Every morning during the Martian spring and summer, a thin and extremely long cloud emerges, only to disappear again. The wispy formation appears near the volcano Arsia Mons and gradually elongates until it reaches over 1,000 miles—about the distance from New York to Kansas City as the crow flies—before dissipating. This cycle then repeats for several months.

Since it was first recorded by a probe in 2018, scientists have been unable to find a plausible explanation for the existence of this cloud, often referred to as the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC). Until now. Recently, researchers successfully modeled the cloud’s formation for the first time, their results suggesting that it may be driven by a physical process that has never been directly observed in any planet's atmosphere.

"We found that we needed to include some exotic physics… physics that, while included in textbooks, is treated as theoretical and usually thought not to happen in nature. It certainly hasn’t been seen in action before," Jorge Hernández-Bernal, a planetary scientist at Paris’ Sorbonne Université and lead author of the study, said in a press release. "Once we included this physics in our simulations, the AMEC emerged just as we hoped.”

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Barnes Ice Cap sits on the central plateau of Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic. It is the last surviving fragment of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the largest of the Pleistocene ice sheets, which at its peak buried most of Canada under two miles of ice and locked away around 80 meters of sea level. That remnant has now yielded direct physical evidence that ice sheets might have reversed their retreat and started to grow again thousands of years ago.

In a recent Science study, researchers show that the Laurentide reached its smallest size about 3,600 years ago, then started re-expanding roughly 2,000 years ago, which the team interprets as the opening move of the next glaciation. Apparently, this brand-new ice age was on its way until about 1960, when human-caused climate warming reversed it.

Frozen to the bed

“Barnes is the last remaining piece of one of the domes of the Laurentide Ice Sheet,” says Nicolás Young, a geologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author of the study. As that enormous dome thinned through the Holocene, its margin withdrew up onto Baffin Island, and what's left today is the deflated core of something that was once two miles thick. The reason Barnes can testify about its own history, Young explains, comes down to the temperature at its base.

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During a lengthy news conference on Friday, NASA provided a detailed overview of how it plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface as soon as 2028 as part of its Artemis Program.

Although much of the information behind these plans has been previously reported at Ars Technica and elsewhere, this marked the first time NASA has laid them out in detail and acknowledged some substantial changes in the architecture.

Most notably, for SpaceX's Starship vehicle, the revised plan calls for the Orion spacecraft to dock with the Starship lunar lander in high-Earth orbit before transiting to the Moon. And for Blue Origin, the mission architecture includes four launches of the New Glenn rocket, but no spacecraft-to-spacecraft refuelings. Additionally, the Blue Origin plans allows for the possibility of its Blue Moon lander rendezvousing with Orion in low-Lunar orbit.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo warning military personnel against using nonpublic information to make bets on prediction markets, saying the wagers could give important clues to enemy countries.

"Do Not Compromise Military Operations for Personal Financial Gain," said the subject line of an October 20 memo published yesterday by CBS News. Hegseth's memo was sent to senior Pentagon leadership, Combatant Command leaders, and Defense Department field activity directors.

Hegseth wrote:

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Using Google's products and services has always been fundamentally precarious—doing so gives the world's largest advertising company a lot of juicy personal data. Google has long said it won't use the sensitive data from products like Gmail, Drive, and Photos for ad personalization, but a change to the company's privacy policy appears to dismantle that firewall.

On October 16, Google issued an update to its privacy policy, spotted by Android Authority. The ad personalization section used to include a clear limit on data from certain apps. "We don’t show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos," the document said. Now, Google has updated it with the following language.

Updated language on when your sensitive data might inform ads. Credit: Google

This equivocation opens the door to using data from apps like Gmail and Photos in ads when it's shared with other Google services, and it just so happens Google has a mechanism for doing that, with Personal Intelligence. The company released Personal Intelligence in early 2026, allowing users to hand data from multiple apps to Google AI products. The idea is that the added context from your existing data will lead to better AI answers, but it's also proving to be a privacy minefield.

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Leaders in the US Space Force would like to have a new spaceport up and running in four years, adding a third heavy-lift launch site to relieve pressure from bases in Florida and California that have shot rockets into orbit for nearly 70 years.

The obvious problem with that ambition is 2030 is four years away, and Pentagon officials have not determined where the new spaceport should go or how to acquire land for it.

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink first mentioned the service's search for a third launch base in May. A congressionally mandated study of the Space Force's launch infrastructure identified the need for "another site that's capable of heavy and super heavy launch capability," Meink said in a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

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As reported by Music Business Worldwide, Spotify appears to be stepping up enforcement of existing policies regarding Family and Duo subscription plans by requiring users to scan a QR code in person on the plan manager's device in order to maintain access to it. Those who fail to scan the address verification QR code within seven days will see their account demoted to the free tier and be barred from joining any other Duo or Family plan for 12 months.

