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Tech
Industry, products, and the wires that hold it all together.
744 stories archived
Trainwatch – alone with your thoughts on a railway line to nowhere
The flat routines of a dead end railway job screen out an approaching menace in a quietly intriguing game from the indie developer of Cat Lady and Lorelai Lonely jobs have provided excellent material for independent video games over the years. From Papers, Please to Firewatch to The Stanley Parable , players have been happy to spend hours dwelling in depressing cubicles or rural hideaways, usually because there is an intriguingly hidden point to it all. In Trainwatch, a character named Troy has taken a seemingly godforsaken job as a railway worker in an unnamed desolate backwater. His main task over the course of a single month is to manage a level crossing, closing the gate whenever a train comes, while also carrying out daily chores such as cooking and washing. It sounds serene, but Troy is also running away from something. The other stipulations are that he stays sober and calls his wife every night. And there is something lurking in the fog at the edges of the fields – one day he must face it. Continue reading...
RIP, Tim Curry: Ars remembers his top 10 iconic performances
A dashing pirate, a butler, a killer clown, an alien mad scientist in drag—the man had range.
AI agents meant to replace Meta workers made “large-scale, disruptive actions”
Reuters report shows Meta's challenges replacing people with AI agents.
New Twitter launches, says Musk's X gave up the name
Judge hasn't ruled on X Corp’s preliminary injunction, but Operation Bluebird plows ahead
Meta settles states' child-safety claims for $18B; Florida rejects deal as "peanuts"
Meta to impose daily limit on child social media use in deal with nearly every state.
A Student Said He Was a Hobby Plane Spotter. He Was Allegedly Taking Photos for the Chinese Government
Weiheng Zeng originally said he took photos of planes for an aviation fan website. Later he admitted a suspected Chinese government official had given him specific locations in the U.S. to go photograph.
Florida Catholics slap down state AG by rejecting religious vaccine exemptions
The bishops' snub comes as the state continues to attack vaccines.
Google announces Gemini 3.5 Transcribe for AI-powered speech-to-text
The AI that powers Gboard's Rambler is coming to more Google products, including Chrome.
OpenAI staff observed warning signs before AI agent hacking crusade caused global alarm
Firm says ‘early signals … could have triggered an earlier response’ as it releases report into Hugging Face hack OpenAI staff observed signs of rogue behaviour among its leading-edge AI agents weeks before they escaped their training environment to launch an unprecedented hacking crusade that spread global alarm. The San Francisco AI company conceded on Wednesday that “early signals … could have triggered an earlier response”, as it released a report into the days-long July hack of a major software repository, Hugging Face , considered the first autonomous agent cyber-attack. Continue reading...
Scientists Discover Vast Underground 'Anomaly' on Mars
Scientists have used a novel technique to detect a major temperature asymmetry under the surface of Mars that could shed light on the evolution and past habitability of the red planet.
The Porsche 911 GT3 Touring punches above its weight class
The "everyday" GT3 delivers, despite looming regulations and an ever-inflating price tag.
Xbox’s new disc-to-digital program gives physical games a digital future
"Most" Xbox One and Series X games are compatible; discs will still work after being claimed.
Court blocks Trump FCC order that could flood broadcast TV with more election ads
Republicans demanded that parties and fundraising committees be given lowest ad rates.
Researchers get two genetic codes to work at the same time
Messing with the genetic code might have gotten a bit easier to do.
15,000 years of solar wind in four hours? A Seattle company gives it a go.
"We're living in this world of scarcity with the Moon."
