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2026-09-03 17:08:29 UTC

Nvidia buys Hugging Face, the GitHub of AI, for $13 billion
Nvidia has agreed to buy AI model platform Hugging Face for $13 billion, in the latest step by the $5.4 trillion chip giant to use its financial might to accelerate the technology’s boom while exerting greater control over the industry.
Hugging Face, which only last year turned down a large investment from Nvidia at a $7 billion valuation to maintain its independence, serves as a repository for millions of models and data sets and has become a champion of “open” AI systems.
Nvidia said the goal of the deal was to speed up the spread of open models. Unlike proprietary models from labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the design of open-weight models is public and users can download, customize and run them on their own hardware.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/nvidia-buys-hugging-face-the-github-of-ai-for-13-billion/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/nvidia-buys-hugging-face-the-github-of-ai-for-13-billion/#comments
Hugging Face is like an ever-evolving warehouse of open AI models.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/nvidia-buys-hugging-face-the-github-of-ai-for-13-billion/

2026-08-27 22:16:41 UTC

Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says
xAI has now been accused of training Grok on child sex abuse materials (CSAM), as regulators and courts continue to probe [how far the problem goes,][1] and some [Grok users have been arrested][2].
In a [complaint][3] filed on Wednesday, a plaintiff known as Jane Doe explained that she was preschool-age in the early 2000s when adult men repeatedly raped her to create CSAM to sell to pedophiles online. Since then, Doe’s images have been hashed by groups like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (CCCP).
For her safety, Doe has opted to receive alerts from the US Department of Justice Victim Notification System any time she may be a victim in a new criminal investigation. Although she has received countless alerts, she was shocked when the CCCP notified her that it had identified AI-generated CSAM on xAI that depicted her. This re-traumatized Doe, whose complaint alleged that messages were found on online forums “between offenders chatting about creating AI generated CSAM of Plaintiff and other similarly situated known, legacy, victims of CSAM.”
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/elon-musks-xai-sued-for-turning-three-girls-real-photos-into-ai-csam/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/elon-musks-xai-is-trying-to-sue-its-way-out-of-a-grok-reckoning/
[3]: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Doe-v-X-Corp-Complaint-8-27-26.pdf
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/elon-musks-xai-used-child-porn-to-train-grok-models-lawsuit-says/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/elon-musks-xai-used-child-porn-to-train-grok-models-lawsuit-says/#comments
An inflatable effigy of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, protesting Musk's Grok AI, stands in Times Square in New York City.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/elon-musks-xai-used-child-porn-to-train-grok-models-lawsuit-says/

2026-08-27 22:16:36 UTC

Anthropic's new hardware standard lets AI agents control the physical world
For all the [interest in][1] and [uptake][2] of [agentic AI systems][3] over [the past year or so][4], the world of automated AI has thus far been primarily limited to text, images, code, and other data and actions that take place inside a computer. Anthropic is now aiming to change that somewhat with what it's calling [the Model Hardware Standard][5] (MHS), a set of standardized drivers designed to let AI agents easily interface with and control arbitrary devices.
For now, the "research preview" of the MHS effort is being sold mainly as a way to help scientists streamline the arduous process of creating the custom software integrations that are often needed to get disparate components of an experiment working in concert. MHS can provide a common interface and common format for data sharing between these devices, Anthropic says, allowing them to talk to each other across a network "without needing a bespoke 'translator' program in between." The standardized system could reduce weeks or months of exacting experimental setup down to "hours or minutes," Anthropic writes.
An Anthropic graphic illustrating how MHS serves as a "translation" layer between AI agents and multiple types of devices. Credit: [Anthropic][6]
In [a video posted alongside the announcement][7], Anthropic Technical Staffer Alek Kemeny says the MHS effort was inspired by observing neuroscientist Arco Bast work through an experiment on memory formation in the brain at [the HHMI Janelia Research Campus][8] in Ashburn, Virginia. Kemeny said Bast had worked out an interface to get the rotating laser beams, microscopes, cameras, and myriad other components of the experiment to coordinate through a common interface. "This idea could be used to have AI run any science experiment in the world," Kemeny recalls thinking at the time.
[Read full article][9]
[Comments][10]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/12/how-do-ai-coding-agents-work-we-look-under-the-hood/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/metas-scrapped-plans-to-go-ai-native-included-slashing-teams-by-60-percent/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/sixteen-claude-ai-agents-working-together-created-a-new-c-compiler/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/10/we-let-openais-agent-mode-surf-the-web-for-us-heres-what-happened/
[5]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-research-preview
[6]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-research-preview
[7]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1zBiAQU1IA
[8]: https://www.hhmi.org/research/janelia
[9]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/anthropics-new-hardware-standard-lets-ai-agents-control-the-physical-world/
[10]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/anthropics-new-hardware-standard-lets-ai-agents-control-the-physical-world/#comments
A researcher reacts in surprise as Claude figures out how to make a robot arms pick up an aluminum can.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/anthropics-new-hardware-standard-lets-ai-agents-control-the-physical-world/

2026-08-27 20:51:15 UTC

AI industry says Trump plans to tax chips in the “single dumbest way imaginable”
Donald Trump may be preparing to announce sweeping new semiconductor tariffs at the absolute worst time, the tech industry fears.
On Thursday, Politico [reported][1] that a wide range of new semiconductor tariffs, which the tech industry expects will “doom” artificial intelligence innovation in the US, could be imposed in the coming “weeks or months.”
About eight people familiar with the Trump administration’s plans were granted anonymity to discuss how the tariffs might work. They suggested that the framework for tariffs may change as it becomes finalized, but one approach under consideration could “dramatically expand the number of tech products subject to the duties, hitting not just chips but potentially many of the goods made with them, such as gaming consoles or the servers that fill data centers.”
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/27/data-centers-chips-tariffs-threat-01050957
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/ai-industry-says-trump-plans-to-tax-chips-in-the-single-dumbest-way-imaginable/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/ai-industry-says-trump-plans-to-tax-chips-in-the-single-dumbest-way-imaginable/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/ai-industry-says-trump-plans-to-tax-chips-in-the-single-dumbest-way-imaginable/

2026-08-27 20:51:10 UTC

Report: Nvidia to acquire AI model repository Hugging Face for $13 billion
Nvidia is reportedly moving forward to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The acquisition could help the hardware giant expand and fortify its deep integration with the wider AI industry.
Among other things, Hugging Face is a cloud repository for AI models, similar in some respects to what GitHub is for conventional computer software. Developers and researchers search for models that meet certain criteria, download and run them, and fine-tune them into different variants that then get uploaded back up to Hugging Face.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/report-nvidia-to-acquire-ai-model-repository-hugging-face-for-13-billion/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/report-nvidia-to-acquire-ai-model-repository-hugging-face-for-13-billion/#comments
Hugging Face is like an ever-evolving warehouse of open AI models.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/report-nvidia-to-acquire-ai-model-repository-hugging-face-for-13-billion/

2026-08-27 18:36:27 UTC

RFK Jr. goes full anti-vaccine bananas over two measles deaths—one was a newborn
In the wake of news on Tuesday that [two people in Pennsylvania died from measles][1], Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been posting a slew of anti-vaccine rhetoric and misinformation on social media—marking a resurgence of his old ways as a fervent opponent of lifesaving immunizations.
The deaths are the first measles-linked fatalities in Pennsylvania in 35 years and are the first US measles deaths reported in 2026. They occurred amid an explosive outbreak in the state that has reached nearly 400 confirmed cases, as well as an ongoing nationwide surge for the vaccine-preventable disease. The US has tallied nearly 2,800 cases so far this year, the highest total since 1991.
Pennsylvania health officials initially declined to provide details about the deaths, only reporting that they were in unvaccinated people from Lancaster County. However, news broke Wednesday that one of the deaths occurred in a newborn baby. That heart-wrenching news was swiftly entangled in the anti-vaccine misinformation Kennedy was spewing online.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/two-unvaccinated-people-die-from-measles-in-pennsylvania-officials-confirm/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/rfk-jr-spews-anti-vaccine-rubbish-as-newborn-revealed-to-have-died-from-measles/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/rfk-jr-spews-anti-vaccine-rubbish-as-newborn-revealed-to-have-died-from-measles/#comments
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/rfk-jr-spews-anti-vaccine-rubbish-as-newborn-revealed-to-have-died-from-measles/

2026-08-27 18:36:21 UTC

The iconic T-38 jets flown by astronauts just got a spiffy new look
For the first time in decades, NASA has rolled out one of its iconic astronaut training aircraft with a bold, new look.
The space agency [debuted a new livery][1] on one of its T-38 jets in celebration of its program to return astronauts to the Moon. The Artemis design retains nods to what made the "white rocket" immediately recognizable, but adds a new colorway and painted graphics to make clear where NASA is headed.
"This new 'Artemis' livery has a black and white paint scheme with blue and red stripes that separate those two paint schemes," said Sean Brady, who proposed and designed the new livery while serving as the T-38 project pilot in NASA's Aircraft Operations Division (AOD), part of the Flight Operations Directorate at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "The [Artemis program logo][2] in the back and a picture of the Moon is on the left and right side of the rear fuselage."
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://www.collectspace.com/news/news-082626a-nasa-t-38-astronaut-trainer-jet-artemis-livery.html
[2]: https://www.collectspace.com/news/news-071919a-nasa-artemis-program-logo.html
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/nasa-t-38-astronaut-training-jet-gets-new-artemis-look/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/nasa-t-38-astronaut-training-jet-gets-new-artemis-look/#comments
NASA's Artemis program logo features prominently in a new livery for one of the agency's T-38 training jets.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/nasa-t-38-astronaut-training-jet-gets-new-artemis-look/

2026-08-27 15:53:07 UTC

Claude, Codex, and Hermes installed unowned code inside corporate networks
Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that executed proof-of-concept code. At least one misconfigured site is directing visitors, human or AI, to live malware.
The potentially dangerous content is in llms.txt and llms-full.txt files, an [emerging convention][1] websites employ to provide machine-readable summaries of the site’s content and its high-level structure. These files are the AI equivalent of the [robots.txt][2] standard that instructs search engines how to index the site's content. Google Lighthouse, a tool for helping web developers, has more [here][3]. Correctly configured llms.txt and llms-full.txt files for Cloudflare are [here][4] and [here][5].
## How the researchers found it
Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found (many sites hosted both an llms.txt and an llms-full.txt file), 120 of them, each on a different site, pointed to one or more code packages or domain names that weren’t registered. To test what happens when an AI agent processes such files, the researchers registered a handful of the unclaimed names and hosted packages that caused any machine executing them to reach out to their server. Within an hour, the researchers received a phone-home response from a Fortune 500 company. Over time, they got a few dozen more, some from more Fortune 500 companies and others from startups. Their beacon also recorded the chain of parent processes that spawned each install, ultimately revealing that coding agents, including Claude, OpenAI's Codex, and Nous Research's Hermes, were involved. Anthropic, OpenAI,
and Nous Research did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
[Read full article][6]
[Comments][7]
[1]: https://llmstxt.org/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
[3]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/agentic-browsing/llms-txt#how_the_llmstxt_audit_works
[4]: https://www.cloudflare.com/llms.txt
[5]: https://www.cloudflare.com/llms-full.txt
[6]: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/claude-codex-and-hermes-installed-unowned-code-inside-corporate-networks/
[7]: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/claude-codex-and-hermes-installed-unowned-code-inside-corporate-networks/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/claude-codex-and-hermes-installed-unowned-code-inside-corporate-networks/

2026-08-27 15:53:01 UTC

Traders brought Central American cacao to Georgia 1,000 years ago
A thousand years ago, feasts in what’s now northern Georgia (in the US) included cacao from Central America.
Potsherds discarded after an 11th-century feast at Etowah—an Indigenous city just north of what’s now Atlanta, Georgia—contained traces of cacao, a raw ingredient of chocolate. The chemical residue and ancient DNA reveal that not only did the Mississippian people who built the city have excellent taste, they also had trade connections that reached at least 3,000 kilometers to Central America. And in a sense, chocolate may have helped build the Mississippian mounds.
## Ancient dirty dishes
University of South Carolina archaeologist Adam King and his colleagues found fragments of ancient DNA from *Theobroma cacao *in the inner surfaces of potsherds from long-ago feasts at Etowah. Fruit from the cacao tree contains beans that, when dried and roasted, produce chocolate in all its glorious forms. Cacao only grows in the tropics, which means the nearest actual cacao trees would have been at least a 3,000-kilometer trek away from the woodlands of the eastern US. And that means the Mississippian people who lived in Etowah must have had continent-spanning trade connections.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/traders-brought-central-american-cacao-to-georgia-1000-years-ago/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/traders-brought-central-american-cacao-to-georgia-1000-years-ago/#comments
Etowah as it looks today
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/traders-brought-central-american-cacao-to-georgia-1000-years-ago/

2026-08-27 15:52:56 UTC

Panic passes Trump tariff refunds back to the Playdate customers who paid them
Panic, the indie game publishers behind [the quirky, yellow crank-sporting Playdate gaming handheld][1], is issuing refunds to customers who had to shoulder the cost of inappropriate tariffs imposed by the Trump administration this year.
The news comes months after [the Supreme Court said in a February ruling that those tariffs were illegal][2], which also demanded that the administration refund the companies that had to temporarily pay the import taxes. In [an update posted on the Playdate help site this week][3], Panic noted that it has finally "begun to receive refunds of the tariffs we paid in the last year" and had consequently "refunded all tariffs charged to customers."
In the initial version of that tariff note, Panic explained that it couldn't afford to simply "absorb" the 19 percent tariffs it was being charged to import Playdate hardware made overseas because "our margins on Playdate are low." As such, while the tax was in effect, it was passed along to customers as an explicit subtotal line item at the bottom of all Playdate orders. That's in contrast to companies like Nintendo, which vaguely cited "market conditions" and tariff "uncertainty" in [raising the asking price of legacy hardware][4] and [some Switch 2 accessories][5] last year.
[Read full article][6]
[Comments][7]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/review-playdate-earns-its-179-price-tag-with-cute-design-memorable-games/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/supreme-court-blocks-trumps-emergency-tariffs-billions-in-refunds-may-be-owed/
[3]: https://help.play.date/orders/tariffs/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/citing-market-conditions-nintendo-hikes-prices-for-original-switch-consoles/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/04/nintendo-raises-planned-switch-2-accessory-prices-amid-tariff-uncertainty/
[6]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/08/panic-refunds-illegal-tariffs-customers-paid-on-its-playdate-gaming-handheld/
[7]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/08/panic-refunds-illegal-tariffs-customers-paid-on-its-playdate-gaming-handheld/#comments
The tiny handheld with the big tariff refund!
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/08/panic-refunds-illegal-tariffs-customers-paid-on-its-playdate-gaming-handheld/

2026-08-27 11:41:43 UTC

An EV that sounds like a 6.75 L V8: A ride in the Bentley Torcal
Bentley provided flights from Washington, DC, to Monterey, California, and accommodation so Ars could ride in the Torcal, as well as some other things you can read about in the coming weeks. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.
MONTEREY, Calif.—Next month Bentley will reveal its first battery-electric vehicle. The British automaker is [no stranger to electric motors][1]; it now offers plug-in hybrids across its range, even [replacing][2] the Continental GT's W12 with [a new plug-in hybrid V8][3]. The addition of electric motors [perfectly suits the marque][4]: what's more Bentley than waves of effortless torque, after all? But until now, there's always been a combustion engine along for the ride. Not so the Torcal.
Clad in plastic and wrapped in a multi-hued dazzle camouflage, it's shorter in length and height compared to a Bentayga, although it is similarly voluminous on the inside thanks to the inherent packaging efficiencies of an EV. If the proportions remind you of [a Porsche Cayenne EV][5], that's because the two share quite a lot of the same basic engineering, albeit reworked by Bentley to suit its needs. The target is 300 miles (482 km) in EPA range or 600 km (373 miles) under WLTP, from the battery pack, and like the Cayenne, expect 400 kW DC fast-charging.
[A camouflaged preproduction Bentley Torcal drives past the camera.] Bentley is targeting the sports SUV segment with the Torcal. It's 5 meters (16 feet, 5 inches) long, which is shorter than a Bentayga. Credit: Bentley
Don't expect the Cayenne's quadruple-figure power output, though. "We'll be well over a thousand newton-meters of torque [737 lb-ft], which is one of the sort of enabling pillars of the technology, which is fantastic. There'll be over 850 PS [838 hp/625 kW], but we're not chasing four figures," said Martin Page, product line director for the Torcal.
[Read full article][6]
[Comments][7]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/11/bentley-will-ditch-internal-combustion-engines-by-2030/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/heres-what-we-learned-driving-a-prototype-of-bentleys-new-hybrid-gt/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/05/the-2025-bentley-continental-gt-the-highs-and-lows-of-borrowed-bits/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/01/the-bentley-flying-spur-hybrid-proves-electric-motors-improve-the-breed/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/05/porsches-cayenne-coupe-electric-brings-formula-e-tech-to-the-autobahn/
[6]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/an-ev-that-sounds-like-a-6-75-l-v8-a-ride-in-the-bentley-torcal/
[7]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/an-ev-that-sounds-like-a-6-75-l-v8-a-ride-in-the-bentley-torcal/#comments
The Torcal is in the final stages of testing.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/an-ev-that-sounds-like-a-6-75-l-v8-a-ride-in-the-bentley-torcal/

