Connexion
Using Google's products and services has always been fundamentally precarious—doing so gives the world's largest advertising company a lot of juicy personal data. Google has long said it won't use the sensitive data from products like Gmail, Drive, and Photos for ad personalization, but a change to the company's privacy policy appears to dismantle that firewall.
On October 16, Google issued an update to its privacy policy, spotted by Android Authority. The ad personalization section used to include a clear limit on data from certain apps. "We don’t show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos," the document said. Now, Google has updated it with the following language.
Updated language on when your sensitive data might inform ads.
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Google
This equivocation opens the door to using data from apps like Gmail and Photos in ads when it's shared with other Google services, and it just so happens Google has a mechanism for doing that, with Personal Intelligence. The company released Personal Intelligence in early 2026, allowing users to hand data from multiple apps to Google AI products. The idea is that the added context from your existing data will lead to better AI answers, but it's also proving to be a privacy minefield.
As reported by Music Business Worldwide, Spotify appears to be stepping up enforcement of existing policies regarding Family and Duo subscription plans by requiring users to scan a QR code in person on the plan manager's device in order to maintain access to it. Those who fail to scan the address verification QR code within seven days will see their account demoted to the free tier and be barred from joining any other Duo or Family plan for 12 months.
Spotify's QR code plan enforcement.
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Spotify
Spotify's support documentation verifies the policy after users on Reddit began posting reports of receiving the QR prompt. The enforcement stems from Spotify's requirement that family plan members reside at the same address—a seemingly reasonable policy in concept. But what if you have a child away in college, a spouse who works on the road, or any number of other circumstances that might see families separated by physical distance? The policy could extend beyond friend groups looking to save a buck, affecting actual families who thought they were using the program as intended.
Goldman Sachs analysts, in their October 15 Music in the Air: 10 Years On report, made available by HITS Daily Double, estimate that "a meaningful share of family plan users are not actual household members, but rather friends sharing a plan to reduce costs." The report goes on to add, "We see additional monetization upside from tightening household verification on multi-user plans. Most family plans require members to reside at the same address, but enforcement has been minimal in practice."
US chip champion Intel was so confused by the US government ban on foreign-made robots that it requested and received a waiver “out of an abundance of caution.” The tech company wanted to make sure that it could continue using certain robotic vehicles in its US chip fabs.
The uncertainty surrounding the Federal Communications Commission ban on certain foreign-made robots was revealed in the agency’s decision to grant Intel’s waiver request. On October 22, the FCC published its order allowing Intel to continue using the foreign-made robots in US semiconductor manufacturing facilities for a period of one year.
The robots in question are automated guided vehicles operating on “tracks or predefined paths” while often requiring operator oversight, according to Intel’s website. They help to move materials and items around within warehouses and factory floors.
Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service has played a pivotal role in supporting Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion for years. But with Starlink having become increasingly unreliable due to Musk’s political inclinations and the latest surprise disruptions to service in Ukraine, the Ukrainians and Europe as a whole are now facing urgent questions about how to move forward without it.
As the world’s largest communications satellite network, Starlink can typically support high-speed Internet and data streams for any user or vehicle equipped with a relatively compact Starlink terminal. This has enabled Ukraine to maintain vital communications for both civilian purposes and military operations—and has also expanded the Ukrainian military’s capability to remotely control or provide guidance to drones used in both air defense against Russian attacks and for striking back at Russian targets.
“Starlink currently offers some of the best satellite coverage available, with virtually no competitors when you consider the combination of cost, availability, and ease of use,” according to the head of hardware R&D at the Ukrainian defense company BlueBird Tech, who provided comments to Ars anonymously for security reasons. “In practical terms, the main limitation is the need to position the antenna so it can receive signals from the satellites.”
Android-powered foldable phones have been available for years, but most people never paid attention to them. As predicted, that could be changing now that Apple has entered the folding phone market with the iPhone Duo. Analysts have speculated that Samsung's Z8 foldables were seeing a boost from the iPhone announcement, and now Samsung has seemingly confirmed that.
In a new blog post, Samsung UK crows that the company's 2026 foldable lineup is moving much faster than last year's models. Compared to the Galaxy Z Fold 7, combined European sales for the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra are up 45 percent. Samsung isn't talking about Z Flip 8 sales, but it previously noted that its larger foldables made up about 80 percent of foldable purchases. We can assume any increase there is not impressive enough to mention.
The reason for flat Z Flip sales may simply be that Apple didn't release a flip phone. Unsurprisingly, Samsung doesn't mention Apple or the iPhone Duo in its press release. However, it does say that search volume for the Z8 series across Europe spiked 460 percent the week of September 6 to 12. And guess what was announced on September 9? Yep, the iPhone Duo. Z Fold 8 search volume across the entire month of September (when the phones launched) was up 260 percent.
Since launching in 2015, JustWatch has helped people navigate the growing number of streaming services by providing a guide on where to find movies they want to stream. Now JustWatch has its own streaming service and wants people to subscribe.
