seems like a great start, at least for those comfortable with digging into the settings. That's why Home Assistant is calling it a "Preview Edition." Using its privacy-minded Nabu Casa cloud—or your own capable computer—to handle the processing, the Voice Preview Edition (VPE) ($60/60 euros, available today)...

7 days ago

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Another company has publicly cut ties with Broadcom's VMware. This time, it's Ingram Micro, one of the world's biggest IT distributors. The announcement comes as Broadcom eyes services as a key part of maintaining VMware business in 2025. But even as some customers are reducing reliance on VMware, its trillion-dollar owner is laughing all the way to the bank. IT distributor severs VMware ties Ingram is reducing its Broadcom-related business to "limited engagement with VMware in select regions," a spokesperson...

7 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

On Thursday, a large group of university and private industry researchers unveiled Genesis, a new open source computer simulation system that lets robots practice tasks in simulated reality 430,000 times faster than in the real world. Researchers can also use an AI agent to generate 3D physics simulations from text prompts. The accelerated simulation means a neural network for piloting robots can spend the virtual equivalent of decades learning to pick up objects, walk, or manipulate tools during just hours...

7 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

For months, popular fighting game YouTubers have been under attack. Even the seemingly most cautious among them have been duped by sophisticated phishing attacks that hack their accounts to push cryptocurrency scams by convincingly appearing to offer legitimate sponsorships from established brands. These scams often start with bad actors seemingly taking over verified accounts on X (formerly Twitter) with substantial followings and then using them to impersonate marketing managers at real brands who can be easily found on LinkedIn. The...

7 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

When the impossibly punctuated S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl released on November 20, after many delays (that included the Russian invasion of the developer's native Ukraine), it seemed like it could have used even more delays. Stalker 2 had big performance issues and game-breaking bugs, along with balance and difficulty spike issues. Some things that seem "wrong" in the game are just going to stay that way. The first-person survival/shooter series has always had a certain wobbly, wild feel to...

7 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily banned drones over parts of New Jersey yesterday and said "the United States government may use deadly force against" airborne aircraft "if it is determined that the aircraft poses an imminent security threat." The FAA issued 22 orders imposing "temporary flight restrictions for special security reasons" until January 17, 2025. "At the request of federal security partners, the FAA published 22 Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs) prohibiting drone flights over critical New Jersey infrastructure," an FAA...

7 days ago

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Intel's Core Ultra 200S desktop processors—the company's biggest overhaul of its desktop platform since 2021—consume less power and run a lot cooler than the company's 13th- and 14th-generation Core CPUs. However, early reviewers found that the processors sometimes struggled to match, let alone beat, those older desktop CPUs in some tasks. This was particularly true for games, and people who build their own gaming PCs are a key constituency for these kinds of brand-new high-end chips. Intel quickly blamed optimization...

7 days ago

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Audi provided flights from Washington, DC, to San Francisco and accommodation so Ars could drive the Q6 and SQ6. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. HEALDSBURG, Calif.—Earlier this summer, Ars got its first drive of Audi's new Q6 e-tron on some very wet roads in Spain. Then, we were driving pre-production Q6s in Euro-spec. Now, the electric SUV is on sale in the US, with more power in the base model and six months more refinement for its software....

7 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

In a widely anticipated test, Blue Origin may ignite the seven main engines on its New Glenn rocket as soon as Thursday at Launch Complex-36 in Florida. This is the final test the company must complete before verifying the massive rocket is ready for its debut flight, and it is the most dynamic. This will be the first time Blue Origin has ever test-fired the BE-7 engines altogether, in a final rehearsal before launch. The company did not respond immediately...

7 days ago

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The publisher of a high-profile, now-corrected study on black plastics has been removed from a critical index of academic journals after failing to meet quality criteria, according to a report by Retraction Watch. On December 16, Clarivate—a scholarly publication analytics company—removed the journal Chemosphere from its platform, the Web of Science, which is a key index for academic journals. The indexing platform tracks citations and calculates journal "impact factors," a proxy for relevance in its field. It's a critical metric...

7 days ago

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The AI-generated video scene has been hopping this year (or twirling wildly, as the case may be). This past week alone we've seen releases or announcements of OpenAI's Sora, Pika AI's Pika 2, Google's Veo 2, and Minimax's video-01-live. It's frankly hard to keep up, and even tougher to test them all. But recently, we put a new open-weights AI video synthesis model, Tencent's HunyuanVideo, to the test—and it's surprisingly capable for being a "free" model. Unlike the aforementioned models,...