2026-08-26 22:10:41 UTC

AI agents meant to replace Meta workers made “large-scale, disruptive actions”
Earlier this year, Meta created a “plan” to reduce some of its teams by as much as 60 percent to make the company “AI native,” [Reuters][1] reported today, citing two people familiar with Meta’s internal affairs.
Reuters’ report highlights the challenges [organizations face][2] when analyzing the [best uses for AI][3] and determining when the technology is a better fit for certain tasks than employees.
Meta confirmed to Reuters that the plan, reportedly codenamed Project OT (short for organization transformation), explored scenarios in which Meta reduced some team headcounts by 60 percent and that the plan called for two rounds of layoffs. Meta wouldn’t confirm which teams Project OT affected.
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/mark-zuckerberg-had-bold-plan-replace-meta-staff-with-ai-heres-how-it-imploded-2026-08-26/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/ai-wont-replace-radiologists-but-it-will-dramatically-change-their-jobs/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/ai-is-hitting-entry-level-jobs-hardest-stanford-study-finds/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/metas-scrapped-plans-to-go-ai-native-included-slashing-teams-by-60-percent/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/metas-scrapped-plans-to-go-ai-native-included-slashing-teams-by-60-percent/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/metas-scrapped-plans-to-go-ai-native-included-slashing-teams-by-60-percent/

2026-08-26 20:57:57 UTC

Google announces Gemini 3.5 Transcribe for AI-powered speech-to-text
While we wait ([possibly in vain][1]) for Gemini 3.5 Pro to launch, Google is releasing a different model in the 3.5 branch. The company has announced Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, an AI model designed to streamline voice input by editing out "ums" and corrections, outputting polished AI text. This model already powers the Gboard "Rambler" feature on the [Pixel 11][2], but it's about to appear throughout the Google ecosystem.
According to Google, Gemini 3.5 Transcribe is much faster and more accurate than its previous voice-to-text engine, known as Chirp 3. The new AI model should be about 70 percent faster from voice to final transcribed text, and the live-speech error rate has dropped to 5.5 percent. That's only a little better than Chirp 3, which Google measures at 7.32 percent. Still, it's a pain to fix typos when you're using voice input, so any improvement here is beneficial.
[ Credit: Google ][3]
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/google-says-gemini-has-reached-1b-users-faster-than-any-other-google-product/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-pixel-11-series-review-is-the-magic-fading/
[3]: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/gemini-3.5-audio-transcribe_fleu.width-1000.format-webp.png
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/google-announces-gemini-3-5-transcribe-for-ai-powered-speech-to-text/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/google-announces-gemini-3-5-transcribe-for-ai-powered-speech-to-text/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/google-announces-gemini-3-5-transcribe-for-ai-powered-speech-to-text/

2026-08-26 20:57:51 UTC

Florida Catholics slap down state AG by rejecting religious vaccine exemptions
Florida's attorney general got a fiery rebuke and some ecclesiastical schooling from the state's Catholic bishops after he boldly threatened to block funding to Catholic schools unless the church bends to the state's anti-vaccine policies—policies allegedly intended to uphold religious freedom.
On July 31, Attorney General James Uthmeier sent a questionable letter to the bishops regarding exemptions to school vaccination requirements. Florida law requires public and private schools to allow vaccination exemptions based on religious grounds. But Catholic schools in the state do not accept religious exemptions; Florida's Catholic dioceses support vaccination and recognize no theological argument against it. The schools only accept exemptions based on medical conditions that are verified by a healthcare provider.
Uthmeier, himself a Catholic, wrote to the bishops in an open letter that, based on his own understanding of Catholicism, he saw "[no legitimate religious reason to refuse granting religious exemptions][1]." He reviewed select theological positions regarding the use of "abortion-derived vaccines," and suggested to the bishops that it was "morally reprehensible" that they not grant religious exemptions.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://x.com/AGJamesUthmeier/status/2083195474148737133/photo/1
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/catholic-bishops-tell-florida-theres-no-religious-reason-for-vaccine-exemptions/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/catholic-bishops-tell-florida-theres-no-religious-reason-for-vaccine-exemptions/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/catholic-bishops-tell-florida-theres-no-religious-reason-for-vaccine-exemptions/

2026-08-26 20:57:39 UTC

New Twitter launches, says Musk's X gave up the name
Operation Bluebird, the Virginia-based startup trying to [revive][1] the allegedly abandoned “Twitter” name and logo, [announced][2] Monday that it has launched its new social media network: Twitter.now.
“We are a small company, we have investors, and we have a product,” Stephen Coates, one of Operation Bluebird’s cofounders, told Ars. “And we have waited months and months to launch, and we are not going to wait anymore.”
As Ars [reported][3] in December 2025, Coates and his coterie believe that when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and quickly changed the company's name to X, the Twitter identity and intellectual property were abandoned.
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/12/can-twitter-fly-again-startup-wants-to-pry-iconic-trademark-from-musks-x/
[2]: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7498375936887881728/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/12/can-twitter-fly-again-startup-wants-to-pry-iconic-trademark-from-musks-x/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/new-twitter-launches-says-musks-x-gave-up-the-name/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/new-twitter-launches-says-musks-x-gave-up-the-name/#comments
Screenshot
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/new-twitter-launches-says-musks-x-gave-up-the-name/

2026-08-26 19:13:21 UTC

Xbox’s new disc-to-digital program gives physical games a digital future
For decades, console owners have faced a choice between the convenience of digital downloads and the permanence of physical game discs. Soon, Xbox owners will be able to get the best of both worlds for thousands of supported titles as part of a newly announced disc-to-digital program.
The program—[announced today][1] ahead of testing for Xbox Insiders starting August 31—will let players claim a "digital entitlement" for "most Xbox One and Xbox Series X disc-based games" simply by inserting the disc into a console and launching it. That game will then be playable completely digitally, without the need to ever insert the disc, as long as you (or a member of your family account) is logged in. The digital entitlement will also allow access to features like Xbox Play Anywhere (for play on PC) and Xbox Cloud Gaming, for supported titles.
Microsoft says that your physical disc will "continue to work exactly as it always has" after the digital entitlement is claimed. But before you get any ideas, the fine print on the announcement mentions that there is only "one revokable license per game disc," so if you resell that disc or loan it to a friend, that digital entitlement could be transferred to a new account when someone else puts it into their console.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/08/26/your-discs-now-also-digital/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/08/xboxs-new-disc-to-digital-program-gives-physical-games-a-digital-future/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/08/xboxs-new-disc-to-digital-program-gives-physical-games-a-digital-future/#comments
I just claimed my digital entitlement, which means I can finally tear this physical copy of *Ryse: Son of Rome* into three equally-sized pieces.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/08/xboxs-new-disc-to-digital-program-gives-physical-games-a-digital-future/

2026-08-26 19:13:15 UTC

The Porsche 911 GT3 Touring punches above its weight class
The GT3 occupies a singular place in the 911 lineup. Whereas the [range-topping Turbo S][1] piles on power, technology, luxury, and all-weather capability, the GT3 has always pursued something more elemental: [a lighter weight, more focus, and a finely honed setup][2] that puts the driver at the center of the experience.
Porsche has expanded the GT3 formula since the model’s debut in 1999, adding the more extreme GT3 RS to the lineup in 2003 and the slightly more reserved GT3 Touring in 2017, along with the GT3 S/C earlier this year. While the concept behind the drop-top S/C requires some mental gymnastics to make sense of it, the Touring’s original premise was refreshingly simple: Take the standard GT3—including its naturally aspirated 4.0 L flat-six and track-tuned chassis—and replace the fixed rear wing with the deployable spoiler from the Carrera. The result is a subtler version of the homologation car that recaptures the classic 911 silhouette without giving up the hardware that makes a GT3 a GT3.
Fresh from its 992.2 mid-cycle update, the latest GT3 Touring sticks closely to that original design. Its 4.0 L flat-six still spins to 9,000 rpm and produces 502 hp (375 kW) and 331 lb-ft (449 Nm), sending its output exclusively to the rear wheels through either a seven-speed PDK dual-clutch automatic or six-speed manual gearbox. Massive brakes, rear-axle steering, a GT3-specific suspension, active sport exhaust, and plenty of other road course-oriented hardware remain standard.
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/10/porsches-2026-911-turbo-s-is-a-ballistic-twin-turbo-701-horsepower-monster/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/01/weight-saving-and-aero-optimization-feature-in-the-2025-porsche-911-gt3/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/driven-the-992-2-porsche-911-gt3-touring-earns-its-keep/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/driven-the-992-2-porsche-911-gt3-touring-earns-its-keep/#comments
With so many other 911s to choose from, what makes the GT3 Touring stand out?
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/driven-the-992-2-porsche-911-gt3-touring-earns-its-keep/

2026-08-26 16:06:00 UTC

Researchers get two genetic codes to work at the same time
The genetic code is what life everywhere uses to convert the information contained in DNA into specific protein sequences. With minor variations, the same genetic code is used by every living thing on Earth, suggesting it was already present in the last common ancestor of all of it. It's not an easy thing to change, because so many things in every cell depend on it.
Nevertheless, some preliminary steps have been taken. Researchers have managed to [add some new amino acids][1] to a bacterial cell and were able to make proteins that were [one amino acid less][2] than usual. But it's a slog; for some of this work, people have had to re-engineer every single gene in a bacterial genome.
Now, researchers have found a way to operate two separate genetic codes simultaneously, avoiding the need to do any work to compensate for altering the code that every protein in a cell relies on. They didn't test it in an actual cell, and it might cause some problems there. But it's a creative solution that should accelerate some synthetic biology work.
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/researchers-rewire-the-genetics-of-e-coli-make-it-virus-proof/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/researchers-try-to-cut-the-genetic-code-from-20-to-19-amino-acids/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/researchers-get-two-genetic-codes-to-work-at-the-same-time/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/researchers-get-two-genetic-codes-to-work-at-the-same-time/#comments
Transfer RNAs are the key to the genetic code, linking specific base sequences to specific amino acids.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/researchers-get-two-genetic-codes-to-work-at-the-same-time/

2026-08-26 14:22:57 UTC

Psychiatry’s diagnostic bible is finally getting a biological upgrade
The “[bible” of clinical psychiatry][1]—the DSM, short for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—is one of the most popular psychiatry reference books around the world. Clinicians use it to diagnose patients and scientists use it to guide research.
Despite its wide impact, the DSM has [never integrated biology][2] in its diagnoses of mental illness. This omission was largely because the underlying biology of mental illness was too preliminary to be included in such a widely used clinical manual.
The most recent version of the DSM—[the DSM-5][3], released in 2013—[has attracted significant criticism][4] [from clinicians and researchers][5], including on how its lack of objective biological measures risks medicalizing human suffering and reducing [the validity][6] of psychiatric diagnoses.
[Read full article][7]
[Comments][8]
[1]: https://www.press.jhu.edu/newsroom/dsm-history-psychiatrys-bible
[2]: https://psychrights.org/2013/130429NIMHTransformingDiagnosis.htm
[3]: https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596
[4]: https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/warning-sign-road-dsm-v-beware-its-unintended-consequences
[5]: https://psychrights.org/2013/130429NIMHTransformingDiagnosis.htm
[6]: https://theconversation.com/new-technologies-like-ai-come-with-big-claims-borrowing-the-scientific-concept-of-validity-can-help-cut-through-the-hype-259030
[7]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/psychiatrys-diagnostic-bible-is-finally-getting-a-biological-upgrade/
[8]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/psychiatrys-diagnostic-bible-is-finally-getting-a-biological-upgrade/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/psychiatrys-diagnostic-bible-is-finally-getting-a-biological-upgrade/

2026-08-26 14:22:51 UTC

15,000 years of solar wind in four hours? A Seattle company gives it a go.
As part of its nuclear fusion processes, the Sun produces a particularly interesting isotope of helium, known as helium-3. Some of this helium-3 escapes the Sun's gravitational pull as part of the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that emanates out across the Solar System.
Over billions of years, this wind has bombarded every body in the vicinity of the Sun, including Earth's Moon. Lacking a magnetic field or atmosphere, the Moon's surface has no barrier to prevent the constant flow of this wind.
This means that helium-3 has been striking the lunar soil, or regolith, for a long time. These helium ions penetrate only a little way into the individual grains of this soil, but periodically meteorites have struck the lunar surface to churn the soil, mixing some of this helium-3 a little below the surface.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/15000-years-of-solar-wind-in-four-hours-a-seattle-company-gives-it-a-go/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/15000-years-of-solar-wind-in-four-hours-a-seattle-company-gives-it-a-go/#comments
A view inside the vacuum chamber at Interlune where helium gas was ionized and accelerated into the Moon dirt (regolith) simulant for implantation.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/15000-years-of-solar-wind-in-four-hours-a-seattle-company-gives-it-a-go/

2026-08-26 11:33:59 UTC

Xtracycle's Swoop ASM e-bike brings an automatic transmission to cargo bikes
The Velotric Discover M e-bike [we reviewed][1] earlier this year had a feature I found somewhat annoying: It would sporadically block much of the display with an alert telling me I should be in a different gear. While the implementation bugged me, the concept made a certain degree of sense; most e-bikes now know your cadence, how much torque you're generating, and how that power is being translated into speed. That's everything you need to know to determine an optimal gear.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought, "If you're so smart, why don't you just shift for me?"
I was completely unaware that Shimano had already developed a system that did exactly that. And for the past few weeks, I've been using it on a $4,500 cargo bike from Xtracycle called [the Swoop ASM][2] that let me see what it's like to hand control of my gears to an electronic brain.
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/05/the-perfect-commuter-bike-velotrics-discover-3-makes-its-case/
[2]: https://xtracycle.com/products/swoop-asm-family-cargo?variant=50083559342376&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=20927341320&gbraid=0AAAAADlYsh2RVZTkrICaT0Bzb2Ee5vLJl&gclid=CjwKCAjwy5rUBhB5EiwAIoAtCjqEVZioO__LZ4H7ZKx5MOE75qODv2JQpiEL0feGpweqQCmFC2uY9hoCWdUQAvD_BwE
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/xtracycles-swoop-asm-e-bike-brings-an-automatic-transmission-to-cargo-bikes/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/xtracycles-swoop-asm-e-bike-brings-an-automatic-transmission-to-cargo-bikes/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/xtracycles-swoop-asm-e-bike-brings-an-automatic-transmission-to-cargo-bikes/

2026-08-26 11:33:53 UTC

IBM's new Granite 4.2 models ride the wave of interest in local LLMs
IBM has rolled out the newest models in its family of open-weight large language models designed to be downloaded and self-hosted. The newly launched Granite 4.2 comes in 3B, 8B, and 30B parameter variants.
Like previous versions, IBM is taking a decoder-only approach here. These new releases offer a 128,000-token context window natively. The 8B and 30B variants (not the 3B one) also go through an agentic reinforcement learning block; they were trained for expanded capabilities like using the terminal, searching the web, or using external tools. The 3B model supports tools too, but without the same level of specialized training.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/ibms-new-granite-4-2-models-ride-the-wave-of-interest-in-local-llms/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/ibms-new-granite-4-2-models-ride-the-wave-of-interest-in-local-llms/#comments
Pulling Granite 4.2 8B via Ollama in macOS.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/ibms-new-granite-4-2-models-ride-the-wave-of-interest-in-local-llms/

2026-08-25 21:28:46 UTC

World humanoid robot games show runners breaking records, bursting into flames
Viral videos of the World Humanoid Robot Games show [sprinting robots][1] beating the human 100-meter record held by Usain Bolt—but also feature running robots crashing into barriers and falling down because they cannot readily stop running. A few fallen robots even break at the waist in a shower of sparks or catch on fire.
That demonstration of both robotic prowess and limitations came from the second edition of the World Humanoid Robot Games hosted in Beijing from August 22–26. Like the inaugural event held in 2025, this year’s event challenged humanoid robots to run fast, perform kung fu or dance moves, fight one another in kickboxing, and play soccer or table tennis.
This year’s games also tested robots in more humdrum practical scenarios like washing and hanging laundry, where they appeared to lag behind typical human working speeds. That suggests the event organizers, including Chinese state media and the Beijing city government, are keen to showcase the commercial potential of humanoid robots at a time when China’s robotics industry is rapidly developing and testing such robots.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3Y9E2CcMTFk
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/world-humanoid-robot-games-show-runners-breaking-records-bursting-into-flames/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/world-humanoid-robot-games-show-runners-breaking-records-bursting-into-flames/#comments
An Honor humanoid robot breaks into pieces as it runs next to two Tian Gong Ultras, center and left, in the second heat of the large robot category of the 100 meter at the 2nd World Robot Games at National Speed Skating Oval on August 25, 2026 in Beijing, China.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/world-humanoid-robot-games-show-runners-breaking-records-bursting-into-flames/

2026-08-25 19:27:24 UTC

Google's anti-nausea Motion Assist dots finally rolling out on Android
Some people are cursed with motion sickness, which can make it impossible to read or use a phone in a moving vehicle without suffering waves of nausea. There's a surprisingly simple trick that can make smartphones usable in such situations. Apple deployed it on the iPhone a couple of years ago, and now Google's own version is finally coming (slowly) to Android.
Motion sickness is caused by a disagreement between what your inner ear senses and what your eyes see. If you're looking at a book or a screen while in a car, the sensory mismatch can lead to a pretty unpleasant time. As part of [iOS 18][1] in 2024, Apple released a feature called Motion Cues that places a network of moving dots on the screen to alleviate motion sickness, and it seems to work surprisingly well. Google's version is similar, but it's called Motion Assist.
Google began testing Motion Assist back in 2024, but it never expanded beyond an internal test until now. Android Authority [reports][2] Motion Assist is appearing on Pixel phones running Android 17, but there's no app or update you can install to get the feature—it's being delivered by Play Services as part of a staged rollout.
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/ios-18-is-all-about-customization-but-also-improves-android-users-sms-life/
[2]: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-17-motion-assist-rolling-out-3702494/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-begins-rolling-out-anti-motion-sickness-feature-on-android-17/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-begins-rolling-out-anti-motion-sickness-feature-on-android-17/#comments
The moving dots can reduce motion sickness.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-begins-rolling-out-anti-motion-sickness-feature-on-android-17/

