Like most tools, generative AI models can be misused. And when the misuse gets bad enough that a major dictionary notices, you know it’s become a cultural phenomenon.

On Sunday, Merriam-Webster announced that “slop” is its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting how the term has become shorthand for the flood of low-quality AI-generated content that has spread across social media, search results, and the web at large. The dictionary defines slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”

“It’s such an illustrative word,” Merriam-Webster president Greg Barlow told the Associated Press. “It’s part of a transformative technology, AI, and it’s something that people have found fascinating, annoying, and a little bit ridiculous.”

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We’re 10 days away from the next installment of the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, and Netflix has released a new trailer for what it’s calling Volume 2. This will cover episodes five through seven, with the final episode comprising Vol. 3.

(Spoilers for Season 5, Vol. 1 below.)

Season 4 ended with Vecna—the Big Bad behind it all—opening the gate that allowed the Upside Down to leak into Hawkins. We got a time jump for S5, Vol. 1, but in a way, we came full circle, since those events coincided with the third anniversary of Will’s original disappearance in S1.

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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 from a prominent US senator.

When the software maker rolled out Active Directory in 2000, it made RC4 a sole means of securing the Windows component, which administrators use to configure and provision fellow administrator and user accounts inside large organizations. RC4, short for Rivist Cipher 4, is a nod to mathematician and cryptographer Ron Rivest of RSA Security, who developed the stream cipher in 1987. Within days of the trade-secret-protected algorithm being leaked in 1994, a researcher demonstrated a cryptographic attack that significantly weakened the security it had been believed to provide. Despite the known susceptibility, RC4 remained a staple in encryption protocols, including SSL and its successor TLS, until about a decade ago.

Out with the old

One of the most visible holdouts in supporting RC4 has been Microsoft. Eventually, Microsoft upgraded Active Directory to support the much more secure AES encryption standard. But by default, Windows servers have continued to respond to RC4-based authentication requests and return an RC4-based response. The RC4 fallback has been a favorite weakness hackers have exploited to compromise enterprise networks. Use of RC4 played a key role in last year’s breach of health giant Ascension. The breach caused life-threatening disruptions at 140 hospitals and put the medical records of 5.6 million patients into the hands of the attackers. US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in September called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft for “gross cybersecurity negligence,” citing the continued default support for RC4.

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Ford’s F-150 Lightning production line has fallen silent, and its employees are now building more gas and hybrid trucks. The automaker continues to retreat from the big bet it made on Americans embracing full-size battery electric pickup trucks, and will focus instead on cheaper vehicles, hybrids, and range-extended electric vehicles—or EREVs—instead, it announced today.

One of those EREVs will be the Lighting’s replacement. With a gasoline generator that just charges the battery—series hybrid fans rejoice—the next Lightning comes with the towing ability that Ford says its customers consider “non-negotiable,” and up to 700 miles (1,126 km) of range.

“Our next-generation F-150 Lightning EREV will be every bit as revolutionary. It delivers everything Lightning customers love – near instantaneous torque and pure electric driving. But with a high-power generator enabling an estimated range of 700+ miles, it tows like a locomotive. Heavy-duty towing and cross-country travel will be as effortless as the daily commute,” said Doug Field, Ford’s chief EV, digital and design officer.

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Last month saw the release of Project Misriah, an ambitious modding project that tried to re-create the feel of Halo 3 inside Valve’s Counter-Strike 2. That project has now been taken down from the Steam Workshop, though, after drawing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint from Microsoft.

Modder Froddoyo introduced Project Misriah on November 16 as “a workshop collection of Halo ported maps and assets that aims to bring a Halo 3 multiplayer-like experience to Counter-Strike 2.” Far from just being inspired by Halo 3, the mod directly copied multiple sound effects, character models, maps, and even movement mechanics from Bungie and Microsoft’s popular series.

In the weeks since, Project Misriah has drawn a lot of praise from both Halo fans and those impressed by what modders could pull off with the Source 2 engine. But last Wednesday, modder Froddoyo shared a DMCA request from Microsoft citing the “unauthorized use of Halo game content in a [Steam] workshop not associated with Halo games.”

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OpenAI is facing increasing scrutiny over how it handles ChatGPT data after users die, only selectively sharing data in lawsuits over ChatGPT-linked suicides.

Last week, OpenAI was accused of hiding key ChatGPT logs from the days before a 56-year-old bodybuilder, Stein-Erik Soelberg, took his own life after “savagely” murdering his mother, 83-year-old Suzanne Adams.

According to the lawsuit—which was filed by Adams’ estate on behalf of surviving family members—Soelberg struggled with mental health problems after a divorce led him to move back into Adams’ home in 2018. But allegedly Soelberg did not turn violent until ChatGPT became his sole confidant, validating a wide range of wild conspiracies, including a dangerous delusion that his mother was part of a network of conspirators spying on him, tracking him, and making attempts on his life.

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We woke up this morning to the horrifying news that beloved actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were killed in their Brentwood home in Los Angeles last night. Both had been stabbed multiple times. Details are scarce, but the couple’s 32-year-old son, Nick—who has long struggled with addiction and recently moved back in with his parents—has been arrested in connection with the killings, with bail set at $4 million.  [UPDATE: Nick Reiner’s bail has been revoked and he faces possible life in prison.]