7 days ago

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David Corenswet stars in James Gunn's Superman reboot. The Internet has been buzzing the last few days about James Gunn's Superman reboot slated for release next year. The studio released a "motion poster" earlier this week set to a moody cover of John Williams' "Superman March," as well as a teaser for a teaser for the film. That teaser just dropped. Clearly, given all the buildup, what director James Gunn wants for Christmas is for everyone to get excited over...

7 days ago

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Amazon workers at seven warehouses walked out Thursday morning, launching a strike ahead of the holidays after Amazon failed to meet a bargaining deadline set by the Teamsters union representing the workers. In a press release, Teamsters declared it "the largest strike against Amazon in US history." Teamsters general president, Sean O'Brien, warned shoppers of potential delays, saying "you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed." "We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our...

7 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

When the Sun is blazing and the wind is blowing, Germany’s solar and wind power plants swing into high gear. For nine days in July 2023, renewables produced more than 70 percent of the electricity generated in the country; there are times when wind turbines even need to be turned off to avoid overloading the grid. But on other days, clouds mute solar energy down to a flicker and wind turbines languish. For nearly a week in January 2023, renewable...

7 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

Amazon announced in September that it will require workers to be in the office five days a week starting in January. Employee backlash ensued, not just because return-to-office (RTO) mandates can be unpopular but also because Amazon is using some of the worst strategies for issuing RTO mandates. Ahead of the mandate, Amazon had been letting many employees work remotely for two days a week, with a smaller number of workers being totally remote. But despite saying that employees would...

8 days ago

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An AT&T customer who switched to the company's FirstNet service for first responders got quite the shock when his bill came in at $6,223.60, instead of the roughly $260 that his four-line plan previously cost each month. The Texas man described his experience in a now-deleted Reddit post three days ago, saying he hadn't been able to get the obviously incorrect bill reversed despite calling AT&T and going to an AT&T store in Dallas. The case drew plenty of attention...

8 days ago

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The Louisiana resident infected with H5N1 bird flu is hospitalized in critical condition and suffering from severe respiratory symptoms, the Louisiana health department revealed Wednesday. The health department had reported the presumptive positive case on Friday and noted the person was hospitalized, as Ars reported. But a spokesperson had, at the time, declined to provide Ars with the patient's condition or further details, citing patient confidentiality and an ongoing public health investigation. This morning, the Centers for Disease Control and...

8 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

In theory, it ought to be as good a time as ever to be a gamer on the iPhone. Classic console emulators have rolled out to the platform for the first time, and they work great. There are strong libraries of non-skeezy mobile games on Apple Arcade and Netflix Games, streaming via Xbox and PlayStation services is continuing apace, and there are even a few AAA console games now running natively on the platform, like Assassin's Creed and Resident Evil...

8 days ago

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Arm and Qualcomm's dispute over Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips is continuing in court this week, with executives from each company taking the stand and attempting to downplay the accusations from the other side. If you haven't been following along, the crux of the issue is Qualcomm's purchase of a chip design firm called Nuvia in 2021. Nuvia was originally founded by ex-Apple chip designers to create high-performance Arm chips for servers, but Qualcomm took an interest in Nuvia's work...

8 days ago

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On Wednesday, the Supreme Court confirmed it would review whether a federal law that could ban or force a sale of TikTok is unconstitutional. The announcement came just one day after TikTok and its owner ByteDance petitioned SCOTUS for a temporary injunction to halt the ban until the high court could consider what TikTok claimed is "a massive and unprecedented speech restriction" ahead of a change in US presidential administrations. “We’re pleased with today’s Supreme Court order," TikTok said in...

8 days ago

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On Wednesday, OpenAI launched a 1-800-CHATGPT (1-800-242-8478) telephone number that anyone in the US can call to talk to ChatGPT via voice chat for up to 15 minutes for free. The company also says that people outside the US can send text messages to the same number for free using WhatsApp. Upon calling, users hear a voice say, "Hello again, it's ChatGPT, an AI assistant. Our conversation may be reviewed for safety. How can I help you?" Callers can ask...

