The Trump administration is recruiting private security firms to conduct federal government-authorized operations, including cyberattacks, against overseas-based criminal organizations that commit hacks on US persons, organizations, or government entities.

In a National Security Presidential Memorandum issued Thursday, US President Donald Trump directed the National Coordination Center (NCC), which operates under the Homeland Security Task Force, to develop a program for conducting specific cyber operations that combat foreign transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security will provide oversight. The lynchpin of that program is bringing in private sector companies to participate.

Devil will be in the still-undefined details

A fact sheet that accompanied Thursday’s memo listed ransomware, sextortion schemes, phishing campaigns, financial fraud, and impersonation scams as activities eligible for private-sector security firms to target. The memo said such firms could “conduct Cyber Surveillance Operations and Cyber Effects Operations” against “cyber-enabled” TCOs. Such groups are defined as “any foreign group that conducts cyber-enabled crime against the United States Government, a United States person, or United States interests, and that is not an institutional part of a foreign government or wholly operated under a foreign government’s direction.”

Read full article

Comments

As Virgin Galactic nears christening the first of its next-generation spaceship designed to launch customers on suborbital flights, it still is missing a key component—a name.

The self-described "commercial spaceline," which was founded by British tycoon Richard Branson, has turned to the public to vote on what to call the new vehicle. The spaceplane will be a member of Virgin Galactic's Delta-class fleet, succeeding SpaceShipTwo, which carried Branson and 31 others on 12 short hops above the US-defined boundary between Earth and space.

"You can vote for one of four finalist names for a spaceship that will join Virgin Galactic's growing fleet and the next chapter in our journey to expand access to space," the company announced on its website on August 11. "Name a Virgin Galactic spaceship, shape a piece of spaceflight history."

Read full article

Comments

Ukrainian drone teams demolished a brigade of US Army tanks and armored vehicles during a live war game held this year—but the US soldiers were lucky enough to get “respawn” attempts while learning from the experience.

The semiannual military exercise, called Combined Resolve, gave the US military a firsthand taste of how modern drone warfare has evolved on the battlefields of Ukraine. The Ukrainian drone operators participating in the exercise were easily able to spot and destroy US armored vehicles by mimicking the actions of dropping bombs from above or moving close enough to simulate a kamikaze strike, according to US officials and a participant who spoke with The Wall Street Journal.

US armored vehicles were being destroyed so quickly that they were “respawned” and sent back into the simulated fray, a US official told The Wall Street Journal. The US troops who participated in the exercise—held in Germany from April 9 to May 10—were on rotational deployment from Fort Hood, Texas.

Read full article

Comments

On Thursday, Flock announced plans to require all agencies with access to license plate reader data to use a safety tool that automatically detects abnormal activity and locks out cops who abuse their access to stalk people they know in their personal lives.

Flock’s audit assistance tool suspends access when user activity “meets defined criteria for abnormal behavior,” Flock said. The suspension can only be lifted by administrator review, with the goal being “to intervene before misuse becomes recurring or widespread.”

The tech has been available as an optional free feature since April, but only a third of agencies had opted in, Flock said. However, after a single Georgia sheriff’s office used the tool and subsequently arrested three cops who were separately using Flock cameras to stalk acquaintances, Flock CEO Garrett Langley told The Verge that dozens of incidents like these helped his company realize they made a mistake and had to act to correct it.

Read full article

Comments

Smart pet-feeder company Petlibro suffered an outage on Tuesday, giving users a harsh reminder of the risks of relying on smart devices.

Petlibro makes pet feeders that connect to Wi-Fi and, for setup with Petlibro’s mobile companion app, Bluetooth. Users can set the feeders to automatically dispense food at scheduled times, which is handy for pet care when the owner is out of the home.

In a statement to The Verge, Petlibro CEO York Wu said this week’s outage was “related to how the Petlibro app communicates with devices through its online servers.”

Read full article

Comments

Today, Instagram unveiled a refresh of its wordmark, accompanied by the usual bland corporate platitudes these kinds of announcements are always packaged with.

Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri called it “leaner and more modern, with references to the original and the simplicity and craft that’s always made it Instagram.”

Sure, Adam. Simplicity and craft are definitely what everyone thinks of when Instagram comes to mind.

Read full article

Comments

Google is announcing a new Gemini model today, but it's not the long-awaited 3.5 Pro. Gemini 3.7 Flash is now rolling out to replace 3.6 Flash, which itself was released only three weeks ago. This new "workhorse" model is supposedly the product of core optimizations and developer feedback, offering improved coding and agentic performance. And Google is hoping to counter the lower cost of some competing models with a lower "introductory price" for 3.7 Flash.

According to Senior Director Tulsee Doshi, Gemini 3.7 Flash is noticeably better at coding than the previous Flash release. She cites a jump in the FrontierCode 1.1 Main test from 34.4 to 43.6 percent and DeepSWE v1.1 going from 49 to 65.3 percent. As for the vibes, Gemini 3.7 Flash's WebDev Arena score has risen to 1,588 from 1,538.