2026-08-25 19:27:07 UTC

Preserving glow-in-the-dark art and fashion for future generations
Fashionistas of a certain age no doubt remember the late designer [Stephen Sprouse][1], who gave Blondie's Debbie Harry her [distinctive][2] Bowery punk style. Sprouse's first collections in the mid-1980s made a major splash, melding graffiti prints, a playful '60s aesthetic, and bright Day-Glo colors that won admirers such as Andy Warhol.
Several examples of Sprouse's work are preserved in the textiles collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, where conservationists are trying to learn more about the phosphorescent and fluorescent pigments the designer used in his creations in order to keep the colors from dulling over time. They [described][3] recent advances in that research at [a meeting][4] of the American Chemical Society (ACS) held this week in Chicago.
Scientists began describing minerals that glowed in the dark as phosphors in the Middle Ages. Typically such materials take on a charge when exposed to light, storing the absorbed energy and releasing it gradually as re-emitted light. Henri Becquerel discovered radioactive decay in 1896 because of his work with phosphorescent uranium salts: He left the salts in a closed drawer with photographic plates, which fogged up even without a light source. DayGlo paints and similar materials exploit the related phenomenon of fluorescence. DayGlo pigments fluoresce in daylight by essentially converting UV light into visible light to produce brighter, more vibrant colors.
[Read full article][5]
[Comments][6]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Sprouse
[2]: https://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/n_10106/
[3]: https://acs.digitellinc.com/p/s/glow-in-the-light-and-dark-investigations-of-the-photochemistry-of-emissive-pigments-used-in-art-668100
[4]: https://www.acs.org/events/fall.html
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/how-chemistry-can-keep-glow-in-the-dark-pigments-from-fading/
[6]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/how-chemistry-can-keep-glow-in-the-dark-pigments-from-fading/#comments
Swath of fabric designed by Stephen Sprouse
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/how-chemistry-can-keep-glow-in-the-dark-pigments-from-fading/

2026-08-25 18:13:00 UTC

Lab supply companies have been selling antibodies using manipulated images
Antibodies play a central role in your body's immune defense. But they're also nearly ubiquitous in biological research, being essential for several widely used lab techniques. While some researchers need to go through the process of producing their own antibodies, antibodies to many key proteins are commercially available and can be ordered for overnight delivery.
In May, however, Reese Richardson, a post-doc at Northwestern University, discovered that some of the images used to demonstrate how these antibodies performed in lab experiments had been [subject to image manipulation][1]—the sorts of changes that would get a paper retracted if they had appeared in the academic literature. The manipulations ranged from removing background noise to copying and pasting data to fabricate results. Now, he has done a more exhaustive search and found problematic manipulations in images used to market over 17,000 commercial antibodies.
Antibodies are useful in the lab because the immune system generates them to recognize specific proteins. While those proteins typically appear on the surface of pathogens, the immune system doesn't know where a given protein it encounters comes from. So, if you inject an animal with your protein of interest, it will typically generate antibodies to recognize that.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://reeserichardson.blog/2026/05/28/how-much-of-thermo-fishers-antibody-data-has-been-manipulated/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/lab-supply-companies-have-been-selling-antibodies-using-manipulated-images/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/lab-supply-companies-have-been-selling-antibodies-using-manipulated-images/#comments
Gorgeous images like these, showing the location of proteins within cells, often depend on commercial antibodies.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/lab-supply-companies-have-been-selling-antibodies-using-manipulated-images/

2026-08-25 18:12:54 UTC

SpaceX intends to invest up to $100 billion in massive Louisiana spaceport
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said Tuesday that SpaceX will commit $100 billion to develop Starship factories and launch pads in the state's coastal areas. In doing so, the company seeks to replicate the Starbase facility it has built over the last decade in southern Texas on a larger scale.
The announcement capped months of speculation about SpaceX's interest in a sprawling parcel of land along the Gulf coast of Louisiana, which offers room to build multiple launch towers and offers access to the methane propellant that fuels the Starship rocket.
Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said the "Starbase Louisiana" facility would become a self-sustaining spaceport with propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and an airport on site.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/spacex-intends-to-invest-up-to-100-billion-in-massive-louisiana-spaceport/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/spacex-intends-to-invest-up-to-100-billion-in-massive-louisiana-spaceport/#comments
SpaceX has big plans for its Starbase Louisiana facility.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/spacex-intends-to-invest-up-to-100-billion-in-massive-louisiana-spaceport/

2026-08-25 18:12:49 UTC

Two unvaccinated people die from measles in Pennsylvania, officials confirm
Two unvaccinated people have died from measles in Pennsylvania, [state health officials confirmed Tuesday][1].
They are the first measles deaths reported in Pennsylvania in 35 years and the first deaths reported in the US in 2026. Last year, [the US saw three measles deaths][2]: two in [otherwise-healthy but unvaccinated school-age children in Texas][3] and one in an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico. Prior to those deaths, the US had not seen [a measles death since 2015][4], when a woman with underlying conditions became severely ill.
Citing privacy, health officials in Pennsylvania are not providing information on the people who died beyond that they were unvaccinated and were residents of Lancaster County. Officials noted that the deaths are among 393 confirmed cases reported this year across 28 counties in the state.
[Read full article][5]
[Comments][6]
[1]: https://www.pa.gov/agencies/health/newsroom/pennsylvania-department-of-health-confirms-two-measles-associate
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/07/measles-cases-reach-33-year-high-as-rfk-jr-pursues-anti-vaccine-agenda/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/02/unvaccinated-school-aged-child-dies-of-measles-in-texas-amid-growing-outbreak/
[4]: https://web.archive.org/web/20151215033618/https:/doh.wa.gov/Newsroom/2015NewsReleases/15119WAMeaslesRelatedDeath
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/two-unvaccinated-people-die-from-measles-in-pennsylvania-officials-confirm/
[6]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/two-unvaccinated-people-die-from-measles-in-pennsylvania-officials-confirm/#comments
Measles rash on the body of a child.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/two-unvaccinated-people-die-from-measles-in-pennsylvania-officials-confirm/

2026-08-25 16:06:07 UTC

New bootloader lets you take the "Meta" out of the original Meta Quest
Remember the original Quest headset that Meta (then Oculus) [trumpeted back in 2019][1]? Meta seems to hope you don't, since the company [officially stopped supporting the wireless VR headset][2] in 2023 to focus on [the more popular Quests 2 and 3][3]. Luckily, tinkerers haven't similarly abandoned the hardware and recently released [a new root-access exploit and bootloader][4] that gives "developers and enthusiasts full control over Quest 1 hardware."
The QuestStack project integrates [previously known vulnerabilities][5] in [the Quest's Android fastboot process][6] into a privilege escalation chain that leads easily to full root access on the device. The bootloading process is now streamlined enough that it can be completed without any downloads [through a web interface][7] after connecting the headset to a PC.
With this exploit, the original Quest hardware can now be officially divorced from any reliance on Meta's servers or services to be useful. That means enterprising Quest owners should be able to sideload apps without needing to [register for a Meta Developer account and activating Developer Mode through Meta's mobile app][8]. It also means users should be able to go through the initial setup and login steps for a fresh Quest headset even if and when Meta decides to shut down the servers that currently support this process.
[Read full article][9]
[Comments][10]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/oculus-quest-review-2019s-best-new-gaming-system-is-wireless-affordable-vr/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/01/meta-ends-support-for-original-quest-headset-after-less-than-4-years/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/10/what-happened-to-the-virtual-reality-gaming-revolution/
[4]: https://github.com/starseed12345/QuestStack
[5]: https://github.com/darknight1050/quest-bootloader-unlocker
[6]: https://github.com/QuestEscape/research
[7]: https://quest1-unlock.skystate.ch/
[8]: https://developers.meta.com/horizon/documentation/native/android/mobile-device-setup/
[9]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/08/new-bootloader-lets-you-take-the-meta-out-of-the-original-meta-quest/
[10]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/08/new-bootloader-lets-you-take-the-meta-out-of-the-original-meta-quest/#comments
Wipe off the dust and load up some new firmware
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/08/new-bootloader-lets-you-take-the-meta-out-of-the-original-meta-quest/

2026-08-25 13:50:55 UTC

Apple's new desktop computers are designed specifically for local AI development
The Mac mini and Mac Studio occupy two distinct points in Apple's lineup of desktops, but lately, they've had something in common: They're popular for local AI inference and software development thanks to the advantages of their unified memory architecture and the fast CPUs and GPUs on their systems-on-a-chip.
Today, Apple announced new iterations of both desktops, along with two new chips: the M6, the first 2nm chip in Apple's M-series lineup for Macs, and the M5 Ultra, now the most powerful chip in the lineup for most things—especially AI workloads.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2026/08/with-new-mac-studio-and-mac-mini-apple-leans-hard-into-local-ai-inference/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2026/08/with-new-mac-studio-and-mac-mini-apple-leans-hard-into-local-ai-inference/#comments
The Mac Studio, shown running LM Studio, software for running LLMs locally.
https://arstechnica.com/apple/2026/08/with-new-mac-studio-and-mac-mini-apple-leans-hard-into-local-ai-inference/

2026-08-24 22:52:04 UTC

Ads and tracking infiltrated TVs. Now they're coming for monitors.
[Ads][1] and [tracking][2] have turned TVs into [privacy nightmares][3]. Both are so widespread among smart TVs that I’ve written [a guide for avoiding them][4]. One recommendation in that guide is to use a computer monitor. But in recent years, monitors have become more capable of pushing ads and tracking users.
Without more straightforward approaches from vendors, such as easily comprehensible privacy policies and avoiding inappropriate ads, monitors are dangerously encroaching into smart-TV-like territory.
## LG monitors’ McAfee ads
LG lost some trust after a recent report that some of its monitors [installed McAfee pop-up ads onto connected computers][5]. Since [at least 2024][6], some of these displays installed an app, LG Monitor App Installer, onto connected computers under the cover of driver updates installed through Windows Update.
[Read full article][7]
[Comments][8]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/05/roku-oss-home-screen-now-features-a-large-permanent-ad/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/newly-purchased-vizio-tvs-now-require-walmart-accounts-to-use-smart-features/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/tv-brands-face-inherent-conflict-over-user-privacy-advertiser-data-demands/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/the-ars-technica-guide-to-dumb-tvs/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/microsoft-responds-to-lg-monitors-installing-mcafee-ads-on-windows/
[6]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/windows11/why-the-lg-monitor-app-installed-without-my-notice/4304003/replies/4538228
[7]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/ads-and-tracking-infiltrated-tvs-now-theyre-coming-for-monitors/
[8]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/ads-and-tracking-infiltrated-tvs-now-theyre-coming-for-monitors/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/ads-and-tracking-infiltrated-tvs-now-theyre-coming-for-monitors/

2026-08-24 22:51:58 UTC

RFK Jr. may upend how vaccine recommendations are categorized
Under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US health department is considering changing how vaccine recommendations are categorized and described. The move creates the possibility that vaccinations currently considered "routine" or "universal" could be given new designations that sound less definitive or more conditional, such as "recommended with qualification" or recommended based on "shared clinical decision-making."
Kennedy has made no new rules or recommendations for the categories yet. However, he laid out ideas and possibilities in a Request for Information (RFI) posted online Friday and published in the [Federal Register on Monday][1]. In [the 10-page document][2], Kennedy poses questions about the current categories and asks the public to weigh in on ideas for how to change or replace them. The deadline to comment on the questions and ideas is September 20.
Currently, there are three categories of vaccination recommendations granted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is informed by a panel of independent expert advisors, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The three categories are: routine, otherwise considered universal (a recommendation that everyone should get a vaccine); risk-based recommendations (only certain groups at higher risk should get a vaccine); and recommendations based on "shared clinical decision-making," or SCDM (a flexible but uncommon recommendation for vaccination based on the characteristics, values, and preferences of a patient and the judgment of their healthcare provider).
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/08/24/2026-17250/request-for-information-categories-used-in-federal-vaccine-recommendations-and-the-role-of-shared
[2]: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-17250.pdf
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/rfk-jr-may-upend-how-vaccine-recommendations-are-categorized/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/rfk-jr-may-upend-how-vaccine-recommendations-are-categorized/#comments
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), center, speaks prior to US President Donald Trump, left, signing an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, Aug. 10, 2026.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/rfk-jr-may-upend-how-vaccine-recommendations-are-categorized/

2026-08-24 22:51:53 UTC

Data centers become "killer application" for new power transformer tech
Data centers have become the [largest driver][1] of [surging electricity demand][2] that is straining US power grids. But the AI data center boom has also accelerated investment in a technology that could provide a silver lining for everyone—solid-state power transformers that replace industrial-age technology with modern power electronics.
Power grids currently rely on conventional transformer technology that is painstakingly assembled by hand and has a fundamental design dating back to the 1880s. Two copper wire coils manually wound around a steel core create electromagnetic fields that help step up voltage levels of alternating current electricity for long-distance transmission or step down voltage levels for the electricity use of homes and businesses. The largest power transformers cannot be mass-manufactured but are instead custom-built for each utility company’s electrical substations.
Manufacturing constraints, coupled with the scramble to upgrade US power infrastructure, have meant utility companies and other customers must wait up to several years for delivery of new power transformers. That is not only a problem for expanding power grid infrastructure to support growing electricity demand, but also delays the process of replacing aging power transformers.
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/executive-summary
[2]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65264
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/energy-hungry-ai-data-centers-spur-new-power-transformer-technology/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/energy-hungry-ai-data-centers-spur-new-power-transformer-technology/#comments
NC State's 1 MW solid state transformer system during deployment for field testing on a live distribution feeder at EPRI's Lenox, Mass., test site. The shipping container houses, from left to right, the charger enclosure, the SST enclosure, and the breaker box enclosure.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/energy-hungry-ai-data-centers-spur-new-power-transformer-technology/

2026-08-24 20:17:57 UTC

Inaudible sounds used to fingerprint browsers catch AliExpress red-handed
Chinese retailer AliExpress has been caught fingerprinting visitors after one of the metrics—an outdated technique that measures inaudible sounds it sends to browsers—impeded a researcher's ability to use his bluetooth headphones.
Researcher Matthew Callaghan [said][1] he stumbled on the stealthy tracking by mistake. After loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from his phone stopped playing over his multipoint headphones, which accept connections from more than one device at a time. He set the headphones to play sounds from his phone except when his PC was producing audio. Each time he loaded AliExpress, the phone audio stopped. Each time he closed the tab the site was loaded into, the phone was once again audible.
## Users can't hear it, but browsers can
While investigating the odd behavior, Callaghan said he found two highly obfuscated scripts. Together, they rendered a graph that analyzed the [WebAudio][2] readings of each visiting browser. This graph acted as an oscillator that measured [Sawtooth waves][3], which are common in output from digital audio.
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://blog.laserphile.com/2026/08/aliexpress-webpage-keeping-multipoint.html
[2]: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/OfflineAudioContext/explainer.md
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawtooth_wave
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/aliexpress-caught-fingerprinting-visitors-after-sending-inaudible-sounds-to-browsers/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/aliexpress-caught-fingerprinting-visitors-after-sending-inaudible-sounds-to-browsers/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/aliexpress-caught-fingerprinting-visitors-after-sending-inaudible-sounds-to-browsers/

2026-08-24 20:17:50 UTC

GM vehicles under federal scrutiny after hundreds of reports
The federal government is [expanding a safety investigation][1] into a number of vehicles manufactured by General Motors after receiving hundreds of reports of brake failure. The problem affects more than 1.1 million cars, including many of GM's electric vehicles, as well as ones it has built for Honda and Acura. The problem is with the brake-by-wire system (which GM calls [eBoost][2]), which can suffer a spindle fracture while driving.
GM says that in the event of that happening, the car should still retain a number of critical safety features—antilock brakes, traction control, and stability control—at least until it comes to a complete stop, at which point they become inoperable. But NHTSA's ODI says that it has received many reports that contradict this behavior and allege that eBoost failures are followed by an immediate loss of braking, which obviously poses a safety risk.
Indeed, NHTSA has received 227 incident reports, a number that grows to 745 once you include the hundreds of occurrences reported to GM. Twenty-two cases resulted in crashes, and while six people have been injured in five crashes, thankfully there have been no fatal incidents.
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2026/INOA-EA26006-17028.pdf
[2]: https://news.gm.com/home.detail.html/Pages/topic/us/en/2026/aug/0819-ev1-changed-how-cars-stop.html
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/feds-deepen-probe-into-general-motors-brake-failures/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/feds-deepen-probe-into-general-motors-brake-failures/#comments
The first report of an eBoost failure involved model year 2023 Cadillac Lyriqs.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/feds-deepen-probe-into-general-motors-brake-failures/

2026-08-24 19:15:45 UTC

Trump tried to curb clean energy. It’s booming anyway.
Donald Trump is presiding over an unexpected clean energy boom, as rising electricity demand spurs investment in new capacity despite the US administration’s efforts to thwart a solar and wind rollout.
Clean energy additions will rise by a record 45 gigawatts this year, according to S&P Global Energy—equivalent to the average electricity demand of Turkey. The increase is roughly 25 percent higher than the record set in 2024.
The US president’s war in Iran, which has driven up global energy prices, along with surging power demand from AI data centers and developers’ rush to capitalize on expiring tax credits, are driving the cleantech boom, said analysts. Trump’s administration has also been pragmatic in the face of its energy needs.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/trump-tried-to-curb-clean-energy-its-booming-anyway/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/trump-tried-to-curb-clean-energy-its-booming-anyway/#comments
Photovoltaic panels and tall wind turbines stand on the coastal mudflat at Yangqiao Farm, Weifeng Town, Guanyun County, Lianyungang City, Jiangsu Province, China.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/trump-tried-to-curb-clean-energy-its-booming-anyway/

2026-08-24 19:15:39 UTC

F1 in the Netherlands: The driver you most want to beat is your teammate
After months of rumors surrounding his future, now we know: Four-time champion Max Verstappen is staying in the sport for the foreseeable future. The news broke on the eve of the Dutch Grand Prix, held this past weekend at Zandvoort in the Netherlands as F1 returned from its mandatory summer vacation.
Verstappen's wasn't the only contract news—Williams will keep both Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz, too. More than once I've noticed a driver having an underwhelming weekend following a freshly signed contract; in this case, all three had a weekend they'd probably rather forget. They weren't the only ones, though. Up and down the grid, we saw friction between teammates. And there's no one an F1 driver wants to beat more than the only other person to have the same car as they do.
Formula 1 returned from its summer break with this weekend's Dutch Grand Prix.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/f1-in-the-netherlands-the-driver-you-most-want-to-beat-is-your-teammate/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/f1-in-the-netherlands-the-driver-you-most-want-to-beat-is-your-teammate/#comments
Aston Martin is no longer the laughing stock of the grid.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/f1-in-the-netherlands-the-driver-you-most-want-to-beat-is-your-teammate/

