ArsTechnica
Trump offers universities a choice: Comply for preferential funding
On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration had offered nine schools a deal: manage your universities in a way that aligns with administration priorities and get “substantial and meaningful federal grants," along with other benefits. Failure to accept the bargain would result in a withdrawal of federal programs that would likely cripple most universities. The offer, sent to a mixture of state and private universities, would see the government dictate everything from hiring and admissions standards to grading and has provisions that appear intended to make conservative ideas more welcome on campus.
The document was sent to the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia. However, independent reporting indicates that the administration will ultimately extend the deal to all colleges and universities.
Ars has obtained a copy of the proposed "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education," which makes the scope of the bargain clear in its introduction. "Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits," it suggests, while mentioning that those benefits include access to fundamental needs, like student loans, federal contracts, research funding, tax benefits, and immigration visas for students and faculty.
Meta won’t allow users to opt out of targeted ads based on AI chats
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users may want to be extra careful while using Meta AI, as Meta has announced that it will soon be using AI interactions to personalize content and ad recommendations without giving users a way to opt out.
Meta plans to notify users on October 7 that their AI interactions will influence recommendations beginning on December 16. However, it may not be immediately obvious to all users that their AI interactions will be used in this way.
The company's blog noted that the initial notification users will see only says, "Learn how Meta will use your info in new ways to personalize your experience." Users will have to click through to understand that the changes specifically apply to Meta AI, with a second screen explaining, "We'll start using your interactions with AIs to personalize your experience."
World-famous primatologist Jane Goodall dead at 91
Legendary primatologist Jane Goodall, whose immersive field research living among chimpanzees in the 1960s essentially redefined the relationship between humans and animals, has died at the age of 91. According to the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), Goodall died of natural causes while in California as part of a US speaking tour.
"Jane was passionate about empowering young people to become involved in conservation and humanitarian projects and she led many educational initiatives focused on both wild and captive chimpanzees," the institute wrote in a statement. "[Her] discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science. She was always guided by her fascination with the mysteries of evolution, and her staunch belief in the fundamental need to respect all forms of life on Earth."
Born in April 1934, Goodall loved nature and wildlife from a very young age, so much so that her father once gave her a stuffed monkey doll that young Jane named Jubilee and kept for the rest of her life. Goodall found an early mentor in paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, who employed her as a secretary at the National Museum in Nairobi. She accompanied Leakey and his wife, Mary Leakey, on a hunt for fossils at the Olduvai Gorge. Impressed with the young woman's potential, Leakey sent her to Tanzania to study chimpanzees in the Gombe forest. He also arranged for her to enter the PhD program in ethology at Cambridge University; Goodall completed her PhD in 1965 with a thesis based on that initial Gombe study. The research program she founded is still active today.
Tesla reverses sales decline in Q3, sells 50k more cars than it built
This morning, Tesla published its production and delivery numbers for the third quarter of the year. We've heard the same story for a while, one of diminishing sales as customers tire of a stale product lineup and are repulsed by the politics of the company's CEO. But Q3 2025 tells a different tale. It's been a good three months for the beleaguered automaker, one that appears to have cleared out a lot of old inventory.
Tesla built a total of 447,450 electric vehicles between July and September this year. That's actually a 4.8 percent decrease compared to the same three months last year.
The Models 3 and Y production lines saw less of a slowdown—Tesla built 435,826 of these EVs, a 1.8 percent decline on last year. But the Models S and X, grouped together with the US-only Cybertruck, saw the greatest cutbacks. Just 11,624 of these collected models were produced, a 55.1 percent decrease compared to Q3 2024.
Japan is running out of its favorite beer after ransomware attack
Japan is just a few days away from running out of Asahi Super Dry as the producer of the nation’s most popular beer wrestles with a devastating cyber attack that has shut down its domestic breweries.
The vast majority of Asahi Group’s 30 factories in Japan have not operated since Monday after the attack disabled its ordering and delivery system, the company said.
Retailers are already expecting empty shelves as the outage stretches into its fourth day with no clear timeline for factories recommencing operations. Super Dry could also run out at izakaya pubs, which rely on draught and bottles.
