Technology News

John Graham-Cumming, who happens to be Cloudflare's CTO, cracked a 30-year-old encrypted file that had a role in rewriting South Africa’s history.

Is your Apple AirTag running low on power? Here’s how to replace that battery and get back to tracking.

During an event for Tesla’s new self-driving Cybercab—due out 2027—Musk revealed an expansive vision for cities transformed by a robotaxi revolution. Experts say the plan has some hitches.

If you're using a large battery for a specialized purpose—say grid-scale storage or an electric vehicle—then it's possible to tweak the battery chemistry, provide a little bit of excess capacity, and carefully manage its charging and discharging so that it enjoys a long life span. But for consumer electronics, the batteries are smaller, the need for light weight dictates the chemistry, and the demand for quick charging can be higher. So most batteries in our gadgets start to see serious degradation after just a couple of years of use.

A big contributor to that is an internal fragmentation of the electrode materials. This leaves some of the electrode material disconnected from the battery's charge handling system, essentially stranding the material inside the battery and trapping some of the lithium uselessly. Now, researchers have found that, for at least one battery chemistry, it's possible to partially reverse some of this decay, boosting the remaining capacity of the battery by up to 30 percent.

The only problem is that not many batteries use the specific chemistry tested here. But it does show how understanding what's going on inside batteries can provide us with ways to extend their lifespan.

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The latest Boom speaker stays mainly the same, with one key upgrade.

Welcome to Edition 7.16 of the Rocket Report! Even several days later, it remains difficult to process the significance of what SpaceX achieved in South Texas last Sunday. The moment of seeing a rocket fall out of the sky and be captured by two arms felt historic to me, as historic as the company's first drone ship landing in April 2016. What a time to be alive.

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.

Surprise! Rocket Lab adds a last-minute mission. After signing a launch contract less than two months ago, Rocket Lab says it will launch a customer as early as Saturday from New Zealand on board its Electron launch vehicle. Rocket Lab added that the customer for the expedited mission, to be named "Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes," is confidential. This is an impressive turnaround in launch times and will allow Rocket Lab to burnish its credentials for the US Space Force, which has prioritized "responsive" launch in recent years.

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Back in 2020, Sarah Cooper’s “How to Medical” lip-sync of Donald Trump’s proposed Covid-19 cures went viral on social media. TikTok’s latest trend gives that schtick a new spin.

A few months back, I put together a big fat guide on how to configure DNS and DHCP on your LAN the old-school way, with bind and dhcpd working together to seamlessly hand out addresses to hosts on your network and also register those hosts in your LAN's forward and reverse DNS lookup zones. The article did really well—thanks for reading it!—but one thing commenters pointed out was that my preferred dhcpd implementation, the venerable isc-dhcp-server, reached end-of-life in 2022. To replace it, ISC has for many years been working on the development of a new DHCP server named Kea.

Kea (which for this piece will refer mainly to the isc-kea-dhcp4 and isc-kea-dhcp-ddns applications) doesn't alter the end-user experience of receiving DHCP addresses—your devices won't much care if you're using isc-dhcp-server or isc-kea-dhcp4. Instead, what Kea brings to the table is a new codebase that jettisons the older dhcpd's multi-decade pile of often crufty code for a new pile of much less crufty code that will (hopefully) be easier to maintain and extend.

Many Ars readers are aware of the classic Joel on Software blog post about how rewriting your application from scratch is almost never a good idea, but something like isc-dhcp-server—whose redesign is being handled planfully by the Internet Systems Consortium—is the exception to the rule.

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From a booger buster to a food masher, these gifts make this amazing (and difficult!) job just a little easier.

Sixty-five years ago, the Army's leaders unveiled its “ultimate weapon” for the age of atomic warfare. Here’s how the service’s vision stands up to today's reality.

The US Commerce Department announced Thursday it is easing restrictions on exports of space-related technology, answering a yearslong call from space companies to reform regulations governing international trade.

This is the most significant update to space-related export regulations in a decade and opens more opportunities for US companies to sell their satellite hardware abroad.

“We are very excited about this rollout," a senior Commerce official said during a background call with reporters. "It’s been a long time coming, and I think it’s going to be very meaningful for our national security and foreign policy interests and certainly facilitate secure trade with our partners."

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It's been a big year for Windows running on Arm chips, something that Microsoft and Arm chipmakers have been trying to get off the ground for well over a decade. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus are at the heart of dozens of Copilot+ Windows PCs, which promise unique AI features and good battery life without as many of the app and hardware compatibility problems that have plagued Windows-on-Arm in the past.

Part of the initial wave of Copilot+ PCs was a single desktop, an $899 developer kit from Qualcomm itself that would give developers and testers a slightly cheaper way to buy into the Copilot+ ecosystem. Microsoft put out a similar Arm-powered dev kit two years ago.

But Qualcomm has unceremoniously canceled the dev kit and is sending out refunds to those who ordered them. That's according to a note received by developer and YouTuber Jeff Geerling, who had already received the Snapdragon Dev Kit and given it a middling review a couple of weeks ago.