2026-08-24 19:15:34 UTC

Nvidia senior manager linked to Supermicro scheme smuggling AI servers to China
Taiwan has indicted nine people—[reportedly][1] including an Nvidia senior manager and two Supermicro employees based in the country—who allegedly helped forge documents to cover up illegal exports of high-end AI servers to China in violation of US export controls.
On Monday, Reuters [reported][2] that prosecutors in Keelung did not release any names but confirmed that the suspects were “charged with breach of trust and document forgery.” One suspect linked to a related case remains at large, accused of the “siphoning of funds from a distributor company involved” in helping China get access to restricted Nvidia chips.
Since 2022, the US has required a license to export semiconductors to China, with the intent of protecting national security by staying ahead of China in the AI race. But after the US [arrested][3] Supermicro co-founder Wally Liaw in March for allegedly funneling $2.5 billion in restricted AI servers to China since 2024, Taiwan launched a separate probe to learn more about the scheme.
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://www.taiwanplus.com/news/taiwan-news/business/260824015/nvidia-manager-among-nine-indicted-over-china-chip-sales
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-indicts-9-over-alleged-illegal-export-ai-servers-china-2026-08-24/
[3]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-charged-conspiring-unlawfully-divert-cutting-edge-us-artificial-intelligence
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/nvidia-senior-manager-linked-to-supermicro-scheme-smuggling-ai-servers-to-china/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/nvidia-senior-manager-linked-to-supermicro-scheme-smuggling-ai-servers-to-china/#comments
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang must balance US national security risks with Nvidia's plans to remain active in China's market.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/nvidia-senior-manager-linked-to-supermicro-scheme-smuggling-ai-servers-to-china/

2026-08-24 19:15:28 UTC

Buyer beware: Those mummified remains might carry toxic spores
Mummified human and animal remains have long been in demand among collectors, and such items are sufficiently rare that their acquisition may involve unregulated, occasionally clandestine trade practices—if not outright illegal ones. According to the authors of [a paper][1] published in the International Journal of Cultural Property, the risks to would-be collectors aren't just legal. Mummified remains may also pose a significant health hazard due to toxic substances used in their preservation and microbial growth due to improper storage. In fact, toxic spores or fungi are often cited as the source of the legendary "[mummy's curse][2]" tied to the excavation of King Tutankhamen's tomb.
Per the authors, the mummification process throughout history has relied on various toxic materials and substances to help preserve the remains—heavy metals like arsenic, mercury, and lead, for example—which is why careful handling is necessary to avoid adverse health effects. (Professionals typically don masks, gloves, and lab coats when working with such remains.) Various micro-organisms (bacteria, fungi, yeasts) can also lie dormant in the tissues for centuries and can recolonize and multiply due to a ready supply of organic material—particularly if the remains have been stored in suboptimal conditions.
A [1962 case][3], for example, revealed the presence of poisonous fungi spores in mummified remains that would cause respiratory inflammation and infection if inhaled, as well as fever. A [2013 study][4] found that the hundreds of mummies on display at the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Sicily, are prone to microbial and fungal growth after years of unstable environmental conditions. Similarly, [in 2012][5], scientists identified three species of fungi (*Aspergillus, Penicillium*, and S*tachybotrys*) on human remains, coffins, walls, and in the air in the crypts of the Church of St. Peter and Paul in Krakow, Poland.
[Read full article][6]
[Comments][7]
[1]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-cultural-property/article/real-mummys-curse-health-risks-associated-with-the-sale-and-trade-of-mummified-remains/FCE6E950ED8A6BEF310766AF1CF53DB4
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_pharaohs
[3]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10962247.2015.1068884
[4]: https://academic.oup.com/femsec/article/86/2/341/539931?login=false
[5]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290054712_Analysis_of_the_occurrence_of_moulds_in_crypts_of_the_Saints_Peter_and_Paul_Church_in_Krakow_performed_in_connection_with_the_buildingconstruction_of_the_National_Pantheon
[6]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/modern-trade-of-mummified-remains-may-carry-its-own-mummys-curse/
[7]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/modern-trade-of-mummified-remains-may-carry-its-own-mummys-curse/#comments
"No harm ever came from reading a book": an ancient curse is unleashed in 1999's *The Mummy*
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/modern-trade-of-mummified-remains-may-carry-its-own-mummys-curse/

2026-08-24 12:50:20 UTC

Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo
In another time, the MacBook Neo could have caused a substantial realignment of the lowish-end laptop business. Sure, it has shortcomings compared to the MacBook Air, but it could have at least encouraged PC makers to start shipping consistently decent keyboards, screens, and build quality in the Neo's $599 price window.
The PC makers did start responding, thanks in part to Intel's [actually new non-Ultra Core Series 3 processors][1] (codenamed Wildcat Lake). Intel has resisted its usual compunction to serve the budget market with aging, re-labeled silicon and has created a lower-end, lower-performance processor with the same building blocks (and the same manufacturing processes) as this year's high-end, high-performance models.
The likes of Dell, Acer, Asus, and Lenovo began hopping on the Wildcat Lake train fairly quickly, announcing would-be Neo competitors. But it felt like most of them were having trouble matching the Neo's barebones specs, let alone undercutting them. Dell's XPS 13 started at $599, but only for students. It [would be $699 for everyone else][2]. Acer's Swift Air 14 [was announced at $699][3], too. Sure, sometimes these offered features the Neo didn't have. But the *point* of the Neo is that it eschews frills and frippery in favor of nailing the basics.
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/intels-non-ultra-core-cpus-are-new-silicon-this-year-for-a-change/
[2]: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps13dx13260laptop
[3]: https://www.acer.com/us-en/laptops/swift/swift-air-14-sfa14-i31#features
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/review-chuwis-449-unibook-laptop-is-a-funhouse-mirror-macbook-neo/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/review-chuwis-449-unibook-laptop-is-a-funhouse-mirror-macbook-neo/#comments
Chuwi's Unibook 304.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/review-chuwis-449-unibook-laptop-is-a-funhouse-mirror-macbook-neo/

2026-08-23 18:16:47 UTC

Volcanoes that made history
The first telegram arrived in Singapore on a Monday, sent from the city of Batavia in the Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia). “Terrific detonations from Krakatau (volcanic island),” it reported. Soon afterward: “Stones falling. Village near Anjer washed away.” The wires continued clattering out news of bridges destroyed, boats smashed, lighthouses “disappeared.” By noon on Tuesday, the scope of the natural disaster was clear: “Where once Mount Krakatau stood the sea now plays.”
Within days, the source of the destruction was known worldwide. On the morning of August 27, 1883, a volcanic eruption had obliterated two islands in the strait between Java and Sumatra, and most of a third. More than 36,000 people perished, the majority in devastating tsunamis that raced outward from the colossal explosion.
Thanks to Victorian-era telecommunications, it was the first time in history that people around the globe could begin to document, in near real time, the immediate and long-term effects of a catastrophic volcanic eruption. What they learned over the next few years laid the foundations for the modern science of volcanology. And it was an especially eye-opening lesson in how the biggest eruptions can influence climate, agriculture, and even the course of human history.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/volcanoes-that-made-history/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/volcanoes-that-made-history/#comments
The Indonesian volcano known as Anak Krakatau, or Child of Krakatau, emerged in the 1920s from the underwater ruins of the larger Krakatau volcano that erupted devastatingly in 1883. Here, the volcano erupts in 2018.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/volcanoes-that-made-history/

2026-08-23 18:16:41 UTC

Due to need for 'absolute success,' China delays critical Moon launch to 2027
China's "Manned Space" program issued [a terse announcement][1] on Sunday regarding its much-anticipated Chang’e 7 lunar exploration mission.
The agency stated: "In keeping with the principle of proceeding prudently and reliably, and ensuring absolute success, after a comprehensive assessment it has been determined that the Chang’e 7 mission does not meet the conditions for launch and therefore cannot be carried out during the planned launch window this year."
The Chinese message offered no explanation for the cause of the delay from the Wenchang Space Launch Site, located on an island in the South China Sea. Consisting of a lunar orbiter, lander, rover, and a mini-hopper of a probe, the mission was due to launch as early as Sunday on a Long March 5 rocket. It is intended to land at the South Pole of the Moon.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://www.cmse.gov.cn/xwzx/202608/t20260823_57750.html
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/due-to-need-for-absolute-success-china-delays-critical-moon-launch-to-2027/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/due-to-need-for-absolute-success-china-delays-critical-moon-launch-to-2027/#comments
Shaded relief image of Shackleton crater at the Moon's south pole, with false-color interior constructed from elevation measurements by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/due-to-need-for-absolute-success-china-delays-critical-moon-launch-to-2027/

2026-08-22 12:04:05 UTC

Dismantling the Roadless Rule threatens to disrupt wildlife and water in US
Pause for a moment and listen. What do you hear? Chances are, somewhere in the background, is the ever-present hum of a road.
More than [4.2 million miles of public roads][1] crisscross the lower 48 states—enough to [reach the Moon and back][2] almost nine times. This vast network of roads spiderwebs its way across the contiguous US, [leaving only about 5 percent][3] as an inventoried [roadless area][4] or [wilderness][5].
Now, some of those last remaining lands free of roads are under threat from the Trump administration’s [proposed rollback][6] of the [2001 Roadless Rule][7]. That includes southeast Alaska’s [Tongass National Forest][8], where eagles, bears, salmon, and many other species thrive in old-growth coastal forest along the Inside Passage.
[Read full article][9]
[Comments][10]
[1]: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2023/vmt421c.cfm
[2]: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/moon-distance/en/
[3]: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/csp2.288
[4]: https://gagecarto.github.io/roadless/
[5]: https://wilderness.net/learn-about-wilderness/fast-facts/
[6]: https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2026-16965/special-areas-roadless-area-conservation
[7]: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46504#_Ref48593706
[8]: https://seacc.org/our-work/tongass/
[9]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/dismantling-the-roadless-rule-threatens-to-disrupt-wildlife-and-water-in-us/
[10]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/dismantling-the-roadless-rule-threatens-to-disrupt-wildlife-and-water-in-us/#comments
Signage to Muir's cabin on Auk Nu Trail in the Tongass National Forest at the fork of two dirt paths leading past mossy trees and logs on a rainy day in Juneau, Alaska.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/dismantling-the-roadless-rule-threatens-to-disrupt-wildlife-and-water-in-us/

2026-08-21 21:58:34 UTC

Hidden Zillow listings created fake supply shock, raising NYC rents, lawsuit says
This week, two New York City renters filed a [class action complaint][1] alleging that a brokerage business called Compass—which has been [boycotting posting listings on free digital platforms like Zillow][2]—has now delisted so many rental units that it has created a fake supply shock that is artificially raising rents.
According to plaintiffs, Peter Castaneda and Haley Gelfand, Compass has bought so many brokerage firms over the past decade-plus that it maintains a monopoly, controlling “over 80 percent of the rental unit listings available for renters in Manhattan based on 2025 data.”
With that monopoly, Compass can “literally dictate pricing for as much as 80 percent of Manhattan’s rental units,” renters argued. And now, Compass is allegedly trying to manipulate prices on other platforms, as well.
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Castaneda-v-Compass-Complaint-8-19-26.pdf
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/zillow-loses-access-to-thousands-of-home-listings-amid-bitter-legal-feud/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/class-action-accuses-brokers-of-hiding-zillow-listings-driving-up-nyc-rents/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/class-action-accuses-brokers-of-hiding-zillow-listings-driving-up-nyc-rents/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/class-action-accuses-brokers-of-hiding-zillow-listings-driving-up-nyc-rents/

2026-08-21 21:58:29 UTC

Thunder + fiber-optic cabling used for seismic imaging
Most of what we know about the Earth's interior comes from observing seismic waves. These travel at somewhat different speeds depending on the details of the rock they're moving through—whether it's solid or semi-molten, how much water is present, whether it's fractured or solid material, and so on. Get enough data from enough seismic events, and you can start piecing together a picture of what's present at different depths below the surface.
In many cases, we can get this data from naturally occurring events like earthquakes. In others, we intentionally create waves using things like explosives, providing the opportunity to do imaging in specific areas without needing to wait for an earthquake. Now, a team of scientists at Penn State suggests there's a potential option that sits between waiting for an earthquake and triggering your own seismic event: thunderstorms.
Some of the energy carried by thunder enters the Earth's upper crust, triggering what are termed "thunderquakes." But, for various physical reasons, the seismic signals are extremely complex, making it difficult to extract clear signals from them. The Penn State team says it has finally constructed a model that can help make sense of this complexity and used it to reconstruct the terrain under the local campus.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/researchers-use-thunderquakes-to-study-structure-of-earths-surface/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/researchers-use-thunderquakes-to-study-structure-of-earths-surface/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/researchers-use-thunderquakes-to-study-structure-of-earths-surface/

2026-08-21 19:58:03 UTC

Lawsuit demands Logitech hand tariff refunds over to customers
Logitech is facing a proposed class action lawsuit for not giving customers tariff refunds.
In April 2025, [Logitech raised the prices][1] on 51 percent of its portfolio, with some prices increasing by as much as 25 percent.
The [complaint][2] seeks to “recover monies that Logitech extracted from American consumers as offset for import tariffs that the United States Supreme Court has since declared unlawful, tariffs for which Logitech now stands to be reimbursed by the federal government. This is all while Logitech retained every dollar of the corresponding price increases it charged its customers due to the illegal tariffs.”
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/looming-tariffs-are-making-it-extra-hard-to-be-a-tech-geek/
[2]: https://www.cpmlegal.com/media/matter/60049_2026-08-18_1_%20Tariffs%20-%20Logitech%20Class%20Action%20Complaint.pdf
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/lawsuit-demands-logitech-hand-tariff-refunds-over-to-customers/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/lawsuit-demands-logitech-hand-tariff-refunds-over-to-customers/#comments
A Logitech MX Master 4 mouse.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/lawsuit-demands-logitech-hand-tariff-refunds-over-to-customers/

2026-08-21 19:57:57 UTC

Motorola's GrapheneOS phones will launch in 2027 priced higher than Pixels
Several months ago, Motorola and the makers of GrapheneOS [announced][1] a team-up that would expand support for the privacy-centric OS to beyond Google's Pixel phones. The announcement, however, was bereft of details. Now, the creators of the OS have taken to Mastodon (naturally) to provide [an update][2]. Moto's GrapheneOS phones are on track to launch in 2027, but they'll cost a pretty penny.
The upcoming Moto devices won't ship with GrapheneOS, but they will be fully supported by the project with help from Moto itself. So far, only Pixel phones have met GrapheneOS's strict hardware requirements to ensure the highest level of security and privacy. The software, which is based on Android, includes features like enhanced memory protection, granular network permissions, customizable app sandboxing, and a duress code that can be used to wipe your phone. (That last one got an activist [charged with a felony][3] earlier this year after he used it to delete his data during a customs interrogation.)
According to the GrapheneOS team, the upcoming Moto phones will be premium flagship devices. The team expects pricing to be even higher than Pixel phones, which is saying something. The [current Pixel lineup][4] starts at $900 for the base model Pixel 11, a $100 increase from last year. The Pixel 11 Pro XL price has gone up to a whopping $1,300 this year.
[Read full article][5]
[Comments][6]
[1]: https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at-mwc-2026/
[2]: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117078064184215730
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/activist-charged-with-felony-after-giving-border-agent-duress-code-that-wiped-his-phone/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-pixel-11-series-review-is-the-magic-fading/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/motorolas-grapheneos-phones-will-launch-in-2027-priced-higher-than-pixels/
[6]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/motorolas-grapheneos-phones-will-launch-in-2027-priced-higher-than-pixels/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/motorolas-grapheneos-phones-will-launch-in-2027-priced-higher-than-pixels/

2026-08-21 18:19:59 UTC

Personalized pricing is “abhorrent,” but FTC limits may increase costs, critics say
Some Americans worry that the Federal Trade Commission's rush to limit personalized pricing in the name of consumer protection could end up killing discounts they depend on or, counterintuitively, raising prices.
The FTC has no power to ban personalized pricing, in which a business uses a customer’s personal data to determine the highest price that person might be willing to pay for a product or service. But the agency believes it could set limits on the practice, including potential penalties for businesses that fail to disclose when customers may be paying more because data suggests they won't balk at the price.
In a [request for public comment][1] on a proposed policy statement, the FTC acknowledged that personalized pricing is common in some industries. But FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said new industries are increasingly tracking customers to set individualized prices, blindsiding consumers who expect a listed price in markets like retail “to be the same price that everyone else sees,” Ferguson said.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/08/ftc-seeks-comment-enforcement-policy-statement-regarding-personalized-pricing
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/critics-ftc-limits-on-personalized-pricing-may-increase-costs-kill-discounts/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/critics-ftc-limits-on-personalized-pricing-may-increase-costs-kill-discounts/#comments
FTC chair Andrew Ferguson wants to put businesses engaged in personalized pricing "on notice."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/critics-ftc-limits-on-personalized-pricing-may-increase-costs-kill-discounts/

