The first portable “Xbox” fails to unify a messy world of competing PC gaming platforms. Here at Ars, we have been writing about rumors of a portable Xbox for literal decades now. With the ROG Xbox Ally, Microsoft has finally made those rumors a reality in the weirdest, most…
Scams like this one net billions from well-educated victims. Federal prosecutors have seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin of an operation that used imprisoned laborers to trick unsuspecting people into making investments in phony funds, often after spending months faking romantic relationships with the victims. Such “pig butchering”…
Like other companies with streaming businesses, DirecTV is leaning into ads more. As if DirecTV doesn’t have enough trouble keeping customers, the satellite TV provider’s streaming devices will show AI-generated screensaver ads next year, according to an announcement today from partnering ads company Glance. People who use either of…
Help Me Schedule creates a meeting widget based on the context of your message. Meetings can be a real drain on productivity, but a new Gmail feature might at least cut down on the time you spend scheduling them. The company has announced “Help Me Schedule” is coming to…
The 1 petaflop DGX Spark system runs AI models with 200 billion parameters locally for $4K. On Tuesday, Nvidia announced it will begin taking orders for the DGX Spark, a $4,000 desktop AI computer that wraps one petaflop of computing performance and 128GB of unified memory into a form…
With EV demand predicted to plummet, GM has rejiggered its production plans. The prospects of continued electric vehicle adoption in the US are in an odd place. As promised, the Trump administration and its congressional Republican allies killed off as many of the clean energy and EV incentives as…
End users can get an extra year of security updates relatively easily. Today is the official end-of-support date for Microsoft’s Windows 10. That doesn’t mean these PCs will suddenly stop working, but if you don’t take action, it does mean your PC has received its last regular security patches…
New paper reveals reducing “bias” means making ChatGPT stop mirroring users’ political language. “ChatGPT shouldn’t have political bias in any direction.” That’s OpenAI’s stated goal in a new research paper released Thursday about measuring and reducing political bias in its AI models. The company says that “people use ChatGPT…
This was the last flight of SpaceX’s second-gen Starship design. Version 3 arrives next year. SpaceX closed a troubled but instructive chapter in its Starship rocket program Monday with a near-perfect test flight that carried the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world from South Texas to the Indian…
Malicious app required to make “Pixnapping” attack work requires no permissions. Android devices are vulnerable to a new attack that can covertly steal two-factor authentication codes, location timelines, and other private data in less than 30 seconds. The new attack, named Pixnapping by the team of academic researchers who devised…