How America fell behind China in the lunar space race—and how it can catch back up
For the last month, NASA's interim administrator, Sean Duffy, has been giving interviews and speeches around the world, offering a singular message: "We are going to beat the Chinese to the Moon."
This is certainly what the president who appointed Duffy to the NASA post wants to hear. Unfortunately, there is a very good chance that Duffy's sentiment is false. Privately, many people within the space industry, and even at NASA, acknowledge that the US space agency appears to be holding a losing hand. Recently, some influential voices, such as former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, have spoken out.
"Unless something changes, it is highly unlikely the United States will beat China’s projected timeline to the Moon’s surface," Bridenstine said in early September.
Meet the Arc spacecraft: It aims to deliver cargo anywhere in the world in an hour
A relatively new spacecraft company, Inversion, revealed its new "on demand" delivery vehicle Wednesday evening during a splashy ceremony at its factory in Los Angeles.
The company said it is building the Arc spacecraft to provide a capability to the US military to deliver as much as 500 pounds (225 kg) of supplies almost anywhere in the world, almost instantaneously.
"The nominal mission for us is pre-positioning Arcs on orbit, and having them stay up there for up to five years, able to be called upon and then autonomously go and land wherever and whenever they're needed, being able to bring their cargo or effects to the desired location in under an hour," said Justin Fiaschetti, co-founder and chief executive of Inversion, in an interview with Ars before the event.
That annoying SMS phish you just got may have come from a box like this
Scammers have been abusing unsecured cellular routers used in industrial settings to blast SMS-based phishing messages in campaigns that have been ongoing since 2023, researchers said.
The routers, manufactured by China-based Milesight IoT Co., Ltd., are rugged Internet of Things devices that use cellular networks to connect traffic lights, electric power meters, and other sorts of remote industrial devices to central hubs. They come equipped with SIM cards that work with 3G/4G/5G cellular networks and can be controlled by text message, Python scripts, and web interfaces.
An unsophisticated, yet effective, delivery vectorSecurity company Sekoia on Tuesday said that an analysis of “suspicious network traces” detected in its honeypots led to the discovery of a cellular router being abused to send SMS messages with phishing URLs. As company researchers investigated further, they identified more than 18,000 such routers accessible on the Internet, with at least 572 of them allowing free access to programming interfaces to anyone who took the time to look for them. The vast majority of the routers were running firmware versions that were more than three years out of date and had known vulnerabilities.
Megafauna was the meat of choice for South American hunters
The extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna may be people’s fault after all, according to a recent study.
A team of archaeologists recently examined animal bones at sites dating to the waning years of the last Ice Age. Their results suggest that extinct megafauna like giant sloths, giant armadillos, and elephant-like creatures were on the menu for Pleistocene hunters in South America. And that means human hunters may have played a nontrivial role in killing off the continent’s last great Ice Age megafauna.
Giant ground sloth: It’s what’s for dinnerArchaeologist Luciano Prates of Argentina's National University of La Plata and his colleagues counted the animal bones left behind by ancient people at 20 archaeological sites in modern-day Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. They compared the number of bones from extinct megafauna (technically, “megafauna” describes any animal over 44 kilograms) to the number of bones from smaller prey. They also tallied the remains of still-living species of megafauna like vicuñas. The archaeologists hoped to learn whether giant sloths, giant armadillos, and now-extinct species of horses were staples in the diets of Ice Age South Americans.
OpenAI mocks Musk’s math in suit over iPhone/ChatGPT integration
OpenAI and Apple have moved to dismiss a lawsuit by Elon Musk's xAI, alleging that ChatGPT's integration into a "handful" of iPhone features violated antitrust laws by giving OpenAI a monopoly on prompts and Apple a new path to block rivals in the smartphone industry.
The lawsuit was filed in August after Musk raged on X about Apple never listing Grok on its editorially curated "Must Have" apps list, which ChatGPT frequently appeared on.
According to Musk, Apple linking ChatGPT to Siri and other native iPhone features gave OpenAI exclusive access to billions of prompts that only OpenAI can use as valuable training data to maintain its dominance in the chatbot market. However, OpenAI and Apple are now mocking Musk's math in court filings, urging the court to agree that xAI's lawsuit is doomed.