People turning to Gemini and hoping it will "know" things may also see modest improvements in Gemini 3.7 Flash. The GDP.pdf benchmark, which measures how well a model can process complex documents, has gone up to 34 percent versus 22 percent with 3.6 Flash. AutomationBench tests how well models can execute common business workflows, and Gemini 3.7 Flash rose to 30.4 percent from 3.6's 17 percent score.

Read full article

Comments

It's time for Rivian's changeover from model year 2026 to 2027, and the electric vehicle startup has decided to take a page from its recently released R2 SUV and apply it to the company's larger, more expensive R1 line. The changes aren't massive—the R1 got a refresh in 2024 that saw the R1S SUV and R1T pickup each get some comprehensive re-engineering with new powertrain options, a new electronic architecture, and new batteries.

But among them is the No. 1 most requested feature by Rivian R1S customers, the automaker told Ars: captain's chairs for the second row. The six-seat interior is an alternative to a middle bench, and the Rivian captain's chair looks thoughtfully designed, with a hidden cupholder that I'm not sure I've seen on any other SUV before. The chairs are also spaced so it's easy to get to the third row, or use that volume between them for skis, snowboards, or surfboards.

Rivian has also changed the trims, bringing them into line with the offer structure on the recently released R2. Instead of choosing from Dual, Tri, or R1s, Rivian is now calling them Premium and Performance; Quad stays Quad. But the base price for each stays the same: The R1T still starts at $79,990 and the R1S at $83,990.

Read full article

Comments

Anthropic investors expect the AI startup to float at a valuation of $2 trillion or more in October, a dizzying figure that would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab’s debut the largest-ever initial public offering.

Half a dozen of the company’s backers told the FT that Anthropic’s rapidly rising revenue would enable it to more than double its current valuation in a planned autumn float.

A listing at that level could unlock billions of dollars in gains for the five-year-old company’s early investors but would also test public markets that are growing more nervous about the AI boom.

Read full article

Comments

Solar storms, like the one in August 1972 that hit during the gap between the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions, throw bursts of protons intense enough to raise an astronaut's cancer risk or even cause radiation sickness. Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field absorb this radiation, but crews heading to the Moon or Mars won't have that protection, and no spacecraft built so far has enough shielding to stop it.

A team led by Jordan Houri and Oren Milstein of StemRad, an Israeli-American startup developing personal protective equipment against radiation, proposed that we could solve this by shielding the astronauts instead of shielding the spacecraft.

To test this idea, StemRad’s team flew a wearable radiation-shielding vest called AstroRad to the Moon and back aboard NASA's uncrewed Artemis I mission, then used the flight data to calculate how it would perform during an actual solar storm. It turns out the vest would perform roughly as well as the Orion’s heavily shielded onboard shelter the crew was supposed to hide in to wait out a storm.

Read full article

Comments

Anthropic has revealed that it will soon watermark content that is processed (not just generated!) by any of its models. In a support article, Anthropic explained that it was rolling out machine-readable watermarks to comply with the European Union’s AI Act, which requires all AI system providers to watermark AI-generated or manipulated audio, image, text, and video outputs. The law applies to any AI model released after August 2 and provides a grace period until December 2026 for providers to update previously released models.

Anthropic confirmed that moving forward, all new models offered globally—not just in the EU—will mark AI-generated content “from day one.” Text outputs will “carry embedded watermarks,” invisible to the user, and other “generated files will include digitally signed provenance metadata where supported,” Anthropic said.

Notably, Anthropic is deploying a "nuke it from orbit" approach, applying the watermarks to all processed content where supported, even though the EU does not require it for cases where an AI system performs "an assistive function for standard editing" (the guidance's own example is grammar correction), or where it doesn't "substantially alter" the user's text or its meaning.

Read full article

Comments

A healthy toddler in Washington state fell ill abruptly. It began with vomiting, lethargy, and weakness on his right side. Then it progressed to a headache, fever, and trouble swallowing. At one point, he briefly became unresponsive, and he had episodes where he stopped breathing. Doctors admitted him to the hospital, but his condition only deteriorated.

The boy was infected with an ultra-rare amoeba known for ravaging the brain. The opportunistic pathogen was first identified in 1986 from the brain of a San Diego Zoo monkey, which died from the infection. Since then, only about 200 human cases have been recorded worldwide. About 90 percent of them have been fatal.

The initial symptoms can be vague and, given its rarity, the infection is notorious for being undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. Still, the scant medical literature does provide some telltale signs, clues of what it can look like on tests and scans. But for the toddler, the infection looked different, sending doctors down the wrong path.

Read full article

Comments

AI companies' penchant for scraping through large swaths of the public web in search of valuable training data has already led to lawsuits and technical fixes aimed at stopping the practice. Now, a pair of designers is hoping to stymie these scrapers with a new font designed to offer people a perfectly readable webpage while serving scrapers a subtly edited, nonsensical version in the underlying HTML.

ShieldFont, as designers Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio write in a recent white paper, was made to offer web publishers "a practical opt-out from unauthorized AI training and [to] disrupt what is collected when that choice is ignored."

When is a horse a potato?

The font is based around ligatures, a long-standing feature of many fonts that is usually used to replace certain letter pairs with a more readable version when they're smushed up next to each other. With ShieldFont, though, those ligatures are instead used to replace entire words with others in an attempt to destroy the text's value to scrapers. This substitution only happens when the font engine draws the page onscreen, meaning scrapers that simply download plaintext source code get an altered version that end users never see.