Launched today, JustWatch TV offers some movies available for free with ads that aren’t free on any other streaming service, including Green Room (2015), Locke (2013), and Sing Sing (2023). Other free movies include Fiddlin’ (2018), Friday the 13th (1980), and Hotel Mumbai (2018). I could play movies available for free on JustWatch TV without creating an account.
JustWatch TV also has movies you can rent.
OpenBSD 8.0 is here, marking the project's 61st release and continuing its schedule of semiannual releases dating back to 1996. What started more than 30 years ago as a fork of NetBSD has grown into one of the most security-conscious operating systems in active development. In a post to the project's announcements mailing list, OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt highlights a host of improvements included with the latest version and writes that the project remains "proud of OpenBSD's record of more than thirty years with only two remote holes in the default install."
The latest OpenBSD version brings new features and improvements across the board. These changes, particularly the new Intel Arc support and expanded virtual address space, should improve compatibility with modern graphics cards and allow the system to map more than 4GB of VRAM. Some of the major updates noted in the release newsletter are as follows:
The new OpenBSD also retires support for Loongson architecture after the port stopped working with the Clang 22 compiler. If you're interested in reading over all the changes that come with the new OpenBSD 8.0, you can take a look at the release announcement.
Ukraine’s unprecedented drone rescue of a wounded soldier from the battlefield has shown once again how battlefield necessity can spur innovation. The operation was revealed just days after separate Ukrainian drones designed for casualty evacuation were deployed for frontline testing—taking a step beyond the US military’s decades of experimentation with similar concepts.
The drone evacuation of the injured soldier took place at an undisclosed time and place on the frontline where the presence of Russian drones and landmines made it impractical to send in a wheeled ground robot, according to The Kyiv Independent. On October 19, Ukraine’s Army shared a video of the drone evacuation, showing the wounded soldier securing himself in a harness suspended beneath a heavy hexacopter drone with six rotors before being flown to safety.
“This is a historic event, the next stage of evacuating the wounded, which we will all come to,” said Napalm, a programmer of the 92nd separate assault brigade's unmanned ground systems company, who went by his callsign per Ukrainian military practice, in a statement. “Now the serious systematic work begins, so that such missions are carried out constantly.”
Open source Windows alternative ReactOS has reached a major milestone: The operating system can now be installed directly onto an NTFS drive partition. As reported by Phoronix, the move to NTFS clears a long-standing hurdle for the project and brings it one step closer to finally reaching beta.
Prior to this latest announcement, ReactOS required users to keep a FAT32 partition for installations. A proprietary Microsoft-developed filesystem, NTFS can trace its roots back through the Windows NT family lineage starting in 1993 with Windows NT 3.1. The variant introduced with Windows XP in 2001 remains the standard used by most Windows systems today. With ReactOS's stated goal of reaching binary compatibility with Windows Server 2003, being confined to FAT32 partitions was a practical barrier to clear on the way to reproducing the Windows environment.
However, users looking to hop off the Windows train shouldn't be grabbing their bags just yet. ReactOS wrote that the new driver still "lacks caching (which causes inferior performance), journaling and security support." So while the new driver is here, even the most intrepid of OS tinkerers should tread carefully. The ReactOS team warned in its announcement on X that there are still "potentially undiscovered bugs."
Virtual reality is in a bit of a weird place right now. After a lot of unfulfilled promise in the 1990s, it came back strong with the 2016 release of the Oculus Rift. For a while, it looked like VR, AR, XR, the metaverse, or whatever you wanted to call it, was going to be huge. Mark Zuckerberg was certainly convinced, and even Apple got in on the hype with its Vision Pro.
But by then momentum for alternate realities of every acronym was already in steady decline, and it only dwindled from there. The rate of development of new headsets has slowed, with many companies (including Apple) scaling back or shelving their efforts. While new releases like the Steam Frame and Pimax Dream Air are still happening, many of the most interesting developments in the space these days are on the enthusiast front.
That's right, DIY VR is a thing, and with a couple hundred dollars in components, plus many hours of your time, you too can enter the immersive world of virtual reality while also experiencing the highs and lows of soldering, firmware flashing, and 3D printing. I rode that rollercoaster myself and learned why this is still a decidedly niche movement.
Nearly 100 years after the dirigible Graf Zeppelin made the first nonstop airship journey across the Pacific Ocean, another airship has successfully completed a round-trip flight from New Mexico to Japan and back. But the significance of this modern feat was less about the journey's length and more about its purpose: demonstrating how a lighter-than-air platform can act as a cell phone tower in the sky.
The trans-Pacific flight that took place over a month between August and September 2026 was the most notable milestone yet for Sceye, a US aerospace company based near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sceye has developed an uncrewed platform filled with helium for buoyancy and equipped with an electric-powered propeller for active propulsion, allowing it to resist most strong winds and keep hovering over the same location for long periods. The platform also uses top-mounted solar panels and onboard batteries to stay powered for stratospheric operations around the clock.
“We can stay over an area of operation, and we do that in the stratosphere right around 60,000 feet, so we're twice as high as air traffic and we're above the jet stream, and yet 30 times closer than low-Earth orbit satellites,” Mikkel Frandsen, founder and CEO of Sceye, told Ars. “We can fly through day and night until the sun comes up the next morning and recharges the batteries, at which point we're still at the same altitude and still over the same area of operation.”