Spotify's QR code plan enforcement. Credit: Spotify

Spotify's support documentation verifies the policy after users on Reddit began posting reports of receiving the QR prompt. The enforcement stems from Spotify's requirement that family plan members reside at the same address—a seemingly reasonable policy in concept. But what if you have a child away in college, a spouse who works on the road, or any number of other circumstances that might see families separated by physical distance? The policy could extend beyond friend groups looking to save a buck, affecting actual families who thought they were using the program as intended.

Goldman Sachs analysts, in their October 15 Music in the Air: 10 Years On report, made available by HITS Daily Double, estimate that "a meaningful share of family plan users are not actual household members, but rather friends sharing a plan to reduce costs." The report goes on to add, "We see additional monetization upside from tightening household verification on multi-user plans. Most family plans require members to reside at the same address, but enforcement has been minimal in practice."

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Much of what we know about how a brain makes decisions comes from studying monkeys watching dots. In a task known as a random-dot-motion task, a cloud of flickering specks drifts weakly in one direction while the subject tries to determine whether—and in which direction— it’s moving. The task has shown that in the primate neocortex, neurons gather visual evidence over time, with their firing rates climbing until they cross a threshold, when the animal commits to a decision.

But avian brains don’t have a neocortex, so it wasn’t obvious how they made similar decisions.

“This was the big question,” said Andreas Nieder, a neurobiologist at the University of Tübingen. “How [would] a differently organized avian brain encode decisions?”

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US chip champion Intel was so confused by the US government ban on foreign-made robots that it requested and received a waiver “out of an abundance of caution.” The tech company wanted to make sure that it could continue using certain robotic vehicles in its US chip fabs.

The uncertainty surrounding the Federal Communications Commission ban on certain foreign-made robots was revealed in the agency’s decision to grant Intel’s waiver request. On October 22, the FCC published its order allowing Intel to continue using the foreign-made robots in US semiconductor manufacturing facilities for a period of one year.

The robots in question are automated guided vehicles operating on “tracks or predefined paths” while often requiring operator oversight, according to Intel’s website. They help to move materials and items around within warehouses and factory floors.

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At a recent meeting of the board that oversees the National Institutes of Health's Clinical Center Research Hospital, chair Jack Leslie opened with cheerful introductions and gregarious chatter—then diverted from the agenda of the regularly scheduled meeting. He spent the next six minutes delivering a pointed rebuke of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, warning that his anti-vaccine activities could tarnish the venerable hospital, often called the "house of hope" for patients with rare conditions or those who have exhausted all other options.

Leslie took issue with a recent stunt Kennedy had pulled at the hospital, which involved making a surprise appearance for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open his signature vaccine injury clinic. The ceremony included a panel with people claiming to have been injured by vaccines. They sat behind placards reading "vaccine injured" and spoke with Kennedy and other high-ranking Trump administration officials.

Leslie prefaced his comments by noting that some might prefer he not speak out against Kennedy's efforts. "But I think that that would be a failing as an advisory board if we were silent," he said. Leslie also noted that he has no concerns about studying potential injuries from vaccines. "Serious reactions are rare, but real," he said, and people who believe they've been injured should "be taken seriously."

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The New York Knicks organization sent employees a phishing email promising free championship rings in a test of its staff's ability to detect scams, The New York Times reported yesterday. “Congratulations, your Employee Championship Ring is here,” the email sent in late September said, instructing employees to click a link to make a selection from two ring designs.

Madison Square Garden employees who clicked that link "were forced to attend a mandatory cybersecurity class to help satisfy some of [owner James] Dolan’s growing cybersecurity concerns," the report said, citing team sources. Dolan is the owner of the Knicks, the New York Rangers, and Madison Square Garden.

It's common for corporations to send phishing emails to find out which employees don't pay attention to clues that an email is a scam. A cybersecurity-test email often appears to be from the company itself but includes telltale signs of phishing. For example, Ars Technica owner Condé Nast sends phishing-test messages from email addresses with a misspelled domain, "condenest.com."

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Gamers still hoping against hope for a true follow-up to Half-Life 2 (after so, so many years) may remember last year's flurry of speculation that Half-Life 3 was finally nearing completion. Amid all those rumors, though, we never got any official sign from anyone inside Valve that a Half-Life project was currently in development.

That changed this week thanks to an apparent slip-up during a panel at GameSoundCon, an industry conference devoted to "the art, technology, and business of game audio." In a panel devoted to Valve's use of open audio engines (captured in this Vimeo clip), Valve composer and audio artist Mike Morasky let an interesting string of three letters slip while talking about the way the company implements high dynamic range (HDR) audio:

Our HDR system is basically that's one of the three pieces that come together to make an HDR that you can easily optimize. And in fact, I think Deadlock has their own version of HDR. HLX has its own version, so on and so forth [emphasis added].

"HLX," of course, has been widely reported as the internal code name for Valve's next Half-Life project. The codename has shown up in Valve engine code since at least 2024, but it has never been referenced in public by a Valve employee until now (though Morasky was responsible for a close call in an interview last year).

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US regulators have issued a warning to a nuclear project critical to Donald Trump’s efforts to revive the industry, after a contractor fell into a reactor cavity and a bundle of fuel rods nearly tipped over during refueling.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Holtec International, a company racing to reopen a shuttered reactor at the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, to address a “chilled work environment” that has made staff hesitant to raise safety concerns without fear of retaliation.

