SpaceX has filed to expand its Starlink satellite network far beyond its current size, aiming to boost total network bandwidth by a factor of 100. Here is how the company plans to pull that off, and why it says it needs a constellation this large.
A ransomware negotiator hired to represent victims was sentenced to six years in prison for secretly working with attackers to help extort his own clients. According to Ars Technica, the case exposes just how fragile — and largely unregulated — the trust underpinning this niche industry really is.
The European Union has told Meta to disable features like autoplay and infinite scroll under the Digital Services Act or face steep fines. According to Ars Technica, the move is part of a broader regulatory push against how platforms design for user engagement and addictive scrolling.
Quantum computing startup Oratomic has raised $300 million for a project aiming to build a viable quantum computer using only 20,000 qubits. According to TechCrunch, that figure challenges the industry's usual assumption that millions of qubits are needed — so what exactly is a qubit, and why does the count matter so much?
South Korean memory chipmaker SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion in the largest foreign IPO in US stock market history, a milestone driven by the AI chip demand boom. According to TechCrunch, the debut has also put pressure on the company to build new fabrication plants on US soil.
Microsoft's carbon emissions rose 25 percent last year, according to its own sustainability report, as the company expanded data center capacity to meet demand for AI computing. The increase illustrates a broader tension facing tech giants between climate commitments and the energy appetite of generative AI.
The European Parliament has advanced a version of "Chat Control," a long-debated proposal aimed at detecting child sexual abuse material shared through messaging apps. Critics, including some lawmakers who backed the vote, argue the measures could weaken encryption and expose ordinary users' private messages to scanning.
Surgeons remotely controlled humanoid robots to perform a preclinical operation on live pigs, described as a world first for the field. The trial is testing whether humanoid robotic platforms, rather than traditional fixed surgical robots, can make complex procedures more flexible and eventually deployable in more settings.
The New York Times and other news publishers have filed a new motion for sanctions against OpenAI, alleging the company hid tools and datasets that could have identified copyrighted journalism appearing in ChatGPT outputs. The filing escalates a long-running lawsuit over how AI models are trained on published news content.
OpenAI's number two executive, Fidji Simo, is stepping down from her full-time role after medical leave for a neuroimmune condition proved longer than expected. Her departure creates a leadership gap as the company weighs a possible IPO and competes with Anthropic for enterprise customers.
Meta is reportedly developing prototype smart glasses that continuously record audio and capture images every few seconds, feeding an always-aware AI assistant. According to the Financial Times, one proposed design would keep raw footage from the wearer, a setup that sharpens long-running questions about consent and surveillance.
The startup General Intuition is betting that millions of hours of video game footage can train foundation models for physical AI, making smarter robots easier to build with far less real-world data. The idea points to why robotics has lagged behind language AI, and what a breakthrough might require.
John Deere equipment owners will gain broader rights to repair their own machines under a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission. The case is a milestone in the long-running right-to-repair fight, which asks who is really allowed to fix the increasingly software-laden products people buy.
The Fiat Topolino is arriving in the US at about $13,995, making it the country's cheapest new electric vehicle, but it tops out at 19mph and travels roughly 46 miles per charge. It is less a conventional car than a micromobility vehicle, and it poses a real question about what an affordable EV should be.
When an Ivy League professor grew suspicious that students were leaning on AI, he replaced take-home work with a supervised, in-person final. Scores fell by about half, a result that has become a flashpoint in the wider debate over what chatbots are doing to how students learn and how universities assess them.
A security advisory reports that multiple versions of Tenda router firmware contain a hidden authentication backdoor, letting attackers bypass the login. Here is what a firmware backdoor is, why home routers are a favorite target, and how to protect your network.
China's DeepSeek plans to develop its own AI chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia and Huawei, a response to US export controls that restrict access to the most advanced processors. Here is why the move matters for the global race to build AI, and how hard it will be.
Meta has launched Muse Image, its first image-generation model from its Superintelligence Labs, now powering AI photo tools across Instagram, WhatsApp and the Meta AI app. Users pushed back over a feature that can pull other people into AI images. Here is what it does and why it raises privacy concerns.
The rapid rise of open-source AI models was expected to erode the business of closed frontier labs, but so far it hasn't. Here is how open and proprietary AI actually differ, why they may serve two phases of the same cycle, and what it means for the market.
From a massive government-data breach to intrusions into critical energy and water systems and an FBI surveillance tool, 2026's most damaging cyberattacks share common threads. Here is a rundown of the biggest incidents and the security lessons they hold.
Sequencing your own DNA at home was once unthinkable, but affordable portable sequencers have brought it within reach of hobbyists. This explainer walks through how home DNA sequencing works, what it can reveal, and the real limits and caveats behind the do-it-yourself genomics trend.
Astronauts have long carried historic artifacts into orbit, from flags to fragments of the past. Ars Technica traces the surprising history of the oldest pieces of Americana ever flown in space, a tradition that blends symbolism, sentiment and a dash of showmanship.
The US Federal Communications Commission plans to end a rule requiring internet service providers to itemize every fee on standardized broadband labels, according to Ars Technica. Providers would instead be allowed to advertise a single 'up to' price, a change consumer advocates say could obscure the true cost of service.
A recent change to Google's privacy settings lets the company store more of your data, including activity that can help train its AI. TechCrunch outlines what shifted and, crucially, the steps you can take to opt out if you would rather your data not be used this way.
An AI agent carried out the technical execution of a real-world ransomware attack for the first known time, according to TechCrunch, but new details show a human still directed key parts of the operation. The case highlights both how far attack automation has come and its current limits.
Programmers have long argued that clean, well-organised code is easier to work with. A new research paper asks whether the same holds for AI coding agents, testing if messy code makes the software assistants now writing code perform worse. Here is why the question matters.
A wave of expensive private schools is putting artificial intelligence at the centre of the classroom, with software driving lessons and human adults acting more as coaches. The Verge reports on the model attracting wealthy families, and the questions it raises about what education should be.
The rock record of Earth's earliest history is strangely blank for hundreds of millions of years. New research suggests a relentless cosmic bombardment repeatedly melted the young planet's first crust, erasing the evidence, and offers an explanation for one of geology's oldest puzzles.
Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourcing marketplace that helped pioneer online micro-work, according to TechCrunch. The move marks a turning point for a platform that quietly shaped how data is labelled and how AI is trained.
Bending Spoons, the Italian company that has quietly bought a string of well-known apps including Evernote, WeTransfer and Vimeo and now owns AOL, has gone public. Here is a plain guide to what the company does, how its acquire-and-run strategy works and why it has drawn both attention and criticism.