“As a result of the initial investigation, it was determined that the Reiners were the victims of homicide,” the LAPD said. “The investigation further revealed that Nick Reiner, the 32-year-old son of Robert and Michele Reiner, was responsible for their deaths. Nick Reiner was located and arrested at approximately 9:15 p.m. He was booked for murder and remains in custody with no bail. On Tuesday, December 16, 2025, the case will be presented to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office for filing consideration.”

“It is with profound sorrow that we announce the tragic passing of Michele and Rob Reiner,” the family said in a statement confirming the deaths. “We are heartbroken by this sudden loss, and we ask for privacy during this unbelievably difficult time.”

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The UK government reportedly will “encourage” Apple and Google to prevent phones from displaying nude images except when users verify that they are adults.

The forthcoming push for nudity-blocking systems was reported by the Financial Times today. The report said the UK won’t institute a legal requirement “for now.” But asking companies to block nude images could be the first step toward making it mandatory if the government doesn’t get what it wants.

“The UK government wants technology companies to block explicit images on phones and computers by default to protect children, with adults having to verify their age to create and access such content,” the FT report said. “Ministers want the likes of Apple and Google to incorporate nudity-detection algorithms into their device operating systems to prevent users taking photos or sharing images of genitalia unless they are verified as adults.”

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Google began offering “dark web reports” a while back, but the company has just announced the feature will be going away very soon. In an email to users of the service, Google says it will stop telling you about dark web data leaks in February. This probably won’t negatively impact your security or privacy because, as Google points out in its latest email, there’s really nothing you can do about the dark web.

The dark web reports launched in March 2023 as a perk for Google One subscribers. The reports were expanded to general access in 2024. Now, barely a year later, Google has decided it doesn’t see the value in this type of alert for users. Dark web reports provide a list of partially redacted user data retrieved from shadowy forums and sites where such information is bought and sold. However, that’s all it is—a list.

The dark web consists of so-called hidden services hosted inside the Tor network. You need a special browser or connection tools in order to access Tor hidden services, and its largely anonymous nature has made it a favorite hangout for online criminals. If a company with your personal data has been hacked, that data probably lives somewhere on the dark web.

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Every other week, it seems, a new Chinese launch company pops up with a rocket design and a plan to reach orbit within a few years. For a long time, the majority of these companies revealed designs that looked a lot like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

The first of these copy cats, the medium-lift Zhuque-3 rocket built by LandSpace, launched earlier this month. Its primary mission was nominal, but the Zhuque-3 rocket failed its landing attempt, which is understandable for a first flight. Doubtless there will be more Chinese Falcon 9-like rockets making their debut in the near future.

However, over the last year, there has been a distinct change in announcements from China when it comes to new launch technology. Just as SpaceX is seeking to transition from its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket—which has now been flying for a decade and a half—to the fully reusable Starship design, so too are Chinese companies modifying their visions.

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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 US-listed group on Sunday said it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware as part of a restructuring agreement with Shenzhen-based Picea Robotics, its lender and primary supplier, which will acquire all of iRobot’s shares.

The deal comes nearly two years after a proposed $1.5 billion acquisition by Amazon fell through over competition concerns from EU regulators.

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When Verizon refused to unlock an iPhone purchased by Kansas resident Patrick Roach, he had no intention of giving up without a fight. Roach sued the wireless carrier in small claims court and won.

Roach bought a discounted iPhone 16e from Verizon’s Straight Talk brand on February 28, 2025, as a gift for his wife’s birthday. He intended to pay for one month of service, cancel, and then switch the phone to the US Mobile service plan that the couple uses. Under federal rules that apply to Verizon and a Verizon unlocking policy that was in place when Roach bought the phone, this strategy should have worked.

“The best deals tend to be buying it from one of these MVNOs [Mobile Virtual Network Operators] and then activating it until it unlocks and then switching it to whatever you are planning to use it with. It usually saves you about half the value of the phone,” Roach said in a phone interview.

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For the first time, global governments have agreed to widespread international trade bans and restrictions for sharks and rays being driven to extinction.

Last week, more than 70 shark and ray species, including oceanic whitetip sharks, whale sharks, and manta rays, received new safeguards under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. The convention, known as CITES, is a United Nations treaty that requires countries to regulate or prohibit international trade in species whose survival is threatened.

Sharks and rays are closely related species that play similar roles as apex predators in the ocean, helping to maintain healthy marine ecosystems. They have been caught and traded for decades, contributing to a global market worth nearly $1 billion annually, according to Luke Warwick, director of shark and ray conservation at Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), an international nonprofit dedicated to preserving animals and their habitats.

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With the popularity of AI coding tools rising among some software developers, their adoption has begun to touch every aspect of the process, including the improvement of AI coding tools themselves.

In interviews with Ars Technica this week, OpenAI employees revealed the extent to which the company now relies on its own AI coding agent, Codex, to build and improve the development tool. “I think the vast majority of Codex is built by Codex, so it’s almost entirely just being used to improve itself,” said Alexander Embiricos, product lead for Codex at OpenAI, in a conversation on Tuesday.