The warning has prompted concerns among critics that financial and political pressures to revitalize nuclear power as an answer to booming AI-driven energy demand are increasing risks of accidents.

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Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service has played a pivotal role in supporting Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion for years. But with Starlink having become increasingly unreliable due to Musk’s political inclinations and the latest surprise disruptions to service in Ukraine, the Ukrainians and Europe as a whole are now facing urgent questions about how to move forward without it.

As the world’s largest communications satellite network, Starlink can typically support high-speed Internet and data streams for any user or vehicle equipped with a relatively compact Starlink terminal. This has enabled Ukraine to maintain vital communications for both civilian purposes and military operations—and has also expanded the Ukrainian military’s capability to remotely control or provide guidance to drones used in both air defense against Russian attacks and for striking back at Russian targets.

“Starlink currently offers some of the best satellite coverage available, with virtually no competitors when you consider the combination of cost, availability, and ease of use,” according to the head of hardware R&D at the Ukrainian defense company BlueBird Tech, who provided comments to Ars anonymously for security reasons. “In practical terms, the main limitation is the need to position the antenna so it can receive signals from the satellites.”

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Peacock series Crystal Lake doesn’t feel like a Friday the 13th movie when you first press play, even though it’s set up to be a prequel to the original film. (This review includes spoilers of the original Friday the 13th movie but avoids major Crystal Lake spoilers.)

Instead, Crystal Lake strives to build a drama that’s half homage, half uncharted territory, while giving a long-awaited backstory to Pamela Voorhees. The original villain in the first film, Pam Voorhees, shocked audiences in 1980 by popping up out of nowhere in the midst of a brutal camp counselor killing spree, then confronting the final girl with a Norman Bates-like delivery of the movie’s chilling tagline, “Kill her, mommy,” using the voice of her drowned son, Jason.

Although the hockey-masked killer, Jason Voorhees, became the horror icon at the center of the franchise, his mom, Pam, continued to fascinate fans, who knew very little about her. Beheaded in the first film after just 13 minutes onscreen, her spirit would occasionally appear in later films, but the original actor, Betsy Palmer, who portrayed Pam refused to return, largely because the character has no depth.

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Welcome to Edition 9.16 of the Rocket Report! Lots of SpaceX-related news this week including a couple of Thursday shockers. In one story, the company told the US Space Force thanks, but no thanks after being offered three military launch contracts. Then, on the civil space side of things, SpaceX's Starship may required up to 22 refuelings to support a lunar landing, a NASA safety panel said.

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.

Miura 5 getting closer to launch. PLD Space says its Miura 5 rocket, due to undertake its inaugural launch next year, is nearing final integration, Aviation Week reports. The rocket is one of three Miura 5s the company has already manufactured, with the other two designed to qualify key system elements, CEO Raúl Torres said in an October 19 program update. PLD Space now targets a first flight of the small-lift vehicle before mid-2027.

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A security researcher has demonstrated a software-only partial jailbreak of the Switch 2, gaining "userland" access that he says "lets us run homebrew, reverse engineer and mod Switch 2 games, back up save files off the Switch, and access most of the Switch 2’s peripherals through MMIO."

The hack relies on the original Switch version of SmileBasic 4, the latest in a long-running series of programming environments and interpreters that run on Nintendo hardware. The so-called "tethered" hack also requires access to a macOS or Linux PC on the same network to run a node.js package that helps enable privileged system access.

Researcher Sammy Hajhamid writes that he used OpenAI's Codex to poke at SmileBasic's language interpreter, using a custom harness that could send USB commands to the system and view results via HDMI (as well as power cycling via a Bluetooth light switch flipping device). After "substantial effort for ~2 weeks," that harness discovered a 32-bit integer overflow that occurs when removing items from an array in SmileBasic. That error gives access to an array pointer, which in turn allows read-and-write access to portions of system memory.

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Personalized mRNA vaccines against melanoma—the deadliest form of skin cancer—reduced the risk of death or recurrence by 42 percent compared to standard treatment in a late-stage trial, pharmaceutical partners Merck and Moderna announced Thursday.

The results are a significant advance in melanoma treatment; Merck and Moderna are already engaging with regulatory authorities to get the vaccine approved. More broadly, the vaccine's success bolsters hope that mRNA vaccines and individualized cancer-targeting medicines offer a new paradigm for cancer therapies.

"From the beginning, we believed mRNA technology could make it possible to develop cancer treatments uniquely matched to each patient’s tumor," Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement. The trial results "mark a defining moment for that vision and show what’s possible when we rethink how medicines are made." They also "reinforce our conviction that mRNA has the potential to fundamentally change how we treat cancer," he said.

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NASA does not have, nor want, nuclear weapons. But when it comes to a particular metric that is part of the Artemis Program to land people on the Moon, NASA guards a particular number like it is trying to prevent outsiders from cracking nuclear codes.