Some Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses were recording people’s conversations without the wearer knowing. The recordings occurred without users saying the prompt phrase (“Hey, Meta”), in a bug that Meta says has been fixed.
This week, some users reported online that their Ray-Ban Metas were recording without their consent. A person going by Kindly-Audience-137 on Reddit, for example, said this happened to them across three Meta Ray-Bans and that they had the “Respond without Hey Meta” setting turned off. The person said the Meta AI app “saves audio recordings and text transcripts of these conversations in my conversation history.”
“I believe this deserves a serious technical investigation. Customers should not have to wonder whether their private conversations are being captured when they have not intentionally activated their glasses’ AI assistant,” the Reddit user said.
Over the past week, the laptop Microsoft sent me has been summarizing books and movies, generating images from my imagination, and running a 70-billion-parameter AI model that would be a stretch to fit on most laptops. It also played AAA games at a speed and fidelity I would have thought impossible on an ARM system just a year ago. Microsoft wants to sell you one computer for all of your needs, and for once that doesn't feel like total marketing fluff. Mostly.
Microsoft is throwing both arms around the new Nvidia RTX Spark platform with the Surface Laptop Ultra—and setting its sights on the would-be MacBook Pro buyer, or as the company called it, "a high performance audience." The bet is that rather than a gaming desktop for fun and a development laptop for work, buyers will pay more for one machine that does both.
The Surface Laptop Ultra arrives at a strange time in personal computing. Recent industry numbers showed a 20 percent drop in total PC shipments year over year in the third quarter of 2026. That's not just consumer purchasing either—that's across the board. Between the RAMpocalypse that has exploded consumer prices and an industry fixated on enterprise money, there hasn't been much new hardware to excite PC enthusiasts.
Android was designed for phones, but that hasn't stopped Google from trying to adapt the OS and its apps to larger machines over the years. Googlebooks are just the latest attempt after tablets, Chromebooks, and foldables induced little change in how people interact with Android software. These new Android-powered laptops are designed to pick up where the web-focused ChromeOS left off, offering premium hardware and native support for Android apps.
Google sees Googlebooks as an alternative to Windows and macOS, but these platforms are entrenched with decades of software and UI conventions that keep users locked in. Googlebooks have to offer something very special to steal users away from either of the dominant operating systems.
For devoted Android phone users, there are some cool things in Googlebook OS, but the Android roots of these machines are impossible to miss. Sometimes it feels like using a Chromebook, and sometimes it feels like using a giant phone. It almost never feels like using a premium laptop, and that's the problem.
Marking the 30th anniversary of KDE on October 14, the project released Plasma 6.8, debuted a movie, and retired Plasma's native X11 session support. The announcement from KDE dubs the new Plasma 6.8 as the "30th Anniversary Edition" and describes the update as preparing Plasma for the future. Legacy X11 applications will still function via the XWayland compatibility layer, and KDE applications will also continue supporting X11 under other desktop environments.
After 42 years in service, the X11 protocol is losing another major desktop environment. Plasma will fully adopt the Wayland system and put support for starting new X11 sessions in Plasma to bed. Users opting to stay on Plasma 6.7 will keep their existing sessions for now. The move was expected, with GNOME officially dropping X11 sessions by default in 2025.
The new Plasma 6.8 brings many improvements, including increased support for adding window decorations (like shadows and rounded corners) to third-party apps, and a more streamlined Union theming system. Other notable additions include Nvidia triple buffering being enabled by default, Kup backup integration (KDE's backup utility—now integrated into Plasma), and kscreenctl, a command-line utility that allows power users to adjust display configurations.
Plex, which made a name for itself by letting users share movies they own, is now helping sell movie theater tickets. The company is looking to monetize its content-discovery capabilities and expand its business beyond its media server software.
Plex partnered with Fandango, which has sold movie tickets since 2000, to drive ticket sales from people searching for movies to stream. Per the announcement:
Starting today, Plex users in the US will see a Fandango ticketing option on title pages for movies currently playing in theaters, allowing them to click through to Fandango to find showtimes and purchase tickets. The integration also enables direct attribution through Kochava, giving studios and advertisers greater visibility into how campaigns and audience engagement translate into ticket sales.
Fandango says it sells tickets for 31,000 movie theater screens in the US. The Plex deal allows it to leverage data from Plex’s streaming service (Plex claims users of the service “make more than 100 million streaming decisions each month”), including "ratings and cross-platform viewing" to gain “insight into audience intent," the announcement said.
Researchers say that mercenary hackers laced ads with zero-click exploits that installed sophisticated malware on the devices of targeted individuals when they did nothing other than load a website or open an installed app.
The finding, published Thursday by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, said the incident is likely to be the first confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered through targeted ads. The attacks, which worked on iOS and Android devices, are particularly pernicious because they work without requiring any interaction from the target and are invisible unless users run special forensic hardware or software. Citizen Lab said it confirmed that AdFection, as it named the campaign, infected 45 devices at international media organization Al Jazeera in 2024 and 2025.