Read full article

Comments

Terabytes worth of credentials, many belonging to the world’s biggest and most sensitive organizations, have been exposed in a supply-chain attack on LiteLLM, an open source tool that streamlines AI-driven software development. Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Samsung, and Salesforce are only a handful of the entities whose access secrets were exposed.

The revelation was posted on Tuesday and Wednesday by security firms CloudSEK and Hudson Rock. CloudSEK said it found cloud keys, repository tokens, SSH keys, Kubernetes secrets, package publishing credentials, environment variables, and AI provider keys that could allow attackers to gain access to more than 2,500 organizations.

40 minutes is all it takes

The credentials were extracted during a 40-minute window in March while the victims used compromised versions of LiteLLM downloaded from the package’s official location in the Python Package Index repository. Hudson Rock said it made the discovery after analyzing a 195TB file that it obtained. Neither firm identified the source of the information.

Read full article

Comments

Physicists with the Beijing Spectrometer III (BES III) experiment have uncovered convincing new evidence of the existence of so-called glueballs, an elusive composite particle made entirely of gluons predicted by quantum theory. The results appeared in a preprint posted to arXiv last month and were also presented last week at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP).

All the stuff we see around us is made up of quarks held together by gluons (carriers of the nuclear strong force) to form protons and neutrons, which comprise the core of every single atom. The Higgs boson, discovered in 2012 after decades of searching, was widely touted as the final missing piece of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. But there are still plenty of unanswered questions, including whether or not glueballs really exist. They should, if the Standard Model is correct; they're a direct prediction of quantum chromodynamics, i.e., the theory of the strong nuclear force. There should even be several kinds of glueballs.

As Matthew Francis wrote for Ars in 2015:

Read full article

Comments

Twitch now lets users opt out of Amazon's use of content from their channels to train Amazon's "generative AI content models." The change, announced today, comes more than two years after a company executive confirmed that Amazon was using Twitch content for AI training.

In an updated support page, Twitch confirms that users must opt out if they don’t want their “streams, VODs, clips, stream chats, and pictures and text on your channel [to] be used in future training of a model developed by Amazon whose purpose is to generate or synthesize text, audio, images, or video.”

To opt out, users must go to the proper settings at www.twitch.tv/settings/security.

Read full article

Comments

President Trump was sued by nonprofit news groups today over Truth Social's "Truth API" that sells real-time access to posts from Trump and other top users of the social network. Trump is profiting from selling preferential access to government information, the lawsuit said.

Trump's social media company this month started charging customers up to $100,000 per month for the earliest access to posts that can have immediate impacts on financial markets. The first customers are mostly high-frequency trading firms that could benefit financially from getting official government news milliseconds before others.

"This scheme is profoundly corrupt. The President stands to gain financially by giving 'market-moving' government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company," the lawsuit said.

Read full article

Comments

Hundreds of US government drones have switched from border surveillance to a different surveillance mission this summer—looking for signs of screwworm infestations in wild animals and livestock herds.

The flesh-eating New World Screwworm is the parasitic larva that emerges from eggs laid by flies in the open wounds or body openings of warm-blooded animals and humans, with untreated cases potentially leading to severe injury or death. Since the first screwworm cases were detected in South Texas in June, the US Department of Agriculture and US Customs and Border Protection have been conducting “one of the most extensive animal-health surveillance operations in the country,” the USDA said on August 10 in social media posts on platforms like X and Facebook.

The effort involves at least 200 drones owned by the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. But the actual number in use "varies depending on availability and need," a USDA spokesperson told Ars.

Read full article

Comments

It's been far too long since I've been able to report a new land speed record. For a while, it looked like Bloodhound might have been able to make good on its 1,000 mph (1,609 km/h) attempt, but then the money ran out. As a result, Thrust SSC's two-way average of 763.6 mph (1,229 km/h), set in 1997, remains the fastest anyone has ever driven a wheeled vehicle over a timed mile. But yesterday, on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, a new record was set by the JCB Hydromax for hydrogen-powered cars.

JCB is a UK-based manufacturer of heavy industrial and agricultural equipment—think diggers, loaders, backhoes, tractors, and so on. And as JCB is based in the UK, it doesn't have the luxury of being able to ignore carbon emissions targets; it has to have alternatives to diesel engines. For some products, that means switching to batteries, but the company has also been working with hydrogen. At first, that meant fuel cells, but after developing prototypes, JCB concluded the tech was too expensive and too fragile for life on the farm or the construction site. Instead, in 2020, the company started developing its own hydrogen combustion engine.

The idea of burning hydrogen in an internal combustion engine has been tried before with little success. For example, in 2006, BMW modified a naturally aspirated V12 engine in a 7 Series to run on hydrogen, which it did, but with 60 percent of the power and five times the fuel consumption compared to gasoline. More recently, Toyota's president Akio Toyoda has been among the drivers of an experimental hydrogen-burning Toyota Corolla in some Japanese endurance races. In this case, Toyota started with the GR Corolla's turbocharged three-cylinder engine; the forced induction from the turbocharger made up somewhat for the reduced energy density of hydrogen.