I am speaking of the number of Starship launches required to fuel a Starship-based lunar lander in low-Earth orbit such that it can fly out to the Moon, land there, and return to lunar orbit.

This number has been a moving target over the years. The general response from NASA has typically been, 'We don't know for sure, so we're not going to say.' In 2023, for example, the then-director of NASA's Human Landing System, Lisa Watson-Morgan, told Ars, "We have a general idea, but I’m reluctant to say exactly what that is."

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Comcast reportedly plans significant job cuts in its cable division as the firm continues to lose residential broadband and TV customers. Comcast lost 144,000 residential broadband customers in Q3 2026, up from a 91,000-customer loss in the same quarter a year ago, the company said in its earnings report today.

Comcast historically capitalized on a lack of competition for high-speed wired broadband. But now it faces stronger competition from fixed wireless providers and from fiber providers in parts of its cable territory.

"Fixed wireless remains aggressive and continues to take share, while fiber construction remains elevated, with pockets of irrational pricing and promotional activity," Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh said today in an earnings call.

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eMudhra, the certificate authority that issued eight intermediate TLS credentials so weak that anyone could mint certificates for any website or mail server—one had a private encryption key of just 4—said it’s getting out of the business.

V. Srinivasan, chairman of India-based eMudhra Limited, cited increasing costs and complexities of compliance requirements—paired with the business generating just 1 percent of its revenue. He also said that the emergence of organizations providing TLS certificates free of charge further reduced returns on investment when compared to other products and services the company offers.

Don't let the door hit you on the butt

“However, the level of social media amplification around this incident has brought scrutiny that is out of proportion to SSL/TLS’s place in our business,” the company continued in a Thursday post. “In view of this, after detailed deliberations our board has concluded that withdrawing from global SSL/TLS is the right decision for eMudhra and its shareholders.”

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Those mourning yesterday's shuttering of highly praised and influential developer BioWare also had to deal with the cancellation of the next Mass Effect game, which was first teased back in 2020. Today, we got our best look at what that game could have been with a short, leaked trailer for Mass Effect: Universe.

In the roughly two-minute montage—which describes itself as "in-engine footage from our small team" that "uses our pre-production assets"—an ex-military officer wearing an N7 trenchcoat (similar to the one seen in that 2020 teaser) encounters an Asari at a bar. He talks of his frustration with military life—"by the time you put out one fire, another had already started"—before discussing his new line of work "stopping [the fires] before they start" and "making the choices no one else is willing to make. Going where others are afraid to go."

Mass Effect: Universe Trailer
by
u/Random_Hyabusa_Ninja in
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A 25-year-old German experimental photographer has won the 2026 Nikon Small World photomicrography competition with a striking image of droplets of ink being deposited on paper by an inkjet printer. Ole Bielfeldt beat out 1,802 other entries hailing from 69 different countries.

Bielfeldt became interested in photomicrography during the COVID-19 lockdown after discovering an old microscope in his parents' attic. He figured out how to build an adaptor out of a tube and some wood to connect the microscope to his father's camera and taught himself the art through trial and error, building custom tools as needed. He documents how he captures transformative images of everyday objects with behind-the-scenes videos posted to macrofying, his photography and videography brand.

It was Bielfeldt's curiosity about the inner workings of inkjet printers that inspired his winning entry, but capturing the action of ink drops being deposited on paper was a challenge, given that the process happens so quickly. The droplets, for instance, moved faster than the camera's shutter speed. Bielfeldt's solution was to deconstruct the printer so that the paper moved under a stationary (rather than moving) printhead, and then take the image in a dark room, using a flash to serve as the shutter, thereby freezing the ink drops mid-air. There was no need for pricey equipment. Bielfeldt does not use AI in his images, preferring to rely on traditional techniques.

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Calley Means—a top ally to anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a co-author of the so-called "MAHA bible"—resigned from his role in the Trump administration Thursday, reportedly in frustration over delays to food policy changes sought by the Make America Healthy Again movement.

"I am resigning from the White House with tremendous respect for President Trump and Bobby Kennedy," Means wrote in a social media post this afternoon. "It was an honor to advocate for MAHA moms in the administration and steer policies like Dietary Guidelines reform, psychedelic reform, removing soda from SNAP, removing food dyes, GRAS reform, and overhauling government food procurement."

His post did not provide a reason for his departure. Means served as a senior advisor to Kennedy.

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When we first drove BMW’s first Neue Klasse model, the iX3, it quickly revealed that BMW knows how to make a good electric vehicle. A clean-sheet design, it featured the automaker’s sixth-generation electric powertrain, a completely reimagined dashboard, and powerful computers to run the whole show. Now, much of that technology is being ported over to the larger X5 line.

But BMW knows not all its customers are ready to go electric, especially in the US, so it’s sticking with its powertrain-agnostic CLAR platform, as used in cars as diverse as the large 7 Series and the new gasoline 3 Series. Which means in addition to the all-electric iX5, there are also mild hybrid and plug-in hybrid X5s available, and in time, even a hydrogen-powered option. For now, as I’ll explain, I think the EV is the pick of the bunch.