8 days ago

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US government authorities are reportedly investigating whether to ban TP-Link wireless routers, which have been targeted in some high-profile attacks linked to the Chinese government. TP-Link, which was founded in China in 1996 and said it relocated its headquarters to the US in October this year, has racked up significant market share in US homes and businesses. US authorities are investigating whether TP-Link "poses a national-security risk and are considering banning the devices," The Wall Street Journal reported today. The...

8 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

Z-Wave can be a very robust automation network, free from the complications and fragility of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Just how robust, you ask? More than a mile long, under the right circumstances, as hardware soon to hit the market promises. All claims of radio distances should be taken with amounts of salt unhealthy for consumption. What can be accomplished across an empty field is not the same as what can be done through buildings, interference, and scatter. But Z-Wave Long...

8 days ago

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When Sony revealed the PlayStation 5 Pro a few months ago, some wondered just how many people would be willing to spend $700 for a marginal upgrade to the already quite powerful graphical performance of the PS5. Now, initial sales reports suggest there's still a substantial portion of the console market that's willing to shell out serious money for top-of-the-line console graphics. Circana analyst Matt Piscatella shared on Bluesky this morning that the PS5 Pro accounted for a full 19...

8 days ago

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Today, the US Environmental Protection Agency granted a pair of waivers to California, allowing the Golden State to continue regulating vehicle-caused air pollution within its borders. The first is for the California Air Resources Board's Advanced Clean Cars II regulations, which apply to light- and medium-duty vehicles like passenger cars, SUVs, and smaller trucks. The second waiver is for regulations that control the amount of nitrogen oxides (NOx) that can be emitted by heavy-duty vehicles as well as off-road vehicles....

8 days ago

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General Motors might have scaled back its electric vehicle ambitions in favor of more hybrids, but it's still accelerating its plans to build out EV charging infrastructure. Today, together with ChargePoint, GM revealed that it will deploy "hundreds" of new DC fast chargers under the GM Energy brand in 2025. "The transition to electric mobility continues to be driven by leaders such as General Motors offering innovative EVs and committing to make chargers as ubiquitous as possible," said Rick Wilmer,...

8 days ago

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If you've been too busy fixing your video drivers to take part in this year's Ars Technica Charity Drive sweepstakes, don't worry. You still have time to donate to a good cause and get a chance to win your share of over $4,000 worth of swag (no purchase necessary to win). In the first week or so of the drive, nearly 180 readers have contributed almost $16,000 to either the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Child's Play as part of the...

8 days ago

Ars Technica - All content

For every illegal drug, there is a combination of emojis that dealers and consumers use to evade detection on social media and messaging platforms. Snowflakes, snowfall, and snowmen symbolize cocaine. Love hearts, lightning bolts, and pill capsules mean MDMA, or molly. Brown hearts and dragons represent heroin. Grapes and baby bottles are the calling cards for codeine-containing cough syrup, or lean. The humble maple leaf, meanwhile, is the universal symbol for all drugs. The proliferation of open drug dealing on...

8 days ago

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In a wide-ranging interview with a Russian television station, the chief executive of Russia's main space corporation said the country is now planning to participate in the International Space Station project all the way to NASA's desired goal of 2030. "In coordination with our American colleagues, we plan to de-orbit the station sometime around the beginning of 2030," the country's chief space official, Yuri Borisov, said during the interview. "The final scenario will probably be specified after the transition to...

8 days ago

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They seem so sweet and innocent but these squirrels are also opportunistic killers. We think of squirrels as adorably harmless creatures, admiring their bushy tails and twitchy little noses and the way they cram their cheeks with nuts or seeds to bring back to their nests for later. But the rodents turn out to be a bit more bloodthirsty than we thought. According to a new paper published in the Journal of Ethology, California ground squirrels have been caught in...

9 days ago

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A new investigation from The New York Times suggests that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has not been reporting his travel activities and other information to the Department of Defense as required by his top-secret clearance. According to the newspaper, concerns about Musk's reporting practices have led to reviews by three different bodies within the military; the Air Force, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and the Defense Department Office of Inspector General. However, none...

9 days ago

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Teen drug use continued to fall in 2024, extending a dramatic decline spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic that experts expected would reverse now that the acute phase of the global crisis is well over. But, according to data released Tuesday, the number of eighth, 10th, and 12th graders who collectively abstained from the use of alcohol, marijuana, or nicotine hit a new high this year. Use of illicit drugs also fell on the whole and use of non-heroin narcotics (Vicodin,...

