Technology News

Squid Game's hotly anticipated second season debuted on Netflix the day after Christmas and racked up more than 68 million views in just three days. It had already been renewed for a third and final season—filmed back-to-back with S2—but Netflix ushered in the new year by gracing us with a 15-second teaser on X, introducing a brand new killer doll dubbed Chul-su—similar to the giant "Red Light, Green Light" doll Young-hee.

(Spoilers for S1 below; some spoilers for S2 but no major reveals.)

As previously reported, the first season followed Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae, seen earlier this year in The Acolyte), a down-on-his-luck gambler who has little left to lose when he agrees to play children's playground games against 455 other players for money. The twist? If you lose a game, you die. If you cheat, you die. And if you win, you might also die.

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Carbon fiber, aluminum, maybe the odd bit of titanium here or there: These are the materials we usually expect race cars to be made of. Now you can start adding thermoplastics like Ultem to the list. Additive manufacturing has become a real asset in the racer’s toolbox, although the technology has actually been used at the track longer than you might think.

"Some people think that 3D printing was invented last year," said Fadi Abro, senior global director of automotive and mobility at Stratasys. The company recently became NASCAR's official 3D printing partner, but it has a relationship with one of the teams—Joe Gibbs Racing—that stretches back two decades.

"Now the teams only have certain things that they can touch in the vehicle, but what that does is it makes it so that every microscopic advantage you can get out of that one tiny detail that you have control over is so meaningful to your team," Abro said.

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If you've been too busy reading about giant old TVs to take part in this year's Ars Technica Charity Drive sweepstakes, don't worry. You still have a little bit of time to donate to a good cause and get a chance to win your share of over $4,000 worth of swag (no purchase necessary to win).

In the first weeks of the drive, hundreds of readers contributed tens of thousands of dollars to either the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Child's Play as part of the charity drive. But we're now in the final day of our attempt to best 2020's record haul of over $58,000.

Entries have to be received by the end of the day today (Thursday, January 2) to be considered for the sweepstakes, so if you've been putting off a donation/entry, now is the time to pull the trigger. Do yourself and the charities involved a favor and give now while you're thinking about it.

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It's getting harder to access popular adult sites in the US South.

On Wednesday, Pornhub's owner, Aylo, kicked off the new year by blocking two more states that implemented age verification laws requiring ID to access porn, Florida and South Carolina. According to 404 Media, these states are now among 16 states where Aylo sites, including Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn, cannot be accessed. Tennessee also risked being blocked, but a court preliminarily blocked its age-verification law from taking effect.

The other blocked states are Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. Mapping it out, 404 Media noted that the Aylo blackout spans nearly the entire US South, with Georgia's age verification law set to take effect in July and likely to trigger another block that would almost complete the blackout.

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Silicon chip manufacturers like Intel and TSMC are constantly outdoing themselves to make ever smaller features, but they are getting closer to the physical limits of silicon.

“We already have very, very high density in silicon-based architectures where silicon performance degrades sharply,” said Ki Seok Kim, a scientist working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.

One way around this problem is to replace silicon with graphene-like 2D materials that maintain their semiconducting properties even at a single-atom scale. Another way is building 3D chips, which squeeze more transistors into the same area without making transistors smaller. Kim’s team did both, building a 3D chip out of vertically stacked 2D semiconductors.

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Tesla sold almost 1.8 million cars in 2024, according to data released by the company this morning. Unfortunately for the electric automaker, it sold more than 1.8 million cars in 2023, beating this year's effort by 19,355 vehicles. But unlike last year, it sold more cars than it built, with production falling by 4 percent in 2024.

In the final quarter of 2024, Tesla built 436,718 Models 3 and Y and delivered 471,930, clearing out a stash of inventory in the process. It built an additional 22,727 electric vehicles—the elderly Models S and X and the divisive Cybertruck—and sold 23,640 of them during the same three months. So in Q4 2024, Tesla actually achieved modest, year-over-year growth in total sales of about 2 percent.

But the picture of the year as a whole is less rosy. Model 3 and Y sales fell by 2 percent year over year, with production falling by slightly more. As noted, this appears to have allowed Tesla to reduce what was at one point a growing inventory of unsold vehicles.

