Pure Tech

Ars Technica

A federal judge today ordered the US government to stop searching devices seized from the house of a Washington Post reporter. It may be only a temporary reprieve for the Post and reporter Hannah Natanson, however. Further proceedings will...

Ars Technica

Websites that authenticate users through links and codes sent in text messages are imperiling the privacy of millions of people, leaving them vulnerable to scams, identity theft, and other crimes, recently published research has found. The...

Ars Technica

In a small clinical trial, customized mRNA vaccines against high-risk skin cancers appeared to reduce the risk of cancer recurrence and death by nearly 50 percent over five years when compared with standard treatment alone. That's...

Ars Technica

The Federal Communications Commission today issued a warning to late-night and daytime talk shows, saying these shows may no longer qualify for an exemption to the FCC's equal-time rule. Because the FCC is chaired by vocal Trump supporter...

Ars Technica

When shadow library Anna's Archive lost its .org domain in early January, the controversial site's operator said the suspension didn't appear to have anything to do with its recent mass scraping of Spotify. But it turns out, probably not...

Ars Technica

The companies that make RAM and flash memory chips are enjoying record profits because of the AI-induced memory crunch—and they’re also indicating that they don’t expect conditions to improve much if at all in 2026. And while RAM kits have...

Ars Technica

Researchers at Princeton University have built a swarm of interconnected mini-robots that "bloom" like flowers in response to changing light levels in an office. According to their new paper published in the journal Science Robotics, such...

Ars Technica

For a lot of the games I've written about in the C:\ArsGames series, I've come to the conclusion that the games hold up pretty well, despite their age—Master of Orion II, Jill of the Jungle, and Wing Commander Privateer, for example. Each...

Ars Technica

The announcement came out of the blue, from Blue, on Wednesday. The space company founded by Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin, said it was developing a new megaconstellation named TeraWave to deliver data speeds of up to 6Tbps anywhere on Earth....

Ars Technica

After a teaser campaign that included a world exclusive with Ars, Volvo has officially unveiled its next electric vehicle, the EX60. We already knew it would have up to 400 miles of range, according to the US EPA test cycle, and be capable...

Ars Technica

The last time we did comparative tests of AI models from OpenAI and Google at Ars was in late 2023, when Google's offering was still called Bard. In the roughly two years since, a lot has happened in the world of artificial intelligence....

Ars Technica

Even as exposure to floods, fire, and extreme heat increase in the face of climate change, a popular tool for evaluating risk has disappeared from the nation’s leading real estate website. Zillow removed the feature displaying climate risk...

Ars Technica

On Saturday, tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plugin for Anthropic's Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called "Humanizer," the simple prompt plugin feeds Claude a list...

Ars Technica

The Helix Nebula is one of the most well-known and commonly photographed planetary nebulae because it resembles the "Eye of Sauron." It is also one of the closest bright nebulae to Earth, located approximately 655 light-years from our...

Ars Technica

Still feeling uneasy about Meta's acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, the Federal Trade Commission will be appealing a November ruling that cleared Meta of allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly in a market dubbed...

Ars Technica

Verizon has started enforcing a 365-day lock period on phones purchased through its TracFone division, one week after the Federal Communications Commission waived a requirement that Verizon unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated...

Ars Technica

YouTubers have been increasingly frustrated with Google's management of the platform, with disinformation welcomed back and an aggressive push for more AI (except where Google doesn't like it). So it's no surprise that creators have been...

Ars Technica

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health alert to clinicians Tuesday, warning that the savage, flesh-eating parasitic fly—the New World Screwworm—is not only approaching the Texas border, but also felling an...

Ars Technica

Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces have made it possible to more accurately extract speech from neural signals in humans, but language is just one of the tools we use to communicate. “When my young nephew asks for ice cream...

Ars Technica

TCL is taking majority ownership of Sony’s Bravia series of TVs, the two companies announced today. The two firms said they have signed a memorandum of understanding and aim to sign binding agreements by the end of March. Pending “relevant...

Ars Technica

Netflix agreed to pay all cash for Warner Bros. Discovery, amending its $72 billion deal in an attempt to fight off Paramount's hostile takeover bid. Netflix originally agreed to buy the company with a mix of cash and stock. To sweeten the...

Ars Technica

As Ars reported last week, NASA's plan to replace the International Space Station with commercial space stations is running into a time crunch. The sprawling International Space Station is due to be decommissioned less than five years from...

Ars Technica

It's been nearly three years now since Destiny maker (and Sony subsidiary) Bungie formally announced a revival of the storied Marathon FPS franchise. And it has been about seven months since the game's original announced release date of...

Ars Technica

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad. The rocket reached a top speed...

Ars Technica

Mac power users waiting on new high-end MacBook Pro models may have been disappointed last fall, when Apple released an M5 upgrade for the low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro without touching the M4 Pro or Max versions of the laptop. But the wait...

Ars Technica

Elon Musk is going for some substantial damages in his lawsuit accusing OpenAI of abandoning its nonprofit mission and "making a fool out of him" as an early investor. On Friday, Musk filed a notice on remedies sought in the lawsuit,...