Read full article

Comments

The Trump administration is trying to stop New York from enforcing its gambling laws against Kalshi, and yesterday said it ordered the prediction market to continue operating in the state.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced that it exercised its emergency authority in response to a "market emergency." The CFTC said it acted "to ensure market stability" and "ordered the exchange to continue to operate in accordance with the Commodity Exchange Act’s Core Principles." The Trump administration took the action after a request from Kalshi.

The market emergency alleged by the CFTC is that New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Kalshi on July 31. James' lawsuit seeks a court order to permanently enjoin Kalshi "from operating an unlawful gambling business" in the state. The lawsuit also demands that Kalshi "make full restitution to customers who have engaged in betting" and pay financial penalties.

Read full article

Comments

If you can truly appreciate an old book—and maybe even marvel at how its fragile, yellowing pages contain some of the earliest ways that people tried to make sense of the world around them—then headlines about tech companies that are destroying books to train AI likely torture a tender part of your soul.

It’s indeed depressing to imagine piles of book spines waiting to be fed into wood chippers while torn-out pages are cropped, scanned, and trashed. But that’s the cheapest and easiest way to scan books as fast as possible, and AI companies are in a race to advance their models by training on the kind of engaging, high-quality long-form texts that can only be found in books. So book lovers fear it’s likely that the practice is happening on a grander scale than is currently being reported and that some physical copies of books will be lost forever.

What makes this destruction extra painful, though, is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Read full article

Comments

Google has revealed its Pixel phone hardware for 2026, and you won't be surprised. The Pixel 11 series looks a lot like last year's lineup, featuring an evolution of the design Google adopted with the Pixel 9. There are some minor tweaks, a few new hardware goodies, and yes, even more Gemini-powered AI. The new phones are joined by an updated Pixel Watch 5 with much the same story, as well as Google's first in-house tracker device, the Pixel Tag. And you can place orders for all of Google's new hardware today.

The Pixel 11 series is clearly the star of the show. You might even call it the highlight—or HiLight. Just as the leaks predicted, Google's most notable hardware innovation for the 2026 Pixel phones is the return of the notification LED (sort of).

The new HiLight feature is available on the Pro phones, so the base model Pixel will remain unilluminated. HiLight consists of a ring of RGB LEDs inside the flash assembly on the back of the phone. It lights up when you're talking to Gemini, so you don't have to look at the screen of your phone to know you've been heard or that the AI is working. Thus, it makes the most sense when the phone is lying face down.

Read full article

Comments

As AI models gain advanced capabilities to find vulnerabilities in software, develop ways to exploit them, and even carry out autonomous hacking sprees, researchers offered a sobering new example on Tuesday, disclosing vulnerabilities in the video conferencing platform Zoom that could have been exploited to take over targets’ devices. Anyone on a call that involved screen sharing, whether participants or the host, would have been vulnerable to a silent attack that could be carried out with no indication and no interaction from the victim.

Researchers from the digital defense firm A Security say the bug was discovered in early June using publicly available AI models, and that it took fewer than 20 prompts to uncover the vulnerabilities and create a working attack. Zoom issued a security advisory on Tuesday, including details about fixes the company has already begun rolling out to address the flaws, which affected devices running all operating systems that Zoom supports—Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.

“What is interesting for us and what we believe is dangerous is the democratization of these capabilities—the barrier to entry is dropping rapidly,” A Security cofounder Omer Gull told WIRED ahead of the disclosure. “Before it would have taken a team of five people maybe six months with a lot of refining and iteration to find this. Now people can reach the same results with under 20 prompts. And Zoom is an important type of target because people assume trust when using it. They don’t see it as a threat.”

Read full article

Comments

Formula E is set to make a big change in terms of visibility when season 12 gets underway this December. It has signed a new multiyear deal to broadcast the sport on Disney+ and ESPN+ in 144 countries, with live coverage of each entire ePrix, from practice through qualifying to the race. The new media deal means that here in the US, Formula E will be shown on the streaming networks from next season; since 2023, the sport has been shown live on Roku.

"This is a landmark moment for Formula E and reflects the incredible momentum behind our Championship," said Formula E's CEO Jeff Dodds. "Disney’s unrivaled global reach and storytelling will introduce Formula E to millions of new fans while bringing them closer than ever to the drama, innovation, and excitement of electric racing. As we enter the GEN4 era, this provides an exceptional platform to accelerate our global growth and continue building one of the world’s most exciting sports properties."

As we've previously covered here at Ars, next season was already shaping up to be a massive one for the electric racing series. It debuts the new GEN4 car in December as well. The new car has double the power of the current racer, with a nominal 603 hp (450 kW) from a twin-motor, all-wheel drive powertrain that goes up to 804 hp (600 kW) in Attack Mode. Which means that for much of a lap, a Formula E GEN4 car will generate as much power as a 2027-spec Formula 1 car; the F1 car is also stuck with just 602 hp from its V6 engine when the battery has no charge.

Read full article

Comments

The Cambrian explosion may have been fueled by poop.