“This investigation should… serve as a clear warning signal to news organizations around the world that they may be being actively targeted via this new threat,” Citizen Lab researchers wrote. “This targeting may happen both in newsrooms and to individual journalists, editors, and other staff members.” Their report went on to say: “The distribution of spyware via targeted ads represents a security risk not only for potential victims but also for states and civil society at large.”
Russian drones are suspected of sinking a cargo ship and leaving chemical tankers ablaze near the Black Sea coasts of Bulgaria and Romania, respectively. The latest attacks mean that at least seven ships have been attacked in the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries—and even within Romania's territorial waters if Russian involvement is confirmed in the case of the chemical tankers.
Such attacks have spurred requests for NATO to redeploy counter-drone systems to provide more protection. In a social media post on October 15, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stated that NATO had increased "counter-drone capabilities" along the alliance's eastern flank after meeting with the leaders of Bulgaria and Romania.
The latest attacks this week occurred within 24 hours between October 14 and October 15, when the two chemical tankers were set afire after Russian drones were detected in Romanian airspace, according to Deutsche Welle. Both ships were sitting at anchor near the mouth of the Sulina canal that connects the Black Sea to the Danube River, which has become a crucial shipping export route for Ukraine, Reuters reported.
Ukrainian troops have been caught off guard by restrictions on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite Internet systems that disrupted frontline operations, while Kyiv received no warning from its partners of a Russian missile attack on its energy facilities for the second day running, according to Ukrainian officials.
Starlink terminals used by Ukrainian drone units began experiencing signal failures at speeds above 160 km/h, disrupting several missions early on Wednesday morning, according to military personnel and senior Ukrainian officials.
“Logistics at the frontline and middle strikes are badly limited,” one senior official familiar with the situation on the front told the FT. Ukraine’s middle strikes target Russian military supply lines and logistics. The limitations came with “no warning, just in the middle of the night,” the official said.
Despite the expansion of Starlink and other communications satellite services, most of the world’s Internet traffic still travels through subsea cables crisscrossing the ocean floors. Those fiber-optic cables coexist with a network of oil and gas pipelines and submarine power cables—and all these crucial links connecting countries and continents now face growing sabotage risks as gray-zone warfare and open conflicts have become widespread.
The rising risks to the world’s invisible infrastructure beneath the waves are the main subject of a new book by Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who leads the Threats to the Global Maritime Order Initiative. Her book, titled Undersea War, explores the modern rise in suspicious incidents in which ships dragging their anchors for unusually long periods have cut or damaged undersea cables and pipelines, from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean.
Braw acknowledges that about 60 percent of undersea cable damage is primarily due to human error during fishing and shipping activities, when weighted nets or anchors drag across the seabed. Natural hazards like storms and undersea landslides also account for a smaller proportion of such incidents. In total, between 150 and 200 cables are damaged each year and usually repaired quickly.
In a bankruptcy proceeding that kicked off yesterday, Disney has offered to buy some of the technology that powers the controversy-plagued chatbot Character.AI.
Disney is willing to pay $20 million for “a non-exclusive perpetual license” of certain Character Technologies intellectual property, the chatbot maker said in a press release that did not go into much further detail on which assets Disney wanted.
The move may be surprising. In September 2025, Disney joined others in publicly criticizing Character.AI for stealing content and harming kids. Specifically, Disney sent a strongly worded cease-and-desist letter that accused Character Technologies of weaponizing Disney characters “in a way that could damage its brand long term,” Axios reported.
Discovery+ subscription prices went up today.
Ad-free plans for new subscribers went from $10 per month to $12/month. Ad-based plans went from $6 to $7.
The new prices take effect for new subscribers immediately. Current subscribers to the streaming service, which primarily features unscripted content, like reality shows and documentaries, will receive 30 days’ notice before the new prices take effect, starting with bills issued as of November 12.
Apple opened preorders for the HomeView smart home hub today.
The HomeView is a 7-inch smart display and speaker that aims to be a central access point for up to six members of a family to access and control Apple’s ecosystem of devices, apps, and the Siri generative AI chatbot that's currently in beta.
Users can speak to HomeView to control smart home devices, such as, for example, telling Siri to close the smart blinds or activate smart locks. HomeView can also show a livestream for up to nine video feeds simultaneously.
When Russia began attacking Ukrainian data centers and telecommunication infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Now Russia’s digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech giant Yandex within several days.
Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia’s centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the “data center war” it started, according to posts translated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki. The Russian commentators also suggested that Ukraine’s decentralized digital services could prove more resilient than Russia’s system if the countries continue trading such blows.
Russia initially launched a drone strike campaign targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted Internet and cell phone service for up to 100,000 households in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and came as part of a broader long-range strike campaign that has involved Russian missiles and jet-powered drones hitting Ukraine’s power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs, and even residential apartment building blocks.