9 days ago

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When Nvidia replaced the longstanding GeForce Experience App with a new, unified Nvidia App last month, most GPU owners probably noted the refresh and rebranding with nothing more than bemusement (though the new lack of an account login requirement was a nice improvement). Now, testing shows that running the new app with default settings can lead to some significant frame rate dips on many high-end games, even when the app's advanced AI features aren't being actively used. Tom's Hardware noted...

9 days ago

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How do you fit 32 terabytes of storage into a hard drive? With a HAMR. Seagate has been experimenting with heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, since at least 2002. The firm has occasionally popped up to offer a demonstration or make yet another "around the corner" pronouncement. The press has enjoyed myriad chances to celebrate the wordplay of Stanley Kirk Burrell, but new qualification from large-scale customers might mean HAMR drives will be actually available, to buy, as physical objects, for...

9 days ago

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Return-to-office (RTO) mandates have caused companies to lose some of their best workers, a study tracking over 3 million workers at 54 "high-tech and financial" firms at the S&P 500 index has found. These companies also have greater challenges finding new talent, the report concluded. The paper, Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain [PDF], comes from researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as Baylor University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. The...

9 days ago

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Application developers who access OpenAI through its long-running API will now have access to the company's latest full o1 model, rather than the months-old o1-preview. The upgrade is one of a number of new features being rolled out to OpenAI's developer customers starting today. OpenAI announced during a livestream today that the new o1 model would bring back many of the "core features you've been missing" from the API during o1-preview. This includes the ability to use developer messages to...

9 days ago

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Rumors have suggested that Nvidia will be taking the wraps off of some next-generation RTX 50-series graphics cards at CES in January. And as we get closer to that date, Nvidia's partners and some of the PC makers have begun to inadvertently leak details of the cards. According to recent leaks from both Zotac and Acer, it looks like Nvidia is planning to announce four new GPUs next month, all at the high end of its lineup: The RTX 5090,...

9 days ago

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The Supreme Court yesterday rejected the broadband industry's challenge to a New York law that requires Internet providers to offer $15- or $20-per-month service to people with low incomes. In August, six trade groups representing the cable, telecom, mobile, and satellite industries filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court ruling that upheld the state law. But the Supreme Court won't take up the case. The high court denied the telecom groups' petition without comment in...

9 days ago

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TikTok has asked the Supreme Court to step in before it's forced to shut down the app in the US next month. In a petition requesting a temporary injunction, TikTok prompted the Supreme Court to block the ban and grant a review that TikTok believes will result in a verdict that the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act is unconstitutional. And if the court cannot take up this review before TikTok's suggested January 6 deadline, the court should...

9 days ago

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The fact that Honda was working on a new Prelude coupe was not entirely secret—not after the automaker unveiled a show car at this year's Long Beach Grand Prix. This morning, the Japanese automaker confirmed that the new Prelude will go on sale here in the US late in 2025. "The return of the Honda Prelude as a hybrid-electric sports model demonstrates our continued commitment to offer a variety of exhilarating products to meet the needs of our customers," said...

9 days ago

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President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, wants the FCC to crack down on news broadcasters that he perceives as being unfair to Trump or Republicans in general. Carr's stated goals would appear to mark a major shift in the FCC's approach to broadcasters. Carr's predecessors, including outgoing Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and Republican Ajit Pai, who served in the first Trump administration, both rejected Trump's calls to punish news networks for alleged bias. Carr has...

9 days ago

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The first batch of Internet satellites for China's Guowang megaconstellation launched Monday on the country's heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket. The satellites are the first of up to 13,000 spacecraft a consortium of Chinese companies plans to build and launch over the next decade. The Guowang fleet will beam low-latency high-speed Internet signals in an architecture similar to SpaceX's Starlink network, although Chinese officials haven't laid out any specifics, such as target markets, service specifications, or user terminals. The Long...

10 days ago

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Matthew Decker is the former chief information officer for Penn State University’s Applied Research Laboratory. As of October, he's also $250,000 richer. In his Penn State position, Decker was well placed to see that the university was not implementing all of the cybersecurity controls that were required by its various contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense (DoD). It did not, for instance, use an external cloud services provider that met the DoD's security guidelines, and it fudged some...

