Ars Technica

It's been almost exactly a year now since we reported on the announcement that Squadron 42—the single-player campaign portion of the now 12-year-old crowdfunding boondoggle Star Citizen—was "feature complete" and in the "polish phase." Now, many years after the game's original 2015 release target, developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) says that, with just a year or two of additional "polish," the game will finally launch sometime in 2026.

The announcement came during this weekend's CitizenCon, per IGN, where RSI founder and CEO Chris Roberts showed off a roughly hour-long prologue of the game's promised 30- to 40-hour storyline. IGN also reported that the live on-stage demo suffered "a number of crashes, bugs, and graphical problems," which helps explain why a little more time is needed to get from "feature complete" to "actual release."

"We did say we were doing it live, risking the demo gods, and they brought their wrath down on us," Roberts said on stage, according to the IGN report. "Both the team and I are confident of giving you this game in 2026. Obviously, you can see it’s not going to be tomorrow because you saw a few crashes there."

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Volkswagen provided flights from Washington, DC, to San Francisco and accommodation so Ars could drive the ID Buzz. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

SAN FRANCISCO—In all the years we've been writing about cars, very few vehicles have generated as much attention as the Volkswagen ID Buzz. At a time when SUVs look increasingly threatening, the Buzz seems like an antidote, with gentle curves and something of a friendly grin at the front. Plus, people are starting to get desperate for an electric minivan option, if audience feedback is anything to go by. It's been a long wait for the North American-spec Buzz, but that is almost over, with the first customer cars due in dealerships in November. Read on to discover what we learned driving it around the Bay Area last week.

VW first showed off the Buzz a good seven years ago. It was the fourth time the company tried to reimagine the classic Kombi for the 21st century but the first time that production got the go-ahead. That was in large part thanks to a new flexible electric vehicle platform developed in the wake of Dieselgate. Other more mainstream VW EVs were needed first, however, and it was 2022 before a short-wheelbase version of the Buzz went on sale in Europe as a five-seater family car and also a commercial van.

We drove that one in Denmark, and while it was just as much of an attention-grabber there as it will be here, the short-wheelbase version was too compromised for US tastes. And it was too expensive, despite its smaller battery. European pricing had me pessimistic about the three-row, big battery model, but the rear-wheel drive Buzz Pro S starts at $59,995.

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A hurricane so small that it could not be observed by satellite formed this weekend, surprising meteorologists and even forecasters at the National Hurricane Center.

Hurricane Oscar developed on Saturday near Turks and Caicos, and to the northeast of Cuba, in the extreme southwestern Atlantic Ocean. As of Saturday evening, hurricane-force winds extended just 5 miles (8 km) from the center of the storm.

This is not the smallest tropical cyclone—as defined by sustained winds greater than 39 mph, or 63 kph—as that record remains held by Tropical Storm Marco back in 2008. However, this may possibly be the smallest hurricane in terms of the extent of its hurricane-force winds.

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The US Space Force's Space Systems Command announced Friday it has ordered nine launches from SpaceX in the first batch of dozens of missions the military will buy in a new phase of competition for lucrative national security launch contracts.

The nine launches are divided into two fixed-price "task orders" that Space Systems Command opened up for bids earlier this year. One covers seven launches with groups of spacecraft for the Space Development Agency's constellation of missile tracking and data relay satellites. The other task order is for two missions for the National Reconnaissance Office, the US government's spy satellite agency.

Two eligible bidders

The parameters of the competition limited the bidders to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA). SpaceX won both task orders for a combined value of $733.5 million, or roughly $81.5 million per mission. Six of the nine missions will launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, beginning as soon as late 2025. The other three will launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, a Space Systems Command spokesperson told Ars.

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It is a matter of settled law on the Judge John Hodgman podcast that people like what they like, and you can't force someone to like something. It is called the Tom Waits Principle.

I thought about that principle constantly while I was trying to open myself up to MechWarrior 5: Clans. Trying to jump into this game and like it, so that I'd have some critical assessment of it, was akin to handing a friend The Black Rider and assuming they would come back begging for more.