2026-08-21 12:24:11 UTC

Rocket Report: SpaceX makes its mark on the Moon; ULA names new boss
Welcome to Edition 9.07 of the Rocket Report! China's workhorse Long March rocket family appears to be rebounding quickly from a rare launch failure August 10. Chinese officials have not publicly released any information on what may have caused the Long March 7A rocket to break apart less than 90 seconds after liftoff, but the rocket's use of YF-100 engines initially raised questions about the failure's impact on other Chinese rockets that use the same type of engines. But no biggie. YF-100 engines returned to flight six days later with the successful flight of a Long March 12 rocket, and the heavy-lift Long March 5—also with YF-100 engines—is set to launch in a few days with one of China's most important space missions of the decade: the Chang'e 7 lunar lander en route to the Moon's south pole.
As always, we [welcome reader submissions][1]. 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.
Trouble in Taiwan. A prototype for a future satellite launch vehicle developed by Taiwan's top weapons manufacturer veered off course shortly after liftoff Wednesday, Taiwan's [Central News Agency reports][2]. The "trajectory anomaly" prompted the activation of the rocket's self-destruct mechanism. The government agency responsible for the test flight, the National [Chung-Shan][3] Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST), reported no injuries or property damage. Debris from rocket fell into a planned safety control zone near the southern tip of Taiwan.
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://arstechnica.wufoo.com/forms/launch-stories/
[2]: https://www.cna.com.tw/news/aipl/202608200239.aspx
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/rocket-report-spacex-makes-a-mark-on-the-moon-ula-names-new-boss/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/rocket-report-spacex-makes-a-mark-on-the-moon-ula-names-new-boss/#comments
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this view of a fresh crater created August 5 by the impact of a Falcon 9 upper stage on the Moon.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/rocket-report-spacex-makes-a-mark-on-the-moon-ula-names-new-boss/

2026-08-21 12:24:06 UTC

As demand for Meta AI glasses explodes, it’s harder to avoid creepy recordings
Can you tell when someone nearby is wearing Meta AI glasses?
As millions of people buy into the smart glasses fad each year, the odds are increasing that you could be secretly recorded while simply going about your day.
Meta is not the only smart glasses maker, but its AI glasses are by far the most popular. And as the devices become more common, some public places, including schools, courts, restaurants, and entertainment venues, have begun to ban them. Even tech lovers have rejected Meta glasses in certain settings. The hackers behind DEF CON 2026 [reportedly][1] banned smart glasses with no exceptions, reminding attendees with prescription pairs to “be sure to pack non-violating eyewear if you need them.”
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/28/def-con-bans-meta-style-pervert-glasses/5279763
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/meta-ai-glasses-may-get-creepier-and-apps-that-detect-them-arent-perfect/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/meta-ai-glasses-may-get-creepier-and-apps-that-detect-them-arent-perfect/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/meta-ai-glasses-may-get-creepier-and-apps-that-detect-them-arent-perfect/

2026-08-20 23:36:28 UTC

Europe cancels planned upgrades for Ariane 6 rocket
In the two years since it made a largely successful debut, Europe's Ariane 6 rocket has launched eight missions, all of which reached orbit safely.
The large, expendable rocket has a capacity of more than 20 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. And to the credit of European rocket scientists and planners, the Ariane 6 has had a substantially smoother rollout than comparable vehicles in the United States—Blue Origin's New Glenn and United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rockets—both of which have had significant growing pains.
However, even though the Ariane 6 rocket has had a successful debut, its future is clouded by high costs.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/europe-cancels-planned-upgrades-for-ariane-6-rocket/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/europe-cancels-planned-upgrades-for-ariane-6-rocket/#comments
Europe's second Ariane 6 rocket lifts off from the Guiana Space Center with a French military spy satellite.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/europe-cancels-planned-upgrades-for-ariane-6-rocket/

2026-08-20 23:36:22 UTC

US distributor of China’s most popular humanoid robots pivots after US ban
A leading US distributor of China’s most popular humanoid robots and robot dogs now plans to produce its own robots at a facility on Long Island, New York. The business pivot comes amid the US government’s growing crackdown on foreign-made robots.
The company RoboStore had previously become the main North American distributor for humanoid robots and quadruped robots from Unitree Robotics, a Chinese robotics company that produces some of the most affordable and popular humanoid robot models. Universities such as Harvard and MIT, along with tech companies like Amazon and Nvidia, purchased such robots made in China through RoboStore for their own research and development purposes.
“We’ve sold over 1,500 robots and deployed them and worked with customers like Cisco, OpenAI, Nvidia, and over 150 universities,” [Teddy Haggerty][1], founder and CEO of RoboStore, told Ars.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teddy-haggerty-4a950089/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/us-distributor-of-chinas-most-popular-humanoid-robots-pivots-after-us-ban/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/us-distributor-of-chinas-most-popular-humanoid-robots-pivots-after-us-ban/#comments
The robotics distributor RoboStore is pivoting from selling China's robots to making its own from a Long Island facility under the new company Robo Inc.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/us-distributor-of-chinas-most-popular-humanoid-robots-pivots-after-us-ban/

2026-08-20 19:11:52 UTC

Roblox must make changes after failing to block adults creeping on kids
Despite making changes last fall to help [block adults from messaging unknown children][1], Roblox is still failing to stop adults from creeping on kids in other ways, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, [said][2] on Thursday.
Suspecting that Roblox may not be doing enough to stop child exploitation, eSafety conducted testing earlier this year that flagged alarming gaps in Roblox safeguards. The agency found that adult strangers could still send connection requests to kids, whose “profiles and biographies, including account names, number and names of connections, avatar images, and non-sensitive biographical information such as their interests were visible to anyone on the Roblox platform, with no option to restrict the visibility of this information.”
Such requests did not trigger parental alerts, eSafety found, and bad actors could also search kids’ visible-to-anyone contact lists for more targets.
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/media-releases/roblox-on-notice-over-ongoing-concerns-about-online-child-grooming
[2]: https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/media-releases/esafety-secures-court-enforceable-undertaking-from-roblox-to-do-more-to-protect-australian-kids-from-grooming-and-sexual-exploitation
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/weak-roblox-safeguards-failed-to-stop-adults-contacting-kids-regulator-says/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/weak-roblox-safeguards-failed-to-stop-adults-contacting-kids-regulator-says/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/weak-roblox-safeguards-failed-to-stop-adults-contacting-kids-regulator-says/

2026-08-20 14:39:28 UTC

Reverse-lookup service exposed millions of photos of people’s faces
When someone uploads a photo to the people-search tool ClarityCheck, the website has a clear message: “Your reverse image search is private and secure.” New [research][1], though, shows that the website left more than 9 million image files, including photographs of people’s faces, publicly [exposed][2]. And a second misconfiguration publicly exposed people’s email addresses and phone numbers.
Overall, according to findings from independent security researcher Jeremiah Fowler, the exposed ClarityCheck database contained roughly 450 GB of images, including what appeared to be profile images, screenshots, and other photographs of adults, teenagers, and children. All of the images were stored in an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket, with files in folders named “faces” and “profiles,” which could be accessed by anyone online through a URL included in the company’s publicly available website code.
ClarityCheck is one of a number of so-called people-finder tools that have appeared online in recent years. These websites broadly claim to be able to search the web, public records, and other databases to identify individuals. ClarityCheck’s website says it can run searches on phone numbers, email addresses, vehicle identification numbers, and names. Its photo-search page says it can help “identify anyone in a photo” and find social media profiles “in seconds.”
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/clarity-check-data-exposed/
[2]: https://www.wired.com/tag/data-breaches/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/reverse-lookup-service-exposed-millions-of-photos-of-peoples-faces/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/reverse-lookup-service-exposed-millions-of-photos-of-peoples-faces/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/reverse-lookup-service-exposed-millions-of-photos-of-peoples-faces/

2026-08-20 14:39:22 UTC

SpaceX’s orbital data centers would create a new category of e-waste
Elon Musk’s talk about maintaining a million-strong AI data center satellite megaconstellation may not exactly be [practical][1] or [economical][2], but it might be unique. It’s about the closest we’ve come to confronting a scheme that would export a considerable amount of valuable materials into space. Humans aren’t doing a great job of material sustainability, but normally we’re talking about stuff escaping a recycling pipeline rather than *escaping* *Earth’s gravitational pull*.
The commercial space sector likes talking about the allure of mining asteroids for precious metals to bring back to Earth. Under what circumstances are we going to be willing to do that in reverse? Starlink alone has [doubled the mass][3] of objects in low-Earth orbit, and this orbital data center constellation would dwarf that—and dispose of at least some satellites by pushing them away from Earth.
Given the roughly five-year expected lifetime for data center GPUs, about 200,000 of the 1 million proposed SpaceX AI1 satellites would be decommissioned each year. Based on their [May 29 FCC filing][4], about 40,000 would definitely deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere. (Those materials would largely be dispersed throughout the atmosphere, turning a resource into a diffuse contaminant that slowly settles over the globe. One related issue: the aluminum would cause an [unknown amount of ozone depletion][5] over a period of decades.) Some or all of the remaining 160,000 satellites would be moved outward into a distant “disposal” orbit, instead. Either way, they're lost from a "material life cycle" point of view.
[Read full article][6]
[Comments][7]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/orbital-data-centers-part-1-theres-no-way-this-is-economically-viable-right/
[3]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21622671.2025.2594491
[4]: https://www.scribd.com/document/1045612919/SpaceX-Response-05-29-2026
[5]: https://www.sjon.earth/elon-musks-orbital-data-centers-could-be-an-environmental-catastrophe/
[6]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/spacexs-orbital-data-centers-would-create-a-new-category-of-e-waste/
[7]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/spacexs-orbital-data-centers-would-create-a-new-category-of-e-waste/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/spacexs-orbital-data-centers-would-create-a-new-category-of-e-waste/

2026-08-20 14:39:17 UTC

Genesis joins the giant electric SUV club with new GV90
A couple of years ago, Genesis showed us its unique take on the luxury electric SUV with the Neolum concept. The brand's designers know how to draw a handsome shape, particularly using an SUV's proportions, and the clean-lined concept featured a four-seat interior with no B pillar, swiveling front seats, and a thoughtful mix of leather, wool, and even wood. Now Genesis has debuted the production version as its new electric flagship, the GV90. And based on the photos, at least, the process of turning that concept into reality has been a success.
The GV90 uses the same 800 V E-GMP platform as other Korean electric three-row SUVs, the Hyundai Ioniq 9 and Kia EV9. A three-row, seven-seat GV90 will be part of the range, and I would assume the most common variant we'll encounter on the roads. But for the launch, Genesis is just focusing on the four-seat GV90 and the high-end GV90 Neolum; the latter faithfully translates most of the concept, including the pillarless coach doors (which Genesis is calling the Neolum Arch Gate).
The GV90 Neolum is a variant with no B pillar and coach doors. Credit: Genesis
[GV90 Neolum interior]
Here's one GV90 Neolum interior. The wood floor from the concept made it, too. Credit: Genesis
This is one of the First Edition GV90 Neolum interiors. Credit: Genesis
Pillarless coach doors certainly add drama to a vehicle, and Genesis has previously told Ars it learned enough to engineer them with all the safety requirements volume production would require. Speaking of safety, all GV90s include the world's first roof airbag (which deploys in the case of a rollover), one of 12 airbags throughout the interior.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/genesis-joins-the-giant-electric-suv-club-with-new-gv90/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/genesis-joins-the-giant-electric-suv-club-with-new-gv90/#comments
The Genesis GV90 has the luxury SUV look nailed down.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/genesis-joins-the-giant-electric-suv-club-with-new-gv90/

2026-08-20 13:25:23 UTC

Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted
Earlier this week, researchers outlined an attack that used a secret input provided by Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise to cause the AI assistant to exfiltrate a password present in the user’s inbox. Now, a separate team has devised a similar attack against Grok. The new data theft hack employs a deceptively simple trick to force the Elon Musk-owned LLM to steal user chats and other personal information. At the time this post went live, the assistant continued to cough up the data, despite xAI being informed of it in June.
The lesson from both this week’s episodes—and the countless other ones that have come before it—is that LLMs are incapable of solving the root causes for prompt injections, the most severe vulnerability classes they’re most prone to. That leaves AI developers with no other option but to build a guardrail that steers the model away from the harmful actions. As I noted in [Tuesday’s story][1], the approach is tantamount to a road traffic safety engineer erecting a protective rail around a dangerous bend rather than banking the curve.
## Cryptographic Context Injection in the house
Prompt injections exploit LLMs' training to comply with user requests whenever possible. Attackers can capitalize on the predilection by smuggling harmful instructions into emails or webpages the assistant is instructed to summarize. Because LLMs can’t reliably distinguish between content in an email sent by an untrusted party and user instructions entered directly into a prompt, the overly solicitous LLM faithfully follows them. To date, Grok and other LLMs' only recourse is to create guardrails that flag suspicious instructions and forbid them from being executed.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/microsoft-copilot-reveals-secret-input-that-allowed-it-to-be-hacked/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/grok-exfiltrates-user-data-when-malicious-instructions-are-encrypted/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/grok-exfiltrates-user-data-when-malicious-instructions-are-encrypted/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/grok-exfiltrates-user-data-when-malicious-instructions-are-encrypted/

2026-08-19 23:16:39 UTC

Amazon aims for delivery drones to reach 500 US neighborhoods by end of 2026
Amazon wants to grow its Prime Air delivery drone service sixfold to reach nearly 500 cities and towns across the United States by the end of 2026. The planned expansions from Amazon and its rivals could make the convenience of delivery drone services available to tens of millions more people in the coming months—but will also test more communities’ tolerance for increased noise from daily drone flights.
On August 19, [Amazon announced][1] it would soon launch Prime Air in the metropolitan areas of Chicago; Cleveland; Atlanta; Syracuse, New York; and Boise, Idaho, with more to come later in the year. Each Prime Air site offers delivery drone service within an area of about 175 square miles, with delivery times ranging from half an hour to an hour.
Prime Air already operates out of Amazon warehouses in 10 cities across seven states. Those include primarily suburban neighborhoods of Phoenix; Tampa; Kansas City; Omaha, Nebraska; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Detroit; Houston; and San Antonio, Dallas, and Waco, Texas.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-prime-air-drone-delivery-expansion
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/amazon-aims-for-delivery-drones-to-reach-500-us-neighborhoods-by-end-of-2026/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/amazon-aims-for-delivery-drones-to-reach-500-us-neighborhoods-by-end-of-2026/#comments
Amazon Prime Air delivery relies on the MK30 drone designed and developed in-house.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/amazon-aims-for-delivery-drones-to-reach-500-us-neighborhoods-by-end-of-2026/

2026-08-19 20:31:25 UTC

The floodgates are open after another Chinese company lands a reusable rocket
It has been a little more than a month since China recovered an orbital-class rocket booster for the first time. A second launch operator accomplished a similar feat Tuesday in another sign of China's growing launch capability.
It took 10 years for a second US launch company, Blue Origin, to propulsively land an orbital-class booster after SpaceX did it with the Falcon 9 rocket in 2015. SpaceX has since added a second reusable rocket to its fleet with Starship and its Super Heavy booster. Perhaps a third American company will join SpaceX and Blue Origin's club in 2027. Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Relativity Space, and Firefly Aerospace—working in partnership with Northrop Grumman—are working on reusable rockets that could make their first flights in the next couple of years.
A similar number of launch companies are working on reusable rockets in China. Some of them operate under the auspices of the sprawling state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). Others are more commercial in nature, driven by capital investment from private industry.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/the-floodgates-are-open-after-another-chinese-company-lands-a-reusable-rocket/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/the-floodgates-are-open-after-another-chinese-company-lands-a-reusable-rocket/#comments
LandSpace's Zhuque-3 rocket comes in for landing in the Gobi Desert.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/the-floodgates-are-open-after-another-chinese-company-lands-a-reusable-rocket/

2026-08-19 20:31:15 UTC

Flight attendants freaked out that Google is buying tons of Spirit employee data
Last Friday, Google won an auction to acquire a huge amount of Spirit Airlines data.
The data doesn’t include personal information or customer data, but instead nearly covers the airline's entire employment and workplace record.
To ensure that no individual can be identified in the dataset, Google agreed to use a court-appointed ombudsman to oversee a process to strip any personally identifying information (PII) from the data before it’s transferred to Google. Under the deal, Google agreed to maintain the data in this de-identified form and to never intentionally re-identify the data. And if Google sells access to the data, third parties would supposedly be bound by the same terms.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/flight-attendants-freaked-out-that-google-to-buy-tons-of-spirit-employee-data/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/flight-attendants-freaked-out-that-google-to-buy-tons-of-spirit-employee-data/#comments
Spirit Airlines shut down overnight on May 2, 2026.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/flight-attendants-freaked-out-that-google-to-buy-tons-of-spirit-employee-data/

2026-08-19 20:31:09 UTC

Framework responds to complaints that BIOS update bricks Ryzen 7040 laptops
A BIOS update for the [Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040-series][1] processors is bricking the systems, multiple users have reported online.
Framework started shipping pre-built Ryzen 7040-based Framework Laptop 13 computers and compatible motherboards in 2023. In June 2026, Framework released BIOS 3.20 for the devices. The update adds mainboard support for features, including a haptic touchpad and new speakers, for the higher-end [Framework Laptop 13 Pro][2] and fixes issues, including one “where the Battery Extender status was reported incorrectly following a reboot, hibernation, or shutdown after the timer had expired," per [a post][3] on Framework’s forum from an employee.
Some users say that they installed the update successfully.
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/review-framework-laptop-finally-gets-an-amd-ryzen-config-and-its-pretty-good/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/framework-laptop-13-pro-review-much-better-battery-much-worse-price/
[3]: https://community.frame.work/t/framework-laptop-13-ryzen-7040-bios-3-20-release-stable/83283
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/framework-responds-to-complaints-that-bios-update-bricked-ryzen-7040-laptops/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/framework-responds-to-complaints-that-bios-update-bricked-ryzen-7040-laptops/#comments
The Framework Laptop 13.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/framework-responds-to-complaints-that-bios-update-bricked-ryzen-7040-laptops/

