The past year has seen plenty of hacks and outages. Here are the ones topping the list. In a roundup of the top stories of 2024, Ars included a supply-chain attack that came dangerously close to inflicting a catastrophe for thousands—possibly millions—of organizations, which included a large assortment of…
In a year where lofty promises collided with inconvenient research, would-be oracles became software tools. Following two years of immense hype in 2023 and 2024, this year felt more like a settling-in period for the LLM-based token prediction industry. After more than two years of public fretting over AI…
A serious data breach has occurred, but Ars users have nothing to worry about. Earlier this month, a hacker named Lovely claimed to have breached a Condé Nast user database and released a list of more than 2.3 million user records from our sister publication WIRED. The released materials…
GPS jamming has gotten cheap and easy, but there are potential solutions. In September 2025, a Widerøe Airlines flight was trying to land in Vardø, Norway, which sits in the country’s far eastern arm, some 40 miles from the Russian coast. The cloud deck was low, and so was…
From compression tricks to multi-agent teamwork, here’s what makes them tick. AI coding agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google can now work on software projects for hours at a time, writing complete apps, running tests, and fixing bugs with human supervision. But these tools are not magic and can…
New GPT Image 1.5 allows more detailed conversational image editing, for better or worse. For most of photography’s roughly 200-year history, altering a photo convincingly required either a darkroom, some Photoshop expertise, or, at minimum, a steady hand with scissors and glue. On Tuesday, OpenAI released a tool that…
The extensions, available for Chromium browsers, harvest full AI conversations over months. Browser extensions with more than 8 million installs are harvesting complete and extended conversations from users’ AI conversations and selling them for marketing purposes, according to data collected from the Google and Microsoft pages hosting them. Security…
Dictionary codifies the term that took hold in 2024 for low-quality AI-generated content. Like most tools, generative AI models can be misused. And when the misuse gets bad enough that a major dictionary notices, you know it has become a cultural phenomenon. On Sunday, Merriam-Webster announced that “slop” is…
The weak RC4 for administrative authentication has been a hacker holy grail for decades. Microsoft is killing off an obsolete and vulnerable encryption cipher that Windows has supported by default for 26 years following more than a decade of devastating hacks that exploited it and recently faced blistering criticism…
Shenzhen-based Picea Robotics, its lender and primary supplier, will acquire all of iRobot’s shares. Roomba maker iRobot has filed for bankruptcy and will be taken over by its Chinese supplier after the company that popularized the robot vacuum cleaner fell under the weight of competition from cheaper rivals. The…