From everything I can tell and what I have read, this game largely delivers on the simulation, and notably a lot of the story, that BattleTech/MechWarrior fans revere. Clans seems very good at what it sets out to do, and I do get the sense that it is relatively accommodating to newcomers compared to other entries. It just did not, despite its stand-alone nature and alleged newcomer friendliness, convert me into a loadout tactician or stomp-and-shoot enthusiast.

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Evolution has turned out bizarre and baffling creatures, such as walking fish. It only gets weirder from there. Some of these fish not only walk on the seafloor, but use their leg-like appendages to taste for signs of prey that might be hiding.

Most species of sea robins are bottom-dwellers that both swim and crawl around on “legs” that extend from their pectoral fins. An international team of researchers has now discovered that the legs of the northern sea robin, Prionotus carolinus, double as sensory organs. They are covered in bumps called papillae (similar to those on a human tongue) with taste receptors that detect chemical stimuli coming from buried prey. If they taste something appetizing, they will dig for their next meal.

There is more to this fish than its extraordinary way of hunting. Analysis of P. carolinus genes found that a gene that may date back to the origin of animals controls the formation of both legs and sensory papillae, which hints at how they might have evolved.

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US District Judge Mark Walker had a blunt message for the Florida surgeon general in an order halting the government official's attempt to censor a political ad that opposes restrictions on abortion.

"To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it's the First Amendment, stupid," Walker, an Obama appointee who is chief judge in US District Court for the Northern District of Florida, wrote yesterday in a ruling that granted a temporary restraining order.

"Whether it's a woman's right to choose, or the right to talk about it, Plaintiff's position is the same—'don't tread on me,'" Walker wrote later in the ruling. "Under the facts of this case, the First Amendment prohibits the State of Florida from trampling on Plaintiff's free speech."

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Fresh water we can use for drinking or agriculture is only about 3 percent of the global water supply, and nearly 70 percent of that is trapped in glaciers and ice caps. So far, that was enough to keep us going, but severe draughts have left places like Jordan, Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa, Spain, and California with limited access to potable water.

One possible solution is to tap into the remaining 97 percent of the water we have on Earth. The problem is that this water is saline, and we need to get the salt out of it to make it drinkable. Desalination is also an energy-expensive process. But MIT researchers led by Jonathan Bessette might have found an answer to that. They built an efficient, self-regulating water desalination system that runs on solar power alone with no need for batteries or a connection to the grid.

Probing the groundwaters

Oceans are the most obvious source of water for desalination. But they are a good option only for a small portion of people who live in coastal areas. Most of the global population—more or less 60 percent—lives farther than 100 kilometers from the coast, which makes using desalinated ocean water infeasible. So, Bessette and his team focused on groundwater instead.

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Amazon workers are being reminded that they can find work elsewhere if they’re unhappy with Amazon’s return-to-office (RTO) mandate.

In September, Amazon told staff that they’ll have to RTO five days a week starting in 2025. Amazon employees are currently allowed to work remotely twice a week. A memo from CEO Andy Jassy announcing the policy change said that “it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture” when working at the office.

On Thursday, at what Reuters described as an “all-hands meeting” for Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS CEO Matt Garman reportedly told workers:

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Yesterday, it was reported that the US Department of Commerce is investigating the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) over suspicions that the chipmaker may have been subverting 5G export controls to make "artificial intelligence or smartphone chips for the Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies," sources with direct knowledge told The Information.

The Department of Commerce has yet to officially announce the probe and declined Ars' request for comment. But TSMC promptly issued a statement today, defending itself as "a law-abiding company" that's "committed to complying with laws and regulations, including export controls."

For the past four years, the US has considered Huawei a national security risk after Huawei allegedly provided financial services to Iran, violating another US export control. In that time, US-China tensions have intensified, with the US increasingly imposing tariffs to limit China's access to US tech, most recently increasing tariffs on semiconductors. As competitiveness over AI dominance has heightened, Congress also recently introduced a bill to stop China and other foreign adversaries from accessing American-made AI and AI-enabling technologies.

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Elon Musk's X updated its terms of service to steer user lawsuits to US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the same court where a judge who bought Tesla stock is overseeing an X lawsuit against the nonprofit Media Matters for America.

