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Enlarge / Warming in 2023 was widespread. Earlier this week, the European Union's Earth science team came out with its analysis of 2023's global temperatures, finding it was the warmest year on record to date. In an era of global warming, that's not especially surprising. What was unusual was how 2023 set its record...

Enlarge / Lucid has dropped the Air's drag coefficient to just 0.197, making it the most aerodynamic car on sale. When we saw our first Lucid Air prototype in 2017, we came away extremely impressed. This alpha build appeared far more realized than some prototypes, complete with functioning infotainment software as o...

The term Luddite is usually used as an insult. It suggests someone who is backward-looking, averse to progress, afraid of new technology, and frankly, not that bright. But Brian Merchant claims that that is not who the Luddites were at all. They were organized, articulate in their demands, very much understood how f...

eBay has agreed to pay $3 million—the maximum criminal penalty possible—after employees harassed, intimidated, and stalked a Massachusetts couple in retaliation for their critical reporting of the online marketplace in 2019. “Today’s settlement holds eBay criminally and financially responsible for emotionally, psych...

For the third time in less than a year, film studios with copyright infringement complaints against a cable Internet provider are trying to force Reddit to share information about users who have discussed piracy on the site. In 2023, film companies lost two attempts to have Reddit unmask its users. In the first inst...

Chinese authorities recently said they're using an advanced encryption attack to de-anonymize users of AirDrop in an effort to crack down on citizens who use the Apple file-sharing feature to mass-distribute content that's outlawed in that country. According to a 2022 report from The New York Times, activists have u...

Enlarge / Starlink satellites with direct-to-cell capability. SpaceX is showing off the first text messages sent between T-Mobile phones via one of Starlink's low Earth orbit satellites. "On Monday, January 8, the Starlink team successfully sent and received our first text messages using T-Mobile network spectrum th...

Enlarge / The new Radeon RX 7600 XT mostly just adds extra memory, though clock speeds and power requirements have also increased somewhat. Graphics card buyers seem anxious about buying a GPU with enough memory installed, even in midrange graphics cards that aren't otherwise equipped to play games at super-high res...

If you're looking for an electric car bargain and you're braver than the average bear, you might want to check out Hertz, the car rental agency. After announcing big plans to purchase tens of thousands of EVs from Tesla and then Polestar, it's now liquidating a third of that fleet, the company told investors. After ...

Enlarge / Yes, that is SteamOS. No, that is not a Steam Deck. Since the successful launch of the Steam Deck nearly two years ago, we've seen plenty of would-be competitors that have tried to mimic the Deck's portable form factor and ability to run PC games. Thus far, though, these competitors have all been missing o...

Enlarge / The John C. Boyle Dam, one of the dams slated for removal. Wending its way from the Olympic Mountains to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Washington’s Elwha River is now free. For about century, the Elwha and Gilnes Canyon Dams corralled these waters. Both have since been removed, and the restoration of the wat...

Can you tell which of these seemingly identical bits of Steam iconography were generated using AI (trick question, it's none of them). Last summer, Valve told Ars Technica that it was worried about potential legal issues surrounding games made with the assistance of AI models trained on copyrighted works and that it...

Enlarge / Behold, the "Rude Man" chalk giant carved on a hill above the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset, England. A major attraction of Dorset, England, is the Cerne Abbas Giant, a 180-foot-tall figure of a naked man wielding a large club carved with chalk into a hilltop. A pair of historians offers a strong case t...

Enlarge / A child with measles. The US may be heading to a "dangerous vaccination tipping point," with immunization rates falling so low that population-level immunity is now at risk, and we will likely see thousands of needless deaths this respiratory virus season, two top officials for the Food and Drug Administra...

For the past year, previously unknown self-replicating malware has been compromising Linux devices around the world and installing cryptomining malware that takes unusual steps to conceal its inner workings, researchers said. The worm is a customized version of Mirai, the botnet malware that infects Linux-based serv...

Amazon today is laying off 500 employees at Twitch and several hundred more at its MGM and Prime Video divisions, the company announced. The 500 job cuts at Twitch reportedly amount to 35 percent of the game-focused live-streaming platform's staff. Twitch CEO Dan Clancy announced the cuts in a blog post and email to...

As a scientist heavily engaged in science communication, I’ve seen it all. People have come to my public talks to argue with me that the Big Bang never happened. People have sent me handwritten letters explaining how dark matter means that ghosts are real. People have asked me for my scientific opinion about homeopa...

HP has used its "Dynamic Security" firmware updates to "create a monopoly" of replacement printer ink cartridges, a lawsuit filed against the company on January 5 claims. The lawsuit, which is seeking class-action certification, represents yet another form of litigation against HP for bricking printers when they try...

European Union regulators are concerned that Microsoft may be covertly controlling OpenAI as its biggest investor. On Tuesday, the European Commission (EC) announced that it is currently "checking whether Microsoft's investment in OpenAI might be reviewable under the EU Merger Regulation." The EC's executive vice pr...

ChatGPT developer OpenAI recently acknowledged the necessity of using copyrighted material in the development of AI tools like ChatGPT, The Telegraph reports, saying they would be "impossible" without it. The statement came as part of a submission to the UK's House of Lords communications and digital select committe...

Enlarge / The Rexroth Nutrunner, a line of torque wrench sold by Bosch Rexroth. Researchers have unearthed nearly two dozen vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to sabotage or disable a popular line of network-connected wrenches that factories around the world use to assemble sensitive instruments and devices. T...

On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to review an appeal from X (formerly Twitter), alleging that the US government's censorship of X transparency reports served as a prior restraint on the platform's speech and was unconstitutional. This free speech battle predates Elon Musk's ownership of the platform. Since 2014...

US-based iPhone users are finally getting long-awaited payments to compensate them for Apple's decision to throttle the performance of iPhones with degraded batteries. Apple agreed to settle with iPhone users in March 2020, but class-action lawsuits and settlements often take years to be resolved and paid out. This ...

Enlarge / The Dual Loop Band as seen on a model head. Apple's highly anticipated mixed-reality Vision Pro headset will be available starting on February 2 at US retail Apple locations and on the Apple Store website, the company announced this morning. Preorders for the $3,499 "spatial computing" headset will start o...