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Ars Technica
Cheap TVs’ incessant advertising reaches troubling new lows
TVs offer us an escape from the real world. After a long day, sometimes there’s nothing more relaxing than turning on your TV, tuning into your favorite program, and unplugging from the realities around you.
But what happens when divisive, potentially offensive messaging infiltrates that escape? Even with streaming services making it easy to watch TV commercial-free, it can still be difficult for TV viewers to avoid ads with these sorts of messages.
That’s especially the case with budget brands, which may even force controversial ads onto TVs when they’re idle, making users pay for low-priced TVs in unexpected, and sometimes troubling, ways.
Categories: Technology News
FTC: 23andMe buyer must honor firm’s privacy promises for genetic data
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said he's keeping an eye on 23andMe's bankruptcy proceeding and the company's planned sale because of privacy concerns related to genetic testing data. 23andMe and its future owner must uphold the company's privacy promises, Ferguson said in a letter sent yesterday to representatives of the US Trustee Program, a Justice Department division that oversees administration of bankruptcy proceedings.
"As Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, I write to express the FTC's interests and concerns relating to the potential sale or transfer of millions of American consumers' sensitive personal information," Ferguson wrote. He continued:
As you may know, 23andMe collects and holds sensitive, immutable, identifiable personal information about millions of American consumers who have used the Company's genetic testing and telehealth services. This includes genetic information, biological DNA samples, health information, ancestry and genealogy information, personal contact information, payment and billing information, and other information, such as messages that genetic relatives can send each other through the platform.
23andMe's recent bankruptcy announcement set off a wave of concern about the fate of genetic data for its 15 million customers. The company said that "any buyer of 23andMe will be required to comply with our privacy policy and with all applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data." Many users reacted to the news by deleting their data, though tech problems apparently related to increased website traffic made that process difficult.
Categories: Technology News
Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought
As it flew up toward the International Space Station last summer, the Starliner spacecraft lost four thrusters. A NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, had to take manual control of the vehicle. But as Starliner's thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move the spacecraft in the direction he wanted to go.
He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone's throw of the space station, a safe harbor, if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission's flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as for the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.
But what if it was not safe to come home, either?
Categories: Technology News
Review: Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft is something less than “a Paperwhite with color”
It has been a bumpy start for Amazon's $280 Kindle Colorsoft, the company's first E-Ink book reader with a color screen. The company delayed shipments for a few weeks to correct a problem where a faint yellow band would appear across the bottom of the screen, something that has apparently been fixed for current versions of the reader (Amazon says it has made "the appropriate adjustments" to fix the problem but hasn't been specific about what those adjustments are).
Amazon didn't send us a Colorsoft for review at the time, maybe in part because of this problem early reviewers had, but we finally got one a few weeks ago and have been using it since then.
My main takeaway is that I don't mind the Colorsoft, but it also doesn't solve any problems I was having with the monochrome Kindle Paperwhite, and it doesn't meaningfully solve the big problems with color E-Ink. It also makes the experience of reading regular text subtly worse, which accounts for the vast majority of my Kindle activity. I'm curious to see future riffs on the idea, but this initial implementation leaves me cold.
Categories: Technology News
Gemini is an increasingly good chatbot, but it’s still a bad assistant
Google announced its intention to unify its generative AI efforts under the Gemini brand at the tail end of 2023, and it has been full steam ahead ever since. In 2025, Google Assistant is being phased out and replaced with Gemini. As Google, Amazon, and others move toward a world in which all virtual assistants are based on generative AI, it's reasonable to consider if this is actually a good idea. Despite promises of "smarter" AI and ever-increasing token limits, these robots still have a fundamental flaw that may make them bad assistants: They lie.
They don't set out to lie, of course, because they don't know what a "lie" is. These systems attempt to generate the most plausible next token to build an output. Because of this, generative AI is non-deterministic—you can't predict the output, and even running the same prompt multiple times will offer varying responses.
This can look impressively like thinking sometimes, but it also leads to frequent hallucinations. That's why the iPhone said Luigi Mangione was dead and Google told people to put glue on pizza. GenAI proponents like Google and Apple have been trying to curb the chaos of confabulations, but this may always be a problem because of the nature of the underlying technology.
Categories: Technology News
Four private astronauts launch on first human mission to fly over the poles
Four adventurers suited up and embarked on a first-of-a-kind trip to space Monday night, becoming the first humans to fly in polar orbit aboard a SpaceX crew capsule chartered by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire.