The new terms that apply to users of the X social network say that all disputes related to the terms "will be brought exclusively in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas or state courts located in Tarrant County, Texas, United States, and you consent to personal jurisdiction in those forums and waive any objection as to inconvenient forum."

X recently moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Texas, but the new headquarters are not in the Northern District or Tarrant County. X's headquarters are in Bastrop, the county seat of Bastrop County, which is served by US District Court for the Western District of Texas.

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On Thursday, OpenAI released an early Windows version of its first ChatGPT app for Windows, following a Mac version that launched in May. Currently, it's only available to subscribers of Plus, Team, Enterprise, and Edu versions of ChatGPT, and users can download it for free in the Microsoft Store for Windows.

OpenAI is positioning the release as a beta test. "This is an early version, and we plan to bring the full experience to all users later this year," OpenAI writes on the Microsoft Store entry for the app. (Interestingly, ChatGPT shows up as being rated "T for Teen" by the ESRB in the Windows store, despite not being a video game.)

A screenshot of the new Windows ChatGPT app captured on October 18, 2024. Credit: Benj Edwards

Upon opening the app, OpenAI requires users to log into a paying ChatGPT account, and from there, the app is basically identical to the web browser version of ChatGPT. You can currently use it to access several models: GPT-4o, GPT-4o with Canvas, 01-preview, 01-mini, GPT-4o mini, and GPT-4. Also, it can generate images using DALL-E 3 or analyze uploaded files and images.

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Today, federal safety investigators opened a new investigation aimed at Tesla's electric vehicles. This is now the 14th investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and one of several currently open. This time, it's the automaker's highly controversial "full self-driving" feature that's in the crosshairs—NHTSA says it now has four reports of Teslas using FSD and then crashing after the camera-only system encountered fog, sun glare, or airborne dust.

Of the four crashes that sparked this investigation, one caused the death of a pedestrian when a Model Y crashed into them in Rimrock, Arizona, in November 2023.

NHTSA has a standing general order that requires it to be told if a car crashes while operating under partial or full automation. Fully automated or autonomous means cars might be termed "actually self-driving," such as the Waymos and Zooxes that clutter up the streets of San Francisco. Festooned with dozens of exterior sensors, these four-wheel testbeds drive around—mostly empty of passengers—gathering data to train themselves with later, with no human supervision. (This is also known as SAE level 4 automation.)

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At this point, we're used to AI-powered image tools that instantly pull off previously high-effort edits, like filling in the missing bits of a scene or erasing unwanted parts of a photo without affecting the background. But a new Adobe Illustrator tool demonstrated at this week's Adobe MAX conference takes 2D image editing things in a literal different direction, letting artists instantly transform 2D vector images into 3D models that can be rotated around the axis of the screen itself.

"Project Turntable" is currently just a tightly controlled demo, part of a set of "Sneaks" that aren't ready to roll out to the public just yet. But even the short early demo shown on stage has some intriguing time-saving implications for working 2D artists.

You spin me right round

In a quick five-minute stage presentation at the MAX conference, Adobe researcher Zhiqin Chen starts with a 2D vectorized Illustrator scene of a warrior fighting a dragon. The warrior is staring directly out of the screen, though, and turning him to face the dragon on his left would usually require "redraw[ing] the entire shape, which is going to take a lot of time," as Chen points out.

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If you're using a large battery for a specialized purpose—say grid-scale storage or an electric vehicle—then it's possible to tweak the battery chemistry, provide a little bit of excess capacity, and carefully manage its charging and discharging so that it enjoys a long life span. But for consumer electronics, the batteries are smaller, the need for light weight dictates the chemistry, and the demand for quick charging can be higher. So most batteries in our gadgets start to see serious degradation after just a couple of years of use.

A big contributor to that is an internal fragmentation of the electrode materials. This leaves some of the electrode material disconnected from the battery's charge handling system, essentially stranding the material inside the battery and trapping some of the lithium uselessly. Now, researchers have found that, for at least one battery chemistry, it's possible to partially reverse some of this decay, boosting the remaining capacity of the battery by up to 30 percent.