2026-08-19 17:15:23 UTC

Trump expected to pick conservative policy wonk Heidi Overton to lead FDA
President Trump is expected to nominate Heidi Overton, a top conservative policy aide, as the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, according to multiple media reports.
Overton is currently the deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and has played a key role in shaping a variety of health policies during Trump's second term. At times, she has notably [angered members of the Make America Healthy Again movement][1], which was created by anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Overton has a medical degree from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and earned a doctoral degree in clinical investigation from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. While at Johns Hopkins, she worked with Marty Makary, the previous FDA commissioner who was ousted by Trump amid a cacophony of controversies.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/07/heidi-overton-maha-rfk/688038/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/trump-expected-to-pick-conservative-policy-wonk-heidi-overton-to-lead-fda/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/trump-expected-to-pick-conservative-policy-wonk-heidi-overton-to-lead-fda/#comments
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (L), and Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy Dr. Heidi Overton (R), stand in the Oval Office after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for childhood vaccine shots to be spaced out into separate visits, August 10, 2026 in Washington, DC.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/trump-expected-to-pick-conservative-policy-wonk-heidi-overton-to-lead-fda/

2026-08-19 17:15:17 UTC

Meta ran ads for an app promising to nudify female politicians
Meta platforms recently ran ads for an AI porn-generation tool that seemingly encouraged users to create [deepfaked][1] videos resembling female US politicians, despite the company’s policies against ads containing sexual material. It’s the latest in a [series of failures][2] by Meta to keep advertisements for tools that produce [nonconsensual intimate imagery][3] off its platforms.
The tool, which is called Kromix, bills itself as an “AI image styler.” A voice-over for one of the video advertisements, viewed by WIRED, promotes the tool as having “no restrictions,” saying “all the characters are real people” and describing it as “the AI that men actually use.” In one ad, a woman closely resembling a prominent female US politician is seen in front of a US flag and the flag of the president of the US above the caption “What if she moved?” She then winks, before the ad cuts to a scene of a woman with the same face performing in a pornographic video.
The Kromix app, which was hosted by Apple’s App Store prior to a request for comment from WIRED, invites paid users to upload photos so that it can use them in scenarios including “bedroom rape” and “Disney love.” Videos on the app also feature AI-generated pornographic videos of women wearing Spider-Man costumes. Requests for comment sent to a contact listed in the app went unanswered.
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://www.wired.com/tag/deepfakes/
[2]: https://www.wired.com/story/meta-ran-ads-that-contained-ai-generated-child-sexual-abuse-imagery/
[3]: https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-remove-nudes-take-it-down-act/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/meta-ran-ads-for-an-app-promising-to-nudify-female-politicians/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/meta-ran-ads-for-an-app-promising-to-nudify-female-politicians/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/meta-ran-ads-for-an-app-promising-to-nudify-female-politicians/

2026-08-19 17:15:12 UTC

Scientists find closest star to the Milky Way's central black hole
Sgr A* is the name we've given to the supermassive black hole that sits at the center of the Milky Way. We've known about its presence since the 1970s but only managed to image it within the past few years. In the intervening time, most of our understanding of the object was obtained by watching a group of stars that orbit the black hole, helping us get a good estimate of its mass and size. In essence, those stars acted as instruments that let us peer into an environment we couldn't study any other way.
In Wednesday's issue of Nature, researchers describe a recently discovered star that is on an extremely eccentric orbit that takes it closer to Sgr A* than anything we've previously identified. It gets so close that it may help us get our first measurements of the spin of the black hole.
## Reading the spin
There's an entire population of stars that orbit relatively close to Sgr A*. We can estimate their mass based on their brightness and spectral features. Using their masses and a reconstruction of their orbits using several years of data, we can figure out just how supermassive Sgr A* is (nearly 10³⁷ kilograms).
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/scientists-find-closest-star-to-the-milky-ways-central-black-hole/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/scientists-find-closest-star-to-the-milky-ways-central-black-hole/#comments
Lasers used to focus the four telescopes that make up the VLT.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/scientists-find-closest-star-to-the-milky-ways-central-black-hole/

2026-08-19 17:15:06 UTC

Google Pixel 11 series review: Is the magic fading?
Google's approach to making smartphones has changed a lot over the years. It started with Nexus phones aimed at the tinkerer and enthusiast niche back when there were countless companies making smartphones. Today, there are far fewer, and Google's hyper-polished Pixel lineup is seeing less competition and higher sales. So maybe Google thinks it can just keep doing what works. The new [Pixel 11 series][1] is Google's most refined yet, featuring sleek designs, smart software, and incredible screens. They're also rather boring.
Google made precious few hardware changes in its 2026 phones, shaving off a fraction of a millimeter here and dropping a gram there. The design language has been the same now for three generations, all while prices continue to inch upward. And this year, Google's hardware has actually regressed in a few key areas. Despite that, the Pixel 11 phones aren't bad—they're some of the best 2026 has to offer. But it feels like Google is forgetting that it's not just competing against Apple and Samsung. It also has to compete against the Pixels of yesteryear.
## The same old (but great) design
Just like last year's [Pixel 10 series][2], Google's 2026 lineup includes three flat phones and one foldable. The flat Pixels are the same size, and even side-by-side, it's hard to tell them apart from their predecessors. We've got almost identical aluminum and glass sandwich designs, which do admittedly look very nice. They still have Pixelsnap, too.
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-reveals-2026-hardware-lineup-pixel-11-pixel-watch-5-and-pixel-tag/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/google-pixel-10-series-review-dont-call-it-an-android/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-pixel-11-series-review-is-the-magic-fading/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-pixel-11-series-review-is-the-magic-fading/#comments
The Pixel 11 lineup is familiar but still stylish.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-pixel-11-series-review-is-the-magic-fading/

2026-08-19 17:15:00 UTC

mRNA cancer vaccine succeeded in Phase 3 melanoma trial, Moderna and Merck say
Pharmaceutical partners Moderna and Merck announced on Wednesday that their novel mRNA-based vaccine—individually tailored to target a patient's unique cancer mutations—was effective in a late-stage clinical trial of patients with melanoma, one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer.
The announcement was scant on details, but if the success holds, it stands to realize the high aspirations for both mRNA vaccines and individualized cancer-targeting medicines in cancer therapy, providing a first success for both treatment types.
The Phase 3 trial included 1,137 patients who had stage IIB–IV melanoma that had been surgically removed prior to their treatment in the trial. Patients were randomized two-to-one to receive either a combination treatment of the tailored mRNA vaccine (intismeran or mRNA-4157) with Merck's established monoclonal antibody cancer treatment Keytruda, or they received treatment with Keytruda alone. Both patient groups were treated for about a year. The trial was placebo-controlled and double-blind, meaning neither the doctors nor the patients knew which treatment patients were randomly assigned to receive.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/mrna-cancer-vaccine-succeeded-in-phase-3-melanoma-trial-moderna-and-merck-say/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/mrna-cancer-vaccine-succeeded-in-phase-3-melanoma-trial-moderna-and-merck-say/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/mrna-cancer-vaccine-succeeded-in-phase-3-melanoma-trial-moderna-and-merck-say/

2026-08-19 17:14:55 UTC

A fantastical journey unfolds in gorgeous Wildwood trailer
In June, we [highlighted][1] a behind-the-scenes featurette on the making of [*Wildwood*][2], director Travis Knight’s forthcoming stop-motion animated fantasy film. Laika Studios released an [extended teaser][3] in May, which racked up over 90 million views. And now we've got the gorgeous full trailer, set to a haunting cover of Avicii's "[Wake Me Up][4]."
The film is an adaptation of the [2011 novel][5] by Colin Meloy—frontman of indie folk-rock band The Decemberists—and his wife, illustrator Carson Ellis. Meloy and Ellis live in Portland, Oregon, near Forest Park, where they often hike the trails. In *Wildwood*, they transformed that local landmark into a magical hidden world filled with talking animals and lurking threats, only accessible to people of The Wood—and select Outsider “half-breeds.”
Twelve-year-old Prue McKee discovers the forest while out walking with her baby brother, Mac. A murder of crows swoops down and carries him away, and Prue discovers the Wilderness while hunting for him. Her schoolmate, Curtis Mehlberg, follows her, and both are able to enter that magical world. Fantastical adventures ensue as the pair encounter a mysterious woman, Alexandra, who has lost her son, along with coyotes, bandits, and some pretty big secrets.
[Read full article][6]
[Comments][7]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/06/wildwood-featurette-lifts-the-veil-on-building-its-stop-motion-world/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildwood_(film)
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POneS8h1jyU
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcrbM1l_BoI
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildwood_(novel)
[6]: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/08/a-fantastical-journey-unfolds-in-gorgeous-wildwood-trailer/
[7]: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/08/a-fantastical-journey-unfolds-in-gorgeous-wildwood-trailer/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/08/a-fantastical-journey-unfolds-in-gorgeous-wildwood-trailer/

2026-08-18 23:09:06 UTC

Ukrainian drones overwhelm Russian tanks’ new active protection system—for now
Russian tanks have entered battle for the first time with a new active protection system designed to shoot down incoming drones. But the technology’s recent combat debut in Ukraine met with only limited success—Ukrainian drones still destroyed the Russian armored vehicles by attacking in overwhelming numbers.
The first documented battlefield appearance of the Arena-M active protection system took place when Russian forces [launched a company-size assault][1] with tanks and other armored vehicles in the Donetsk Oblast of eastern Ukraine on July 22. The Ukrainian defenders repelled the attack and [posted video footage][2] of their [kamikaze drone strikes][3] destroying at least seven T-72B3A tanks, including some that carried the Arena-M system, [according to Euromaidan Press][4].
However, Ukrainian soldiers also described the Russian Arena-M system successfully shooting down some incoming drones, according to the journalists [Dmytro Putiata][5] and [Rob Lee][6]. The Ukrainians reported requiring between 15 and 20 drones to finish off each tank.
[Read full article][7]
[Comments][8]
[1]: https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-24-2026/
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBad0WLr288
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/ukraines-drones-get-ai-upgrades-for-kamikaze-strikes-future-swarm-attacks/
[4]: https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/08/17/arena-m-works/
[5]: https://x.com/kriegsforscherD/status/2086165753917509724
[6]: https://x.com/RALee85/status/2086188280408903894
[7]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/ukrainian-drones-overwhelm-russian-tanks-new-active-protection-system-for-now/
[8]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/ukrainian-drones-overwhelm-russian-tanks-new-active-protection-system-for-now/#comments
The first-person view of a Ukrainian drone about to strike a Russian tank equipped with the Arena-M active protection system.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/ukrainian-drones-overwhelm-russian-tanks-new-active-protection-system-for-now/

2026-08-18 23:09:00 UTC

"Sabotage": Experts, lawmakers blast RFK Jr. for destroying healthcare research
The federal agency tasked with studying ways to improve America's [outstandingly poor healthcare system][1] is "on the brink," experts warn. The Trump administration has cut its staff by 75 percent, canceled its grants en masse, and is refusing to spend tens of millions of dollars appropriated by Congress.
Whether the agency "will survive the second Trump administration is an open question," health policy experts Aaron Carroll and David Atkins wrote in [an opinion piece published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine][2].
The agency in question is the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which has focused on ways to improve patient safety, healthcare quality, care delivery, and new technologies and practices since the 1990s. In the past, "Republican leaders recognized that health care disparities were fundamental quality problems," Carroll and Atkins wrote. But recently, disparities in care have become partisan issues.
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/05/us-healthcare-still-stupidly-expensive-with-pathetic-outcomes-study-finds/
[2]: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-26-03490
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/sabotage-experts-lawmakers-blast-rfk-jr-for-destroying-healthcare-research/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/sabotage-experts-lawmakers-blast-rfk-jr-for-destroying-healthcare-research/#comments
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), during an executive order signing in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on Sept. 30, 2025.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/sabotage-experts-lawmakers-blast-rfk-jr-for-destroying-healthcare-research/

2026-08-18 21:18:15 UTC

Disney sues FCC and its chair, escalating fight against Trump's chief censor
Disney today sued the Federal Communications Commission and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in a lawsuit that aims to stop what it called a "campaign of censorship" waged by the Trump administration against ABC.
Disney, ABC, and the eight broadcast stations they own filed a [complaint][1] in US District Court for the District of Columbia. They also submitted a [motion][2] for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction that would halt the FCC proceeding in which Carr is threatening to deny renewals of broadcast licenses held by ABC stations.
The lawsuit accused the FCC of violating the First Amendment by retaliating against the company's protected expression. "Again and again, the Administration has attacked ABC’s speech—the stories its journalists report and the viewpoints its network programs air," the lawsuit said. "Over time, those attacks have escalated into express demands that ABC be stripped of its broadcast licenses *because of its speech*."
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.295648/gov.uscourts.dcd.295648.1.0_1.pdf
[2]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.295648/gov.uscourts.dcd.295648.2.1.pdf
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/disney-sues-fcc-and-its-chair-escalating-fight-against-trumps-chief-censor/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/disney-sues-fcc-and-its-chair-escalating-fight-against-trumps-chief-censor/#comments
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr speaks on stage during the Concordia Annual Summit on September 22, 2025, in New York City.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/disney-sues-fcc-and-its-chair-escalating-fight-against-trumps-chief-censor/

2026-08-18 21:17:58 UTC

Against all odds, SpaceX finally tugs Starship into port after 24 days at sea
SpaceX's most recent Starship test flight may have ended July 24, but its mission isn't over yet.
The spacecraft [splashed down in the Indian Ocean][1] intact after flying halfway around the world from SpaceX's launch base in South Texas. Engineers expected the ship's life to end with a fiery disintegration after toppling over, just as past Starships have done following splashdown.
Numerous onboard sensors and cameras, along with buoys and drones in position at the splashdown zone, have provided important data for SpaceX to assess the performance of the ship's heat shield after each test flight, so officials accepted the post-flight conflagrations. That day, Starship tipped over and remained intact, surprising just about everyone.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/spacex-eyes-tower-catch-for-next-starship-after-auspicious-end-to-13th-flight/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/its-christmastime-at-spacex-as-company-salvages-starship-from-indian-ocean/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/its-christmastime-at-spacex-as-company-salvages-starship-from-indian-ocean/#comments
SpaceX's Starship vehicle arrives off the coast of Christmas Island after a 24-day journey from a splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/its-christmastime-at-spacex-as-company-salvages-starship-from-indian-ocean/

2026-08-18 17:35:48 UTC

Ford hopes this Hypercar will be its next Le Mans winner
The car that Ford hopes will return it to overall victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans made its unofficial debut this week. Ford sent us some pictures of the still-unnamed car conducting its first track test at the colorful Paul Ricard circuit in Provence, France, where drivers Matt Campbell and Logan Sargeant started the hard work of making the car both fast and reliable.
Ford already has four overall wins at Le Mans, owning the top spot four years in a row. But the last of these wins came in 1969, when a privately entered—and at that point outdated—GT40 managed to beat Porsche's still-untamed 917 on the German car's debut. The company returned to top-level endurance racing in 1982 with the C100 during the early days of the Group C regulations, but the car was uncompetitive and unreliable, and the program soon ended.
In 2016, 50 years on from its first win, [a class win in the GTE-Pro category][1] added some more silverware to the corporate display cabinet. Now, the soaring popularity of the Hypercar category in the World Endurance Championship and at Le Mans has tempted it back to the fastest class.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/07/after-victory-at-le-mans-we-catch-up-with-ford-to-talk-about-its-gt/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/ford-hopes-this-hypercar-will-be-its-next-le-mans-winner/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/ford-hopes-this-hypercar-will-be-its-next-le-mans-winner/#comments
Ford's unnamed Le Mans racer testing at Paul Ricard. The colored lines are very high-grip surfaces that slow down a car that's spun and left the track.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08/ford-hopes-this-hypercar-will-be-its-next-le-mans-winner/

2026-08-18 17:35:42 UTC

Fairphone's latest repairable phone is finally available in the US for $650
As smartphone designs have become more refined, they've also become less repairable. Fairphone bucks that trend, offering devices that can be fully disassembled and serviced using a single screwdriver. But its devices were a pain to get in the US until now.
The Dutch company has [launched the Fairphone Gen 6+ in the US][1], offering not only the phone but a full line of accessories and replacement parts so you can keep your phone running for years. And yes, the battery is removable.
Don't expect the Fairphone Gen 6+ to blow you away in the spec department—it focuses on being repairable and paying workers a fair wage. Half of the phone is made from recycled materials, and it has a microSD card slot. How retro.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://www.fairphone.com/stories/the-fairphone-gen-6-is-all-about-giving-you-more
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/fairphone-brings-the-repairable-fairphone-gen-6-to-the-us/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/fairphone-brings-the-repairable-fairphone-gen-6-to-the-us/#comments
The Fairphone 6+ is a different kind of smartphone.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/fairphone-brings-the-repairable-fairphone-gen-6-to-the-us/

2026-08-18 17:35:37 UTC

The United States is about to wake up to the threat from China's space program
There are generally two schools of thought in the Western space community when it comes to the prospect of China landing humans on the Moon in the next few years and very possibly beating NASA and the United States in its efforts to return astronauts there.
Many people will ask what the big deal is. After all, NASA won the space race to the Moon nearly six decades ago, when Apollo 11 landed there. That it took so long for anyone else to follow speaks to the magnitude of the US achievement, they might say.
But others have a starkly different opinion. A dominant storyline of the 21st century has been the economic and geopolitical rise of China, and what was once a unipolar world now has two large nations vying for supremacy across a number of fronts. One is space. If China can land humans on the Moon before the United States returns, it will represent a huge geopolitical win. From a propaganda standpoint, it will allow China to declare that it has not just caught up to the United States but surpassed it as this century's superpower.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/the-united-states-is-about-to-wake-up-to-the-threat-from-chinas-space-program/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/the-united-states-is-about-to-wake-up-to-the-threat-from-chinas-space-program/#comments
A mosaic of the Shackleton Crater showcases the power of two lunar orbiting cameras working together to reveal unprecedented detail of the lunar south pole region. Scientists created this mosaic using images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the ShadowCam instrument on South Korea's Danuri orbiter, revealing the dark interior of Shackleton in new detail.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/the-united-states-is-about-to-wake-up-to-the-threat-from-chinas-space-program/

