Ars Technica

A user on Quizlet, an online learning platform, created a public flashcard set in February that appears to have exposed highly confidential information about security procedures in US Customs and Border Protection facilities around Kingsville, Texas. The Quizlet set, titled “USBP Review,” was available to the public until March 20, when it was made private less than half an hour after WIRED messaged a phone number potentially linked to the Quizlet user. Though an individual with the user’s name

The Orion spacecraft is now much closer to the Moon than Earth on its 10-day journey into deep space and back, and overall everything is going smashingly well. Things are going so well that, during the daily mission briefings at Johnson Space Center in Houston, there's just not that much of substance to talk about. So the discourse keeps coming back to, of all things, the toilet on board Orion. As you may recall, there were some toilet problems in the initial hours of the mission. During the ini

Right-to-repair efforts are gaining headway in the US. A lot of that movement has been led by state legislation in Colorado. Since 2022, Colorado has passed bills giving users the tools, instructions, and legal capabilities to fix or upgrade their own wheelchairs, agricultural farming equipment, and consumer electronics. Similar efforts have rippled out through the country, where repair bills have been introduced in every US state and passed in eight of them. “Colorado has the broadest repair ri

As the Artemis II lunar mission moved into its third day on Friday, and with the spacecraft's big engine firing behind it, the four astronauts on board had a little more downtime. So the four crew members—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—had their first opportunities to speak with their families at length, and also did a couple of media events. They held medical conferences with physicians back in Houston, although these were apparently routine since none of the cre

Banks and other firms that want to work on SpaceX's initial public offering (IPO) are being required to buy subscriptions to the Grok AI service, The New York Times reported today. Elon Musk "is requiring banks, law firms, auditors and other advisers working on the IPO to buy subscriptions to Grok, his artificial intelligence chatbot that is part of SpaceX," the NYT wrote, citing anonymous sources who are familiar with the confidential negotiations. "Some of the banks have agreed to spend tens o

Donald Trump is facing significant hurdles after declaring, in a series of executive orders last year, that rapid construction of AI data centers was among his top priorities to ensure the US wins the AI race against China. Perhaps most likely to frustrate the president, his aggressive tariffs on Chinese imports are reportedly hindering most data center projects. Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that "almost half of the US data centers planned for this year are expected to be delayed or can

For more than a month, security practitioners have been warning about the perils of using OpenClaw, the viral AI agentic tool that has taken the development community by storm. A recently fixed vulnerability provides an object lesson for why. OpenClaw, which was introduced in November and now boasts 347,000 stars on Github, by design takes control of a user’s computer and interacts with other apps and platforms to assist with a host of tasks, including organizing files, doing research, and shopp

A Rome court has ruled that the price hikes Netflix imposed on subscribers in Italy in 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2024 were unlawful. The court ordered Netflix to refund affected customers by up to 500 euros (about $576), depending on their plan. The lawsuit was brought by Italian consumer advocacy group Movimento Consumatori, which alleged that the price hikes violate the Consumer Code, Italian legislation that aims to protect consumer rights. The Consumer Code says it's unlawful for a “professional

With the war in the Persian Gulf now more than a month old, the effect on fuel prices is plain to see: On average, they're up almost a dollar per gallon, or 25 percent, according to AAA. For a nation as addicted to the automotive as we are, that's bad news. Except, of course, for electric vehicles. The last half year has been rough for EV adoption here in the US. At the end of last September, the Trump administration abolished the federal tax credit for both new and used EVs, one of a series of

OpenAI has struck a deal to acquire TBPN, a technology-focused talk show popular in Silicon Valley, making an unexpected move into broadcasting after pledging to abandon “side quests” and focus on its core business. The ChatGPT maker had purchased the 11-person company in a “low hundreds of millions of dollars” deal, according to a person with knowledge of the terms. TBPN, or Technology Business Programming Network, has acquired a devoted following among start-up founders and their investors sin

