Ars Technica

As H5N1 bird flu continues to spread wildly among California dairy herds and farmworkers, federal health officials on Thursday offered some relatively good news about Missouri: The wily avian influenza virus does not appear to have spread from the state's sole human case, which otherwise remains a mystery.

On September 6, the Missouri Health department announced that a person with underlying health conditions tested positive for bird flu, and later testing indicated that it was an H5N1 strain related to the one currently circulating among US dairy cows. But, state and federal health officials were—and still are—stumped as to how that person became infected. The person had no known contact with infected animals and no contact with any obviously suspect animal products. No dairy herds in Missouri have tested positive, and no poultry farms had reported recent outbreaks, either. To date, all other human cases of H5N1 have been among farmworkers who had contact with H5N1-infected animals.

But aside from the puzzle, attention turned to the possibility that the unexplained Missouri case had passed on the infection to those around them. A household contact had symptoms at the same time as the person—aka the index case—and at least six health care workers developed illnesses after interacting with the person. One of the six had tested negative for bird flu around the time of their illness, but questions remained about the other five.

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Apple has released new iPhones, new Apple Watches, a new iPad mini, and a flotilla of software updates this fall, but Mac hardware has gone unmentioned so far. That's set to change next week, according to an uncharacteristically un-cryptic post from Apple Worldwide Marketing SVP Greg Joswiak earlier today.

Imploring readers to "Mac [sic] their calendars," Joswiak's post teases "an exciting week of announcements ahead, starting on Monday morning." If the wordplay wasn't enough, an attached teaser video with a winking neon Mac logo drives the point home.

Though Joswiak's post was light on additional details, months of reliable rumors have told us the most likely things to expect: refreshed MacBook Pros and 24-inch iMacs with few if any external changes but new Apple M4-series chips on the inside, plus a new M4 Mac mini with a substantial design overhaul. The MacBook Pros and iMacs were refreshed with M3 chips almost exactly a year ago, but the Mac mini was last updated with the M2 in early 2023.

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"Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements. They can come back in the future if sufficient documentation is provided."

That two-line comment, submitted by major Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, accompanied a patch that removed about a dozen names from the kernle's MAINTAINERS file. "Some entries" notably had either Russian names or .ru email addresses. "Various compliance requirements" was, in this case, sanctions against Russia and Russian companies, stemming from that country's invasion of Ukraine.

This merge did not go unnoticed. Replies on the kernel mailing list asked about this "very vague" patch. Kernel developer James Bottomley wrote that "we" (seemingly speaking for Linux maintainers) had "actual advice" from Linux Foundation counsel. Employees of companies on the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (OFAC SDN), or connected to them, will have their collaborations "subject to restrictions," and "cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file." "Sufficient documentation" would mean evidence that someone does not work for an OFAC SDN entity, Bottomley wrote.

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Cable companies, advertising firms, and newspapers are asking courts to block a federal "click-to-cancel" rule that would force businesses to make it easier for consumers to cancel services. Lawsuits were filed yesterday, about a week after the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that "requires sellers to provide consumers with simple cancellation mechanisms to immediately halt all recurring charges."

Cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association and the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade group sued the FTC in the conservative US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. The lawsuit claims the 5th Circuit is a proper venue because a third plaintiff, the Electronic Security Association, has its principal offices in Dallas. That group represents security companies such as ADT.

A separate lawsuit was filed against the FTC in the 6th Circuit appeals court by the Michigan Press Association and National Federation of Independent Business. The two lawsuits were apparently coordinated as they both complain about the rule with the following text:

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Back in May, Google augmented its Gemini AI model with SynthID, a toolkit that embeds AI-generated content with watermarks it says are "imperceptible to humans" but can be easily and reliably detected via an algorithm. Today, Google took that SynthID system open source, offering the same basic watermarking toolkit for free to developers and businesses.

The move gives the entire AI industry an easy, seemingly robust way to silently mark content as artificially generated, which could be useful for detecting deepfakes and other damaging AI content before it goes out in the wild. But there are still some important limitations that may prevent AI watermarking from becoming a de facto standard across the AI industry any time soon.