Codex, which OpenAI launched in its modern incarnation as a research preview in May 2025, operates as a cloud-based software engineering agent that can handle tasks like writing features, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests. The tool runs in sandboxed environments linked to a user’s code repository and can execute multiple tasks in parallel. OpenAI offers Codex through ChatGPT’s web interface, a command-line interface (CLI), and IDE extensions for VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf.

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If you’ve been too busy floating in your new WoW house to take part in this year’s Ars Technica Charity Drive sweepstakes, don’t worry. You still have time to donate to a good cause and get a chance to win your share of over $4,000 worth of swag (no purchase necessary to win).

In the first two days or so of the drive, over 200 readers have contributed over $11,000 to either the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Child’s Play as part of the charity drive (Child’s Play has a roughly 60/40 donation lead at the moment). That’s still a long way off from 2020’s record haul of over $58,000, but there’s still plenty of time until the Charity Drive wraps up on Friday, January 2, 2026.

That doesn’t mean you should put your donation off, though. Do yourself and the charities involved a favor and give now while you’re thinking about it.

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Google has increasingly moved toward keeping features locked to its hardware products, but the Translate app is bucking that trend. The live translate feature is breaking out of the Google bubble with support for any earbuds you happen to have connected to your Android phone. The app is also getting improved translation quality across dozens of languages and some Duolingo-like learning features.

The latest version of Google’s live translation is built on Gemini and initially rolled out earlier this year. It supports smooth back-and-forth translations as both on-screen text and audio. Beginning a live translate session in Google Translate used to require Pixel Buds, but that won’t be the case going forward.

Google says a beta test of expanded headphone support is launching today in the US, Mexico, and India. The audio translation attempts to preserve the tone and cadence of the original speaker, but it’s not as capable as the full AI-reproduced voice translations you can do on the latest Pixel phones. Google says this feature should work on any earbuds or headphones, but it’s only for Android right now. The feature will expand to iOS in the coming months. Apple does have a similar live translation feature on the iPhone, but it requires AirPods.

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Dozens of Ukrainian civilians filed a series of lawsuits in Texas this week, accusing some of the biggest US chip firms of negligently failing to track chips that evaded export curbs. Those chips were ultimately used to power Russian and Iranian weapon systems, causing wrongful deaths last year.

Their complaints alleged that for years, Texas Instruments (TI), AMD, and Intel have ignored public reporting, government warnings, and shareholder pressure to do more to track final destinations of chips and shut down shady distribution channels diverting chips to sanctioned actors in Russia and Iran.

Putting profits over human lives, tech firms continued using “high-risk” channels, Ukrainian civilians’ legal team alleged in a press statement, without ever strengthening controls.

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Modern bionic hand prostheses nearly match their natural counterparts when it comes to dexterity, degrees of freedom, and capability. And many amputees who tried advanced bionic hands apparently didn’t like them. “Up to 50 percent of people with upper limb amputation abandon these prostheses, never to use them again,” says Jake George, an electrical and computer engineer at the University of Utah.

The main issue with bionic hands that drives users away from them, George explains, is that they’re difficult to control. “Our goal was making such bionic arms more intuitive, so that users could go about their tasks without having to think about it,” George says. To make this happen, his team came up with an AI bionic hand co-pilot.

Micro-management issues

Bionic hands’ control problems stem largely from their lack of autonomy. Grasping a paper cup without crushing it or catching a ball mid-flight appear so effortless because our natural movements rely on an elaborate system of reflexes and feedback loops. When an object you hold begins to slip, tiny mechanoreceptors in your fingertips send signals to the nervous system that make the hand tighten its grip. This all happens within 60 to 80 milliseconds—before you even consciously notice. This reflex is just one of many ways your brain automatically assists you in dexterity-based tasks.

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Rian Johnson has another Benoit Blanc hit on his hands with Wake Up Dead Man, in which Blanc tackles the strange death of a fire-and-brimstone parish priest, Monseigneur Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). It’s a classic locked-room mystery in a spookily Gothic small-town setting, and Johnson turned to cinematographer Steve Yedlin (Looper, The Last Jedi) to help realize his artistic vision.

(Minor spoilers below but no major reveals.)

Yedlin worked on the previous two Knives Out installments. He’s known Johnson since the two were in their teens, and that longstanding friendship ensures that they are on the same page, aesthetically, from the start when they work on projects.

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President Trump issued an executive order yesterday attempting to thwart state AI laws, saying that federal agencies must fight state laws because Congress hasn’t yet implemented a national AI standard. Trump’s executive order tells the Justice Department, Commerce Department, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and other federal agencies to take a variety of actions.

“My Administration must act with the Congress to ensure that there is a minimally burdensome national standard—not 50 discordant State ones. The resulting framework must forbid State laws that conflict with the policy set forth in this order… Until such a national standard exists, however, it is imperative that my Administration takes action to check the most onerous and excessive laws emerging from the States that threaten to stymie innovation,” Trump’s order said. The order claims that state laws, such as one passed in Colorado, “are increasingly responsible for requiring entities to embed ideological bias within models.”

Congressional Republicans recently decided not to include a Trump-backed plan to block state AI laws in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), although it could be included in other legislation. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has also failed to get congressional backing for legislation that would punish states with AI laws.