Google is releasing its second Fitbit tracker of 2026, offering fans of the aging Charge 6 a more refined option. The new Fitbit Edge slots right in between the Pixel Watch 5 and the Fitbit Air, featuring a compact screen and more health sensors than the Air. You won't get all the apps and features of the Pixel Watch 5, but the Edge is only about half as expensive.
The Fitbit Edge is essentially a new Charge 6, but it has more of a Pixel Watch aesthetic. Squish Google's smartwatch from the sides, and you've got the Edge. It has a pill-shaped 1.34-inch OLED touch display inside a slender aluminum frame that is rated IP68 (5 ATM) for water and dust protection. Google says the screen has 46 percent more viewable area compared to the Charge 6. It's very close in overall size to the Fitbit Air and uses the same magnetic charging puck.
Left to right: Fitbit Air (with new metal mesh band), Fitbit Edge, and Pixel Watch 5.
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Google
The Edge works with Android or iPhones via the Google Health app, and it can run for about seven days on a charge. If the tracker is away from your phone, it can still follow your activity all week with support for seven days of full health data storage (or 30 days of basic data). However, the generous weeklong battery life does not include always-on display mode. If you turn it on, battery life drops to about two days, barely longer than the Pixel Watch 5.
No organization in the world operates more robots than Amazon. The company already has more than 1 million robots working in warehouses around the clock to make tens of millions of same-day and one-day package deliveries happen on a daily basis—and Amazon is poised to significantly grow that robotic fleet in the coming years as it establishes new factories to churn out increasingly more capable robot workers.
Despite deploying so many robots, Amazon is also the second-largest corporate employer in the world, with more than 1.5 million full-time and part-time human workers, according to its 2025 annual report. Amazon executives say that the growing robot fleet has eased the burden on its human workforce by taking on the toughest fulfillment center tasks that carry the greatest risks of physical fatigue and injury. But labor advocacy groups and independent researchers point to evidence suggesting that warehouse automation driven by AI is not all upside for the humans who work alongside robots.
“For the last 100 years, most of the automation that we've seen usually happens away from workers—you're taking that high-risk task away from the worker, and you're doing so in a way that is not physically proximate,” Brad Greenwood, professor of business at George Mason University, told Ars. “The rise of collaborative robots really changes that dynamic for two reasons: one is that it is physically proximate, and two, the robot has the ability to dictate the pace of work.”
Elon Musk is a very familiar figure to Ars readers, given his massive influence (for better and worse) on the technology sector over the last 20 years. Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney's latest biographical documentary—simply titled Musk—covers a lot of well-known ground and challenges the carefully crafted public image of Musk as a visionary tech titan.
Gibney's documentary presents Musk as more of a Gilded Age confidence man, rejiggered for the 21st century: an investor cosplaying as an inventor whose real genius is pumping stocks and dazzling investors and the public alike with visions of a high-tech utopian future. The film is bound to push all the right outrage buttons, whether one is a Musk fan or a detractor—which makes it very much a product of the peculiar social media-driven era in which we live.
Gibney has been making documentaries since the 1980s, covering such varied subjects as Jimi Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism, WikiLeaks, Scientology, Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes (the subject of another forthcoming documentary, You Can See Everything, featuring comedian Nathan Fielder), Boris Becker, The Sopranos creator David Chase, alleged Russian interference in the US 2016 presidential election, the opioid epidemic, and cyclist Lance Armstrong. He snagged his first Oscar nomination for 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature two years later for Taxi to the Dark Side.
Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out two of five data centers belonging to the Russian tech giant Yandex. The damage has left Yandex, known as “Russia’s Google” because it operates the country’s most popular search engine, struggling to maintain its AI chatbot and other online services.
The Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centers in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions of Russia on October 8 and October 9, according to Reuters. Those actions came as a direct response to a Russian drone strike campaign targeting Ukraine’s data centers, which has disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of Ukrainians since late September.
“We continue to respond to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, and we’re doing so with high precision,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a post on X. “Another data center was hit as well—our symmetrical response.”
The Museo de Historia de la Computación in Spain has unveiled a 1:1 scale visual replica of the famous Cray-1 supercomputer from 1976. Instead of sourcing expensive, cutting-edge tech to run the system, the creative team powered the project with 30 2012-era Mac Minis. Developed over 18 months, the project serves as a 50th-anniversary tribute to the Cray-1 and Apple's founding.
Mac Minis from over a decade ago might not seem like the obvious first choice for building a cluster supercomputer, but when networked together, the developers can orchestrate the 64 active processing cores into a combined 1.3 teraflops of performance in their most recent tests. The museum reportedly achieved 1.5 teraflops previously using all 70 available cores, prior to one node going offline. Benchmarks were obtained using a custom matrix-multiplication Python script. Five PCs are quad-core i7s, and the remaining 25 are dual-core i5 models. Except for two units from 2014, the rest of the array dates to 2012.
The replica is a valuable tool for museum-goers to understand the shifts in computer architecture since 1976. The original Cray-1 used vector processing, applying a single instruction to multiple data elements simultaneously, whereas the replica distributes work across independent processors in a parallel cluster. The peak theoretical performance of the original Cray-1 was approximately 160 megaflops. What was originally a purpose-built research machine has been re-created with consumer hardware that's vastly more capable than the machine that inspired it.