Google uses a version of SynthID to watermark audio, video, and images generated by its multimodal AI systems, with differing techniques that are explained briefly in this video. But in a new paper published in Nature, Google researchers go into detail on how the SynthID process embeds an unseen watermark in the text-based output of its Gemini model.

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In the 1940s, scientists at the recently established National Cancer Institute were trying to breed mice that could inform our understanding of cancer, either because they predictably developed certain cancers or were surprisingly resistant.

The team spotted a peculiar litter in which some baby mice had short, kinked tails and misplaced ribs growing out of their neck bones. The strain of mice, nicknamed “tail short,” has been faithfully bred ever since, in the hope that one day, research might reveal what was the matter with them.

After more than 60 years, researchers finally got their answer, when Maria Barna, a developmental biologist then at the University of California San Francisco, found that the mice had a genetic mutation that caused a protein to disappear from their ribosomes—the places in cells where proteins are made.

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You likely have never heard of Babel Street or Location X, but chances are good that they know a lot about you and anyone else you know who keeps a phone nearby around the clock.

Reston, Virginia-located Babel Street is the little-known firm behind Location X, a service with the capability to track the locations of hundreds of millions of phone users over sustained periods of time. Ostensibly, Babel Street limits the use of the service to personnel and contractors of US government law enforcement agencies, including state entities. Despite the restriction, an individual working on behalf of a company that helps people remove their personal information from consumer data broker databases recently was able to obtain a two-week free trial by (truthfully) telling Babel Street he was considering performing contracting work for a government agency in the future.

KrebsOnSecurity, one of five news outlets that obtained access to the data produced during the trial, said that one capability of Location X is the ability to draw a line between two states or other locations—or a shape around a building, street block, or entire city—and see a historical record of Internet-connected devices that traversed those boundaries.

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SAN FRANCISCO—On Tuesday, TED AI 2024 kicked off its first day at San Francisco's Herbst Theater with a lineup of speakers that tackled AI's impact on science, art, and society. The two-day event brought a mix of researchers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and other experts who painted a complex picture of AI with fairly minimal hype.

The second annual conference, organized by Walter and Sam De Brouwer, marked a notable shift from last year's broad existential debates and proclamations of AI as being "the new electricity." Rather than sweeping predictions about, say, looming artificial general intelligence (although there was still some of that, too), speakers mostly focused on immediate challenges: battles over training data rights, proposals for hardware-based regulation, debates about human-AI relationships, and the complex dynamics of workplace adoption.

The day's sessions covered a wide breadth of AI topics: physicist Carlo Rovelli explored consciousness and time, Project CETI researcher Patricia Sharma demonstrated attempts to use AI to decode whale communication, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. outlined music industry adaptation strategies, and even a few robots made appearances.

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After a rocky first half of the year, Tesla enjoyed a much healthier third quarter in 2024. As we learned earlier this month, it arrested a slide in sales, delivering 6 percent more electric vehicles year over year. But the automotive side of the business was essentially flat—Tesla attributes its success to its second-best quarter ever for regulatory credits, as well as making it cheaper to build the cars it sells.

Automotive revenues grew by 2 percent to $20 billion for the third quarter, less than the growth in deliveries. But Tesla's static battery and solar operations grew by 52 percent year over year, bringing in $2.4 billion. Services and other revenue-generating activities brought in another $2.8 billion, growing 29 percent compared to Q3 2023.

Cutting operating expenses by 6 percent helped a lot, as did increasing income from operations, up 54 percent to $2.7 billion. Some of that income has come from the Supercharger network, though it's still mostly from Tesla drivers—so far, only a few of the OEMs that have announced a switch to the Tesla-style NACS plug have gained access to Tesla's chargers. But Tesla says part sales have been strong, and it has increased its margins at its service centers.

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Fourteen-year-old Sewell Setzer III loved interacting with Character.AI's hyper-realistic chatbots—with a limited version available for free or a "supercharged" version for a $9.99 monthly fee—most frequently chatting with bots named after his favorite Game of Thrones characters.

Within a month—his mother, Megan Garcia, later realized—these chat sessions had turned dark, with chatbots insisting they were real humans and posing as therapists and adult lovers seeming to directly spur Sewell to develop suicidal thoughts. Within a year, Setzer "died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head," a lawsuit Garcia filed Wednesday said.