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Sometimes, downing an energy drink can feel like refueling your battery. But with too much, that jolt can turn into a catastrophic surge that fries the wiring and blows a fuse. That was the unfortunate and alarming case for a man in the UK several years ago, according to a case report this week in BMJ Case Reports.

The man, who was in his 50s and otherwise healthy, showed up at a hospital after the entire left side of his body abruptly went numb and he was left with clumsy, uncoordinated muscle movements (ataxia). His blood pressure was astonishingly high, at 254/150 mm Hg. For context, a normal reading is under 120/80, while anything over 180/120 is considered a hypertensive crisis, which is a medical emergency.

The man had suffered a mild stroke, and his extremely high blood pressure was an obvious factor. But why his blood pressure had reached stratospheric heights was far less obvious to his doctors, according to the retrospective case report written by Martha Coyle and Sunil Munshi of Nottingham University Hospital.

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Back in April, District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers delivered a scathing judgment finding that Apple was in “willful violation” of her 2021 injunction intended to open up iOS App Store payments. That contempt of court finding has now been almost entirely upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a development that Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney tells Ars he hopes will “do a lot of good for developers and start to really change the App Store situation worldwide, I think.”

The ruling, signed by a panel of three appellate court judges, affirmed that Apple’s initial attempts to charge a 27 percent fee to iOS developers using outside payment options “had a prohibitive effect, in violation of the injunction.” Similarly, Apple’s restrictions on how those outside links had to be designed were overly broad; the appeals court suggests that Apple can only ensure that internal and external payment options are presented in a similar fashion.

The appeals court also agreed that Apple acted in “bad faith” by refusing to comply with the injunction, rejecting viable, compliant alternatives in internal discussions. And the appeals court was also not convinced by Apple’s process-focused arguments, saying the district court properly evaluated materials Apple argued were protected by attorney-client privilege.

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For years, Sen. Ron Johnson has been spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation about COVID-19 and the safety of vaccines.

He’s promoted disproven treatments for COVID-19 and claimed, without evidence, that athletes are “dropping dead on the field” after getting the COVID-19 vaccination. Now the Wisconsin politician is endorsing a book by a discredited doctor promoting an unproven and dangerous treatment for autism and a host of ailments: chlorine dioxide, a chemical used for disinfecting and bleaching.

The book is “The War on Chlorine Dioxide: The Medicine that Could End Medicine” by Dr. Pierre Kory, a critical care specialist who practiced in Wisconsin hospitals before losing his medical certification for statements advocating using an antiparasite medication to treat COVID-19. The action, he’s said, makes him unemployable, even though he still has a license.

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A startup established three years ago to churn out a new class of high-power satellites has raised $250 million to ramp up production at its Southern California factory.

The company, named K2, announced the cash infusion on Thursday. K2’s Series C fundraising round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with additional funding from investment firms in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. K2 has now raised more than $400 million since its founding in 2022 and is on track to launch its first major demonstration mission next year, officials said.

K2 aims to take advantage of a coming abundance of heavy- and super-heavy-lift launch capacity, with SpaceX’s Starship expected to begin deploying satellites as soon as next year. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket launched twice this year and will fly more in 2026 while engineers develop an even larger New Glenn with additional engines and more lift capability.

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Smart TVs can feel like a dumb choice if you’re looking for privacy, reliability, and simplicity.

Today’s TVs and streaming sticks are usually loaded up with advertisements and user tracking, making offline TVs seem very attractive. But ever since smart TV operating systems began making money, “dumb” TVs have been hard to find.

In response, we created this non-smart TV guide that includes much more than dumb TVs. Since non-smart TVs are so rare, this guide also breaks down additional ways to watch TV and movies online and locally without dealing with smart TVs’ evolution toward software-centric features and snooping. We’ll discuss a range of options suitable for various budgets, different experience levels, and different rooms in your home.

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Protecting children from the dangers of the online world was always difficult, but that challenge has intensified with the advent of AI chatbots. A new report offers a glimpse into the problems associated with the new market, including the misuse of AI companies’ large language models (LLMs).

In a blog post today, the US Public Interest Group Education Fund (PIRG) reported its findings after testing AI toys (PDF). It described AI toys as online devices with integrated microphones that let users talk to the toy, which uses a chatbot to respond.

AI toys are currently a niche market, but they could be set to grow. More consumer companies have been eager to shoehorn AI technology into their products so they can do more, cost more, and potentially give companies user tracking and advertising data. A partnership between OpenAI and Mattel announced this year could also create a wave of AI-based toys from the maker of Barbie and Hot Wheels, as well as its competitors.

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Welcome to Edition 8.22 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week concerns the decision by SpaceX founder Elon Musk to take the company public, via IPO, sometime within the next 12 to 18 months. Musk confirmed this after Ars published a story on Wednesday evening. This understandably raises questions about whether a future SpaceX will be committed more to AI data centers in space or Mars settlement. However, one of the company’s founding employees, Tom Mueller, said this could benefit the company’s Mars plans. Clearly this is something we’ll be following closely.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Avio will build solid rocket motors in Virginia. The governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, announced Wednesday that Avio USA has selected his state to produce solid rocket motors for defense and commercial space propulsion purposes. Avio USA’s investment, which will be up to $500 million, is supported by its Italian parent Avio. The company’s factory will encompass 860,000 sq. feet.