Hyundai gives the Ioniq 5 a huge price cut for model-year 2026
Earlier today, we wrote about how Ford, General Motors, and Tesla have reacted to the end of the clean vehicle tax credits. Now we know what Hyundai is doing, and the answer is "giving the Ioniq 5 a huge price cut."
The cheapest Ioniq 5 is still the SE RWD. A model-year 2025 SE RWD cost $42,600; for model-year 2026 it's now $35,000. The price cuts for other versions are even greater—between $9,150 and $9,800. For example, the Ioniq 5 XRT that you see in the photo above had a starting price of $55,500 for MY25; now it starts at a very reasonable $46,275.
"Hyundai is taking bold steps to ensure our award-winning Ioniq 5 remains a top choice for EV buyers," said Randy Parker, president and CEO of Hyundai Motor North America. "This pricing realignment reflects our commitment to delivering exceptional technology and innovation without compromise."
Cable nostalgia persists as streaming gets more expensive, fragmented
Streaming is overtaking broadcast, cable, and satellite. But amid all the cord cutting lies a much smaller, yet intriguing, practice: going back to cable.
Cord reviving is when cord cutters, or people who previously abandoned traditional TV services in favor of streaming, decide to go back to traditional pay-TV services, like cable.
There's no doubt that this happens far less frequently than cord cutting. But TiVo's Q2 2025 Video Trends Report: North America released today points to growth in cord reviving. It reads:
OpenAI’s Sora 2 lets users insert themselves into AI videos with sound
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced Sora 2, its second-generation video-synthesis AI model that can now generate videos in various styles with synchronized dialogue and sound effects, which is a first for the company. OpenAI also launched a new iOS social app that allows users to insert themselves into AI-generated videos through what OpenAI calls "cameos."
OpenAI showcased the new model in an AI-generated video that features a photorealistic version of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talking to the camera in a slightly unnatural-sounding voice amid fantastical backdrops, like a competitive ride-on duck race and a glowing mushroom garden.
Regarding that voice, the new model can create what OpenAI calls "sophisticated background soundscapes, speech, and sound effects with a high degree of realism." In May, Google's Veo 3 became the first video-synthesis model from a major AI lab to generate synchronized audio as well as video. Just a few days ago, Alibaba released Wan 2.5, an open-weights video model that can generate audio as well. Now OpenAI has joined the audio party with Sora 2.
FCC chairman leads “cruel” vote to take Wi-Fi access away from school kids
The Federal Communications Commission yesterday voted to end funding for two programs designed to help schoolchildren and library patrons access the Internet.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr claims that Biden-era orders to establish the programs exceeded the FCC's authority. The FCC voted 2-1 to kill the programs, with Republican Olivia Trusty voting with Carr and Democrat Anna Gomez dissenting.
In the previous administration, the FCC expanded the Universal Service Fund's E-Rate program in 2024 to let schools and libraries lend out Wi-Fi hotspots and services that could be used off-premises. The FCC separately decided in 2023 to let the E-Rate program pay for Wi-Fi service on school buses.
Can today’s AI video models accurately model how the real world works?
Over the last few months, many AI boosters have been increasingly interested in generative video models and their seeming ability to show at least limited emergent knowledge of the physical properties of the real world. That kind of learning could underpin a robust version of a so-called "world model" that would represent a major breakthrough in generative AI's actual operant real-world capabilities.
Recently, Google's DeepMind Research tried to add some scientific rigor to how well video models can actually learn about the real world from their training data. In the bluntly titled paper "Video Models are Zero-shot Learners and Reasoners," the researchers used Google's Veo 3 model to generate thousands of videos designed to test its abilities across dozens of tasks related to perceiving, modeling, manipulating, and reasoning about the real world.
In the paper, the researchers boldly claim that Veo 3 "can solve a broad variety of tasks it wasn’t explicitly trained for" (that's the "zero-shot" part of the title) and that video models "are on a path to becoming unified, generalist vision foundation models." But digging into the actual results of those experiments, the researchers seem to be grading today's video models on a bit of a curve and assuming future progress will smooth out many of today's highly inconsistent results.
Trailer for del Toro’s Frankenstein is pure macabre mythology
Netflix has released the full official trailer for director Guillermo del Toro's hotly anticipated new film Frankenstein, starring Oscar Isaac as the brilliant but tragically flawed mad scientist, Victor Frankenstein.