PC shipments saw a steep drop of about 20 percent in Q3 2026, analysts reported this week.
The industry saw its “sharpest decline since “Q1 2023," Omdia said in an announcement toady. Global shipments of laptops, desktops, and workstations fell 21.2 percent year over year (YoY) to 58.1 million devices, the analyst said.
Desktop PC shipments (including desktop workstations) decreased 23.5 percent to 11.7 million units, and laptop shipments (including laptop workstations) declined 20.6 percent to 46.4 million, per Omdia.
The Debian Linux project has opened a call for community artwork submissions ahead of the release of the upcoming Forky (Debian 14). If you think you've got the artistic chops, your art could appear on the boot screens, login prompts, and desktop wallpapers of millions of users. The submission deadline is November 26.
Continuing Debian's community-driven ethos, the artwork submission process mirrors that of previous releases. The artwork must feel distinctively "Debian," integrate cleanly without the need for core software patching, and remain visually appealing for the long term.
Elise Couper's "Ceratopsian" theme was chosen as the winning default for Debian 13 Trixie. For anyone who might not be up on the latest from the Toy Story franchise, the release names echo character names from the animated films. Trixie was a triceratops introduced in Toy Story 3, hence the "Ceratopsian" wink in the winning submission. It makes sense that the next version of Debian continues this trend with Forky, a character introduced in the franchise's fourth entry. The Debian team cautions against overly busy designs that may cause user fatigue, but if anyone can successfully incorporate Forky's googly eyes into the design somehow, know that you'd at least win the contest for my Debian desktop wallpaper.
Let's Encrypt is continuing a push toward tighter security by reducing free SSL/TLS certificate lifetimes from 90 days to 64 days, starting February 10, 2027. For administrators already implementing modern ACME clients that support ARI (ACME Renewal Information), the change should be seamless. For those still relying on hardcoded renewal schedules or manual processes, February will be the deadline to update before certificates start expiring unexpectedly.
Starting on October 14, Let's Encrypt will begin testing the 64-day certificates, and interested users can opt in to test their setups before production goes live.
Prior to Let's Encrypt's launch in early 2016, certificates were often issued for as long as one to three years. The service started with 90-day certificates to force renewal automation that didn't previously exist. Shorter certificate validity periods limited vulnerabilities from private key thefts and encouraged accelerated HTTPS adoption across the web.
In its first live event in two years, Microsoft today announced its newest Surface laptop, outlined a host of changes coming to Windows 11, and shared a vision of how local-AI and agentic workflows could reshape personal computing for those in the dev community as well as home enthusiasts.
Originally teased in May 2026, the new Surface Laptop Ultra will be Microsoft's first offering to take advantage of the new Nvidia RTX Spark SoC (system on a chip). The device has a starting price of $2,599 and comes in various SoC and memory configurations, with either a 5120-core or 6144-core Blackwell GPU and up to 128GB of LPDDR5x unified memory. It will begin shipping on October 16 and is available for preorder now.
While the new Ultra is clearly focused on the developer crowd, graphical performance was highlighted during the presentation to show off just how capable the laptop can be. By leaning on unified memory allocation rather than the physical VRAM limits of a traditional GPU, the laptop can assign its resources to handle modern gaming tasks as well as local AI development and deployment. The new Gears of War: E-Day was shown running on the system, meaning that even without a traditional gaming GPU, AAA titles are on the table.
One of Donald Trump’s biggest goals as president is to increase domestic manufacturing and reshore supply chains so that the most in-demand technologies in the world can be 100 percent made in the United States.
By executive order last December, he launched his “Genesis Mission,” an ambitious plan seeking to leverage US dominance in AI to maintain or seize an edge in advanced robotics, biotechnology, semiconductors, and nuclear technologies. According to Trump, that plan works best with self-sustaining supply chains. Not even neighboring countries or longtime allies should be relied upon to manufacture a single component of any US product in his ideal world.
The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) has long warned that Trump’s reshoring goals are not grounded in reality, but only recently has America’s largest technology trade association attempted to estimate what it would cost businesses and consumers to follow through on Trump’s plan.
Drones sank two cargo ships and damaged a third in the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries for the first time, killing at least two sailors. The attacks represent a notable escalation as Black Sea commercial shipping has increasingly come under attack during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Russia also being accused of carrying out “hybrid warfare” incidents across Europe.
The Togo-flagged cargo ship Alfa Watan sank, and the Palau-flagged cargo ship Able was set ablaze after being attacked by multiple sea and aerial drones about 80 miles (128 kilometers) off the coast of Bulgaria on October 6, according to the Associated Press. In an interview, Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev described the incidents as “an unacceptable attack in Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone” and “a blatant violation of international law and maritime law.”
A Bulgarian ferry managed to evacuate the 18 crew members of the Able, with two severely injured mariners being flown to a hospital in the city of Varna.
After months of industry and customer speculation, Paramount Skydance has shed some light on the future of the HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming services.