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Over two decades after the release of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, a new project described as a “spiritual successor” to that seminal RPG series was announced at The Game Awards Thursday night. Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic will be a collaboration between Lucasfilm Games and Arcanaut Studios, a new development house being launched by original KOTOR director Casey Hudson.

Hudson, who will serve as director on the new game, said in an interview with StarWars.com that he has remained in contact with Lucasfilm since the KOTOR days, in the hopes of being able to collaborate in the Star Wars universe again. “It took the right conditions to get everything to line up,” he told the site.

Calling KOTOR “one of the defining experiences of my career,” Hudson said he wants to “explore a contemporary vision” of the Star Wars universe and “deliver on the combination of player agency and immersion in Star Wars” that defined the original games. As director on the upcoming game, Hudson said he sees his role as “to gather and shape a cohesive vision that the entire team contributes to. Ensuring that everyone shares that vision and understands their part in creating it is critical to the success of a project.”

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Back in 2016, after six-and-a-half years spent working on puzzle-adventure opus The Witness, Jonathan Blow says he needed a break. He tells Ars that the project he started in The Witness’ wake was meant to serve as a quick proof of concept for a new engine and programming language he was working on. “It was supposed to be a short game,” that could be finished in “like a year and a half or two years,” he said.

Now, after nine years of development—and his fair share of outspoken, controversial statements—Blow is finally approaching the finish line on that “short game.” He said Order of the Sinking Star—which was announced Thursday via a Game Awards trailer ahead of a planned 2026 release—now encompasses around 1,400 individual puzzles that could take completionists 400 to 500 hours to fully conquer.

Jonathan Blow, seen here probably thinking about puzzles. Credit: Thekla, Inc.

“I don’t know why I convinced myself it was going to be a small game,” Blow told me while demonstrating a preview build to Ars last week. “But once we start things, I just want to do the good version of the thing, right? I always make it as good as it can be.”

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AI company Runway has announced what it calls its first world model, GWM-1. It’s a significant step in a new direction for a company that has made its name primarily on video generation, and it’s part of a wider gold rush to build new frontier of models as large language models and image and video generation move into a refinement phase, no longer an untapped frontier.

GWM-1 is a blanket term for a trio of autoregression models, each built on top of Runway’s Gen-4.5 text-to-video generation model and then post-trained with domain-specific data for different kinds of applications. Here’s what each does.

GWM Worlds

GWM Worlds offers an interface for digital environment exploration with real-time user input that affects the generation of coming frames, which Runway suggests can remain consistent and coherent “across long sequences of movement.”

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Long-time World of Warcraft players have been waiting 21 years for the new in-game housing features that Blizzard officially announced last year and which launched in early access last week. Shortly after that launch, though, players quickly discovered a way to make their houses float high above the ground by exploiting an unintended, invisible UI glitch.

Now, Blizzard says that the overwhelming response to that accidental house hovering has been so strong that it’s pivoting to integrate it as an official part of the game.

“We were going to fix flying houses to bring them back to terra firma, but you all made such awesome stuff, so we made it possible with the base UI instead,” WoW Principal Designer Jesse Kurlancheek posted on social media Tuesday. Lead Producer Kyle Hartline followed up on that announcement with some behind-the-scenes gossip: “Like no joke we had an ops channel about how to roll out the float fix but folks shared like 5 of the dopest houses and we all kinda immediately agreed this was way too cool to change,” he wrote.

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On Thursday, OpenAI released GPT-5.2, its newest family of AI models for ChatGPT, in three versions called Instant, Thinking, and Pro. The release follows CEO Sam Altman’s internal “code red” memo earlier this month, which directed company resources toward improving ChatGPT in response to competitive pressure from Google’s Gemini 3 AI model.

“We designed 5.2 to unlock even more economic value for people,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s chief product officer, said during a press briefing with journalists on Thursday. “It’s better at creating spreadsheets, building presentations, writing code, perceiving images, understanding long context, using tools and then linking complex, multi-step projects.”

As with previous versions of GPT-5, the three model tiers serve different purposes: Instant handles faster tasks like writing and translation; Thinking spits out simulated reasoning “thinking” text in an attempt to tackle more complex work like coding and math; and Pro spits out even more simulated reasoning text with the goal of delivering the highest-accuracy performance for difficult problems.

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Warner Bros. has been hinting all week that it was coming and finally dropped the long-awaited first extended teaser trailer for Supergirl, directed by Craig Gillespie and starring Milly Alcock in the title role.

Plans for a Supergirl movie date all the way back to 2018, but the merger that produced Warner Bros. Discovery scuttled the original concept. James Gunn and Peter Safran came in as co-CEOs of the new DC Studios and announced plans for a “soft reboot” of the DC universe, starting with this summer’s Superman. Sasha Calle played Supergirl for a brief appearance in 2023’s The Flash, but despite having signed a multi-year contract, Gunn and Safran decided to go in a different direction for their standalone film and cast Alcock (House of the Dragon) instead.

Gunn particularly wanted to distance this new version of Supergirl from earlier incarnations, especially how the character was portrayed by Melissa Benoist in the Arrowverse series that ran from 2015–2021. He wanted someone less earnest, more of a contrast to David Corenswet’s wholesome Superman. “This is a story-based medium; we want stories to be in theaters that are cool and different from each other,” Gunn said at a media briefing. “And this movie is not exactly just a female clone of Superman. It’s its own thing entirely. And with a character who’s equally worthy of this treatment.”