As Setzer became obsessed with his chatbot fantasy life, he disconnected from reality, her complaint said. Detecting a shift in her son, Garcia repeatedly took Setzer to a therapist, who diagnosed her son with anxiety and disruptive mood disorder. But nothing helped to steer Setzer away from the dangerous chatbots. Taking away his phone only intensified his apparent addiction.

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When Zachary Lindsey, a physicist at Berry College in Georgia, decided to run an experiment on how to get the best speed and torque while playing disc golf (aka Frisbee golf), he had no trouble recruiting 24 eager participants keen on finding science-based tips on how to improve their game. Lindsey and his team determined the optimal thumb distance from the center of the disc to increase launch speed and distance, according to a new paper published in the journal AIP Advances.

Disc golf first emerged in the 1960s, but "Steady" Ed Hendrick, inventor of the modern Frisbee, is widely considered the "father" of the sport since it was he who coined and trademarked the name "disc golf" in 1975. He and his son founded their own company to manufacture the equipment used in the game. As of 2023, the Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA) had over 107,000 registered members worldwide, with players hailing from 40 countries.

A disc golf course typically has either nine or 18 holes or targets, called "baskets." There is a tee position for starting play, and players take turns throwing discs until they catch them in the basket, similar to how golfers work toward sinking a golf ball into a hole. The expected number of throws required of an experienced player to make the basket is considered "par."

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It's been just a week since US telecom regulators announced a formal inquiry into broadband data caps, and the docket is filling up with comments from users who say they shouldn't have to pay overage charges for using their Internet service. The docket has about 190 comments so far, nearly all from individual broadband customers.

Federal Communications Commission dockets are usually populated with filings from telecom companies, advocacy groups, and other organizations, but some attract comments from individual users of telecom services. The data cap docket probably won't break any records given that the FCC has fielded many millions of comments on net neutrality, but it currently tops the agency's list of most active proceedings based on the number of filings in the past 30 days.

"Data caps, especially by providers in markets with no competition, are nothing more than an arbitrary money grab by greedy corporations. They limit and stifle innovation, cause undue stress, and are unnecessary," wrote Lucas Landreth.

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Today, Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 18.2 for supported devices. This beta release marks the first time several key AI features that Apple teased at its developer conference this June are available.

Apple is marketing a wide range of generative AI features under the banner "Apple Intelligence." Initially, Apple Intelligence was planned to release as part of iOS 18, but some features slipped to iOS 18.1, others to iOS 18.2, and a few still to future undisclosed software updates.

iOS 18.1 has been in beta for a while and includes improvements to Siri, generative writing tools that help with rewriting or proofreading, smart replies for Messages, and notification summaries. That update is expected to reach the public next week.

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Trying to watch your favorite NFL team's games throughout a season is a fiendish logistics puzzle, one that doesn't even have a "just pay for it" shortcut.

You can buy a Sunday Ticket package from YouTube, but that only covers games on Sunday and only those not shown in your local TV market. You can pay for cable or set up an HDTV antenna, but you have to hope it catches NBC, CBS, and Fox for Sunday games (if your local station chooses to carry your team), and for Monday night games, ABC (though most are on ESPN and some even exclusive to ESPN+). Thursday nights? That's Amazon Prime.

Oh, and this year's Christmas Day games are on Netflix. And the games played in London and Germany are on the NFL Network, which requires either cable or an NFL+ subscription. And Peacock also had that one game in Brazil and is getting another playoff game this year. Many of these games get broadcast options in their home regions, though that doesn't much help ex-pat fans.

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Any company that makes Arm chips must license technology from Arm Holdings plc, the British company that develops the instruction set. Companies can license the instruction set and create their own CPU designs or license one of Arm's ready-made Cortex CPU core designs to incorporate into their own chips.

Bloomberg reports that Arm is canceling Qualcomm's license, an escalation of a fight that began in late 2022 when Arm sued Qualcomm over its acquisition of Nuvia in 2021. Arm has given Qualcomm 60 days' notice of the cancellation, giving the companies two months to come to some kind of agreement before Qualcomm is forced to stop manufacturing and selling its Arm chips.