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The Russian space program reached a significant milestone over the holidays with the 2,000th launch of a rocket from the "R-7" family of boosters. The launch took place on Christmas Day when an R-7 rocket lifted off, carrying a remote-sensing satellite from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

This family of rockets has an incredible heritage dating back nearly six decades. The first R-7 vehicle was designed by the legendary Soviet rocket scientist Sergei Korolev. It flew in 1957 and was the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. Because the first Soviet nuclear warheads were massive, the R-7 vehicle was powerful enough to be converted into an orbital rocket.

A modified version of the R-7 rocket, therefore, launched the Sputnik satellite later in 1957. And the slightly more powerful "Vostok" version of the booster carried Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961, opening the era of human spaceflight. The first Soyuz variant, a rocket that has been upgraded multiple times but remains similar to its original form, flew in 1966. Humans still fly on the Soyuz rocket today to the International Space Station.

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Corporate executives are being hit with an influx of hyper-personalized phishing scams generated by artificial intelligence bots, as the fast-developing technology makes advanced cyber crime easier.

Leading companies such as British insurer Beazley and ecommerce group eBay have warned of the rise of fraudulent emails containing personal details probably obtained through AI analysis of online profiles.

“This is getting worse and it’s getting very personal, and this is why we suspect AI is behind a lot of it,” said Beazley’s Chief Information Security Officer Kirsty Kelly. “We’re starting to see very targeted attacks that have scraped an immense amount of information about a person.”

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Every television deserves a row of speakers to call its own. These are our favorite soundbars.

Whether you’re skiing in the backcountry or trampolining in the backyard, we have an activity tracker for you.

Back in 2019, we told you about an intriguing experiment to test a famous anthropological legend about an elderly Inuit man in the 1950s who fashioned a knife out of his own frozen feces. He used it to kill and skin a dog, using its rib cage as a makeshift sled to venture off into the Arctic. Metin Eren, an archaeologist at Kent State University, fashioned rudimentary blades out of his own frozen feces to test whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon.

Sadly for the legend, the blades failed every test, but the study was colorful enough to snag Eren an Ig Nobel Prize the following year. And it's just one of the many fascinating projects routinely undertaken in his Experimental Archaeology Laboratory, where he and his team try to reverse-engineer all manner of ancient technologies, whether they involve stone tools, ceramics, metal, butchery, textiles, and so forth.

Eren's lab is quite prolific, publishing 15 to 20 papers a year. “The only thing we’re limited by is time,” he said. Many have colorful or quirky elements and hence tend to garner media attention, but Eren emphasizes that what he does is very much serious science, not entertainment. “I think sometimes people look at experimental archaeology and think it’s no different from LARPing,” Eren told Ars. “I have nothing against LARPers, but it’s very different. It’s not playtime. It’s hardcore science. Me making a stone tool is no different than a chemist pouring chemicals into a beaker. But that act alone is not the experiment. It might be the flashiest bit, but that's not the experimental process.”

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Oppressive, unstimulating urban architecture isn’t just about eyesores; there’s evidence that it can cause actual harm to its residents. To fix this in 2025, we must start building for joy.

Oppressive, unstimulating urban architecture isn’t just about eyesores; there’s evidence that it can cause actual harm to its residents. To fix this in 2025, we must start building for joy.

The small step back to Earth’s satellite will provide a giant leap for exploring our solar system.

An innovative new coldbrew machine makes for wonderfully frothy nitro and espresso martinis. But is the flavor fully cooked?

These fitness apps will help you turn New Year's resolutions into real results.

After Jaguar's chaotic relaunch and the pomp and theater of Tesla's Cybercab reveal party, it's hard to imagine the coming year will top 2024—until you see our picks for the best EVs of 2025.

Whether you want to run a marathon or learn to play the guitar, here’s how to set yourself up for success.

Your messages going back years are likely still lurking online, potentially exposing sensitive information you forgot existed. But there's no time like the present to do some digital decluttering.

Don’t panic, doomscrollers: It’s possible to reframe your habits and make screen time more positive and curated.