Pick your power

The most conventional option is the X5 40 xDrive, powered by a 3.0 L turbocharged inline six-cylinder engine that generates 394 hp (294 kW) and 428 lb-ft (580 Nm). The 48 V mild hybrid system can contribute a decent slug of torque (148 lb-ft/200 Nm) if necessary, and the engine operates under the Miller cycle for better efficiency, as well as featuring the usual BMW engine technology, like variable valve timing. Expect around 26 mpg (9 L/100 km) from this powertrain and a full-to-empty range of 569 miles (915 km).

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Android-powered foldable phones have been available for years, but most people never paid attention to them. As predicted, that could be changing now that Apple has entered the folding phone market with the iPhone Duo. Analysts have speculated that Samsung's Z8 foldables were seeing a boost from the iPhone announcement, and now Samsung has seemingly confirmed that.

In a new blog post, Samsung UK crows that the company's 2026 foldable lineup is moving much faster than last year's models. Compared to the Galaxy Z Fold 7, combined European sales for the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra are up 45 percent. Samsung isn't talking about Z Flip 8 sales, but it previously noted that its larger foldables made up about 80 percent of foldable purchases. We can assume any increase there is not impressive enough to mention.

The reason for flat Z Flip sales may simply be that Apple didn't release a flip phone. Unsurprisingly, Samsung doesn't mention Apple or the iPhone Duo in its press release. However, it does say that search volume for the Z8 series across Europe spiked 460 percent the week of September 6 to 12. And guess what was announced on September 9? Yep, the iPhone Duo. Z Fold 8 search volume across the entire month of September (when the phones launched) was up 260 percent.

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Four years ago, a senior official in Russia's foreign ministry painted a bullseye on commercial satellite networks that assist Ukraine in its fight against invading Russian military forces.

On Wednesday, several days after a Russian military spacecraft moved within striking distance of one of those commercial satellites, the same Russian diplomat assured the world there's no reason to worry.

There's a sharp incongruity in those statements from Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy head of Russia's delegation to the United Nations. Vorontsov's comments Wednesday in the UN General Assembly's First Committee came moments after a US official called attention to recent maneuvers by Kosmos 2612, a Russian military craft that approached a US-registered commercial satellite some 340 miles (550 kilometers) above Earth.

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Meta must pay $25 billion to New Mexico after a jury found the tech giant guilty of nearly 44 million violations of state consumer protection laws.

The largest fine to ever hit Meta came after New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez declined to join an $18 billion settlement Meta reached earlier this year with attorneys general in nearly all states.

In his opinion Wednesday, US district court judge Francis J. Mathew said there was no “bright line rule” for determining the appropriate penalty for Meta's repeated and willful deception of users since 2010 about their “control of data, third-party data misuse, misinformation, hate speech, and equal enforcement.”

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Government officials in Guinea-Bissau have formally rejected a clinical trial that would be run by Danish researchers and funded by the US to look for alleged nonspecific harms from the newborn dose of the hepatitis B vaccine. The vaccine dose is currently recommended globally for all newborns and has been used safely and effectively for decades.

In an email to Ars Technica, one of the trial's lead researchers, Christine Stabell Benn of Bandim Health Project and the University of Southern Denmark, said that Guinea-Bissau's Council of Ministers "formally reaffirmed its non-acceptance of the study on 16 October."

The revelation that the study was formally rejected last week comes after news on Monday that judicial police in Guinea-Bissau raided Bandim Health's offices and seized vaccines. Stabell Benn highlighted that the police search came after the trial was rejected.

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Last year, we reported on Red Viper, a Virtual Boy emulator that added a splash of Super Game Boy-style color to Nintendo's famously failed red-on-black "portable" 3D headset from the '90s. Now, a new emulation experiment, VBoy Color, has taken the concept to a higher level, using a tile-based palette system that allows for many more distinct colors in each individual Virtual Boy frame.

Rather than simply replacing the Virtual Boy's four shades of red with four different colors, VBoy Color's readme files explain how the emulator's game-specific Color Packs can assign a distinct four-color palette to each 8x8 tile in a Virtual Boy scene. That means the emulator can differentiate between green pipes, grey platforms, and red brick wall in Mario Clash, for instance, even though all those in-game objects share the same overlapping red hues in the original game.

The Game Boy Color-esque results feel like being transported into an alternate history where Nintendo invested in a full-color display rather than cheaper red LEDs for the Virtual Boy hardware. The increased contrast between differently colored elements is particularly welcome in games like Jack Bros. or Vertical Force, where the original red-on-red display often makes it hard to differentiate the player-character from busy red background elements.

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Amazon has warned that vulnerabilities in a programming language that underpins much of the Internet, discovered using AI tools, are being “broadly exploited” as governments and companies rush to secure their systems.

The world’s largest cloud computing provider on Wednesday said it had identified an attempt by hackers to exploit the bug four days before the weakness was disclosed to the public.

Amazon added the flaws were “now being broadly exploited in the wild.”