Paramount Skydance completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) today, ending a monthslong saga that began when Netflix last year announced its own plans to buy WBD. Netflix scrapped those plans in February. Skydance is the name of the company created from the $111 billion merger.
In an announcement today, Skydance said that all of the direct-to-consumer streaming services it owns, including the Discovery+ service that Discovery Inc. (which merged with WarnerMedia in 2022 to create WBD) launched in 2021, “will unify into a single service over time.”
A surge in Russian jet-powered drone strikes on Ukrainian data centers has increasingly disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of people. Now Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other government officials are warning of the need for more air defense capabilities, as such telecommunication outages could threaten Ukraine’s digital economy and undermine the country’s ongoing resistance to Russia’s invasion.
The Russian attacks on Ukrainian telecommunication infrastructure have focused on Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv since September 23, according to the nonprofit Reporters Without Borders. Ukraine’s digital transformation ministry reported that 100,000 households in the Kyiv region were temporarily experiencing Internet outages from those initial strikes—and Russia has only intensified its strike campaign against major Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in recent weeks.
“Russian attacks on Ukraine’s telecommunication infrastructure are not new, with strikes and shelling previously damaging fiber optic lines, cell towers, and facilities belonging to mobile network companies,” said Tetiana Gaviuk, analyst for Europe at ACLED, in a post on October 1. “However, the recent concentrated attacks on Kyiv’s data centers and telecom networks stand out because multiple providers and facilities were hit within days, indicating Russia’s increased pressure on Ukraine’s digital infrastructure.”
The mechanical keyboard isn't always so mechanical anymore.
Over the past six years, keyboards with optical, Hall-effect, and other "contactless" switches have become increasingly common, often going for higher prices than traditional mechanical keyboards, which already command a premium over basic membrane boards. In return, they promise some theoretical advantages, particularly for gamers. In daily use, though, the differences can be pretty subtle.
So what exactly are you paying for? In this guide, we break down how the newest switches work, why contactless designs are becoming more popular, and where their advantages—and disadvantages—really matter.
This year, members of Seattle Mountain Rescue have been setting off into the wilds of the US Pacific Northwest wearing an unusual piece of kit.
They’ve been hiking into the wilderness with powered assistive devices attached to their hips and legs. Designed to increase lower-body strength when climbing or carrying heavy loads, these pieces of equipment are being tested to see if they can boost rescuers’ speed and endurance when it matters most—during searches for stranded people.
Devices like these are called human exoskeletons. They attach to parts of the body to create an external—or “exo”—mechanical structure. This powered frame enhances the wearer’s physical capabilities.
My family has spent four summers participating in demand response programs whereby utility companies pay customers to reduce energy use on the hottest summer days. Most summers have involved carefully precooling our New York City apartment before switching off the air conditioners and sweating it out during the designated demand response periods.
But this year, we kept our window air conditioners running throughout a heat dome event that drove daytime temperatures into the triple digits and made the nights oppressively hot. The difference was that we powered the air conditioners through two household batteries tucked away unobtrusively in the corners of our living room and bedroom.
We were among about 1,000 New York City households that took part in a free and growing program offered by the local startup Every Electric. The company’s proposition is simple: Get one or more batteries delivered to your home, plug the batteries into a standard wall electrical outlet, and then plug your window air conditioners into the batteries. Households can keep running air conditioners as usual during peak demand periods while also earning money through the local demand response program with the utility company Con Edison.
The era of generative AI has upended technology supply chains, and there is one ironclad rule in 2026: If it has memory or storage, it's getting more expensive. Even devices with years-old tech inside are still apparently subject to that unwritten rule. Nvidia has just announced that the Shield TV Pro is getting $100 more expensive, effective immediately.
The most recent version of the Shield streaming box debuted in 2019, running Android TV with AI upscaling and hardware decoding for almost any type of media. While it ran an aging Tegra X1+ processor, that was (and still is) fast for a TV media streamer. The device launched at $199.99, with a non-Pro variant at $149.99. The non-Pro Shield has since been discontinued, but the Shield TV Pro lives on at the new $299.99 price.
Nvidia has confirmed that you can blame AI for the higher Shield TV pricing. "Starting October 2, SHIELD Pro will be priced at $299. The cost of components, including memory, has increased substantially across the industry," a spokesperson told Ars.
What makes a display a Mini LED display?
It's a question that sounds like it should have a simple answer. But it's now at the center of a lawsuit between two of the biggest names in TVs, with TCL accusing its longtime competitor Samsung of falsely advertising budget LCD-LED TVs as Mini LED sets.
TCL may have a point. Samsung's M-series TVs, which range from $300 for a 43-inch model to $2,300 for a 100-inch model, do raise some legitimate questions about what should qualify as Mini LED. More broadly, though, the dispute highlights a problem for shoppers: Without agreed-upon standards for what "Mini LED" actually means, manufacturers have plenty of room to define the technology for themselves.
Micron and Samsung executives this week said the memory shortage will continue for at least the next couple of years.
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra expects demand for the firm’s memory to exceed its available supply over that period, he told investors last night.
