Pure Tech

Ars Technica

Welcome to Edition 9.03 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX counted down all the way to T-0 on Thursday evening in South Texas before a handful of Raptor engines decided not to light at ignition of the rocket. It is not clear whether the vehicle...

Ars Technica

Climate change is being driven largely by the greenhouse gases we've pumped into the atmosphere, which trap more of the Sun's energy there. That added energy increases the odds of extreme events: longer, more intense heat waves and...

Ars Technica

The rich and famous who filed into the Kennedy Center’s opera house in December were there to enjoy one of the nation’s most exclusive celebrations of the performing arts: the center’s annual honors gala. The black-tie event, hosted by...

Ars Technica

When Lucid introduced the Air electric sedan in late 2021, the first Air Dream Edition I tested packed over 1,100 hp (820 kW) and carried a $180,000-plus window sticker. It's easily the most powerful street car I've tested; the only...

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SpaceX called off a test flight of its powerful Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster as the countdown clock reached zero Thursday at the company's spaceport in South Texas. The launch team at Starbase, Texas, just north of the...

Ars Technica

Two nominees for high-profile health roles in the Trump administration faced scrutiny from the Senate health committee Wednesday—and both crashed and burned in their own special ways. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and...

Ars Technica

The Indian government has fined HP India and its partners a total of 1.4 billion rupees (about $14.4 million) for working with reseller partners in the “cartelization” of computers, ink cartridges, and toner. The Competition Commission of...

Ars Technica

The widespread introduction of AI-powered coding tools has led to some dramatic splits between those integrating those tools into their workflows and anti-AI absolutists who don't want large language model-generated code anywhere near...

Ars Technica

For year after year, more Americans have bought Toyota RAV4s than anything that isn't a pickup truck. The brand's reputation for solid reliability has kept it ahead of SUVs from other automakers, and the nation's embrace of SUVs and...

Ars Technica

One of the Russian government’s most elite hacking groups has adopted an attack, known as Clickfix, to compromise devices belonging to sensitive organizations in Ukraine, the latter country’s CERT center is warning. Clickfix has emerged as...

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Facing mounting pressure to acknowledge that Grok can still be used to generate non-consensual sexualized images of adults and minors, xAI filed a lawsuit Tuesday, suing the first user that Elon Musk’s firm has accused of using its chatbot...

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T-Mobile canceled some longtime subscribers' free-line promotions as part of a forced migration to new rate plans, spurring complaints from customers yesterday. T-Mobile admitted the problem and blamed it on technical errors that it is...

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Europe wasted no time using its landmark Digital Markets Act (DMA) to try and rein in Big Tech. Companies like Apple, Meta, and Google have faced steep fines and orders to modify their business practices since the law came into force in...

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Thousands of unionized Hyundai auto workers began walking off the job early after negotiations with the South Korean automaker broke down over plans to deploy humanoid robots—the most significant pushback from organized labor so far over...

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Kalshi is a high-tech prediction market that allows people to "forecast the future" (their term). It is about contracts and information, the company says, making its offerings more like a soybean futures contract than a round of blackjack...

Ars Technica

Most of the gas in the Universe is a mixture of hydrogen and helium. It's thought that the initial atmospheres of most planets also start out that way. However, over billions of years, as planets evolve, the composition of their...

Ars Technica

One week ago, three widely respected European news outlets published the results of an investigation into what they described as a "joint plan" by China and Russia to "defeat Elon Musk's Starlink." The story was the product of a...

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On Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released preliminary findings verifying Elon Musk’s and Tesla’s claims that a driver involved in a fatal Texas crash that killed a grandmother overrode Full Self Driving in the...

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Energy companies are raising money at IPO at their fastest pace this century, taking advantage of investors’ hunt for new ways to bet on the boom in power-intensive AI data centers. Initial public offerings for energy firms raised $12.6...

Ars Technica

OnePlus arrived on the scene in 2014 with brash marketing and a compelling pitch: What if your phone was cheaper and faster? More than a decade later, the market is much different, and so is OnePlus. Confirming months of rumors and...

Ars Technica

New navigation satellites in low-Earth orbit could provide 100 times stronger signal strength compared to GPS and other global navigation satellite systems operating from higher orbital altitudes—enabling greater location accuracy within...

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A dried-out felt-tip marker and a snapped-off piece of molded black plastic sold for $857,600 at a Sotheby's auction on Wednesday. What otherwise might have been worthless bits of trash commanded the highest bids due to where the two items...

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ROCKVILLE, Maryland—Hundreds of Bethesda Game Studios and Zenimax Online Studios employees and their supporters braved nearly 100°F temperatures to protest sweeping layoffs across Xbox during a lunchtime rally in front of parent company...

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Jurassic Park, while beloved as a film, has been the subject of snarky memes for the infamous line in which one of the characters declares, "This is a Unix system, I know this!" while using a computer with an unusual 3D file manager...