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The Wild West of copyrighted characters in AI may be coming to an end. There has been legal wrangling over the role of copyright in the AI era, but the mother of all legal teams may now be gearing up for a fight. Disney has sent a cease and desist to Google, alleging the company’s AI tools are infringing Disney’s copyrights “on a massive scale.”

According to the letter, Google is violating the entertainment conglomerate’s intellectual property in multiple ways. The legal notice says Google has copied a “large corpus” of Disney’s works to train its gen AI models, which is believable, as Google’s image and video models will happily produce popular Disney characters—they couldn’t do that without feeding the models lots of Disney data.

The C&D also takes issue with Google for distributing “copies of its protected works” to consumers. So all those memes you’ve been making with Disney characters? Yeah, Disney doesn’t like that, either. The letter calls out a huge number of Disney-owned properties that can be prompted into existence in Google AI, including The Lion King, Deadpool, and Star Wars.

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© Aurich Lawson

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is in critical condition. This year, the premier public health agency had its funding brutally cut and staff gutted, its mission sabotaged, and its headquarters riddled with literal bullets. The over 500 rounds fired were meant for its scientists and public health experts, who endured only to be sidelined, ignored, and overruled by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist hellbent on warping the agency to fit his anti-science agenda.

Then, on August 27, Kennedy fired CDC Director Susan Monarez just weeks after she was confirmed by the Senate. She had refused to blindly approve vaccine recommendations from a panel of vaccine skeptics and contrarians that he had hand-selected. The agency descended into chaos, and Monarez wasn’t the only one to leave the agency that day.

Three top leaders had reached their breaking point and coordinated their resignations upon the dramatic ouster: Drs. Demetre Daskalakis, Debra Houry, and Daniel Jernigan walked out of the agency as their colleagues rallied around them.

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© Getty | Elijah Nouvelage

A little while back, we took a look at a large cargo bike from Urban Arrow that had some interesting features: a drive train that sported continuous variable gearing and a belt drive. But it was difficult to get a feel for what using that drivetrain was like when it was being used to shift a large and extremely heavy cargo bike. So, I jumped at the opportunity when Urban Arrow’s sister company, Gazelle, offered a chance to ride one of its new Arroyo models, which feature the same drivetrain, but this time coupled to a fairly standard commuter bike.

Getting rid of all the weight and bulk really allowed the drive system to shine. And, as with its cargo-carrying cousin, the bike is filled with thoughtful touches and design decisions that make riding it a pleasure. But all that comes at a cost: This is a premium bike with little in the way of compromises, and it’s priced accordingly.

High-end hardware

The Arroyo line is meant for commuters and urban/suburban riding. It has a step-through frame, a large rack, fenders, and its riding stance is very upright. In keeping with its Dutch heritage, it’s meant to be ridden as a bicycle, rather than a bike-like scooter. There’s no throttle to let you avoid pedaling, and even when it’s set to its maximum assist rating, you’ll end up putting in a reasonable amount of effort during the ride. If you’re looking for something that lets you handle a commute in hot weather without sweating, you’ll probably want to look elsewhere.

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© John TImmer

Cast your mind back to 2021. Electric vehicles were hot stuff, buoyed by Tesla’s increasingly stratospheric valuation and a general optimism fueled by what would turn out to be the most significant climate-focused spending package in US history. For some time, automakers had been promising an all-electric future, and they started laying the groundwork to make that happen, partnering with battery suppliers and the like.

Take Ford—that year, it announced a joint venture with SK to build a pair of battery factories, one in Kentucky, the other in Tennessee. BlueOvalSK represented an $11.4 billion investment that would create 11,000 jobs, we were told, and an annual output of 60 GWh from both plants.

Four years later, things look very different. EV subsidies are dead, as is any inclination by the current government to hold automakers accountable for selling too many gas guzzlers. EV-heavy product plans have been thrown out, and designs for new combustion-powered cars are being dusted off and spiffed up. Fewer EVs means a lower need for batteries, and today we saw that in evidence when it emerged that Ford and SK On are ending their battery factory joint venture.

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© Ford

Since the 1990s, physicists have pondered the tantalizing possibility of an exotic fourth type of neutrino, dubbed the “sterile” neutrino, that doesn’t interact with regular matter at all, apart from its fellow neutrinos, perhaps. But definitive experimental evidence for sterile neutrinos has remained elusive. Now it looks like the latest results from Fermilab’s MiniBooNE experiment have ruled out the sterile neutrino entirely, according to a paper published in the journal Nature.

How did the possibility of sterile neutrinos even become a thing? It all dates back to the so-called “solar neutrino problem.” Physicists detected the first solar neutrinos from the Sun in 1966. The only problem was that there were far fewer solar neutrinos being detected than predicted by theory, a conundrum that became known as the solar neutrino problem. In 1962, physicists discovered a second type (“flavor”) of neutrino, the muon neutrino. This was followed by the discovery of a third flavor, the tau neutrino, in 2000.