The first animals on Earth emerged about 600 million years ago, and 60 million years later, those simple early animals evolved in wildly different directions, branching out into a diverse menagerie of complicated new forms and conquering new ecological niches. Known as the Cambrian Explosion, this flurry of rapid evolution produced most of the animal phyla and ecosystems we see around us today.

And it may have taken off because some of those early animals evolved a bizarre new ability: pooping. According to a recent study, the first poo pellets helped spread nutrients to deeper parts of the ocean, fueling the evolution of bigger animals in more diverse ecosystems.

Read full article

Comments

On Monday, passengers aboard Delta flight 591 going from Las Vegas to Atlanta allegedly spoofed the onboard Wi-Fi, raising the attention of federal law enforcement.

The incident came one day after the DEF CON security conference concluded in Las Vegas and was first described on social media accounts that follow publicly available air-to-ground messages, known as ACARS.

According to the “ACARS Drama” account, a message sent by pilots from the plane stated: “NO INFO AS OF NOW WE HAVE A BUNCH OF PAX THAT WERE AT A CYBER CONFERENCE IN LAS THEY WERE ABLE TO JAM OUR WIFI AND BROADCAST THEIR SIGNAL.”

Read full article

Comments

Backlash to Trump's vaccine order on Monday has been swift and sharp, with various public health and medical organizations and independent experts calling it "dangerous," "unscientific," "false and misleading," "so wrong," and saying it is "putting children's health at risk."

The responses are unsurprising; the medical and health communities have consistently fought against the anti-vaccine, anti-science agendas pushed by Trump and his health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has no background in science, medicine, or public health. The American Academy of Pediatrics—which called the order "not only disheartening but dangerous"—is leading a lawsuit against previous changes to federal childhood vaccine recommendations under Trump and Kennedy. In March, the organization, along with other medical groups, won a temporary injunction reversing most of the changes.

However, less expected among the scorn for Trump's order is the immediate pushback from the pharmaceutical industry.

Read full article

Comments

Romanian army divers used explosives to destroy two Russian-made drones found floating in the Black Sea near Romania’s largest natural gas project, according to the NATO member country’s defense minister.

Defense Minister Radu Miruță posted a Facebook video supposedly showing one of the drones being blown up in the water by explosive ordnance disposal divers of the Romanian army on August 11, as reported by Reuters and other news outlets. The drones were first spotted in the water by a ship working in the vicinity of the Neptun Deep—an offshore gas project under development in the Black Sea that will make Romania the largest gas producer in the European Union.

A Romanian Coast Guard ship that responded with army soldiers aboard found two drifting Gerbera-type drones of Russian design along with other debris. Miruță also disclosed that Romania had reached out to “Ukrainian partners who confirmed that the systems do not belong to them.”

Read full article

Comments

Google’s Chrome browser has added a new feature that could go a long way in preventing a form of account takeover that’s grown increasingly common as users adopt two-factor authentication, passkeys, and similar protections.

The new Chrome protection is known as device-bound session credentials (DBSCs). The measure stores a unique encryption key in a silicon-resident fortress that’s built into the device running the browser. On Windows machines, this fortress is called a TPM, short for Trusted Platform Module. On macOS and iOS, it’s known as a secure enclave. Other platforms have differing names. Recently released versions of Chrome for Windows and macOS generate a key that’s stored in this fortress.

An antidote to session cookie theft

DBSCs protect against the theft of session cookies, the unique strings of characters that websites store on browsers. Session cookies greatly speed up browsing on sensitive sites that require user authentication. Instead of requiring the exchange of credentials each time a user opens a new site page, the server sets a session cookie that effectively proves the user has already successfully logged in.

Read full article

Comments

Meta and TikTok tried to defeat thousands of social media addiction lawsuits in one fell swoop, but an appeals court rejected the attempt in a ruling issued yesterday.

First up among the lawsuits is a case brought against Meta by the California attorney general and other state AGs. Meta said in a July court filing that the state AGs' demands for damages would amount to more than $1.4 trillion. A trial in district court is scheduled to start on August 19, with jury selection beginning August 12.

In a 3-0 ruling yesterday, a judges' panel from the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected the Meta and TikTok claims that they have legal immunity to the lawsuits under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Read full article

Comments

Google has been all-in with Gemini for the last several years, and despite some animosity online, the bet is paying off. CEO Sundar Pichai announced today that Gemini has reached 1 billion monthly active users (MAUs), an important milestone for any Google product. While 13 other Google products have managed that feat, Gemini has done it faster than any other.

Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organization in Gmail, document summary in Drive, and much more. Gemini is also core to Google's flagship search experience, with AI Mode and AI Overviews becoming increasingly hard to avoid. The 1 billion-user metric has nothing to do with any of that, though.

These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that's not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort.

Read full article

Comments

A strange thing is happening in the used EV market. Supply is up thanks to an ever-increasing stream of ex-lease cars reaching the market, and yet prices have been going up as well. As a result of America's latest war in the Middle East, used EVs have appreciated by just over 5 percent since February. Despite the stronger pricing, used EV sales have been strong this year—up 25 percent year over year by May, although a weaker June has brought overall sales up just over 20 percent year over year, according to the analysts at Cox Automotive.