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Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power returns next month for its third season. Prime Video unveiled a teaser earlier this year at San Diego Comic-Con, but we haven't heard much about the new season otherwise. We now have the official full trailer, and it's jam-packed with a rising Sauron, who is intent on conquering Middle-Earth with his army of Orcs—with the fractured opposition of elves, dwarves, and men scrambling to figure out how best to stop him. We also meet the human men who will become the Ringwraiths; the showrunners have dubbed them the Nazgnagol ("Rings-servant").

(Some spoilers for the first two seasons below.)

Prime Video made a major investment in The Rings of Power when it acquired the rights to the source material from the Tolkien estate, even committing to multiple seasons upfront. S3 is set seven years after the events of S2 and opens when the war between the elves and Sauron is at its height. Per the official synopsis:

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It’s easy to criticize US automakers and their tepid approach to electric vehicles under the current administration and the expiration of the EV tax credit. It’s also easy to look at the rest of the world's embrace of EVs and wonder if the US is entering a “Malaise 2.0” era. Which is why GM wants the world to know that it is still focused on its end goals of electrification, autonomy, and improving vehicle quality while reducing development time.

At this year’s GM Forward event, company executives announced that its hands-off, eyes-off Super Cruise technology will expand across the lineup and be available on nearly every vehicle. This will include the pickup trucks and the crossovers, and not just the Escalade IQ that it was announced for last year.

Sterling Anderson, GM’s head of product, said the company is testing this technology to the tune of 1 million miles (1.6 million km) a month in both the virtual and real world. The goal is that not only would the vehicle be able to take you places, but it could go and do things for you.

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Unknown hackers hijacked more than 300 Tor exit nodes and reconfigured them to favor unencrypted email traffic and redirect SSH connections through servers they controlled, a researcher reported Tuesday.

The hijacking began in late August, when, according to Tor volunteers, the attacker used a valid password that had been reused to gain access to a Tor management server. The attacker then installed Ebury, a backdoor written for Linux that was discovered 12 years ago.

Mysteries remain

Then the attacker connected from the management server to a second Tor server, called Switzerland2, through SSH, using an RSA key that, for unknown reasons, investigators couldn’t find among Switzerland2’s authorized keys. With administrative control of Switzerland2, the attackers installed Ebury there as well. Finally, the attacker reconfigured settings on two exit nodes that Switzerland2 hosted.

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In 2015, all but two countries agreed to make an effort to keep global temperatures from reaching 1.5° C above pre-industrial readings. Since then, most of the world has largely treated what they signed on to as aspirational, and one of the largest emitters (the US) has alternately withdrawn and recommitted to the agreement. Meanwhile, the planet has responded as expected to steadily rising carbon emissions and appears to be practically at the 1.5° limit.

On Wednesday, for the first time, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) acknowledged that reality and conceded that the goal of keeping warming below 1.5° was no longer a viable one. Instead, its new goalposts focus on keeping both how long we exceed that limit and how much we exceed it by, at a minimum. Doing that will require both dramatic emissions cuts now and the removal of hundreds of gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere before the century is out.

Bowing to the inevitable

Depending on which baseline you use to establish pre-industrial temperatures, as well as which reconstruction of global temperatures you rely on, the world has either gotten very close to, or already exceeded, the 1.5° milestone. The current El Niño event, which appears exceptionally strong, will almost certainly mean that we've gone over it no matter which records you choose.

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr today warned broadcasters about airing "fake polls," amplifying one of the many complaints that President Trump has regularly made about the news media.

Carr's post on X said, "Many journalists and broadcasters have been amplifying or airing these Polls without regard to basic journalistic ethics and without informing the public that those Polls lack a scientific, accurate, or even real basis... Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in News Distortions or running Broadcast Hoaxes by airing Polls that would violate their regulatory obligations."

Carr urged broadcasters to "provide their viewers with additional context and information about Polls they have covered." In fact, one small polling outfit was exposed as a hoax this week, and a similar incident occurred in August. News outlets have reported on these hoaxes, providing the very "context" that Carr said is needed.

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In September, when Microsoft severely limited the game-streaming buffet available to Game Pass subscribers, the company said non-subscribers would soon be able to "purchase cloud playtime hours through the Xbox Store and stream eligible games they own on supported devices." Today, Microsoft rolled out those a la carte Cloud Playtime purchases to Xbox Insiders, with prices that might be a bit galling for players who have already purchased these streamable games.

The "introductory launch pricing" for Xbox's Cloud Playtime purchases is as follows:

• 10 hours for $4 (~$0.40/hour)
• 25 hours for $8 (~$0.32/hour)
• 50 hours for $12 (~$0.24/hour)

Purchased playtime "remains available until it’s used," Microsoft writes, so you don't have to worry about your 50-hour purchase expiring before you can use it fully.

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Enterprise-sized businesses spend, on average, 28 percent of their software budgets on unwanted upgrades, migrations, and licensing changes. Often, those firms' IT heads think those changes are detrimental.