Physicists already suspected that neutrinos might be able to switch from one flavor to another. In 2002, scientists at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (or SNO) announced that they had solved the solar neutrino problem. The missing solar (electron) neutrinos were just in disguise, having changed into a different flavor on the long journey between the Sun and the Earth. If neutrinos oscillate, then they must have a teensy bit of mass after all. That posed another knotty neutrino-related problem. There are three neutrino flavors, but none of them has a well-defined mass. Rather, different kinds of “mass states” mix together in various ways to produce electron, muon, and tau neutrinos. That’s quantum weirdness for you.

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© UC Santa BarbaraCC BY-NC-ND

On Thursday, The Walt Disney Company announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI and a three-year licensing agreement that will allow users of OpenAI’s Sora video generator to create short clips featuring more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters. It’s the first major content licensing partnership between a Hollywood studio related to the most recent version of OpenAI’s AI video platform, which drew criticism from some parts of the entertainment industry when it launched in late September.

“Technological innovation has continually shaped the evolution of entertainment, bringing with it new ways to create and share great stories with the world,” said Disney CEO Robert A. Iger in the announcement. “The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works.”

The deal creates interesting bedfellows between a company that basically defined modern US copyright policy through congressional lobbying back in the 1990s and one that has argued in a submission to the UK House of Lords that useful AI models cannot be created without copyrighted material.

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© China News Service via Getty Images

Oracle stock dropped after it reported disappointing revenues on Wednesday alongside a $15 billion increase in its planned spending on data centers this year to serve artificial intelligence groups.

Shares in Larry Ellison’s database company fell 11 percent in pre-market trading on Thursday after it reported revenues of $16.1 billion in the last quarter, up 14 percent from the previous year, but below analysts’ estimates.

Oracle raised its forecast for capital expenditure this financial year by more than 40 percent to $50 billion. The outlay, largely directed to building data centers, climbed to $12 billion in the quarter, above expectations of $8.4 billion.

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© Mesut Dogan

NASA has lost contact with one of its three spacecraft orbiting Mars, the agency announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, a second Mars orbiter is perilously close to running out of fuel, and the third mission is running well past its warranty.

Ground teams last heard from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft on Saturday, December 6. “Telemetry from MAVEN had showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind the red planet,” NASA said in a short statement. “After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA’s Deep Space Network did not observe a signal.”

NASA said mission controllers are “investigating the anomaly to address the situation. More information will be shared once it becomes available.”

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© NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

SpaceX is planning to raise tens of billions of dollars through an initial public offering next year, multiple outlets have reported, and Ars can confirm. This represents a major change in thinking from the world’s leading space company and its founder, Elon Musk.

The Wall Street Journal and The Information first reported about a possible IPO last Friday, and Bloomberg followed that up on Tuesday evening with a report suggesting the company would target a $1.5 trillion valuation. This would allow SpaceX to raise in excess of $30 billion.

This is an enormous amount of funding. The largest IPO in history occurred in 2019, when the state-owned Saudi Arabian oil company began public trading as Aramco and raised $29 billion. In terms of revenue, Aramco is a top-five company in the world.

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© JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

A conservative group yesterday urged the Federal Communications Commission to take licenses away from NPR and PBS stations and let other entities use the spectrum. The request came from the Center for American Rights (CAR), a nonprofit law firm that has played a prominent role in the news-distortion investigations spearheaded by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.

“In the wake of the wind-down of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the end of federal funding for NPR and PBS, the Center respectfully suggests that the Commission open an inquiry that looks at the future of ‘public’ broadcasting in that new environment,” a Center for American Rights filing said.

The CPB is set to shut down after Congress approved President Trump’s request to rescind its funding. The Center for American Rights said the CPB shutdown should be used as an opportunity to reassign spectrum used by NPR and PBS stations to other entities.

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© Getty Images | tarabird

On Tuesday, French AI startup Mistral AI released Devstral 2, a 123 billion parameter open-weights coding model designed to work as part of an autonomous software engineering agent. The model achieves a 72.2 percent score on SWE-bench Verified, a benchmark that attempts to test whether AI systems can solve real GitHub issues, putting it among the top-performing open-weights models.

Perhaps more notably, Mistral didn’t just release an AI model, it released a new development app called Mistral Vibe. It’s a command line interface (CLI) similar to Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Gemini CLI that lets developers interact with the Devstral models directly in their terminal. The tool can scan file structures and Git status to maintain context across an entire project, make changes across multiple files, and execute shell commands autonomously. Mistral released the CLI under the Apache 2.0 license.

It’s always wise to take AI benchmarks with a large grain of salt, but we’ve heard from employees of the big AI companies that they pay very close attention to how well models do on SWE-bench Verified, which presents AI models with 500 real software engineering problems pulled from GitHub issues in popular Python repositories. The AI must read the issue description, navigate the codebase, and generate a working patch that passes unit tests. While some AI researchers have noted that around 90 percent of the tasks in the benchmark test relatively simple bug fixes that experienced engineers could complete in under an hour, it’s one of the few standardized ways to compare coding models.

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© Mistral / Benj Edwards

In a surprising, and likely temporary, turn of events, the number of people paying to watch cable channels has grown.