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Recently, AI researcher Simon Willison wanted to add up his charges from using a cloud service, but the payment values and dates he needed were scattered among a dozen separate emails. Inputting them manually would have been tedious, so he turned to a technique he calls "video scraping," which involves feeding a screen recording video into an AI model, similar to ChatGPT, for data extraction purposes.

What he discovered seems simple on its surface, but the quality of the result has deeper implications for the future of AI assistants, which may soon be able to see and interact with what we're doing on our computer screens.

"The other day I found myself needing to add up some numeric values that were scattered across twelve different emails," Willison wrote in a detailed post on his blog. He recorded a 35-second video scrolling through the relevant emails, then fed that video into Google's AI Studio tool, which allows people to experiment with several versions of Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash AI models.

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Dune: Prophecy will premiere on HBO and Max on November 17, 2024.

New York Comic-Con kicked off today, and among the highlights was an HBO panel devoted to the platform's forthcoming new series, Dune: Prophecy—including the release of a two-and-a-half-minute trailer.

As previously reported, the series was announced in 2019, with director Denis Villeneuve serving as an executive producer and Alison Schapker (Alias, Fringe, Altered Carbon) serving as showrunner. It's a prequel series inspired by the novel Sisterhood of Dune, written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, exploring the origins of the Bene Gesserit. The first season will have six episodes, and it's unclear how closely the series will adhere to the source material. Per the official premise:

Set 10,000 years before the ascension of Paul Atreides, Dune: Prophecy follows two Harkonnen sisters as they combat forces that threaten the future of humankind, and establish the fabled sect that will become known as the Bene Gesserit.

Emily Watson co-stars as Valya Harkonnen, leader of the Sisterhood, with Olivia Williams playing her sister, Tula Harkonnen. Mark Strong plays Emperor Javicco Corrino, while Jodhi May plays Empress Natalya, and Sarah-Sofie Boussnina plays Princess Ynez.

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Since Redbox went bankrupt, many have wondered what will happen to those red kiosks and DVDs. Another question worth examining is: What will happen to all the data stored inside the Redboxes?

Redbox parent company Chicken Soup for the Soul filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in June and is in the process of liquidating its assets. Meanwhile, stores with Redboxes are eager to remove the obsolete hardware. And tinkerers have reported getting their hands on Redbox kiosks and doing all sorts of things with them, including running Doom.

But Redboxes falling into technologists' hands can seemingly also result in the uncovering of customer data from kiosks' hard drives. As spotted by Lowpass today, programmer and expert reverse-engineer Foone Turing reported via Mastodon that she was able to retrieve records for 2,471 transactions from the disk image of a Redbox hard drive. Turing told Ars Technica that she got the image from a Discord channel:

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Between 1400 and 1775, a significant upsurge in witch trials swept across early modern Europe, resulting in the execution of an estimated 40,000–60,000 accused witches. Historians and social scientists have long studied this period in hopes of learning more about how large-scale social changes occur. Some have pointed to the invention of the printing press and the publication of witch-hunting manuals—most notably the highly influential Malleus Maleficarum—as a major factor, making it easier for the witch-hunting hysteria to spread across the continent.

The abrupt emergence of the craze and its rapid spread, resulting in a pronounced shift in social behaviors—namely, the often brutal persecution of suspected witches—is consistent with a theory of social change dubbed "ideational diffusion," according to a new paper published in the journal Theory and Society. There is the introduction of new ideas, reinforced by social networks, that eventually take root and lead to widespread behavioral changes in a society.

The authors had already been thinking about cultural change and the driving forces by which it occurs, including social contagion—especially large cultural shifts like the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, for example. One co-author, Steve Pfaff, a sociologist at Chapman University, was working on a project about witch trials in Scotland and was particularly interested in the role the Malleus Maleficarum might have played.

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Measles, whooping cough, polio, tetanus—devastating and sometimes deadly diseases await comebacks in the US as more and more parents are declining routine childhood vaccines that have proved safe and effective.

The vaccination rates among kindergartners have fallen once again, dipping into the range of 92 percent in the 2023–2024 school year, down from about 93 percent the previous school year and 95 percent in 2019–2020. That's according to an analysis of the latest vaccination data published today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The analysis also found that vaccination exemptions rose to an all-time high of 3.3 percent, up from 3 percent in the previous school year. The rise in exemptions is nearly entirely driven by non-medical exemptions—in other words, religious or philosophical exemptions. Only 0.2 percent of all vaccination exemptions are medically justified.

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Google is making changes to the Gemini app team and Knowledge & Information teams.Google is making changes to the Gemini app team and Knowledge & Information teams.

An overview of Google Research and why research is having ever more real-world impact.An overview of Google Research and why research is having ever more real-world impact.

NotebookLM is piloting a way for teams to collaborate, and introducing a new way to customize Audio Overviews.NotebookLM is piloting a way for teams to collaborate, and introducing a new way to customize Audio Overviews.