Micron no longer sells consumer RAM, and Mehrotra’s statements refer to Micron’s business-to-business sales of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI and DRAM for servers. However, his comments also have implications for consumer devices. Manufacturing capacity is prioritizing memory for AI and servers, limiting the supply of memory manufactured for consumer devices.
Soon, Reddit won’t let people use Old.Reddit.com unless they have used the site while logged in within the previous six months.
In July, Reddit started requiring that users be logged in to access Old Reddit. This new requirement is an effort to reduce Reddit’s biggest source of scraping and automated traffic, the company says.
Today, the social media platform announced additional upcoming restrictions on Old Reddit. A Reddit post from an employee, known as "judy-funnie" on the platform, says that “in the next few months, we'll further limit access for logged-in users to only those who have used Old Reddit in the last six months (which covers the vast majority of all Old Reddit users).”
There was a call to boycott Disney last fall. The owner of the ABC network had taken Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air over comments Kimmel made about responses to Charlie Kirk's murder, sending free speech proponents into a frenzy.
Those free speech proponents include me, who, as a reporter, has clear stakes in protecting that right. Although I was on board with halting support for a company I felt had acted wrongfully, truly boycotting Disney proved harder than I expected.
Canceling Disney+ was simple but threw a hefty wrench into my evening routine. I tend to end many weekdays laughing at comforting sitcom reruns and adult animation. I usually associate Disney with princesses, kids' movies, and, more recently, comic heroes. But Disney also owns Hulu, which exclusively streamed many of my favorite shows for unwinding at the time, like American Dad, Futurama, Living Single, Fresh Off the Boat, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Today, the Firefox 157 update will roll out a redesign of the web browser across desktop and mobile platforms. The team that made it hopes it will help expand the browser's audience beyond privacy-conscious techies and open-web or open source advocates to a broader audience who might simply pick the browser because they prefer its user experience over competitors like Chrome, Edge, and Safari.
In advance of the redesign's launch, I spent half an hour chatting with Mozilla's head of Firefox, Ajit Varma, about Firefox's current market position and product strategy, and what barriers or opportunities there are for gaining ground in a Chromium-dominated landscape.
We are mere days away from the launch of Googlebooks, the long-awaited Android laptops that Google hopes will compete with macOS and Windows. But what of Chromebooks? There have been hints that Google plans to sunset its web-first ChromeOS platform, and a new support page lays out some of the specifics.
The support page, spotted by 9to5Google, aims to explain the role of Googlebooks to Chrome Enterprise and Education customers. The page starts off by noting that Googlebook OS, which is Android even if Google doesn't like to say that, will offer an enhanced experience with deeper system capabilities and lots of AI.
Like Chromebooks, Googlebooks are guaranteed 10 years of software support. However, the latest Chromebook models won't get that in the traditional way. Google's support page says that it plans to continue ChromeOS support through "mid-2034," so there are already devices with support windows beyond that.
Since 2024, Microsoft has tried to sell “Copilot+ PC.” The marketing initiative was aimed at making it easy for people to know which Windows systems were approved to run AI-accelerated workloads locally.
But Copilot+ PC branding is nowhere to be found on the new Surface PCs Microsoft announced this week.
Speaking with Windows Central, Brett Ostrum, corporate VP of Surface, said that the new Surface computers “are not called Copilot+ PCs” despite meeting the label’s requirements.
Virtually every Android device comes with the Play Store preloaded, but there are other ways to get apps. F-Droid bills itself as a community-driven source for free and open source Android apps, but its official app store has gone 10 years without a major update. That's finally changing: After a multiyear effort, the team has just announced F-Droid 2.0 is rolling out.
The new F-Droid client was redesigned from scratch in Kotlin Compose, which is the standard for modern Android apps. This makes the store much more responsive, and there's optional support for Android's Material theming. The interface has also been cleaned up considerably, making the most important functions easier to access and hiding some others in overflow menus.
While the new F-Droid looks nicer, the update was largely about making it easier to find and install apps. When F-Droid first appeared, there wasn't much to see, but now it has thousands of open source apps. Unlike the Play Store, F-Droid doesn't track your taps and installs to push ads and suggestions—it helps you find things and gets out of the way.
Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney has never been one to shy away from controversy. His latest feature, Musk, has stirred up plenty even before its release, drawing the ire of its subject, Elon Musk, and threats of a defamation lawsuit. After the film debuted two weeks ago at the Venice International Film Festival, rumors swirled that Universal Pictures was getting cold feet about theatrically releasing the film in international markets.
Those rumors appear to be unfounded (at least for now). And Musk is still on track for a US theatrical release, thanks to the folks at domestic distributor Bleecker Street Media, which released the official trailer today.
Gibney has been making documentaries since the 1980s, covering such varied subjects as Jimi Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism, WikiLeaks, Scientology, Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes (the subject of another forthcoming documentary, You Can See Everything, featuring comedian Nathan Fielder), Boris Becker, The Sopranos creator David Chase, alleged Russian interference in the US 2016 presidential election, the opioid epidemic, and cyclist Lance Armstrong. He snagged his first Oscar nomination for 2005's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature two years later for Taxi to the Dark Side.
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