On Monday, research analyst MoffettNathanson released its “Cord-Cutting Monitor Q3 2025: Signs of Life?” report. It found that the pay TV operators, including cable companies, satellite companies, and virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs) like YouTube TV and Fubo, added 303,000 net subscribers in Q3 2025.

According to the report, “There are more linear video subscribers now than there were three months ago. That’s the first time we’ve been able to say that since 2017.”

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© Getty

Amazon has been updating the large-screened Kindle Scribe tablet more frequently and regularly than it updates its standard e-readers, and today the company is announcing the tablet’s third hardware update in four years. The regular Scribe is also being joined by a lower-end Scribe with less storage and no front light and an upgraded Kindle Scribe Colorsoft model with a color e-ink screen. This makes it only the second Kindle to include a color screen, after last year’s Kindle Colorsoft.

Both the regular Kindle Scribe and the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft are available to order starting today for $500 and $630, respectively. Both of those devices include a Premium Pen accessory and 32GB of internal storage; 64GB of storage is available for an extra $50 for both devices. The cheaper front light-less Scribe is coming sometime next year and will run $430 for a model with a more modest 16GB of storage. (These are all much more expensive than the original Scribe’s $340 launch price, but inflation, tariffs, and shortages are wreaking havoc with all kinds of tech prices for the past few years.)

The Scribe and Scribe Colorsoft both come with an updated front light “with miniaturized LEDs that fit tightly against the display,” narrowing the bezel and improving the uniformity of the lighting. Amazon has also tweaked the friction level of the paper-like texture on the glass display, shrunk the gap between the glass and the actual display panel to make writing on the tablet feel more like writing on paper, and added a quad-core processor and more RAM to speed the tablet up.

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© Amazon

Donald Trump’s decision to allow Nvidia to export an advanced artificial intelligence chip, the H200, to China may give China exactly what it needs to win the AI race, experts and lawmakers have warned.

The H200 is about 10 times less powerful than Nvidia’s Blackwell chip, which is the tech giant’s currently most advanced chip that cannot be exported to China. But the H200 is six times more powerful than the H20, the most advanced chip available in China today. Meanwhile China’s leading AI chip maker, Huawei, is estimated to be about two years behind Nvidia’s technology. By approving the sales, Trump may unwittingly be helping Chinese chip makers “catch up” to Nvidia, Jake Sullivan told The New York Times.

Sullivan, a former Biden-era national security advisor who helped design AI chip export curbs on China, told the NYT that Trump’s move was “nuts” because “China’s main problem” in the AI race “is they don’t have enough advanced computing capability.”

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© Andrew Harnik / Staff | Getty Images News

With a key Russian launch pad out of service, NASA is accelerating the launch of two Cargo Dragon spaceships in order to ensure that astronauts on board the International Space Station have all the supplies they need next year.

According to the space agency’s internal schedule, the next Dragon supply mission, CRS-34, is moving forward one month from June 2026 to May. And the next Dragon supply mission after this, CRS-35, has been advanced three months from November to August.

A source indicated that the changing schedules are a “direct result” of a launch pad incident on Thanksgiving Day at the Russian spaceport in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

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© NASA

Although many of us associate it with rally-derived machinery from the late 1990s and early 2000s, these days, Subaru has mostly abandoned its performance cars to concentrate on its true calling—rugged, all-wheel-drive vehicles that are high on practicality, powered by horizontally opposed “boxer” engines. One area where the brand has never particularly excelled has been fuel efficiency, which is where today’s test car, the Subaru Forester Hybrid, comes in.

The last time Ars reviewed a Subaru Forester, it left us impressed. How about one with 40 percent better economy, in that case? Now, the 2.5 L flat-four engine operates on the Atkinson/Miller cycle, which generates 162 hp (121 kW) and 154 lb-ft (208 Nm). There’s an electric motor-generator starter and an electric traction motor with 118 hp (88 kW) and 199 lb-ft (270 Nm) that work together to send a combined 194 hp (145 kW) to all four wheels via a symmetrical all-wheel drive system and a planetary continuously variable transmission.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it’s the same powertrain that Subaru has also fitted to the smaller Crosstrek Hybrid that we drove in September.

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© Jonathan Gitlin

Heat-reddened clay, fire-cracked stone, and fragments of pyrite mark where Neanderthals gathered around a campfire 400,000 years ago in what’s now Suffolk, England.

Based on chemical analysis of the sediment at the site, along with the telltale presence of pyrite, a mineral not naturally found nearby but very handy for striking sparks with flint, British Museum archaeologist Rob Davis and his colleagues say the Neanderthals probably started the fire themselves. That makes the abandoned English clay pit at Barnham the oldest evidence in the world that people (Neanderthal people, in this case) had learned to not only use fire, but also create it and control it.

A cozy Neanderthal campfire

Today, the Barnham site is part of an abandoned clay pit where workers first discovered stone tools in the early 1900s. But 400,000 years ago, it would have been a picturesque little spot at the edge of a stream-fed pond, surrounded by a mix of forest and grassland. There are no hominin fossils here, but archaeologists unearthed a Neanderthal skull about 100 kilometers to the south, so the hominins at Barnham were probably also Neanderthals. The place would have offered a group of Neanderthals a relatively quiet, sheltered place to set up camp, according to Davis and his colleagues.

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© Craig Williams, The Trustees of the British Museum