Ars Technica

An unconfirmed report early this month suggested Asus was pulling back on its smartphone plans, but the company declined to comment at the time. Asus chairman Jonney Shih has now confirmed the wind-down of its smartphone business during an...

Ars Technica

I have been writing about the Giant Magellan Telescope for a long time. Nearly two decades ago, for example, I wrote that time was "running out" in the race to build the next great optical telescope on the ground. At the time the proposed...

Ars Technica

Currently, Microsoft's long-running Cloud Gaming service is limited to players that have a Microsoft's Game Pass subscription. Now, new reporting suggests Microsoft is planning to offer non-subscribers access to game streams paid for by...

Ars Technica

Far Side fans might recall a classic 1982 cartoon called "Cow Tools," featuring a cow standing next to a jumble of strange objects—the joke being that cows don't use tools. That's why a pet Swiss brown cow in Austria named Veronika has...

Ars Technica

If you've ever used a 3D printer, you may recall the wondrous feeling when you first printed something you could have never sculpted or built yourself. Download a model file, load some plastic filament, push a button, and almost like...

Ars Technica

The global cost of greenhouse gas emissions is nearly double what scientists previously thought, according to a study published Thursday by researchers at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It is...

Ars Technica

Tencia Benavidez, a Supernatural user who lives in New Mexico, started her VR workouts during the Covid pandemic. She has been a regular user in the five years since, calling the ability to work out in VR ideal, given that she lives in a...

Ars Technica

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The rocket NASA is preparing to send four astronauts on a trip around the Moon will emerge from its assembly building on Florida's Space Coast early Saturday for a slow crawl to its seaside launch pad. Riding...

Ars Technica

A generally healthy 63-year-old man in the New England area went to the hospital with a fever, cough, and vision problems in his right eye. His doctors eventually determined that a dreaded hypervirulent bacteria—which is rising...

Ars Technica

Rackspace’s new pricing for its email hosting services is “devastating,” according to a partner that has been using Rackspace as its email provider since 1999. In recent weeks, Rackspace updated its email hosting pricing. Its standard plan...

Ars Technica

Archaeologists recently found the wreck of an enormous medieval cargo ship lying on the seafloor off the Danish coast, and it reveals new details of medieval trade and life at sea. Archaeologists discovered the shipwreck while surveying...

Ars Technica

The operator of WorldCat won a default judgment against Anna's Archive, with a federal judge ruling yesterday that the shadow library must delete all copies of its WorldCat data and stop scraping, using, storing, or distributing the data....

Ars Technica

Security firm Mandiant has released a database that allows any administrative password protected by Microsoft’s NTLM.v1 hash algorithm to be hacked in an attempt to nudge users who continue using the deprecated function despite known...

Ars Technica

A generally healthy 63-year-old man in the New England area went to the hospital with a fever, cough, and vision problems in his right eye. What his doctors eventually figured out was that a dreaded hypervirulent bacteria—which is rising...

Ars Technica

On Friday, OpenAI announced it will begin testing advertisements inside the ChatGPT app for some US users in a bid to expand its customer base and diversify revenue. The move represents a reversal for CEO Sam Altman, who in 2024 described...

Ars Technica

Big Tech's AI-fueled memory shortage is set to be the PC industry's defining story for 2026 and beyond. Standalone, direct-to-consumer RAM kits were some of the first products to feel the bite, with prices spiking by 300 or 400 percent by...

Ars Technica

Verizon has received all approvals it needs for a $9.6 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications, an Internet service provider with about 3.3 million broadband customers in 25 states. Verizon said it expects to complete the merger on...

Ars Technica

On Thursday, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) reported record fourth-quarter earnings and said it expects AI chip demand to continue for years. During an earnings call, CEO C.C. Wei told investors that while he cannot...

Ars Technica

Late last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened yet another investigation into Tesla and its partially automated driver assist systems. This time it was about FSD (again), which has been the subject of more than...

Ars Technica

It has been nearly 80 years since Ferrari unleashed its first V12-powered sports car upon the world with the 125 S. In 1947, its debut year, the 125 S secured Ferrari’s first-ever race victory for the automaker, along with five other wins...

Ars Technica

Ashley St Clair, the influencer and mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, has sued the billionaire’s AI company, accusing its Grok chatbot of creating fake sexual imagery of her without her consent. In the lawsuit, filed in New York state...

Ars Technica

Welcome to Edition 8.25 of the Rocket Report! All eyes are on Florida this weekend as NASA rolls out the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft to its launch site in Florida for the Artemis II mission. NASA has not announced a...

Ars Technica

Pharmaceutical executives are finally saying how they really feel about the extreme anti-vaccine agenda Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been ruthlessly implementing—and it's not pretty. According to reporting from Bloomberg at...

Ars Technica

The New York Times has published new details about a purported cyberattack that unnamed US officials claim plunged parts of Venezuela into darkness in the lead-up to the capture of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro. Key among the new...