The private astronauts rocketed into orbit atop a Falcon 9 booster from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:46 pm EDT Monday (01:46 UTC Tuesday). Instead of heading to the northeast in pursuit of the International Space Station, the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft departed Launch Complex 39A and arced to the southeast, then turned south on a flight path hugging Florida's east coast.
The unusual trajectory aligned the Falcon 9 with a perfectly polar orbit at an inclination of 90 degrees to the equator, bringing the four-person crew directly over the North or South Pole every 45 minutes.
Categories: Technology News
DeepMind is holding back release of AI research to give Google an edge
Google’s artificial intelligence arm DeepMind has been holding back the release of its world-renowned research, as it seeks to retain a competitive edge in the race to dominate the burgeoning AI industry.
The group, led by Nobel Prize-winner Sir Demis Hassabis, has introduced a tougher vetting process and more bureaucracy that made it harder to publish studies about its work on AI, according to seven current and former research scientists at Google DeepMind.
Three former researchers said the group was most reluctant to share papers that reveal innovations that could be exploited by competitors, or cast Google’s own Gemini AI model in a negative light compared with others.
Categories: Technology News
Tuesday Telescope: A close-up of the magical camera at the end of a robotic arm
We're back! A long-time reader and subscriber recently mentioned in the Ars Forums that they "kind of" missed the Daily Telescope posts that I used to write in 2023 and 2024. Although I would have preferred that everyone desperately missed the Daily Telescope, I appreciate the sentiment. I really do.
I initially stopped writing these posts about a year ago because it just became too much to commit to writing one thing every day. I mean, I could have done it. But doing so on the daily crossed over the line from enjoyable to drudgery, and one of the best things about working for Ars is that it tends very much toward the enjoyable side. Anyway, writing one of these posts on a weekly basis feels more sustainable. I guess we'll find out!
Today's image comes to you all the way from Mars. One of the most powerful tools on NASA's Perseverance rover is the WATSON camera attached to the end of the rover's robotic arm. In the fine tradition of tortured acronyms at the space agency, WATSON stands for Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering. And because of course it is, WATSON is located on the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument. Seriously, NASA must stand for Not Another Screwball Acronym.
Categories: Technology News
MCP: The new “USB-C for AI” that’s bringing fierce rivals together
What does it take to get OpenAI and Anthropic—two competitors in the AI assistant market—to get along? Despite a fundamental difference in direction that led Anthropic's founders to quit OpenAI in 2020 and later create the Claude AI assistant, a shared technical hurdle has now brought them together: How to easily connect their AI models to external data sources.
The solution comes from Anthropic, which developed and released an open specification called Model Context Protocol (MCP) in November 2024. MCP establishes a royalty-free protocol that allows AI models to connect with outside data sources and services without requiring unique integrations for each service.
"Think of MCP as a USB-C port for AI applications," wrote Anthropic in MCP's documentation. The analogy is imperfect, but it represents the idea that, similar to how USB-C unified various cables and ports (with admittedly a debatable level of success), MCP aims to standardize how AI models connect to the infoscape around them.
Categories: Technology News
With new Gen-4 model, Runway claims to have finally achieved consistency in AI videos
AI video startup Runway announced the availability of its newest video synthesis model today. Dubbed Gen-4, the model purports to solve several key problems with AI video generation.
Chief among those is the notion of consistent characters and objects across shots. If you've watched any short films made with AI, you've likely noticed that they're either dream-like sequences or thematically but not realistically connected images—mood pieces more than consistent narratives.
Runway claims Gen-4 can maintain consistent characters and objects, provided it's given a single reference image of the character or object in question as part of the project in Runway's interface.
Categories: Technology News
Apple updates all its operating systems, brings Apple Intelligence to Vision Pro
Apple dropped a big batch of medium-size software updates for nearly all of its products this afternoon. The iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, macOS 15.4, tvOS 18.4, and visionOS 2.4 updates are all currently available to download, and each adds a small handful of new features for their respective platforms.
A watchOS 11.4 update was also published briefly, but it's currently unavailable.
For iPhones and iPads that support Apple Intelligence, the flagship feature in 18.4 is Priority Notifications, which attempts to separate time-sensitive or potentially important notifications from the rest of them so you can see them more easily. The update also brings along the handful of new Unicode 16.0 emoji, a separate app for managing a Vision Pro headset (similar to the companion app for the Apple Watch), and a grab bag of other fixes and minor enhancements.