The only problem is that not many batteries use the specific chemistry tested here. But it does show how understanding what's going on inside batteries can provide us with ways to extend their lifespan.

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Welcome to Edition 7.16 of the Rocket Report! Even several days later, it remains difficult to process the significance of what SpaceX achieved in South Texas last Sunday. The moment of seeing a rocket fall out of the sky and be captured by two arms felt historic to me, as historic as the company's first drone ship landing in April 2016. What a time to be alive.

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

Surprise! Rocket Lab adds a last-minute mission. After signing a launch contract less than two months ago, Rocket Lab says it will launch a customer as early as Saturday from New Zealand on board its Electron launch vehicle. Rocket Lab added that the customer for the expedited mission, to be named "Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes," is confidential. This is an impressive turnaround in launch times and will allow Rocket Lab to burnish its credentials for the US Space Force, which has prioritized "responsive" launch in recent years.

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A few months back, I put together a big fat guide on how to configure DNS and DHCP on your LAN the old-school way, with bind and dhcpd working together to seamlessly hand out addresses to hosts on your network and also register those hosts in your LAN's forward and reverse DNS lookup zones. The article did really well—thanks for reading it!—but one thing commenters pointed out was that my preferred dhcpd implementation, the venerable isc-dhcp-server, reached end-of-life in 2022. To replace it, ISC has for many years been working on the development of a new DHCP server named Kea.

Kea (which for this piece will refer mainly to the isc-kea-dhcp4 and isc-kea-dhcp-ddns applications) doesn't alter the end-user experience of receiving DHCP addresses—your devices won't much care if you're using isc-dhcp-server or isc-kea-dhcp4. Instead, what Kea brings to the table is a new codebase that jettisons the older dhcpd's multi-decade pile of often crufty code for a new pile of much less crufty code that will (hopefully) be easier to maintain and extend.

Many Ars readers are aware of the classic Joel on Software blog post about how rewriting your application from scratch is almost never a good idea, but something like isc-dhcp-server—whose redesign is being handled planfully by the Internet Systems Consortium—is the exception to the rule.

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The US Commerce Department announced Thursday it is easing restrictions on exports of space-related technology, answering a yearslong call from space companies to reform regulations governing international trade.

This is the most significant update to space-related export regulations in a decade and opens more opportunities for US companies to sell their satellite hardware abroad.

“We are very excited about this rollout," a senior Commerce official said during a background call with reporters. "It’s been a long time coming, and I think it’s going to be very meaningful for our national security and foreign policy interests and certainly facilitate secure trade with our partners."

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It's been a big year for Windows running on Arm chips, something that Microsoft and Arm chipmakers have been trying to get off the ground for well over a decade. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus are at the heart of dozens of Copilot+ Windows PCs, which promise unique AI features and good battery life without as many of the app and hardware compatibility problems that have plagued Windows-on-Arm in the past.

Part of the initial wave of Copilot+ PCs was a single desktop, an $899 developer kit from Qualcomm itself that would give developers and testers a slightly cheaper way to buy into the Copilot+ ecosystem. Microsoft put out a similar Arm-powered dev kit two years ago.

But Qualcomm has unceremoniously canceled the dev kit and is sending out refunds to those who ordered them. That's according to a note received by developer and YouTuber Jeff Geerling, who had already received the Snapdragon Dev Kit and given it a middling review a couple of weeks ago.

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Recently, AI researcher Simon Willison wanted to add up his charges from using a cloud service, but the payment values and dates he needed were scattered among a dozen separate emails. Inputting them manually would have been tedious, so he turned to a technique he calls "video scraping," which involves feeding a screen recording video into an AI model, similar to ChatGPT, for data extraction purposes.

What he discovered seems simple on its surface, but the quality of the result has deeper implications for the future of AI assistants, which may soon be able to see and interact with what we're doing on our computer screens.

"The other day I found myself needing to add up some numeric values that were scattered across twelve different emails," Willison wrote in a detailed post on his blog. He recorded a 35-second video scrolling through the relevant emails, then fed that video into Google's AI Studio tool, which allows people to experiment with several versions of Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash AI models.

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