The Orion spacecraft successfully fired its main engine for 5 minutes and 50 seconds on Thursday, sending four astronauts on a free-return trajectory around the Moon. For NASA and the Artemis II crew members, this marked a point of no return for more than week. Most Americans, indeed about three-quarters of the population around the world, have not witnessed humans leaving low-Earth orbit in their lifetimes. The last time this occurred was 1972, with the final Apollo Moon mission. The “transluna

Perplexity's AI search engine encourages users to go deeper with their prompts by engaging in chat sessions that a lawsuit has alleged are often shared in their entirety with Google and Meta without users' knowledge or consent. "This happened to every user regardless of whether or not they signed up for a Perplexity account," the lawsuit alleged, while stressing that "enormous volumes of sensitive information from both subscribed and non-subscribed users" are shared. Using developer tools, the l

Starlink operator SpaceX claims that Amazon violated orbital debris requirements by launching satellites into initial altitudes that are too high, increasing the risk of collision with other satellites and spacecraft. SpaceX, which recently reported two Starlink satellite failures that created new space debris, yesterday accused Amazon and its launch partner Arianespace of negligence that "needlessly and significantly increases risk to other operational systems and inhabited spacecraft." Amazon

OpenAI might be pulling back on video generation, but Google is forging ahead with a major AI update to its Vids editing product. The company's latest video and audio models are now integrated with the tool, and you can choose from various controllable avatars to appear in generated videos. Your creations are also easier to share on YouTube now. Veo 3.1 is the biggest part of the Vids upgrade. Google first deployed this updated model in Gemini late last year, promising a substantial improvement

The cost of high-performance GPUs, typically $8,000 or more, means they are frequently shared among dozens of users in cloud environments. Two new attacks demonstrate how a malicious user can gain full root control of a host machine by performing novel Rowhammer attacks on high-performance GPU cards made by Nvidia. The attacks exploit memory hardware’s increasing susceptibility to bit flips, in which 0s stored in memory switch to 1s and vice versa. In 2014, researchers first demonstrated that re

Google's Gemini AI models have improved by leaps and bounds over the past year, but you can only use Gemini on Google's terms. The company's Gemma open-weight models have provided more freedom, but Gemma 3, which launched over a year ago, is getting a bit long in the tooth. Starting today, developers can start working with Gemma 4, which comes in four sizes optimized for local usage. Google has also acknowledged developer frustrations with AI licensing, so it's dumping the custom Gemma license.

When it comes to automotive bragging rights, a good Nürburgring Nordschleife lap time is right up there with the best of them. And today, those bragging rights belong to Ford. The automaker revealed that its GT Mk IV, an evolution of the mid-engined supercar it created in 2016, is now the fastest production car to ever lap the 12.9-mile (20.8-km) race track in Germany, with a time of 6 minutes, 15.997 seconds set by Frédéric Vervisch. The century-old racetrack in Germany's Eifel region was built

An Anthropic-backed DMCA effort to remove its recently leaked Claude Code client source code from GitHub this week resulted in the accidental removal of many legitimate forks of its official public code repository. While that overzealous takedown has now been reversed, Anthropic still faces an extreme uphill battle in limiting the spread of its recently leaked code. The DMCA notice that GitHub received late Tuesday focuses on a repository containing the leaked source code originally posted by Gi

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—The first time NASA launched humans toward the Moon, in December 1968, the United States was a deeply fractured nation. The historic flight of three people into the unknown brought a measure of solace to a country riven by assassinations, riots, political discord, and a deeply unpopular foreign war. If history does not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes. Today, four humans are on the way to the Moon, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. They

This morning, Tesla published its production and delivery results for the first three months of 2026. And for the first time in a while, the news has been largely positive. The automaker built a total of 408,386 electric vehicles, a 12.6 percent increase from Q1 2025. Almost all of those EVs were Models 3 and Y—the company built 394,611 of these, a 14.2 percent increase compared to the same quarter last year. The rest were mostly Cybertrucks, as we learned at the end of January that the aging Mo