Pure Tech

Ars Technica

In April last year, the Environmental Protection Agency released its latest attempt to regulate the carbon emissions of power plants under the Clean Air Act. It's something the EPA has been required to do since a 2007 Supreme Court...

Ars Technica

An upsized version of SpaceX's Starship mega-rocket rolled to the launch pad early Thursday in preparation for liftoff on a test flight next week. The two-mile transfer moved the bullet-shaped spaceship one step closer to launch Monday...

Ars Technica

Networks protected by Ivanti VPNs are under active attack by well-resourced hackers who are exploiting a critical vulnerability that gives them complete control over the network-connected devices. Hardware maker Ivanti disclosed the...

Ars Technica

More than 130,000 residents in Southern California face the catastrophic loss of property, and possibly life, as a series of wildfires have brought devastation to the region this week. The most notable fire developed late Monday or early...

Ars Technica

At the end of 2024, a US court authorized the Department of Justice to sell 69,370 bitcoins from "the largest cryptocurrency seizure in history." At bitcoin's current price, just under $92,000, these bitcoins are worth nearly $6.4 billion,...

Ars Technica

If you asked someone what they wanted from TVs released in 2025, I doubt they'd say "more software and AI." Yet, if you look at what TV companies have planned for this year, which is being primarily promoted at the CES technology trade...

Ars Technica

A federal judge this week rejected Google's motion to throw out a class-action lawsuit alleging that it invaded the privacy of users who opted out of functionality that records a users' web and app activities. A jury trial is scheduled for...

Ars Technica

When X CEO Linda Yaccarino took the stage as a keynote speaker at CES 2025, she revealed that "90 percent of the advertisers" who boycotted X over brand safety concerns since Elon Musk's 2022 Twitter acquisition "are back on X." Yaccarino...

Ars Technica

Most crossword puzzle fans have experienced that moment where, after a period of struggle on a particularly difficult puzzle, everything suddenly starts to come together, and they are able to fill in a bunch of squares correctly. Alexander...

Ars Technica

In the wake of the successful Nintendo Switch and Valve Steam Deck, we have seen a wave of PC-based, Android-based, and even FPGA-based handheld gaming systems that can sometimes be hard to tell apart. The upcoming Atari GameStation...

Ars Technica

The Internet has become the most prevalent communications technology the world has ever seen. Though there are more fixed and mobile telephone connections, even they use Internet technology in their core. For all the many uses the Internet...

Ars Technica

Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers sounds like a very niche local meetup, one with hats and T-shirts that barely fit the name. But it's really a "neutral space" for funding and support, corralling together some big names with a stake in...

Ars Technica

The Raspberry Pi foundation has spent the last year filling out the Pi 5 lineup—in August, we got a cheaper $50 version with 2GB of RAM, and in December, we got the Pi 500, a Pi-inside-a-keyboard intended specifically for general-purpose...

Ars Technica

The list of electric vehicles that qualify for the IRS clean vehicle tax credit has changed with the arrival of the new year. No longer linked to battery capacity, the credit of up to $7,500 is now tied to the sourcing of battery...

Ars Technica

Five years ago, a small company in Houston named Intuitive Machines had just 30 employees, a couple of 3D printers, and a few soldering irons. Oh, and it had some big dreams. The company's founders wanted to open a business on the Moon. On...

Ars Technica

A sprawling 3,500-year-old fortress offers tantalizing clues about a culture that once dotted the southern Caucasus mountains with similar walled communities. Archaeologists recently used a drone to map a sprawling 3,500-year-old fortress...

Ars Technica

It's pretty easy to see the problem here: The Internet is brimming with misinformation, and most large language models are trained on a massive body of text obtained from the Internet. Ideally, having substantially higher volumes of...

Ars Technica

The Italian government is considering the purchase of satellite Internet services from SpaceX's Starlink constellation, and the potential deal has triggered controversy along political, economic, and spaceflight lines in Europe. The story...

Ars Technica

The people overseeing the security of Google’s Chrome browser explicitly forbid third-party extension developers from trying to manipulate how the browser extensions they submit are presented in the Chrome Web Store. The policy...

Ars Technica

Just when you thought you had seen every possible Doom mod, two game developers released a free browser game that reimagines the first level of 1993's Doom as an art gallery, replacing demons with paintings and shotguns with wine glasses....

Ars Technica

There's a good chance you've seen headlines about HMPV recently, with some touting "what you need to know" about the virus, aka human metapneumovirus. The answer is: not much. It's a common, usually mild respiratory virus that circulates...

Ars Technica

AT&T, following last year's embarrassing botched update that kicked every device off its wireless network and blocked over 92 million phone calls, is now promising full-day bill credits to mobile customers for future outages that last...

Ars Technica

This article is a summary of my personal experiences with using generative models while programming over the past year. It has not been a passive process. I have intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming to learn about them....

Ars Technica

For nearly four years, NASA's Perseverance rover has journeyed across an unexplored patch of land on Mars—once home to an ancient river delta—and collected a slew of rock samples sealed inside cigar-sized titanium tubes. These tubes might...

Ars Technica

In just 20 minutes this morning, an automated license-plate-recognition (ALPR) system in Nashville, Tennessee, captured photographs and detailed information from nearly 1,000 vehicles as they passed by. Among them: eight black Jeep...