Del Toro has been telling interviewers for years about his enduring love for Mary Shelley's novel and his long-standing desire to direct a film that would capture the novel's sense of grand Miltonian tragedy. He loved the original script for Kenneth Branagh's 1994 adaptation, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but the final film, alas, deviated sharply from that script and was just not that good. After several false starts, del Toro finally signed on to film his vision for Netflix in 2023. He called this film “the culmination of a journey that has occupied most of my life,” at the Netflix Tudum event earlier this year, adding, “Monsters have become my personal belief system. There are strands of Frankenstein through my films.”
"It was a religion for me," del Toro said during a press conference at the film's world premiere in Venice last month. "Since I was a kid—I was raised very Catholic—I never quite understood the saints. And then when I saw Boris Karloff on the screen, I understood what a saint or a messiah looked like. So I've been following the creature since I was a kid, and I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, both creatively in terms of achieving the scope that it needed for me to make it different, to make it at a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world."
Taiwan rejects Trump’s demand to shift 50% of chip manufacturing into US
Taiwan has no plans to move half its chip production into the US, Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun confirmed, quickly pushing back on seemingly false claims that the US had raised the condition during recent trade talks.
US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had suggested that Taiwan was currently mulling moving half its semiconductor supply chain to the US in exchange for "some kind of security guarantee," as Taiwan faces the ongoing threat of a potential Chinese invasion. Trump has maintained since taking office that reshoring of semiconductor supply chains is critical for economic and national security, and Lutnick indicated that Taiwan should agree to the unusual terms because it needs the US for protection.
But speaking Wednesday, Cheng said that while "certain progress" has been made in trade talks, Taiwan has not only made "no such commitment" but that "this issue was not discussed in this round of negotiation, and we will not agree to such a condition," Bloomberg reported.
AI medical tools found to downplay symptoms of women, ethnic minorities
Artificial intelligence tools used by doctors risk leading to worse health outcomes for women and ethnic minorities, as a growing body of research shows that many large language models downplay the symptoms of these patients.
A series of recent studies have found that the uptake of AI models across the healthcare sector could lead to biased medical decisions, reinforcing patterns of under treatment that already exist across different groups in western societies.
The findings by researchers at leading US and UK universities suggest that medical AI tools powered by LLMs have a tendency to not reflect the severity of symptoms among female patients, while also displaying less “empathy” towards Black and Asian ones.
Rocket Report: European rocket reuse test delayed; NASA tweaks SLS for Artemis II
Welcome to Edition 8.11 of the Rocket Report! We have reached the time of year when it is possible the US government will shut down its operations at the end of this month, depending on congressional action. A shutdown would have significant implications for many NASA missions, but most notably a couple of dozen in the science directorate that the White House would like to shut down. At Ars, we will be watching this issue closely in the coming days. As for Artemis II, it seems to be far enough along that a launch next February seems possible as long as any government closure does not drag on for weeks and weeks.
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.
Rocket Lab to sell common shares. The space company said Tuesday that it intends to raise up to $750 million by selling common shares, MSN reports. This new at-the-market program replaces a prior agreement that allowed Rocket Lab to sell up to $500 million of stock. Under that earlier arrangement, the company had sold roughly $396.6 million in shares before ending the program.
Two UK teens charged in connection to Scattered Spider ransomware attacks
Federal prosecutors charged a UK teenager with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and other crimes in connection with the network intrusions of 47 US companies that generated more than $115 million in ransomware payments over a three-year span.
A criminal complaint unsealed on Thursday (PDF) said that Thalha Jubair, 19, of London, was part of Scattered Spider, the name of an English-language-speaking group that has breached the networks of scores of companies worldwide. After obtaining data, the group demanded that the victims pay hefty ransoms or see their confidential data published or sold.
Bitcoin paid by victims recoveredThe unsealing of the document, filed in US District Court of the District of New Jersey, came the same day Jubair and another alleged Scattered Spider member—Owen Flowers, 18, from Walsall, West Midlands—were charged by UK prosecutors in connection with last year’s cyberattack on Transport for London. The agency, which oversees London’s public transit system, faced a monthslong recovery effort as a result of the breach.