“I’m about to just toss the whole thing…” Amazon Echo Show owners are reporting an uptick in advertisements on their smart displays. The company’s Echo Show smart displays have previously shown ads through the company’s Shopping Lists feature, as well as advertising for Alexa skills. Additionally, Echo Shows may play…
Ending support for SoundTouch may help Bose avoid a Sonos situation. Bose will brick key features of its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speakers and soundbars soon. On Thursday, Bose informed customers that as of February 18, 2026, it will stop supporting the devices, and the devices’ cloud-based features, including the companion…
Among other things, the scammers bypass multi-factor authentication. Microsoft is warning of an active scam that diverts employees’ paycheck payments to attacker-controlled accounts after first taking over their profiles on Workday or other cloud-based HR services. Payroll Pirate, as Microsoft says the campaign has been dubbed, gains access to…
The termites know how much of their agricultural area has been taken over by weeds. Odontotermes obesus is one of the termite species that grows fungi, called Termitomyces, in their mounds. Workers collect dead leaves, wood, and grass to stack them in underground fungus gardens called combs. There, the…
The CMA will focus on regulating search and search advertising, but not Gemini (for now). Google is facing multiple antitrust actions in the US, and European regulators have been similarly tightening the screws. You can now add the UK to the list of Google’s governmental worries. The country’s antitrust…
Project Amethyst focuses on efficient machine learning, new compression techniques. It feels like it was just yesterday that Sony hardware architect Mark Cerny was first teasing Sony’s “PS4 successor” and its “enhanced ray-tracing capabilities” powered by new AMD chips. Now that we’re nearly five full years into the PS5…
255 miles of range, new infotainment, but where did all the torque go? The Chevrolet Bolt was one of the earliest electric vehicles to offer well over 200 miles (321 km) of range at a competitive price. For Ars, it was love at first drive, and that remained true…
The long, winding road for Franklin Chang-Diaz’s plasma rocket engine takes another turn. Welcome to Edition 8.14 of the Rocket Report! We’re now more than a week into a federal government shutdown, but there’s been little effect on the space industry. Military space operations are continuing unabated, and NASA…
AI is “comically good” at detecting small earthquakes—here’s why that matters. On January 1, 2008, at 1:59 am in Calipatria, California, an earthquake happened. You haven’t heard of this earthquake; even if you had been living in Calipatria, you wouldn’t have felt anything. It was magnitude -0.53, about the…
Anthropic study suggests “poison” training attacks don’t scale with model size. Scraping the open web for AI training data can have its drawbacks. On Thursday, researchers from Anthropic, the UK AI Security Institute, and the Alan Turing Institute released a preprint research paper suggesting that large language models like…