10 days ago

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Editors of the environmental chemistry journal Chemosphere have posted an eye-catching correction to a study reporting toxic flame retardants from electronics wind up in some household products made of black plastic, including kitchen utensils. The study sparked a flurry of media reports a few weeks ago that urgently implored people to ditch their kitchen spatulas and spoons. Wirecutter even offered a buying guide for what to replace them with. The correction, posted Sunday, will likely take some heat off the...

10 days ago

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When Sony launched the PlayStation Portable almost exactly 20 years ago, the value proposition was right there in the name: a PlayStation, but portable. But now modders have flipped that, introducing a PSP that can be played on a TV, console-style, and they've dubbed it the PS Placeable. It's a non-destructive mod to PSP-2000 and PSP-3000 systems that allows you to play PSP games on the TV off the original UMD physical media format, with a wireless controller like the...

10 days ago

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Hackers trying to extort the Rhode Island government infiltrated the state's public benefits system, causing state officials to shut down online services that let residents apply for Medicaid and other assistance programs. "As part of this investigation today, we discovered that within the Rhode Island Bridges system, a cybercriminal had installed dangerous malware that constituted an urgent threat," Governor Dan McKee said at a Friday night press conference, according to The Providence Journal. "That is why tonight we have shut...

10 days ago

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Just as Amazon warehouse workers are threatening to launch the "first large-scale" unfair labor practices strike at Amazon in US history, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) released a report accusing Amazon of operating "uniquely dangerous warehouses" that allegedly put profits over worker safety. As chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Sanders started investigating Amazon in June 2023. His goal was "to uncover why Amazon’s injury rates far exceed those of its competitors and to understand what...

10 days ago

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T-Mobile today said it opened registration for the "T-Mobile Starlink" beta service that will enable text messaging via satellites in dead zones not covered by cell towers. T-Mobile's announcement said the service using Starlink's low-Earth orbit satellites will "provid[e] coverage for the 500,000 square miles of land in the United States not covered by earth-bound cell towers." Starlink parent SpaceX has so far launched over 300 satellites with direct-to-cell capabilities, T-Mobile noted. A registration page says, "We expect the beta...

10 days ago

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The incoming Trump administration has even more plans to delay electric vehicle adoption than previously thought. According to Reuters, which has seen transition team documents, the Trump team wants to abolish EV subsidies, claw back federal funding meant for EV charging infrastructure, block EV battery imports on national security grounds, and prevent the federal government and the US military from purchasing more EVs. During the campaign, candidate Trump made repeated references to ending a supposed EV mandate. In fact, policies...

10 days ago

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Medical accounts of red wine headaches go back to Roman times, but the experience is likely as old as winemaking—something like 10,000 years. As chemists specializing in winemaking, we wanted to try to figure out the source of these headaches. Many components of red wine have been accused of causing this misery—sulfites, biogenic amines, and tannins are the most popular. Our research suggests the most likely culprit is one you may not have considered. The common suspects Sulfites have been...

10 days ago

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If you're looking to buy a TV in 2025, you may be disappointed by the types of advancements TV brands will be prioritizing in the new year. While there's an audience of enthusiasts interested in developments in tech like OLED, QDEL, and Micro LED, plus other features like transparency and improved audio, that doesn't appear to be what the industry is focused on. Today's TV selection has a serious dependency on advertisements and user tracking. In 2025, we expect competition...

10 days ago

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A person in Louisiana is hospitalized with H5N1 bird flu after having contact with sick and dying birds suspected of carrying the virus, state health officials announced Friday. It is the first human H5N1 case detected in Louisiana. For now, the case is considered a "presumptive" positive until testing is confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health officials say that the risk to the public is low but caution people to stay away from any sick or...

13 days ago

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A sophisticated and ongoing supply-chain attack operating for the past year has been stealing sensitive login credentials from both malicious and benevolent security personnel by infecting them with Trojanized versions of open source software from GitHub and NPM, researchers said. The campaign, first reported three weeks ago by security firm Checkmarx and again on Friday by Datadog Security Labs, uses multiple avenues to infect the devices of researchers in security and other technical fields. One is through packages that have...

13 days ago

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Werner Herzog has made more than 60 films over his illustrious career. His documentaries alone span an impressive topical range, from the life and death of bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man) to people who choose to live and work in Antarctica (the Oscar-nominated Encounters at the End of the World) or a haunting exploration of the oldest human paintings in France's Chauvet Cave (Cave of Forgotten Dreams). His latest offering, Theater of Thought, tackles what might be his most...