Categories: Technology News
DOGE accesses federal payroll system and punishes employees who objected
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gained access "to a payroll system that processes salaries for about 276,000 federal employees across dozens of agencies," despite "objections from senior IT staff who feared it could compromise highly sensitive government personnel information" and lead to cyberattacks, The New York Times reported today.
The system at the Interior Department gives DOGE "visibility into sensitive employee information, such as Social Security numbers, and the ability to more easily hire and fire workers," the NYT wrote, citing people familiar with the matter. DOGE workers had been trying to get access to the Federal Personnel and Payroll System for about two weeks and succeeded over the weekend, the report said.
"The dispute came to a head on Saturday, as the DOGE workers obtained the access and then placed two of the IT officials who had resisted them on administrative leave and under investigation, the people said," according to the NYT report. The agency's CIO and CISO are reportedly under investigation for their "workplace behavior."
Categories: Technology News
Research roundup: 2,400-year-old clay puppets; this is your brain on Klingon
It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection of such stories. March's list includes fascinating papers on such topics as how the brain responds to speaking Klingon (or Dothraki, or Navi), the discovery of creepy preclassic Salvadoran puppets, the effectiveness of "dazzle camouflage," and how male blue-lined octopuses manage not to be cannibalized by their chosen mates.
Wind Cave’s rocks fluoresce under black light Several fluorescence measurements of a zebra calcite in Wind Cave were taken using portable spectrometers. Credit: Joshua SebreeSouth Dakota's Wind Cave gets its name from the flow of air moving continually through its many passages and equalizing the atmospheric pressure between the air inside and outside—almost like the cave is "breathing." Its rock and mineral formations also boast a unique chemistry that fluoresces when exposed to black light, according to talks presented at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego. That fluorescence could shed light on how life can thrive in extreme environments, including that of Jupiter's moon, Europa.
University of Northern Iowa astrobiologist Joshua Sebree and several students have been mapping new areas of Wind Cave (as well as other caves in the US), recording the passages, rock formations, minerals, and lifeforms they encounter in the process. They noticed that under UV light, certain parts of Wind Cave took on otherworldly hues, thanks to different concentrations of organic and inorganic fossilized chemical compounds. Those areas seem to indicate where water once flowed, carrying minerals into the cave from the surface 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, according to their analysis of the fluorescent spectra. Sebree et al. found that Wind Cave was likely carved out by waters rich in manganese, producing zebra stripes that glow pink under UV light, revealing the calcites that grew within as a result of those waters.
Categories: Technology News
Lithium-ion battery waste fires are increasing, and vapes are a big part of it
2024 was "a year of growth," according to fire-suppression company Fire Rover, but that's not an entirely good thing.
The company, which offers fire detection and suppression systems based on thermal and optical imaging, smoke analytics, and human verification, releases annual reports on waste and recycling facility fires in the US and Canada to select industry and media. In 2024, Fire Rover, based on its fire identifications, saw 2,910 incidents, a 60 percent increase from the 1,809 in 2023, and more than double the 1,409 fires confirmed in 2022.
Publicly reported fire incidents at waste and recycling facilities also hit 398, a new high since Fire Rover began compiling its report eight years ago, when that number was closer to 275.
Categories: Technology News
Even Trump may not be able to save Elon Musk from his old tweets
Back in December, Elon Musk accused the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of launching a purely politically motivated probe into his Twitter purchase. In a letter from his lawyer, Alex Spiro, Musk alleged that the SEC gave him 48 hours to accept a settlement or face fraud charges. Musk refused to pay the fine, demanding to know "who directed these actions," suspecting either former SEC Chair Gary Gensler or Joe Biden's White House.
Once the SEC lawsuit was filed in January, Musk's condemnation of the settlement was echoed in his claims that the SEC was "totally broken." These comments seemed to further his feud with the agency following a contentious 2018 Tesla settlement over Musk's tweets that resulted in the Supreme Court declining to hear Musk's arguments against his tweets being monitored by the SEC.
But after Donald Trump issued a February executive order declaring sweeping powers over independent agencies—including the SEC, which was accused of launching politically motivated investigations—it appeared that Musk might instead have been setting up the narrative to possibly get the probe squashed.
Categories: Technology News
France fines Apple €150M for “excessive” pop-ups that let users reject tracking
France's competition regulator fined Apple €150 million, saying the iPhone maker went overboard in its implementation of pop-up messages that let users consent to or reject tracking that third-party applications use for targeted advertising.