2026-08-18 17:35:32 UTC

Peacock raises prices by 18 percent after becoming profitable
For the fourth time in four years, Peacock has raised its prices.
The Select plan, which has ads and doesn’t include sports, movies, or Peacock originals, went from $8/month to $9/month. The monthly fee for the standard ad plan (Premium) went from $11/month to $13/month, and the ad-free plan (Premium Plus) went from $17/month to $20/month. Annual pricing, as previously, offers 12 months for the price of 10 months.
Peacock’s previous price hike was in July 2025, when the middle tier (with ads) went from $8/month to $11/month, and the ad-free plan increased from $14 to $17. Peacock also raised prices in July 2024 and August 2023. NBCUniversal launched the service in 2020.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/peacock-raises-prices-by-18-percent-after-becoming-profitable/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/peacock-raises-prices-by-18-percent-after-becoming-profitable/#comments
(Photo by )
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/peacock-raises-prices-by-18-percent-after-becoming-profitable/

2026-08-18 15:47:23 UTC

X-rays add new twist to narwhal's spiral tusk
CT scan of a narwhal tusk. Credit: Adrian Rodriguez Palomo/CC BY-NC
CT scan of a narwhal tusk. Credit: Adrian Rodriguez Palomo/CC BY-NC
Narwhals are toothed whales, renowned for their distinctive straight, spiraling tusks, which many people in medieval times believed were the horns of unicorns and thus held magical healing properties. That belief was debunked long ago, but the tusks remain popular souvenirs in Canada and Greenland. And they still hold a fascination for scientists keen to learn more about their unusual structure. A new paper published in the journal Nature Communications reports that rather than one left-oriented spiral, narwhal tusks also have a second internal spiral oriented in the opposite direction.
Inuit legend holds that a woman was dragged into the ocean by a harpoon rope after the weapon had hit a narwhal and was transformed into the animal herself. Her hair, which she'd worn in a twisted knot, became the spiral tusk. The tusk is actually a canine tooth in the left upper jaw of male narwhals, pushing through the lip when the males reach two or three years of age and growing to lengths as long as 1.5 to 2 meters (just under 5 feet to 9 feet 10 inches). Some males may develop two long spiral tusks or, in rare cases, none at all.
There's a general consensus that these tusks most likely evolved via sexual selection as a form of social status. They clearly aren't crucial for survival, since the females usually don't develop the tusk—and if they do, the tusks are much smaller with fewer spirals—and yet typically live longer than the males. But the precise function of the tusk is still a matter of considerable debate.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/x-rays-add-new-twist-to-narwhals-spiral-tusk/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/x-rays-add-new-twist-to-narwhals-spiral-tusk/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/x-rays-add-new-twist-to-narwhals-spiral-tusk/

2026-08-18 15:47:17 UTC

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma takes pains to deliver a slasher fan’s dream
Here’s one for all the kids who were exposed to lurid slasher movies when they were way too young and it kinda messed them up… but they’re finally ready to laugh about it.
Jane Schoenbrun’s latest movie, *Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,* is shocking, emotional, provocative, numbing, warm, witty, and surreal. It’s a slasher nerd’s dream, with a David Fincher-esque attention to detail in the opening sequence, which was designed using insights gathered from horror convention-goers. Written to indulge superfans, the movie also makes sure to not lose the general audience. Just as the geeky navel-gazing threatens to become tedious, a joke or a wink keeps the audience laughing and focused on the fantastical story Schoenbrun actually wants to tell—which isn’t a genuine slasher at all.
The movie follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a queer film director tasked with creating a "woke" reboot of a politically incorrect sleepaway camp franchise in the vein of *Friday the 13th*. On her way to meet the reclusive [final girl][1] from the original Camp Miasma film—Billy Preston, portrayed deliciously by a junk food-obsessed Gillian Anderson—Kris fails to nail her pitch and instead gets yanked into a fantasy buried deep in her psyche while at the abandoned set where Billy now lives.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_girl
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/08/teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma-takes-pains-to-deliver-a-slasher-fans-dream/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/08/teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma-takes-pains-to-deliver-a-slasher-fans-dream/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/08/teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma-takes-pains-to-deliver-a-slasher-fans-dream/

2026-08-18 13:42:42 UTC

Microsoft Copilot reveals secret input that allowed it to be hacked
It’s not every day that attackers can force a frontier AI model to cough up user passwords and other sensitive data without user confirmation. That’s exactly what researchers recently did to Microsoft 365 Copilot Enterprise. Even more unusual is the source they tapped to discover the critical vulnerability that made their exploit possible. Rather than employing reverse engineering or other traditional vulnerability-hunting methods, they asked Copilot. The LLM assistant readily complied.
Researchers at security firm Varonis knew they wanted to create an exploit that would exfiltrate user data when a user did nothing more than click on a link. Like most AI assistants today, Copilot steadfastly refused and made clear that sensitive prompts like that require explicit user consent in the form of a gesture, such as pressing a return key or other key. In response, the researchers peppered Copilot with questions about the guardrails that required user confirmation before the assistant can execute powerful commands.
## Loose lips sink ships
The dialog was like a game of 20 questions. Each answer provided a new clue that divulged information about the complex safety mechanism. Why was auto-execution impossible, they asked. What URL structures and deep links were involved? What happens when a page is loaded with input already in the prompt field? Each answer provided a deeper view into the guardrail and its limits. Eventually, Copilot provided a stunning Microsoft trade secret—an undocumented prompt parameter that completely bypassed the requirement for user consent.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/microsoft-copilot-reveals-secret-input-that-allowed-it-to-be-hacked/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/microsoft-copilot-reveals-secret-input-that-allowed-it-to-be-hacked/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/microsoft-copilot-reveals-secret-input-that-allowed-it-to-be-hacked/

2026-08-18 12:11:23 UTC

As temperatures get hotter, pesticides are more dangerous to farmworkers
For the nation’s 2.4 million farmworkers, climate change is poised to exacerbate the harms of pesticides, a growing body of research shows.
[Heat stresses the body][1], making it more vulnerable to pesticides and other toxicants, and protective clothing worn in the heat only adds to this stress. Hotter temperatures can also lead to higher evaporation rates, increasing farmworkers’ exposure as more pesticides are applied to crops. And heat can boost rates of chemical transformation of pesticides into more toxic compounds.
“When it’s in the air, you are inhaling it through your nose. You are exposed to it through your other organs like skin. Your skin can absorb some of the pesticides [that are] in the air, and also when you’re sweating as part of doing your work you are increasing the pore size of your skin,” said Omanjana Goswami, a scientist in the food and environmental program at the Union for Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. “It is awful. There is no other word for it.”
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/heat-stress/about/index.html
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/as-temperatures-get-hotter-pesticides-are-more-dangerous-to-farmworkers/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/as-temperatures-get-hotter-pesticides-are-more-dangerous-to-farmworkers/#comments
Farmworkers work in a strawberry field on June 12, 2025, in Oxnard, California.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/as-temperatures-get-hotter-pesticides-are-more-dangerous-to-farmworkers/

2026-08-18 04:59:36 UTC

Theban tomb reveals how Egyptian burial trends evolved in time
Egypt's Theban necropolis holds over 400 tombs, a rich resource for archaeologists eager to learn more about that region's ancient history. A [new paper][1] published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology outlines how Egyptian burial trends likely changed over the course of centuries, shifting from individual burials in elaborate coffins to reusing earlier burial sites for later interments, resulting in greater density and the occasional superposition of bodies.
There has been prior research on the reuse of tombs in Thebes. This latest paper focused on a Theban tomb known as 209 in the western necropolis, dating back to the early 25th Dynasty (754–656 BCE) and ultimately abandoned in the Ptolemaic period (305–30 BCE). The original owner was likely a high official of Nubian origin named Nisemro. Over the centuries, the tomb was prone to repeated flash flooding due to its location within an active drainage channel of the Wadi Hatasun, so it's a complex site, archaeologically speaking.
That made it ideal for what the authors term an "integrated archaeothanatological approach," incorporating collected data on body position, coffin use, superpositions of remains, and stratigraphic relationships with osteological analysis in order to reconstruct the chronological sequence of the burials. They focused on a site known as Side Chamber 3, one of the main secondary areas of the tomb that was largely undisrupted.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-archaeology/articles/10.3389/fearc.2026.1888379/full
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/theban-tomb-reveals-how-egyptian-burial-trends-evolved-in-time/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/theban-tomb-reveals-how-egyptian-burial-trends-evolved-in-time/#comments
Mummified individuals from Side Chamber 3 of Theban Tomb 209, showing variation in body orientation and arm position.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/theban-tomb-reveals-how-egyptian-burial-trends-evolved-in-time/

2026-08-17 22:23:52 UTC

Former SpaceX engineers are building a robotic factory for making steel parts
Three former SpaceX engineers have switched their attention from making rocket engines to manufacturing steel parts by using AI-driven software and robots. Their immediate goal involves establishing a prototype factory that can automate most of the steel fabrication process for crucial infrastructure components by 2027.
The startup, [called 1872][1], officially launched on July 22 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at its Factory One facility in Cincinnati, Ohio. The company is initially focused on automating the manufacturing of steel skids—rectangular steel frames that can provide a moveable foundation for modular buildings—with the goal of supplying customers who are developing AI data centers or small modular nuclear reactors.
“We're building towards autonomy, but we're not necessarily building in a dogmatic fashion towards full autonomy,” Dan Summers, CEO of 1872, told Ars. “We may achieve 80 percent autonomous operations, and we may decide that it makes sense to stop there because there's just diminishing returns to go to full 100 percent.”
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://1872.ai/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/former-spacex-engineers-are-building-a-robotic-factory-for-making-steel-parts/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/former-spacex-engineers-are-building-a-robotic-factory-for-making-steel-parts/#comments
1872's Factory One building had a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 22, 2026.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/former-spacex-engineers-are-building-a-robotic-factory-for-making-steel-parts/

2026-08-12 23:34:51 UTC

The web’s newest weapon against AI scrapers is a font
AI companies' penchant for [scraping through large swathes of the public web][1] in search of [valuable training data][2] has already led to [lawsuits][3] and [technical fixes][4] aimed at stopping the practice. Now, a pair of designers are hoping to stymie these scrapers with a new font designed to offer people a perfectly readable webpage while serving scrapers a subtly edited, nonsensical version in the underlying HTML.
ShieldFont, as designers Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio [write in a recent white paper][5], was made to offer web publishers "a practical opt-out from unauthorized AI training and [to] disrupt what is collected when that choice is ignored."
## When is a horse a potato?
The font is based around [ligatures][6], a long-standing feature of many fonts that is usually used to replace certain letter pairs with a more readable version when they're smushed up next to each other. With ShieldFont, though, those ligatures are instead used to replace entire words with others in an attempt to destroy the text's value to scrapers. This substitution only happens when the font engine draws the page on screen, meaning scrapers that simply download plaintext source code get an altered version that end users never see.
[Read full article][7]
[Comments][8]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/devs-say-ai-crawlers-dominate-traffic-forcing-blocks-on-entire-countries/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/01/openai-says-its-impossible-to-create-useful-ai-models-without-copyrighted-material/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/reddit-sues-to-block-perplexity-from-scraping-google-search-results/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/tag/ai-scraping/
[5]: https://shieldfont.org/white-paper/
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)
[7]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/new-font-turns-ordinary-webpages-into-nonsense-for-ai-scrapers/
[8]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/new-font-turns-ordinary-webpages-into-nonsense-for-ai-scrapers/#comments
The cowboy was riding a potato? Huh... guess I'd better update my weights for potato tokens...
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/new-font-turns-ordinary-webpages-into-nonsense-for-ai-scrapers/

2026-08-12 23:34:45 UTC

Toddler's tragic death from brain-destroying amoeba offers lessons for doctors
A healthy toddler in Washington state fell ill abruptly. It began with vomiting, lethargy, and weakness on his right side. Then it progressed to a headache, fever, and trouble swallowing. At one point, he briefly became unresponsive, and he had episodes where he stopped breathing. Doctors admitted him to the hospital, but his condition only deteriorated.
The boy was infected with an ultra-rare amoeba known for ravaging the brain. The opportunistic pathogen was [first identified in 1986][1] from the brain of a San Diego Zoo monkey, which died from the infection. Since then, only about 200 human cases have been recorded worldwide. About 90 percent of them have been fatal.
The initial symptoms can be vague and, given its rarity, the infection is notorious for being undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. Still, the scant medical literature does provide some telltale signs, clues of what it can look like on tests and scans. But for the toddler, the infection looked different, sending doctors down the wrong path.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8579774/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/an-ultra-rare-amoeba-was-destroying-a-toddlers-brain-doctors-missed-it/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/an-ultra-rare-amoeba-was-destroying-a-toddlers-brain-doctors-missed-it/#comments
Balamuthia mandrillaris is a free-living amoeba (a single-celled living organism) naturally present in the environment. Balamuthia can cause a rare and serious brain infection called amoebic granulomatous encephalitis. (Photo by: CDC/IMAGE POINT FR/BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/an-ultra-rare-amoeba-was-destroying-a-toddlers-brain-doctors-missed-it/

2026-08-12 22:01:14 UTC

US boosts drone surveillance as flesh-eating screwworms spread in Texas
Hundreds of US government drones have switched from border surveillance to a different surveillance mission this summer—looking for signs of screwworm infestations in wild animals and livestock herds.
The flesh-eating New World Screwworm is the parasitic larva that emerges from eggs laid by flies in the open wounds or body openings of warm-blooded animals and humans, with untreated cases potentially leading to severe injury or death. Since the first screwworm cases were [detected in South Texas][1] in June, the US Department of Agriculture and US Customs and Border Protection have been conducting “one of the most extensive animal-health surveillance operations in the country,” [according to the USDA][2] in [social media posts][3] on platforms like X and Facebook on August 10.
The effort involves at least 200 drones owned by the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. The USDA has described performing more than 1,000 drone flights and surveying more than 22,000 animals so far.
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/06/flesh-eating-screwworm-infection-detected-in-south-texas-usda-says/
[2]: https://x.com/Screwworm_RR/status/2086846942387036495
[3]: https://www.facebook.com/USDAAPHIS/posts/secretary-rollins-is-reviewing-the-technology-supporting-one-of-the-most-extensi/1073665485182547/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/us-boosts-drone-surveillance-as-flesh-eating-screwworms-spread-in-texas/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/us-boosts-drone-surveillance-as-flesh-eating-screwworms-spread-in-texas/#comments
US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins watches a Customs and Border Protection officer talk about a drone used to survey livestock and wild animals for signs of screwworm infestation.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/us-boosts-drone-surveillance-as-flesh-eating-screwworms-spread-in-texas/

2026-08-12 22:01:08 UTC

Trump sued over "brazen" scheme to sell Truth Social API access for $100K a month
President Trump was sued by nonprofit news groups today over Truth Social's "Truth API" that sells real-time access to posts from Trump and other top users of the social network. Trump is profiting from selling preferential access to government information, the lawsuit said.
Trump's social media company this month started charging customers up to $100,000 per month for the earliest access to posts that can have immediate impacts on financial markets. The first customers are mostly high-frequency trading firms that could benefit financially from getting official government news milliseconds before others.
"This scheme is profoundly corrupt. The President stands to gain financially by giving 'market-moving' government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company," the [lawsuit][1] said.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Intercept-Media-v-Trump-Complaint-8-12-26.pdf
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/trump-sued-over-brazen-scheme-to-sell-truth-social-api-access-for-100k-a-month/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/trump-sued-over-brazen-scheme-to-sell-truth-social-api-access-for-100k-a-month/#comments
President Donald Trump at the White House on October 14, 2025.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/trump-sued-over-brazen-scheme-to-sell-truth-social-api-access-for-100k-a-month/

2026-08-12 22:01:03 UTC

Twitch content has trained Amazon AI for years, but users can opt out now
Twitch now lets users opt out of Amazon's use of content from their channels to train Amazon's "generative AI content models." The change, announced today, comes more than two years after a company executive confirmed that Amazon was using Twitch content for AI training.
In an updated [support page][1], Twitch confirms that users must opt out if they don’t want their “streams, VODs, clips, stream chats, and pictures and text on your channel [to] be used in future training of a model developed by Amazon whose purpose is to generate or synthesize text, audio, images, or video.”
To opt out, users must go to the proper settings at [www.twitch.tv/settings/security][2].
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/twitch-account-settings?language=en_US
[2]: http://www.twitch.tv/settings/security
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/twitch-content-has-trained-amazon-ai-for-years-but-users-can-opt-out-now/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/twitch-content-has-trained-amazon-ai-for-years-but-users-can-opt-out-now/#comments
Twitch
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/twitch-content-has-trained-amazon-ai-for-years-but-users-can-opt-out-now/

2026-08-12 22:00:58 UTC

Have physicists finally discovered glueballs? New evidence points to yes.
Physicists with the Beijing Spectrometer III (BES III) experiment have uncovered [convincing new evidence][1] of the existence of so-called [glueballs][2], an elusive composite particle made entirely of gluons predicted by quantum theory. The [results][3] appeared in [a preprint][4] posted to arXiv last month and were [also presented][5] last week at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP).
All the stuff we see around us is made up of quarks held together by gluons (carriers of the nuclear strong force) to form protons and neutrons, which comprise the core of every single atom. The [Higgs boson][6], discovered in 2012 after decades of searching, was widely touted as the final missing piece of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. But there are still plenty of unanswered questions, including whether or not glueballs really exist. They should, if the Standard Model is correct; they're a direct prediction of quantum chromodynamics, i.e., the theory of the strong nuclear force. There should even be several kinds of glueballs.
As Matthew Francis [wrote for Ars][7] in 2015:
[Read full article][8]
[Comments][9]
[1]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/science/physics/glueball-confirmed-particle-made-of-pure-force-closes-fifty-year-physics-search/ar-AA29F7qG
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glueball
[3]: https://english.ihep.cas.cn/nw/han/y26/202608/t20260804_1186878.html
[4]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20366
[5]: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1522800/contributions/7201543/
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
[7]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/missing-glueballs-are-sticky-problem-for-particle-physics/
[8]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/have-physicists-finally-discovered-glueballs-new-evidence-points-to-yes/
[9]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/have-physicists-finally-discovered-glueballs-new-evidence-points-to-yes/#comments
Physicists with the Beijing Spectrometer III in China have found new evidence for exotic particles known as glueballs.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/have-physicists-finally-discovered-glueballs-new-evidence-points-to-yes/