Those results are according to a survey of 2,018 chief information officers and senior IT decision-makers at companies with at least 10,000 employees that Origina commissioned for its report, “The Software Tax.” About half of the respondents (1,011) are from the US, and the rest are from the United Kingdom. All respondents worked at companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue.

Keep in mind that Origina provides maintenance for various enterprise software. Its report points to independent software maintenance as a way for IT leaders to regain control over software budgets, illustrating its potential bias. A third-party research consultancy, Censuswide, conducted the survey.

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Tesla published its third-quarter 2026 financial results this afternoon. Earlier in October, it reported its sales and deliveries for the three-month period, selling fewer cars than in the same quarter in 2025, yet it still beat analyst projections. Now we can see how those sales translate to the bottom line. Tesla brought in $28 billion in revenue in Q3, almost the same as in 2025.

Automotive revenues were $20.6 billion, a 3 percent decrease year over year. Perhaps more troubling is the decline in revenue from solar panels and storage batteries—this line of business had been growing, but for Q3 revenue fell 16 percent year over year to $2.9 billion. Services and other revenues, though, which include parts and Supercharger use, grew by a third to $4.6 billion.

But the company—like the rest of us—has seen its expenses go up. Operating expenses rose by 39 percent to $4.8 billion, dropping the company’s operating margin to just 2.6 percent; in Q3 2025, Tesla’s margin was 5.8 percent. Net profit fell to $787 million, down 43 percent year over year. What’s more, capital expenditures were up by 110 percent to $4.7 billion, and free cash flow was down 62 percent to $1.5 billion.

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Apple just revealed a new brand identity for Apple Music, with the expected turn to Liquid Glass. I’m not much of a fan of their new design language in general; this is where I admit that I’m still running MacOS Sequoia and have grumpy things to say about rounded corner radii and text legibility.

It’s just a trend, it will pass, and at some point I’ll probably cave and upgrade when it starts actually affecting my ability to get work done, or more importantly get security updates. Once I adjust, I’ll stop noticing it, and life will go on.

As such, I wouldn’t normally find an obvious rebrand like this notable, much less feel like I had much to say about it. But then I happened to catch Apple’s behind-the-scenes video in my YouTube recommendations, and I realized I did have thoughts.

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The legendary studio behind series like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Neverwinter Nights, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is no more. BioWare announced via social media Wednesday afternoon that "after more than three decades of shared adventures, BioWare is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending."

The official announcement was posted mere minutes after a Bloomberg report detailed 400 job cuts across BioWare parent company Electronic Arts, including 50 at BioWare, based on reports from "a person familiar with the company's plans."

"Across our portfolio, we’re making deliberate choices to align talent and investments where we see the greatest opportunities for players and long-term growth," EA executives wrote in a message to staff, according to Bloomberg.

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Google would certainly prefer that everyone used its Gemini models with Google Cloud services, but soon, you'll have more options. OpenAI and Google have come to an arrangement that will see the former's frontier models arrive in Google Cloud services. Perhaps more importantly, GPT models will soon appear in Antigravity, Google's agent-powered coding tool.

For enterprise customers and AI enthusiasts, OpenAI's latest model will appear in Google's "Model Garden" in the coming weeks, adding to its 200-plus options. The garden already offers access to Google's Gemini models, as well as an assortment of open models like Mistral, Llama, and Gemma. Anthropic's Claude AI has also been available for some time. Google says it's now the only large cloud provider offering access to all three leading closed LLMs.

While OpenAI notes that Microsoft continues to be its primary cloud partner, the full suite of current GPT 6 and 6.1 models—Astra, Sol, and Luna—will launch on Google Cloud. Astra will naturally cost the most to run, but Google's system supports dynamically moving workloads between LLMs based on performance, latency, and efficiency.

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A Wall Street Journal report said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk ordered the Starlink throttling that blindsided Ukraine's air assault forces last week, despite Musk's claim that all decisions on the military version of Starlink are made by the US military and President Trump.

Trump denied ordering the restrictions. While Musk may have spoken to Trump and administration officials before the decision, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Musk made the final call. The decision came after both Musk and Trump criticized Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries.

"Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration," the WSJ wrote, citing unnamed US officials and people familiar with the matter. The report said that "Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network... rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless."

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Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI is stuck facing a lawsuit over alleged data center pollution after Donald Trump failed to convince a judge that his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has complete control over all Clean Air Act lawsuits and can dismiss any suit at whim.

Soon after unpermitted gas turbines were discovered powering Musk’s giant Colossus data center in Memphis, Tennessee, the NAACP sued. Its lawsuit sought an injunction requiring xAI (which, following a merger, is known now as SpaceXAI) to use the best available pollution control technology when operating the turbines and ordering penalties up to $124,426 per day per violation. Without such remedies, the turbines risked drastically spiking pollution in already vulnerable neighborhoods housing predominantly Black communities nearby, the NAACP argued.

To block the lawsuit, Trump tried to intervene, arguing that the EPA had the power to unilaterally dismiss lawsuits any time the president decides against enforcing the Clean Air Act. According to Trump, it would supposedly “not serve the public interest” if citizens were allowed to seek massive civil penalties to punish polluting AI firms that were trying to get data centers operational as fast as possible to support Trump’s AI Action Plan.