The App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework used by Apple on iPhones and iPads since 2021 makes the use of third-party applications too complex and hurts small companies that rely on advertising revenue, said a press release today by the Autorité de la concurrence (Competition Authority). The system harms "smaller publishers in particular since, unlike the main vertically integrated platforms, they depend to a large extent on third-party data collection to finance their business," the agency said.
User consent obtained via the ATA framework "authorizes the application in question to collect user data for targeted advertising purposes," the agency said. "If consent is given, the application can access the Identifier for Advertisers ('IDFA'), the identifier by which each device can be tracked through its use of third-party applications and sites." The French investigation was triggered by a complaint lodged by advertising industry associations.
Categories: Technology News
There’s a new benchmark in town for measuring performance on Windows 95 PCs
If you're still using a computer you bought during the Clinton administration, interesting news: Crystal Dew World, developers of apps like CrystalDiskInfo and CrystalDiskMark, have released an update to their CrystalMark Retro benchmark (as spotted by Tom's Hardware). The most interesting aspect of the update for retro computing enthusiasts is expanded operating system support: the app will now run on Windows 95, Windows 98, and old versions of Windows NT like 3.51 and 4.0. The previous version of the app only went as far back as Windows XP.
The app spits out benchmarking scores for five things: single-core CPU performance, multi-core CPU performance, 2D graphics performance using GDI, 3D graphics performance using OpenGL, and disk speed (broken into four sub-benchmarks for sequential and random read and write performance).
The app will also run on current systems, including 64-bit x86 and Arm-based PCs, and the results database is dominated by those modern systems. But searching by operating system allows you to zero in on those retro results, including nine (as of this writing) for Windows 95, six for Windows 98, and five for Windows NT 3.51.
Categories: Technology News
The 2025 BMW M5 Touring review: Way more power, way too much weight
When BMW introduced the original M5 to the European motoring public in 1984, the automaker effectively established a new vehicle segment. By combining the practical and understatedly rakish E28 5-Series with the motorsport-derived six-cylinder engine from the M1 supercar, the automaker had created a “do-it-all” performance machine, a vehicle that could serve as a tasteful and luxurious sedan one moment and a charismatic sports car the next.
It’s a concept that has guided the development of not only subsequent generations of the M5 but also all of the other sports sedans that have dared to go toe to toe with it over the past forty years. For decades, it’s been the benchmark by which all big, fast four-doors have been judged, but after spending a week with the all-new $125,275 G99-generation M5 Touring, I can’t help but wonder if that era is coming to a close.
A range of factors have contributed to this seismic shift. While other automakers have been chasing the M5’s ghost around the Nürburgring, BMW has purposely started to reposition its M Division vehicles as the pinnacle representation of the brand rather than the pinnacle representation of BMW performance. It’s a move that has yielded models like the XM, a vehicle that certainly has plenty of firepower under the hood but ultimately prioritizes style over substance.
Categories: Technology News
Google’s new experimental Gemini 2.5 model rolls out to free users
Google released its latest and greatest Gemini AI model last week, but it was only made available to paying subscribers. Google has moved with uncharacteristic speed to release Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental) for free users, too. The next time you check in with Gemini, you can access most of the new AI's features without a Gemini Advanced subscription.
The Gemini 2.5 branch will eventually replace 2.0, which was only released in late 2024. It supports simulated reasoning, as all Google's models will in the future. This approach to producing an output can avoid some of the common mistakes that AI models have made in the past. We've also been impressed with Gemini 2.5's vibe, which has landed it at the top of the LMSYS Chatbot arena leaderboard.
Google says Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental) is ready and waiting for free users to try on the web. Simply select the model from the drop-down menu and enter your prompt to watch the "thinking" happen. The model will roll out to the mobile app for free users soon.
Categories: Technology News
Europe’s quest to finally land on Mars takes another turn
Oh, ExoMars, what a long, strange trip it has been. Are you ever going to go to space?
The ExoMars mission represents Europe's third attempt to land successfully on Mars, and at a cost of more than $1.3 billion. there is a lot riding on its success. But success is far from assured for a mission that has been whipsawed by geopolitical tensions, budget cuts, and an ever-changing architecture over the last 20 years.
The latest news, announced Sunday, is that Airbus will design and build the lander that will carry the ExoMars down to the surface of Mars. The mission is scheduled to launch no earlier than 2028 on a US rocket. But there have been so many twists and turns in the ExoMars story that it's very difficult to know what will ultimately happen.
Categories: Technology News