"This is more of the same from ARM—more unfounded threats designed to strongarm a longtime partner, interfere with our performance-leading CPUs, and increase royalty rates regardless of the broad rights under our architecture license," a Qualcomm spokesperson told Ars. "With a trial fast approaching in December, Arm’s desperate ploy appears to be an attempt to disrupt the legal process, and its claim for termination is completely baseless. We are confident that Qualcomm’s rights under its agreement with Arm will be affirmed. Arm’s anticompetitive conduct will not be tolerated.”

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The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) board has agreed to spend $212 million to get its Muni Metro light rail off floppy disks.

The Muni Metro’s Automatic Train Control System (ATCS) has required 5¼-inch floppy disks since 1998, when it was installed at San Francisco’s Market Street subway station. The system uses three floppy disks for loading DOS software that controls the system’s central servers. Michael Roccaforte, an SFMTA spokesperson, gave further details on how the light rail operates to Ars Technica in April, saying: “When a train enters the subway, its onboard computer connects to the train control system to run the train in automatic mode, where the trains drive themselves while the operators supervise. When they exit the subway, they disconnect from the ATCS and return to manual operation on the street." After starting initial planning in 2018, the SFMTA originally expected to move to a floppy-disk-free train control system by 2028. But with COVID-19 preventing work for 18 months, the estimated completion date was delayed.

On October 15, the SFMTA moved closer to ditching floppies when its board approved a contract with Hitachi Rail for implementing a new train control system that doesn't use floppy disks, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Hitachi Rail tech is said to power train systems, including Japan’s bullet train, in more than 50 countries. The $212 million contract includes support services from Hitachi for "20 to 25 years," the Chronicle said.

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One person is dead and 48 others across 10 states have been sickened in an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak that appears to be linked to McDonald's Quarter Pounders and the slivered onions used on the burgers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

McDonald's has paused distribution of the slivered onions and removed Quarter Pounders from the menus of restaurants in areas known to be affected. As of now, those areas include Colorado, Kansas, Utah, and Wyoming, as well as portions of Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.

However, the CDC was quick to note that the size and span of the outbreak are likely larger than is currently known. "This outbreak may not be limited to the states with known illnesses, and the true number of sick people is likely much higher than the number reported," the agency said in its outbreak notice posted Tuesday afternoon.

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When Canadian developer Peter Todd found out that a new HBO documentary, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, was set to identify him as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin, he was mostly just pissed. “This was clearly going to be a circus,” Todd told WIRED in an email.

The identity of the person—or people—who created bitcoin has been the subject of speculation since December 2010, when they disappeared from public view. The mystery has proved all the more irresistible for the trove of bitcoin Satoshi is widely believed to have controlled, suspected to be worth many billions of dollars today. When the documentary was released on October 8, Todd joined a long line of alleged Satoshis.

Documentary maker Cullen Hoback, who in a previous film claimed to have identified the individual behind QAnon, laid out his theory to Todd on camera. The confrontation would become the climactic scene of the documentary. But Todd nonetheless claims he didn’t see it coming; he alleges he was left with the impression the film was about the history of bitcoin, not the identity of its creator.

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T-Mobile promised users who bought certain mobile plans that it would never raise their prices for as long as they lived—but then raised their prices this year. So it's no surprise that 2,000 T-Mobile customers complained to the government about a price hike on plans that were advertised as having a lifetime price lock.

"I am still alive and T-Mobile is increasing the price for service by $5 per line. How is this a lifetime price lock?" one customer in Connecticut asked the Federal Communications Commission in a complaint that we obtained through a public records request.

"I am not dead yet," a customer in New York wrote bluntly, saying they had bought a plan with a "guarantee for life."

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United Launch Alliance has started assembling its next Vulcan rocket—the first destined to launch a US military payload—as the Space Force prepares to certify it to loft the Pentagon's most precious national security satellites.

Space Force officials expect to approve ULA's Vulcan rocket for military missions without requiring another test flight, despite an unusual problem on the rocket's second demonstration flight earlier this month.

ULA has launched two Vulcan test flights. Military officials watched closely, gathering data to formally certify the rocket is reliable enough to launch national security missions. The first test flight in January, designated Cert-1, was nearly flawless. The Cert-2 launch October 4 overcame an anomaly on one of Vulcan's strap-on solid rocket boosters, which lost its exhaust nozzle but kept firing with degraded thrust.

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