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Smart TVs running operating systems from Samsung, Vizio, and Roku continue sending data to automatic content recognition (ACR) endpoints after users opt out of tracking in the devices’ settings, according to research published on Monday. The paper from Northeastern University researchers points to potential privacy violations from some of the biggest TV brands.

ACR captures video screenshots or audio clips from smart TVs and sends the data to remote servers, where it's used for things like measuring content viewership and serving targeted ads.

The paper, "Watching the Watchers: Privacy Analysis of US Smart TV Automatic Content Recognition," examined eight smart TV OSes across 12 smart TVs from 10 manufacturers (Amazon, Hisense, LG, Roku, Samsung, Sony, Supersonic, TCL, Vizio, and Westinghouse) to examine when smart TVs use ACR and how effective opting out of user tracking is.

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In its current iteration, SpaceX is largely a data company seeking to provide enormous amounts of compute for artificial intelligence. During an earnings call on Tuesday afternoon, company officials spent much of their time discussing ambitious plans to roll out up to 10 GW of compute in 2027—on the ground.

Gone are the days of aspirational talk about sending humans to Mars and settling the red planet. Now it is almost all about artificial intelligence and the data needed to support its expansion. However, the company's long-term ambitions to provide data services from space, initially with the Starlink Internet constellation and eventually through the "Starmind" data center constellation, still rely on an actual rocket.

That would be the Starship vehicle, and during the earnings call, SpaceX founder Elon Musk and the company's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, provided new performance targets for the vehicle.

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Nearly two-thirds of US doctors are turning to an AI-powered search engine to make patient decisions, propelling a little-known tech startup to a $15 billion valuation while prompting a debate over the future of patient care.

Miami-based OpenEvidence, founded by serial entrepreneur Daniel Nadler in 2022, said that many of America’s 1 million physicians processed more than 42 million prompts last month. Doctors are using the company’s chatbot to scour medical journals and clinical guidelines to help diagnose and treat patients.

The ads-powered platform has grown largely by word of mouth, penetrating a sector where few tools have seen similar traction. “We’re the first viral consumer internet app in healthcare,” Nadler told the FT in an interview.

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Carrie White, the telekinetic prom queen from hell, is one of the most beloved horror icons in popular culture. First introduced in Stephen King's 1974 novel, Carrie, the character was immortalized in director Brian De Palma's 1976 adaptation, widely regarded as one of the best horror films of all time. It's certainly one of the best King adaptations. So Mike Flanagan faced a massive challenge when he signed on to create an eight-episode miniseries for Prime Video based on the book, released just in time to mark the 50th anniversary of de Palma's film.

I was among the skeptics who questioned why a Carrie miniseries was even necessary, although as a diehard Flanagan fan ("Flana-fan"?), I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. If anyone has an affinity for smartly adapting horror in general, and King's work in particular, it's Flanagan. And you know what? With one (very big) exception, Flanagan pulls it off, giving us a richly textured version of the story that is as much about kindness and lost innocence as bloody, vengeful rage—although we get plenty of the latter, too.

(Many spoilers below for the novel and the 1976 film, but there are no major reveals for the new series until after the second gallery. We'll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

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It's October in the Midwest, which means it's time for the pinball world to descend on a convention center in Chicagoland for the annual Pinball Expo. Once thought to be an entertainment sector slowly bleeding out, pinball has come back in a big way in recent years. I visited one of Chicago's last old-school manufacturers before heading down the road to see what's new in the silver-ball universe.

Behind the silver ball

Hundreds gathered on a brisk fall Friday morning outside Stern Pinball's headquarters in Elk Grove, Illinois, waiting to enter a Wonka-like wonder factory where piles of raw parts become licensed creations from Jaws to the brand-new Fallout. Stern invited me to tour its offices and factory floor before heading off to the convention in nearby Schaumburg, Illinois.

An early-morning line begins to form outside of Stern HQ as buses of Pinball Expo attendees arrive for tours.

As I stood with my tour group in Stern Pinball's HQ lobby, mouth agape at the dozens of machines lining the walls, we were greeted by the man himself, Gary Stern, who gave us some background on the company's 40-year history. After a stop at Gary's podium, we were ushered to the factory floor entrance, where Stern employee and legendary game designer George Gomez briefed us on the tour rules and answered questions. According to Gomez, "at any given time, Stern controls 90 percent of the current pinball market, and everybody else splits the rest."

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Website admins, brace yourselves. Fixes for what are believed to be uncommonly severe vulnerabilities are scheduled to drop in a little more than 12 hours for PHP, a programming language that powers websites and Web applications everywhere.

PHP maintainers said Monday that they planned to release patches for two vulnerabilities, both with severity ratings of 9.2 out of a possible 10.

Waiting for PHP2Shell

“All PHP users are encouraged to prepare now so they can upgrade as soon as the release is available,” the advisory stated. “We reserve the right to release earlier should details of either vulnerability become public, or should evidence of active exploitation appear in the wild.”

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