Used EVs also hang around on dealer lots a lot less than new ones—the same analysts at Cox found just 38 days' supply of used EVs in June, but 81 days for new EVs. And much of the demand is at the cheaper end of the spectrum, say the analysts at Recurrent. In previous installments of our used EV buyers' guide, we've already looked at the most affordable used EVs, ending last time at $25,000—EVs that may now qualify for a $1,750 rebate if you're in California. Today we're looking at used EVs that cost between $25,000 and $30,000, and according to Autotrader's search, there are more than 9,000 used EVs for sale in that price range.

Broadly, you can split the results into three buckets: Cars where you'll find plenty to choose from; ones where there might be a couple of hundred for sale nationwide; and then the oddities where there might just be a handful to pick from.

Read full article

Comments

Although shredded iceberg lettuce at Taco Bell restaurants has been a prime suspect in an explosive outbreak of the diarrheal parasite Cyclospora, a new report from the Food and Drug Administration finally reveals where all the contaminated lettuce was sold—and only a sliver of it went to Taco Bell locations.

The feces-tainted lettuce was sourced from Mexico and sold by Taylor Farms, a mammoth produce provider based in California. Taylor Farms has drawn scrutiny for its ties to the Trump administration and reluctance to provide information amid the outbreak, which has now sickened over 23,000 people across 47 states, killing two and sending over 500 others to the hospital. Taylor Farms reportedly attempted to delay issuing a recall amid the illnesses and, since then, has refused to clearly report how much tainted lettuce it recalled and where all of it had been shipped.

The FDA's Enforcement Report finally provides some answers: Taylor Farms recalled 236,192 cases of lettuce due to potential Cyclospora contamination. Of those, only 5,900—just shy of 2.5 percent—were sold to Yum, the parent company of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC. The other 97.5 percent of the lettuce that potentially sickened Americans was distributed elsewhere.

Read full article

Comments

Global warming is leading to more extremely hot weather. There is perhaps no more obvious consequence of climate change. But changing how we analyze this problem can still help scientists think about it in a different way that may yield surprises.

Generally, studies on heat extremes work with some combination of daily minimum, maximum, and mean temperatures. Sometimes they focus on multi-day heatwaves using those metrics, since the discomfort and health impacts increase for longer events. There are different thresholds you can use to define extreme heat in these analyses, either based on past statistics or on the human body’s physiological limits.

A new study led by Weilin Liao and Xuanzong Zhang at Sun Yat-sen University tried breaking down heat extremes to the hourly level instead, which reveals some interesting nuances.

Read full article

Comments

In 2018, 20,000 Google employees worldwide made headlines when they staged a walkout to protest how the company had handled sexual misconduct allegations against key corporate executives, among other grievances. One of the organizers was Claire Stapleton, a communications specialist whose distinctive voice and ability to channel the corporate ethos had once earned her the internal moniker "Bard of Google."

Six months later, a disillusioned Stapleton resigned, claiming she had been demoted during the most recent restructuring as retaliation for helping to spearhead the walkout. The story of how she went from enthusiastic cheerleader to proactive dissident, and the many lessons she learned along the way, are featured in her new book, Don't Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech—A Biting Memoir of Twelve Years Inside Google.

Stapleton didn't set out to be a rabble-rouser. When she joined Google out of college in 2007, it was like "getting the golden ticket in Willy Wonka," she told Ars. Awareness of her good fortune offset any initial uneasiness or skepticism, although Stapleton was sufficiently independent-minded not to move into what was then Google's new corporate housing development in Mountain View, California. Stapleton was very good at her job, and she quickly moved up the ranks, playing a key role in shaping the company's public image.

Read full article

Comments

The Federal Communications Commission has been shorthanded throughout President Trump's second term, but it's about to get a new commissioner. Unsurprisingly, Trump is breaking a historical norm with a nomination that would give Republicans a 3-1 advantage on the FCC.

Historically, the president and Senate worked together to ensure that the president's party maintained only a one-vote majority. Normally, the president's party has three FCC members while the minority party has two.

Instead of the typical 3-2 split, the FCC has operated with a 2-1 Republican majority during Trump's second term. On Friday, Trump nominated Republican Danielle Thumann Severs to take one of the empty spots. Thumann Severs, a lawyer, has been working as FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's senior counsel. She must be confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate before being sworn in as a commissioner.

Read full article

Comments

Imagine that you share a ride to work with the same colleague most mornings. As it passes by a license plate reader, the camera records the car, which can be linked through vehicle records to its registered owner. Beside it, another sensor detects signals broadcast by devices traveling nearby, such as your phone and your colleague’s smartwatch.

After enough trips, software may treat some of those devices as a recurring electronic signature associated with the vehicle. Weeks later, one of the same device signals appears alongside a different car connected to an investigation. The signal itself may not contain its owner’s name, but its previous association with a known vehicle gives investigators another clue they can use to work out who was carrying the device.

SignalTrace, a system marketed by the security company Leonardo, is designed to work alongside automatic license plate readers. The company says it can recognize groups of consumer devices that regularly move together, then associate them with license plate records and time-stamped locations. The pattern can then be searched even when a police investigator does not know the plate number.