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This week, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) won a key battle in its fight to reverse a visa-restriction policy that the Trump administration had used to attempt to revoke green cards and deport non-US citizens who...

Ars Technica

Sheetz, a US convenience store chain, is moving its 838 locations off VMware. Sheetz has used VMware virtualization across two Dell R440/R450-series servers at each of its locations since 2019. Now it’s migrating 12 to 14 virtual machines...

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Right on the heels of Microsoft releasing a record number of security patches, a researcher has published exploit code that can enable low-privilege Windows accounts to make sensitive changes to administrator accounts. The exploit, which...

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Big changes are coming to Android apps, but they're not the changes Google wanted. The settlement between Google and Epic that aimed to put to rest the companies' long-running antitrust battle is being withdrawn, and that means third-party...

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The Federal Communications Commission will vote to repeal the National Television Ownership Rule that is supposed to prevent a single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. The proposed...

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As rumors continue to swirl about OpenAI's work on a personalized smart speaker and other hardware, the company is today rolling out its first branded device. The $230 Codex Micro is a specialized, RGB-lit mini-keyboard designed to let...

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New Zealand actor Sam Neill, who starred as Dr. Alan Grant in the 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park and its 2022 sequel, Jurassic World Dominion, died on Monday in Sydney, Australia. He was 78. While American audiences likely know Neill best...

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Anil Menon, a NASA flight surgeon, felt crushed nine years ago as his hopes and aspirations collapsed around him. For the fourth time, he had diligently applied to become an astronaut at the US space agency, seeking to fulfill a lifelong...

Ars Technica

Forget the sale of the century. The auction house Sotheby’s has geared up for the sale of the epoch. On July 14 it opened live bidding on assorted fossils, but the pièce de résistance is lot 20, a rare 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex...

Ars Technica

SpaceX has pinned the bulk of its future value on orbital data centers. Not rockets. Not spacecraft. Instead, it envisions launching and maintaining a constellation of 1 million satellites capable of generating 120 GW to power tens of...

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An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence. The discovery was made by researchers at security firm ESET...

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The Trump administration on Monday barred US citizens in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from returning home amid an Ebola outbreak that continues to outpace response efforts. Reuters first reported late Monday that Americans...

Ars Technica

Meta's AI-fueled layoffs of 8,000 employees targeted workers with disabilities and those who took protected medical or family leaves, alleged a lawsuit filed by 26 employees who were selected for termination. Meta used internal AI tools to...

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Believe it or not, there was a time when searching the web for images was not possible. Twenty-five years ago, Google launched image search, and it's celebrating by looking back at its biggest visual milestones and refreshing the...

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Credit: Wanqing Zhang Credit: Wanqing Zhang Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have developed a novel conductive ink that can be painted directly onto the skin in colorful custom designs, turning into a functional...

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For the first time in its history, the US military sent explosive-laden drone boats into combat by attacking an Iranian midget submarine and naval port. The unprecedented use of such kamikaze sea drones by the United States comes nearly a...

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New York became the first state to pause all construction of massive new data centers after Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul announced a one-year moratorium on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The state-wide ban applies to data centers using 50...

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Lettuce and salad greens have become the prime suspects in an explosive outbreak of the diarrheal parasite Cyclospora, which is surging nationwide but erupting to extraordinary heights in Michigan. In recent years, Michigan has typically...

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Baby boomers are the generation cutting back most on alcohol consumption, outstripping Gen Z’s abstinence, as moderation takes hold at every level of society. Seventy-one percent of boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, consumed...

Ars Technica

The next test flight of SpaceX's Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster could take off as soon as Thursday, and much of the hour-long mission will look a lot like the last Starship flight in May. But there are a few key differences...

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The federal government is warning users of home and small office routers to secure their devices as Russia state hackers continue to mass-compromise them for use in obscuring nefarious actions against sensitive organizations in the public...

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A US citizen doing humanitarian work in the Democratic Republic of Congo has tested positive for Ebola, marking the second American infected amid the DRC's explosive Ebola outbreak—and the second to be sent for care in Germany rather than...

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Watering your lawn in the summer can be both pragmatic and fun with so-called "silly sprinklers," designed to create amusing loops and spirals of water jets. And there's some fascinating physics at work to boot. Researchers at New York...

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Apple is gunning for OpenAI, demanding steep penalties after stumbling on a “rare” bug that temporarily allowed a poached employee that joined OpenAI to maintain access to confidential information on Apple servers for weeks after his...

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A group of 12 states led by California sued Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery today in an attempt to block a $111 billion merger that was greenlit by the Trump administration last month. "The unlawful merger of these two...

Ars Technica

When Warner Bros. showed new footage of its forthcoming satirical black comedy, Digger, at Cinemacon in April, industry insiders considered it a highlight of the event. The general public hasn't seen anything other than a title...