Ars Technica

Nintendo still isn't ready to officially reveal any details about the Switch 2 (beyond a brief mention of backward compatibility in November). But that hasn't stopped gaming accessory maker Genki from giving us one of the best looks yet at...

Ars Technica

Honda provided flights from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and accommodation so Ars could attend its CES events. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. LAS VEGAS—If you've always dreamed of a world where your vehicle is a "partner" around...

Ars Technica

The European Commission (EC) is planning to "energetically" advance its probe into content moderation on X (formerly Twitter), potentially ordering changes at Elon Musk's social network in the coming months, Bloomberg reported. Since 2023,...

Ars Technica

For several years, an innovative, California-based launch company named Relativity Space has been the darling of investors and media. Relativity promised to disrupt launch by taking a somewhat niche technology in the space industry at the...

Ars Technica

The H5N1 bird flu situation in the US seems more fraught than ever this week as the virus continues to spread swiftly in dairy cattle and birds while sporadically jumping to humans. On Monday, officials in Louisiana announced that the...

Ars Technica

Almost exactly a year ago, we were publicly yearning for the day when more portable gaming PC makers could ditch Windows in favor of SteamOS (without having to resort to touchy unofficial workarounds). Now, that day has finally come, with...

Ars Technica

The US Justice Department today announced it filed an antitrust lawsuit against "six of the nation's largest landlords for participating in algorithmic pricing schemes that harmed renters." One of the landlords, Cortland Management, agreed...

Ars Technica

When suspicion began to mount that the young prosecutor, Yujin Choi, might have faked her sexual misconduct allegations against a Denver District Attorney's Office colleague, investigators asked to examine Choi's laptop and cell phone. But...

Ars Technica

Most scientific literature is published in for-profit journals that rely on subscriptions and paywalls to turn a profit. But that trend has been shifting as various governments and funding agencies are requiring that the science they fund...

Ars Technica

Nvidia has good news and bad news for people building or buying gaming PCs. The good news is that three of its four new RTX 50-series GPUs are the same price as or slightly cheaper than the RTX 40-series GPUs they're replacing. The RTX...

Ars Technica

Who is better at maneuvering a large load through a maze, ants or humans? The piano-mover puzzle involves trying to transport an oddly shaped load across a constricted environment with various obstructions. It's one of several...

Ars Technica

Lenovo announced a laptop today that experiments with a new way to offer laptop users more screen space than the typical clamshell design. The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable has a screen that can roll up vertically to expand from 14...

Ars Technica

Meta announced today that it's ending the third-party fact-checking program it introduced in 2016, and will rely instead on a Community Notes approach similar to what's used on Elon Musk's X platform. The end of third-party fact-checking...

Ars Technica

Here at Ars, we're judicious about which of the many, many Switch 2 rumors we decide to highlight on this page. For every report on hardware power or magnetic Joy-Cons that we share, there are probably five others we see and decide are too...

Ars Technica

The Pixel 4a, a well-regarded release in Google's line of budget-minded phones with nice cameras and decent stock software, was not supposed to get any more updates. This week, it will receive a rather uncommon one—one that intends to...

Ars Technica

The second season of The Last of Us will hit HBO and Max in April. HBO released a new one-minute teaser for the second season of its post-apocalyptic drama The Last of Us during CES last night, along with a release date of April...

Ars Technica

On Monday, Nvidia announced Project DIGITS, a small desktop computer aimed at researchers, data scientists, and students who want to experiment with AI models—such as chatbots like ChatGPT and image generators—at home. The $3,000 device,...

Ars Technica

The Pixel 4a, a well-regarded release in Google's line of budget-minded phones with nice cameras and decent stock software, was not supposed to get any more updates. This week, it will receive a rather uncommon one—one that intends to...

Ars Technica

Tesla is the target of yet another federal safety probe, the fourth currently open by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation. Today's trouble concerns the automaker's "Smart Summon" and...

Ars Technica

The annual Consumer Electronics Show got underway in Las Vegas this week, but Winter Storm Blair unraveled my plan to be on the ground to check things out in person. That means I still haven't had an in-person look at the Sony Honda...

Ars Technica

In 2012, an industry-wide coalition of hardware and software makers adopted Secure Boot to protect Windows devices against the threat of malware that could infect the BIOS and, later, its predecessor the UEFI, the firmware that loaded the...

Ars Technica

Once again, we're back with our annual power ranking of US launch companies. 2024 was the third year Ars compiled a list of the most accomplished rocket companies in the United States with the goal of sparking debate, discussion, and...

Ars Technica

Federal toxicology researchers on Monday finally published a long-controversial analysis that claims to find a link between high levels of fluoride exposure and slightly lower IQs in children living in areas outside the US, mostly in China...

Ars Technica

Apple plans to release a software update that is meant to help users understand better that its notification summaries are AI-generated and may contain errors, according to a recent BBC news story. The update is a response to reports that...

Ars Technica

The Waymo self-driving company says it has fixed a problem that caused a car to repeatedly circle a parking lot for about five minutes while its rider was trying to get to an airport. Last month, Mike Johns posted a video on LinkedIn...