2026-08-12 12:57:02 UTC

Did poop enable the evolution of complex animals?
The Cambrian explosion may have been fueled by poop.
The first animals on Earth emerged about 600 million years ago, and 60 million years later, those simple early animals evolved into wildly different directions, branching out into a diverse menagerie of complicated new forms and conquering new ecological niches. Known as the Cambrian Explosion, this flurry of rapid evolution produced most of the animal phyla and ecosystems we see around us today.
And it may have taken off because some of those early animals evolved a bizarre new ability: pooping. According to a recent study, the first poo pellets helped spread nutrients to deeper parts of the ocean, fueling the evolution of bigger animals in more diverse ecosystems.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/feces-fueled-a-flurry-of-evolution-during-the-cambrian-study-suggests/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/feces-fueled-a-flurry-of-evolution-during-the-cambrian-study-suggests/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/feces-fueled-a-flurry-of-evolution-during-the-cambrian-study-suggests/

2026-08-11 22:11:55 UTC

Russian drones found near vital European offshore gas site, get blown up
Romanian army divers used explosives to destroy two Russian-made drones found floating in the Black Sea near Romania’s largest natural gas project, according to the NATO member country’s defense minister.
Defense Minister Radu Miruță [posted a Facebook video][1] supposedly showing one of the drones being blown up in the water by explosive ordnance disposal divers of the Romanian army on August 11, as [reported by Reuters][2] and other news outlets. The drones were first spotted in the water by a ship working in the vicinity of the [Neptun Deep][3]—an offshore gas project under development in the Black Sea that will make Romania the largest gas producer in the European Union.
A Romanian Coast Guard ship that responded with army soldiers aboard found two drifting Gerbera-type drones of Russian design along with other debris. Miruță also disclosed that Romania had reached out to “Ukrainian partners who confirmed that the systems do not belong to them.”
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/reel/2535405280216704
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/romania-destroys-drones-drifting-near-major-offshore-gas-project-black-sea-2026-08-11/
[3]: https://www.omvpetrom.com/en/about-us/what-we-do/our-projects/neptun-deep
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/romania-destroys-russian-drones-drifting-near-vital-european-offshore-gas-site/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/romania-destroys-russian-drones-drifting-near-vital-european-offshore-gas-site/#comments
A Gerbera-type drone of Russian design was destroyed after being discovered floating near Romania's largest natural gas project.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/romania-destroys-russian-drones-drifting-near-vital-european-offshore-gas-site/

2026-08-07 14:58:38 UTC

AI chatbots have failed people in crisis. Can that be fixed?
This year alone, there have been numerous known instances—often via lawsuits—of AI chatbots (most often, OpenAI’s ChatGPT) that have gone horrifically wrong.
A January lawsuit described the story of a man who [took][1] his own life after being allegedly “coached” into suicide. A college student in Georgia [sued][2] OpenAI, claiming that ChatGPT “pushed him into psychosis.”
In June, a Canadian family also sued OpenAI and [argued][3] that ChatGPT agreed with the young woman’s dismissiveness when it first gave her the option to seek professional mental health advice. ChatGPT allegedly “encouraged” her to end her life, too, and she did so.
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/chatgpt-wrote-goodnight-moon-suicide-lullaby-for-man-who-later-killed-himself/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/before-psychosis-chatgpt-told-man-he-was-an-oracle-new-lawsuit-alleges/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/lawsuit-chatgpt-validated-suicidal-womans-distrust-of-crisis-lines/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/ai-chatbots-have-failed-people-in-crisis-can-that-be-fixed/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/ai-chatbots-have-failed-people-in-crisis-can-that-be-fixed/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/ai-chatbots-have-failed-people-in-crisis-can-that-be-fixed/

2026-08-07 14:58:33 UTC

Report: White House drafting executive order linking vaccines and autism
The White House is drafting an executive order on the disproven link between vaccines and autism, according to independent reports from [The Washington Post][1] and [Bloomberg][2], which both cited unnamed sources with knowledge of the efforts.
Bloomberg reported that the executive order, which is still taking shape and is subject to change, could be issued as soon as next week. The Post said the order's drafting so far is aimed at the childhood vaccine schedule, autism research, and parental choice for vaccinations.
Dozens of high-quality studies encompassing data from millions of children worldwide have already been carried out on the topic and have consistently found no link between childhood vaccines and autism. The claim of a link stems from an unethical, fraudulent study that was retracted years ago, and [its author][3] was stripped of his medical license.
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/08/06/white-house-drafting-order-vaccines-autism-despite-pollsters-warnings/
[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-06/trump-administration-considers-order-on-autism-and-vaccines?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc4NjA0ODg3MCwiZXhwIjoxNzg2NjUzNjcwLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUSkQ0RDJLR1pBTlUwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI2MkUxRTdCQjIyNzA0Mzk5QTBGNzRBRThCQ0I2QkZGMCJ9.6aL34oRHCxrSoXyeo4cZEU2d2uyzC08fo0Efe2uolVw&leadSource=article-gifting&utm_campaign=morning_rounds&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_2zCXh2eSH5LCoc9DQ9zJJcvhl6ssBOP9x9ZJ5PoPzVNEOrMUUTW64B4LeV-8Np-i5JZEUeykdpEZs49h5__zteqWK1ei9ML5aCESXKbiE33aOnJ0&_hsmi=432010539&utm_content=432010539&utm_source=hs_email
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/report-white-house-drafting-executive-order-linking-vaccines-and-autism/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/report-white-house-drafting-executive-order-linking-vaccines-and-autism/#comments
President Donald Trump, flanked by senior health officials, speaks during a news conference on September 22, 2025, inside the Roosevelt Room at The White House in Washington.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/report-white-house-drafting-executive-order-linking-vaccines-and-autism/

2026-08-07 13:37:37 UTC

Trump is losing his war on wind power
On Thursday, a US District Court in Oregon ordered the US government to restart the process of approving wind projects. All new wind development in the US has been on hold since August of 2025, when the Department of Defense (DoD) stopped participating in a process that allows it to compel developers to alter projects in order to limit their interference with radar equipment. The court ruled, however, that the DoD's national security claims did not allow it to opt out of a process that is legally mandated.
The Trump administration has made many attempts to block wind development, both offshore and land based. Its attempts to stop offshore wind included the same approach at issue in this case: Claim that drone developments mean that radar interference by wind turbines [creates a national security risk][1]. The courts [were not sympathetic][2] to this claim, including in cases where judges examined a classified report that the DoD was using to justify blocking offshore wind construction. As a result, the administration has turned to [paying companies][3] not to pursue wind development.
In parallel, the government was pursuing a similar approach for onshore wind. Here, a law lays out a process for the DoD to evaluate any problems posed by wind turbines and negotiate changes to planned wind farms with the developers. As laid out in the new decision, the government simply stopped participating in this process in August 2025, first by refusing to sign off on previously negotiated agreements, and later by refusing to draft agreements entirely. Eventually, it simply refused to participate in negotiations at all. This has brought a halt to all wind development in the US.
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/12/us-government-finds-new-excuse-to-stop-construction-of-offshore-wind/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/court-orders-restart-of-all-us-offshore-wind-construction/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/trumps-latest-anti-wind-effort-pay-companies-to-abandon-offshore-leases/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/trump-is-losing-his-war-on-wind-power/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/trump-is-losing-his-war-on-wind-power/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/trump-is-losing-his-war-on-wind-power/

2026-08-07 13:37:32 UTC

The world's biggest solar telescope caught vortexes on the Sun's surface
Wherever two fluids slide past each other at different speeds, the boundary between them buckles, then curls, then rolls up into vortexes. It’s called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and the physics behind it was worked out in the late 1860s. We know this instability explains why wind causes ripples on the surface of water and clouds shear into a row of curves.
For decades scientists argued the same thing must be happening with plasma on the surface of the Sun, and yet nobody had been able to confirm it. Now, a team led by David Kuridze and Friedrich Wöger of the National Solar Observatory reports that Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities are not just visible on the Sun, but they’re ubiquitous. Their new study proposes that this may change the way we think about how heat, mass, and magnetic energy move through the Sun's atmosphere.
## Telescope’s test drive
The reason plasma whirlpools on the Sun stayed hidden for so long is rather trivial: they are very small. Their scale sits below what telescopes with mirrors smaller than 2 meters can resolve. For most of the history of solar physics, that has ruled out every telescope on Earth. This changed when the US National Science Foundation opened the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, a 4-meter instrument in Hawaii and the largest solar telescope in the world. The telescope entered its operational phase back in November 2021.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/the-worlds-biggest-solar-telescope-caught-vortexes-on-the-suns-surface/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/the-worlds-biggest-solar-telescope-caught-vortexes-on-the-suns-surface/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/the-worlds-biggest-solar-telescope-caught-vortexes-on-the-suns-surface/

2026-07-25 21:56:50 UTC

SDCC teaser gives us our first good look at Blade Runner 2099
It's been nearly five years since Ridley Scott first announced his plans for a TV spinoff of his sci-fi masterpiece *Blade Runner* (1982) and the 2017 sequel *[Blade Runner 2049][1]*. It's finally here—or almost, anyway. Prime Video debuted the first teaser for the new ten-episode series, *Blade Runner 2099,* at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday. We also got a teaser for the third season of Prime Video's *Rings of Power* and a new trailer for HBO's *Lanterns*.
Yeoh and Schafer joined show runner Silka Luisa (*Shining Girls*) onstage for the big reveal, which also included [an exclusive clip][2] shown to the audience. Luisa [told Entertainment Weekly][3] that the series stays true to the original's "noir principles... and there's a mystery at the heart of the show that looks both forwards and backwards in terms of mythology." An uprising has occurred and the humans lost, which means they are now the hunted second-class citizens. "The show is really imagining what comes after us, and what does it mean to be human in a world where humanity is no longer relevant," [said Luisa][4].
Per the official synopsis:
[Read full article][5]
[Comments][6]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_2049
[2]: https://nerdist.com/article/blade-runner-2099-shared-first-teaser-and-release-date/
[3]: https://ew.com/blade-runner-2099-exclusive-first-look-replicant-uprising-12020855
[4]: https://ew.com/blade-runner-2099-exclusive-first-look-replicant-uprising-12020855
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/07/sdcc-teaser-gives-us-our-first-good-look-at-blade-runner-2099/
[6]: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/07/sdcc-teaser-gives-us-our-first-good-look-at-blade-runner-2099/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/07/sdcc-teaser-gives-us-our-first-good-look-at-blade-runner-2099/

2026-07-25 13:00:17 UTC

Big Tech accused of stonewalling European social media researchers
In the final weeks before Romania’s presidential vote in November 2024, [TikTok][1] accounts that had previously spent years posting about manicures or fashion suddenly started promoting a little-known politician named Calin Georgescu.
His posts, espousing hard-line views on immigration and anti-Semitic tropes, were viewed 120 million times before the vote. Georgescu, who had previously been polling in the single digits, stunned observers by winning the election’s first round with 23 percent of the vote.
In the Netherlands, Adriana Iamnitchi was watching closely. As chair of computational social sciences at Maastricht University, she leads the research into disinformation campaigns. She wanted to know how pro-Georgescu content was being monetized on TikTok through hidden influencer marketing and livestreamed political content.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://www.wired.com/tag/tiktok/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/big-tech-accused-of-stonewalling-european-social-media-researchers/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/big-tech-accused-of-stonewalling-european-social-media-researchers/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/big-tech-accused-of-stonewalling-european-social-media-researchers/

2026-07-25 13:00:12 UTC

With help from data, art museums are reframing the visitor experience
Giovanni Kanter goes to at least one art museum whenever he visits a new city. That’s on top of his regular exploration of galleries in New York, where the 25-year-old ICU nurse lives and studies. He typically discovers new artists and gallery openings through word of mouth, though he has recently started curating his social media feed to serve relevant content (he’s currently in what he terms a “surrealism phase”).
He was raised on visual art; he's the son of painter [Marianne Gargour][1] and nephew of mixed-media artist [Heather Hutchison][2] and painter-printmaker [Mark Thomas Kanter][3]. His “exposure-oriented education” featured childhood visits to galleries and shows in and around Dallas, where he grew up, and in France, where he spent time with his grandparents.
But Kanter is an exception. Many other young people have a less immersive artistic education, perhaps shaped by occasional school trips or family visits to museums. If they haven’t internalized an instinct for what Kanter calls “moving through the art and absorbing it,” the museum experience is central to how they learn about and understand art.
[Read full article][4]
[Comments][5]
[1]: https://mgargour.com/previous-abstract
[2]: https://www.heatherhutchison.com/
[3]: https://www.instagram.com/mark.t.kanter/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/07/with-help-from-data-art-museums-are-reframing-the-visitor-experience/
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/07/with-help-from-data-art-museums-are-reframing-the-visitor-experience/#comments
Visitors at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/07/with-help-from-data-art-museums-are-reframing-the-visitor-experience/

2026-07-25 00:16:45 UTC

Paramount/WBD merger delayed for months as states' lawsuit moves toward trial
Paramount Skydance agreed to a longer-term delay of its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, preventing the companies from combining until after a judge rules on the merits of a case in which a dozen states challenged the legality of the merger.
Under a [stipulation][1] filed in court today, the states and companies agreed that the merger will not be completed and the firms will not integrate their operations until "five days after the merits determination in these matters," or on June 1, 2027, whichever is earlier. The delay was also agreed to by the Writers Guild of America, which filed its own lawsuit to block the merger. If there is no merits determination by June 1, the plaintiffs could seek a preliminary injunction to keep blocking the deal.
The agreement amounts to "a months-long halt" to the merger, New York Attorney General Letitia James' office [said][2]. “Halting this merger while our case proceeds is a critical victory in our efforts to uphold the law and protect the film and television industries," James said.
[Read full article][3]
[Comments][4]
[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.474157/gov.uscourts.cand.474157.169.0_5.pdf
[2]: https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2026/attorney-general-james-halts-paramounts-merger-warner-bros-months
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/after-court-loss-paramount-agrees-to-delay-warner-bros-merger-until-trial/
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/after-court-loss-paramount-agrees-to-delay-warner-bros-merger-until-trial/#comments
Paramount logo displayed on a water tower in Los Angeles, California on February 17, 2026.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/after-court-loss-paramount-agrees-to-delay-warner-bros-merger-until-trial/

2026-07-25 00:16:39 UTC

Wildfire forces evacuation of NASA's Deep Space Network complex in Spain
A fast-moving wildfire, one of many raging across Spain, bore down on the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex on Friday, forcing an evacuation and temporarily suspending operations at one of NASA's most important tracking stations.
The tracking station is part of NASA's Deep Space Network, operating in concert with similar facilities in California and Australia to provide global coverage as Earth's rotation brings the planets, stars, and deep space probes in and out of view. The network supports more than 40 missions from the Moon to the edge of the Solar System, including Artemis, the James Webb Space Telescope, and NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft.
A NASA spokesperson confirmed the tracking station in Spain, located in the hills nearly 40 miles (65 kilometers) west of central Madrid, was evaluated Friday "due to ongoing wildfires in the region. Photos and video from the area showed flames and smoke plumes rising over the ground station's antenna array, anchored by a 230-foot-diameter (70-meter) radio dish and a collection of smaller 112-foot (34-meter) antennas.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/wildfire-forces-evacuation-of-nasas-deep-space-network-complex-in-spain/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/wildfire-forces-evacuation-of-nasas-deep-space-network-complex-in-spain/#comments
Smoke from a nearby fire drifts over a NASA antenna in Robledo de Chavela near Madrid, Spain, on July 24, 2026.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/wildfire-forces-evacuation-of-nasas-deep-space-network-complex-in-spain/

2026-07-24 21:33:22 UTC

Roku raises streaming stick prices by up to 60 percent
Roku is raising the prices for its streaming sticks and boxes by up to 60 percent.
Roku has updated its website with the new prices. Currently, it is still selling its streaming players at their old MSRPs but lists those prices as sale prices. The new prices are:
* Roku Streaming Stick: $40 (formerly $30)
* Roku Streaming Stick Plus: $60 (formerly $40)
* Roku Streaming Stick 4K: $80 (formerly $50)
* Roku Ultra: $150 (formerly $100)
* Roku Streambar SE: $150 (formerly $100)
Roku is even upping the price for a bundle that includes a Streaming Stick Plus and a one-month subscription to Fox One. As recently as July 20, Roku listed the bundle at $60 with a sale price of $25, according to the Internet Archive’s [Wayback Machine][1]. Now, the bundle carries an $80 MSRP and $45 sale price.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260720215812/https:/www.roku.com/products/players
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/roku-raises-streaming-stick-prices-by-up-to-60-percent/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/roku-raises-streaming-stick-prices-by-up-to-60-percent/#comments
A Roku Streaming Stick 4K plugged into a TV.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/roku-raises-streaming-stick-prices-by-up-to-60-percent/

2026-07-24 21:33:17 UTC

Anthropic's Opus 5 is about token efficiency, not a capability leap
Today, Anthropic [rolled out Opus 5][1], the newest update for the model that has recently become a popular choice for coding and other software development tasks, among other things.
While this is a noteworthy bump for Opus, it doesn't seem to be an Opus 4.5-level breakthrough in agentic coding performance.
[Read full article][2]
[Comments][3]
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/anthropics-opus-5-is-about-token-efficiency-not-a-capability-leap/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/anthropics-opus-5-is-about-token-efficiency-not-a-capability-leap/#comments
Opus 5 isn't as remarkable as Mythos, but it's more widely available and much more affordable.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/anthropics-opus-5-is-about-token-efficiency-not-a-capability-leap/