Read full article

Comments

Last week, a researcher outlined what he said was a “novel attack surface” in passkeys, the new authentication paradigm that offers a more secure alternative to password-based methods. In fact, the attacks demonstrated in the post are neither novel nor unique to passkeys. This distinction is important because the research has generated confusion among end users and security professionals as they assess whether this new mechanism is truly safe to use.

The attack is called Pass-ta-key—a blending of the word passkey with the phrase “pass the key” and a nod to a plate of pasta. Arie Olshtein, a researcher at security firm Palo Alto Networks, described in a post last week how Pass-ta-key could obtain all passkeys stored in the Google Password Manager app (GPM) for Windows when it’s running on a machine infected with malware.

This came as a surprise to many people because they believed passkeys are stored exclusively in the trusted platform manager (TPM), the locked-down enclave in a hardened silicon chip that’s reserved for storing cryptographic keys and other highly sensitive information on Windows machines. If passkeys are stored in the TPM, then how was Pass-ta-key able to extract the entire set of passkeys stored by the app, they wanted to know.

Read full article

Comments

By now, any serious gamer is familiar with a favorite title becoming unplayable after a centralized online server gets shut down, or being unable to purchase and download a digitally delisted, critically acclaimed title from yesteryear. Can anything be done about this video game preservation problem?

To help answer that question, we'll be hosting a live conversation with Ross Scott, the founder of the Stop Killing Games campaign, on August 11 at 2:30 pm ET as part of the Ars Live series. As Ars' Senior Gaming Editor, I've documented countless examples of once vibrant games being left for dead by their creators.

Scott founded the Stop Killing Games movement in 2024 after Ubisoft decided to shut down the servers for The Crew. Since then, he's helped gather millions of gamers' signatures on government petitions demanding legislative action to provide some form of perpetual access for games people purchase—either via continuing centralized server support or an option for players to maintain their own servers. The movement has already led to an official parliamentary debate and response from the European Commission and proposed legislation that is working its way through the California legislature.

Read full article

Comments

Meta has announced its intention to focus on open-weight large language models. Additionally, the company announced the release of an open model called Muse Glimmer and a promise to open the weights for Muse Spark 1.2, its more powerful model, in the next few weeks.

Alongside these announcements, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a more than 6,000-word essay outlining the company's philosophy about AI systems and governance moving forward. The essay aims to differentiate Meta from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, which develop proprietary models and have lobbied the US government for help competing against large-scale distillation—which involves using an existing model to train a new one—or open-weight models by Chinese labs.

Read full article

Comments

President Trump signed an executive order Monday that makes sweeping, unilateral changes to federal vaccine recommendations. The order aims to reduce the number of lifesaving vaccines all children are recommended to get—from 18 to 11—while also splitting them up and spacing them out over more time and more medical visits.

The vaccine changes are not backed by evidence or spurred by new findings. Rather, they are based on false anti-vaccine fearmongering about harms, including the debunked claim that they cause autism, and misinformation that multiple vaccinations can "overwhelm" children's immune systems. This false claim has also been repeatedly debunked and explained.

During a signing event at the White House on Monday afternoon, Trump falsely claimed that pediatricians "have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda," that is "poured into a little child's body, and bad things happen in too many cases. This is an explosion; this is an epidemic," Trump said.

Read full article

Comments

Following its announcement in March, game developer Cold Iron Studios has shut down the servers for the cloud version of Aliens: Fireteam Elite on the Nintendo Switch. The game originally cost $30 (or $60 for an “Ultimate” version with additional content).

Cold Iron Studios hasn't offered customers refunds.

TheGamer reported that affected players are entitled to a discount for the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game, which is a 2021 co-op, third-person shooter based on the Alien film franchise. However, that would mean paying money for a game that you have already paid money for once.

Read full article

Comments

Amazon’s artificial intelligence ambitions will soon be partly fueled by a natural gas-burning power plant in Texas that “could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States,” The New York Times reported.

These gas-burning plants are increasingly lumped into data center projects. They produce harmful pollutants, which can accelerate climate change impacts and harm public health—contributing to conditions like asthma, heart disease, lung cancer, and strokes. Some communities are demanding more stringent environmental reviews, but the Trump administration favors fast-tracking that can include skipping the permitting process entirely.

Since Elon Musk’s xAI controversially began relying on gas turbines last spring to power its biggest AI data center, Colossus, there has been public backlash to off-the-grid data centers like the one Amazon is building.

Read full article

Comments

Social media scuttlebutt about Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million superyacht failing to assist stranded boaters off the coast of Alaska was partly corroborated by ship-tracking data—and eventually prompted responses from both the US Coast Guard and a spokesperson for Zuckerberg.

The incident was made public when Michael Love, a passenger aboard the replica steamship Wilderness Legacy during an Alaska cruise, posted about it on the social media platform Bluesky. The ship detoured to rescue a stranded 21-foot skiff with two women, a child and a dog, after the US Coast Guard had supposedly first radioed Zuckerberg’s superyacht, Launchpad, for help without success.

“There was near unanimous booing when the captain announced this,” Love wrote in describing the Alaska cruise passengers’ response to the lack of help from Zuckerberg’s ship.