With the end of physical media in sight, gamers have had enough
An increasing tension between players and publishers about ownership of titles could lead to a divestment from the system the big companies are trying to enforce At the time of press, there is a well-publicised protest taking place in the video games community. PlayStation 5 owners are being encouraged to log off from their consoles between 23 and 30 August – no playing games, no downloading new titles. The motivating factor is Sony’s decision to cease physical game disc production from January 2028. After that, games will only be released as digital products. In an act of poor timing or wilful defiance, Sony chose this week to send out a mass email reminding customers of their PS5 terms and conditions: “The software is licensed to you, not sold,” states the relevant clause. “You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and personal license to play … ” It knows, of course, that most customers won’t open the email, let alone read it. There has always been a tension between game players and game publishers – an underlying sense of mutual mistrust. Players are wary of their favourite franchises being canned, or games being delayed or released with bugs. Publishers and manufacturers are wary of piracy and the capricious tastes of consumers. But now the atmosphere among many game players feels more starkly political than ever. Microsoft has been targeted by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement for its ties to the Israeli military ; the consumer advocacy group Stop Killing Games is gaining support; players have protested over the purchase of Electronic Arts by a Saudi-led consortium – boycotts have been proposed in part due to the possible ramifications regarding LGBTQ+ content in titles such as The Sims. As the games industry has grown and globalised, its impact on culture, society and politics has increased. Yet, on an individual level, gamers and consumers are feeling increasingly powerless. Continue reading...
Psychiatry’s diagnostic bible is finally getting a biological upgrade
Biology is coming to psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, even as reliable biomarkers remain rare.
Flock’s CEO Is Lying to Cops About 404 Media's Reporting on Abortion Case
Garrett Langley, Flock’s CEO, told cops that a 404 Media story about cops using Flock to track someone who self-administered an abortion was "entirely false." He's lying.
Meta agrees to major changes to Facebook and Instagram as it settles US trial over teen addiction for up to $17bn
US tech giant agrees to establish further protections for teens such as daily usage limits and blocks on nighttime use Meta agreed to significant changes to its Instagram and Facebook apps in a settlement that ended a landmark lawsuit on Wednesday. Dozens of US states had accused the tech giant of addicting and harming children with dangerous products. The agreement curtails a major trial in California and will require the social media company to pay up to $17bn. Meta agreed to establish safeguards for teenage users, including daily usage limits and blocks on nighttime use nationwide in the US. Continue reading...
Inside the Warehouse Where Amazon Scans and Destroys Books for AI Training
An interview with one of the Amazon employees at Amazon’s AI training facility VGT3.
Podcast: Cops Are Making Fake Flock Cameras and Amazon Packages
Cops making fake Flock cameras to catch people, Darth Vader unmasked, and our three year anniversary.
Vholume review – a headlong rush of parkour perfection in a brutalist wonderland
PC; Nathan Grange, Léonard Lemaitre, Niels Tiercelin, IronEqual Race across impossible dystopian cityscapes in this exhilarating game of wall-runs, death-chancing leaps and split-second improvisation At first, Vholume seems like a quick rush through some smartly selected references. Has this breathless yet austere parkour game been designed or ingeniously curated? The urban gymnast moveset comes from Mirror’s Edge. Level names use terms like conapt, first coined by Philip K Dick. And the environments themselves are dystopian and surreal, Half-Life 2’s City 17 colliding with the blasted avenues and mute archways of de Chirico. Many games have influences. Vholume has actual taste. All the surface stuff fades away when the game is in motion, however. Vholume’s an on-foot racing game in which you hoof it through spectacularly odd environments, moving from one beam of concrete to the next. You’re clipping your wall-runs and power-slides together to bridge seemingly impossible gaps between buildings, forever in search of the next stretch of track, the next turn, the next jump that gets you to the level’s exit and the worldwide leaderboards. And once that’s done, you have a choice: onwards to another gauntlet, or back to the start of this one again to slice a few microseconds off your score? Or maybe you’d rather head over to multiplayer to race against the ghosts of others? Continue reading...
IBM's new Granite 4.2 models ride the wave of interest in local LLMs
The focus is on agentic capability and predictable enterprise deployment.
Xtracycle's Swoop ASM e-bike brings an automatic transmission to cargo bikes
A steel frame cargo bike with a unique twist: You can let it choose your gear.