13 days ago

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Elon Musk has at least one more battle to wage against Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, who will be leaving the agency when President-elect Trump takes over in January. Musk yesterday posted a copy of a letter sent to Gensler by Musk's attorney, Alex Spiro. The letter dated December 12 says the SEC issued a settlement demand in its investigation into whether Musk violated federal securities laws in connection with 2022 purchases of Twitter stock, and that the...

13 days ago

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A bitcoin investor who went to increasingly great lengths to hide $1 million in cryptocurrency gains on his tax returns was sentenced to two years in prison on Thursday. It seems that not even his most "sophisticated" tactics—including using mixers, managing multiple wallets, and setting up in-person meetings to swap bitcoins for cash—kept the feds from tracing crypto trades that he believed were untraceable. The Austin, Texas, man, Frank Richard Ahlgren III, started buying up bitcoins in 2011. In 2015,...

13 days ago

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Formula 1’s recent popularity still feels a little strange to longtime fans of the sport, particularly in the US, where it had been so niche for so long. But the past five years have seen F1 rise meteorically, and a new, much younger fanbase infused with enthusiasm for the cutting-edge race cars and the athletes who pilot them has emerged. F1 Arcade capitalizes on that popularity, combining food and drinks—including Lewis Hamilton's agave tipple—with dozens and dozens of race simulators that...

13 days ago

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ORLANDO, Florida—Earlier this year, officials at US Space Command released a list of priorities and needs, and among the routine recitation of things like cyber defense, communications, and surveillance was a relatively new term: "integrated space fires." This is a new phrase in the esoteric terminology the military uses to describe its activities. Essentially, "fires" are offensive or defensive actions against an adversary. The Army defines fires as "the use of weapon systems to create specific lethal and nonlethal effects...

13 days ago

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On Wednesday, a video from OpenAI's newly launched Sora AI video generator went viral on social media, featuring a gymnast who sprouts extra limbs and briefly loses her head during what appears to be an Olympic-style floor routine. As it turns out, the nonsensical synthesis errors in the video—what we like to call "jabberwockies"—hint at technical details about how AI video generators work and how they might get better in the future. But before we dig into the details, let's...

13 days ago

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The gap of time between how long Americans live and how much of that time is spent in good health only grew wider in the last two decades, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open. The study, which looked at global health data between 2000 and 2019—prior to the COVID-19 pandemic—found the US stood out for its years of suffering. By 2019, Americans had a gap between their lifespan and their healthspan of 12.4 years, the largest...

13 days ago

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The gap of time between how long Americans live and how much of that time is spent in good health only grew wider in the last two decades, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open. The study, which looked at global health data between 2000 and 2019—prior to the COVID-19 pandemic—found the US stood out for its years of suffering. By 2019, Americans had a gap between their lifespan and their healthspan of 12.4 years, the largest...

13 days ago

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Welcome to Edition 7.23 of the Rocket Report! We're closing in on the end of the year, with a little less than three weeks remaining in 2024. Can you believe it? I hardly can. The biggest question left in launch is whether Blue Origin will make its deadline for launching New Glenn by the end of this year. It's been a long-time goal of founder Jeff Bezos, but the clock is ticking. We wish them luck! As always, we welcome...

13 days ago

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Large language models have found great success so far by using their transformer architecture to effectively predict the next words (i.e., language tokens) needed to respond to queries. When it comes to complex reasoning tasks that require abstract logic, though, some researchers have found that interpreting everything through this kind of "language space" can start to cause some problems, even for modern "reasoning" models. Now, researchers are trying to work around these problems by crafting models that can work out potential logical solutions...

14 days ago

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Following a pair of lawsuits alleging that chatbots caused a teen boy's suicide, groomed a 9-year-old girl, and caused a vulnerable teen to self-harm, Character.AI (C.AI) has announced a separate model just for teens, ages 13 and up, that's supposed to make their experiences with bots safer. In a blog, C.AI said it took a month to develop the teen model, with the goal of guiding the existing model "away from certain responses or interactions, reducing the likelihood of users...

14 days ago

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Thousands of sites running WordPress remain unpatched against a critical security flaw in a widely used plugin that was being actively exploited in attacks that allow for unauthenticated execution of malicious code, security researchers said. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-11972, is found in Hunk Companion, a plugin that runs on 10,000 sites that use the WordPress content management system. The vulnerability, which carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10, was patched earlier this week. At the...

14 days ago