Read full article

Comments

Talk of the affordability crisis may be penetrating corporate boardrooms. Hot on the heels of the name and starting price for Ford's new affordable electric truck, news leaked today that the sub-$30,000 Fathom isn't the only cheap Ford in the works. According to a report at Automotive News, the automaker is working on a new entry-level crossover that will start at around $25,000, although don't expect it in showrooms until 2029.

The leak is courtesy of an unnamed Ford dealer, which, together with its peers, was shown an early prototype described as resembling a first-gen Ford Escape. The crossover is said to have both hybrid and unelectrified powertrain options, and Automotive News notes that several sources have told it that Ford will assemble a hybrid crossover at its Hermosillo plant in Mexico in 2029, alongside the Bronco Sport and Maverick.

Additionally, Ford apparently showed off a four-door Mustang, which Automotive News compares to the Porsche Panamera in terms of size and styling, albeit with a sub-$40,000 price tag (making it almost a third the price of the cheapest Panamera). And a third nugget of news—the universal electric vehicle platform that will build the Fathom will result in four other electric Ford models as well.

Read full article

Comments

Amid a massive Cyclospora outbreak linked to its iceberg lettuce, Taylor Farms is now recalling products containing jalapeños, which were linked last week to a large, multi-state Salmonella outbreak.

On Sunday, August 9, Taylor Farms recalled jalapeño-containing products, including diced jalapeños, dips, salsas, pico de gallo, guacamole, and pre-made salads, burritos, and sandwiches. The foods, which include both branded and unbranded products, were sold across 26 states at major retailers, including Hannaford, Kroger, Target, Trader Joe's, Walmart, and Whole Foods.

The recalled products contain recalled jalapeños from Coast Citrus Distributors, which was linked last week to a Salmonella outbreak that has infected at least 345 people across 27 states, sending at least 36 people to the hospital. No deaths have been reported.

Read full article

Comments

SteamOS is continuing its slow march to fuller support on a wider variety of non-Valve hardware. This weekend's release of the SteamOS 3.8.25 Beta includes "initial gamepad support" for a few recent gaming handhelds and improved support for a few others.

Those newly supported handhelds include MSI's Claw 8 EX AI+, the extremely expensive, extremely powerful handheld built around Intel's Arc G3 processor that launched this summer. While SteamOS has long included beta support for "other AMD powered handhelds," Valve has only recently been working on offering compatibility with Intel-based handhelds like the MSI Claw line. This weekend's update suggests the company hasn't abandoned those efforts and that Intel chips aren't being left out of the SteamOS conversation.

SteamOS 3.8.25 also newly supports the controllers built into Ayaneo's Android-focused Pocket S2 and the more recently released Windows-based Konkr Fit. Valve also says the new OS offers "improved support" for older MSI Claw devices and the OneXPlayer line of portable gaming PCs.

Read full article

Comments

A new day has dawned in the Play Store, and it's one that Google tried very hard to avoid. The first third-party app store has arrived in Google Play as a result of the long-running antitrust lawsuit with Epic. Those in the US can now head into Google Play and download Aptoide, a game-focused store that has been available as a sideloaded client since the early days of Android.

Forcing Google to distribute third-party app stores in Google Play was one of several remedies imposed by Judge James Donato after Epic emerged victorious in 2023. The remedies also included lowering developer fees, mirroring Google Play apps in other app stores, and allowing developers to use alternative payment systems. But it was the app store stipulation that seemed to irk Google the most.

Google almost avoided this outcome when it agreed to a settlement with Epic, which was announced early this year. Under the terms, Google would certify third-party app stores to allow users to install and use them with less friction, but it would not host them in Google Play. However, Google and Epic withdrew the settlement when it appeared the court would not approve it. This Registered App Store program is still slated to launch internationally, but in the US, Google is only doing what it must to comply with the judge's orders.

Read full article

Comments

One of China's most used rockets, the Long March 7A, exploded a little more than a minute after lifting off on Monday evening, local time.

The medium-lift rocket's payload was classified, but it was believed to be a military communications satellite. The rocket's liftoff from Wenchang Space Launch Site appeared to be nominal, but publicly captured videos (such as this one) showed that the rocket's first stage exploded about 1 minute and 20 seconds into flight.

The Long March 7A rocket was developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and is operated by the state's space agency. As of Monday night in China, state officials have not commented on the explosion.

Read full article

Comments

Any dog owner would tell you that their canine companions are attuned to their humans' emotional state and respond accordingly. Scientists have performed fMRI scans on dogs and identified a specific brain region that processes happy human facial expresses, like a smile, according to a new paper published in the journal iScience. They also found that dogs can tell the difference between negative facial expressions, specifically anger, sadness, and fear.

“Humans are really good at picking up small details on the face, and so are dogs,” said co-author Raúl Hernández-Pérez of the University of Vienna. “This makes dogs very interesting. By studying their brains, we can understand what adaptations have developed to support their remarkable social and emotional understanding of humans.”

Prior behavioral studies have shown that dogs are sensitive to emotion in human faces. Dogs will, for example, choose a box their human has identified with a happy expression over one the human treats with fear or disgust. Past fMRI studies found that an area in the canine left temporal cortex showed a stronger response to human faces compared to dog faces, as well as a greater response in the caudate, hippocampus, and amygdala to human faces showing emotion versus neutral faces.

Read full article

Comments