ArsTechnica
One of Google’s new Pixel 10 AI features has already been removed
Google is one of the most ardent proponents of generative AI technology, as evidenced by the recent launch of the Pixel 10 series. The phones were announced with more than 20 new AI experiences, according to Google. However, one of them is already being pulled from the company's phones. If you go looking for your Daily Hub, you may be disappointed. Not that disappointed, though, as it has been pulled because it didn't do very much.
Many of Google's new AI features only make themselves known in specific circumstances, for example when Magic Cue finds an opportunity to suggest an address or calendar appointment based on your screen context. The Daily Hub, on the other hand, asserted itself multiple times throughout the day. It appeared at the top of the Google Discover feed, as well as in the At a Glance widget right at the top of the home screen.
Just a few weeks after release, Google has pulled the Daily Hub preview from Pixel 10 devices. You will no longer see it in Google Discover nor in the home screen widget. After being spotted by 9to5Google, the company has issued a statement explaining its plans.
Developers joke about “coding like cavemen” as AI service suffers major outage
On Wednesday afternoon, Anthropic experienced a brief but complete service outage that took down its AI infrastructure, leaving developers unable to access Claude.ai, the API, Claude Code, or the management console for around half an hour. The outage affected all three of Anthropic's main services simultaneously, with the company posting at 12:28 pm Eastern that "APIs, Console, and Claude.ai are down. Services will be restored as soon as possible." As of press time, the services appear to be restored.
The disruption, though lasting only about 30 minutes, quickly took the top spot on tech link-sharing site Hacker News for a short time and inspired immediate reactions from developers who have become increasingly reliant on AI coding tools for their daily work. "Everyone will just have to learn how to do it like we did in the old days, and blindly copy and paste from Stack Overflow," joked one Hacker News commenter. Another user recalled a joke from a previous AI outage: "Nooooo I'm going to have to use my brain again and write 100% of my code like a caveman from December 2024."
The most recent outage came at an inopportune time, affecting developers across the US who have integrated Claude into their workflows. One Hacker News user observed: "It's like every other day, the moment US working hours start, AI (in my case I mostly use Anthropic, others may be better) starts dying or at least getting intermittent errors. In EU working hours there's rarely any outages." Another user also noted this pattern, saying that "early morning here in the UK everything is fine, as soon as most of the US is up and at it, then it slowly turns to treacle."
Can we please keep our broadband money, Republican governor asks Trump admin
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry has a simple request for the Trump administration: Don't take our broadband money away.
Trump's Commerce Department rewrote the rules of the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program, forcing states to change how they spend money earmarked for expanding broadband access. The overhaul led states to reduce spending on fiber networks and increase spending on satellite—although not to the extent sought by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who is demanding more money for his Starlink network.
Since states are spending less on deployment, and the program still has the $42 billion allocated by Congress, what happens to the leftover amount after money is spent on deploying broadband networks? Amid speculation that the Trump administration wants to return that money to the US Treasury, Louisiana's Republican governor is worried that states won't be able to use the full $42 billion. It's possible that half or more of the $42 billion won't be used to expand broadband.
Spotify peeved after 10,000 users sold data to build AI tools
For millions of Spotify users, the "Wrapped" feature—which crunches the numbers on their annual listening habits—is a highlight of every year's end, ever since it debuted in 2015. NPR once broke down exactly why our brains find the feature so "irresistible," while Cosmopolitan last year declared that sharing Wrapped screenshots of top artists and songs had by now become "the ultimate status symbol" for tens of millions of music fans.
It's no surprise then that, after a decade, some Spotify users who are especially eager to see Wrapped evolve are no longer willing to wait to see if Spotify will ever deliver the more creative streaming insights they crave.
With the help of AI, these users expect that their data can be more quickly analyzed to potentially uncover overlooked or never-considered patterns that could offer even more insights into what their listening habits say about them.
Microsoft ends OpenAI exclusivity in Office, adds rival Anthropic
Microsoft's Office 365 suite will soon incorporate AI models from Anthropic alongside existing OpenAI technology, The Information reported, ending years of exclusive reliance on OpenAI for generative AI features across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
The shift reportedly follows internal testing that revealed Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4 model excels at specific Office tasks where OpenAI's models fall short, particularly in visual design and spreadsheet automation, according to sources familiar with the project cited by The Information, who stressed the move is not a negotiating tactic.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to Ars Technica's request for comment.
Flush door handles are the car industry’s latest safety problem
Earlier this week, Ars spent some time driving the new Nissan Leaf. We have to wait until Friday to tell you how that car drives, but among the changes from the previous generation are door handles that retract flush with the bodywork, for the front doors at least. Car designers love them for not ruining the lines of the door with the necessities of real life, but is the benefit from drag reduction worth the safety risk?
That question is in even sharper relief this morning. Bloomberg's Dana Hull has a deeply reported article that looks at the problem of Tesla's door handles, which fail when the cars lose power.
The electric vehicle manufacturer chose not to use conventional door locks in its cars, preferring to use IP-based electronic controls. While the front seat occupants have always had a physical latch that can open the door, it took some years for the automaker to add emergency releases for the rear doors, and even now that it has, many rear-seat Tesla passengers will be unaware of where to find or how to operate the emergency release.
Has Perseverance found a biosignature on Mars?
Last year, we reported on the discovery of an intriguing arrow-shaped rock on Mars by NASA's Perseverance rover. The rock contained chemical signatures and structures that could have been formed by ancient microbial life. Granted, this was not slam-dunk evidence of past life on Mars, and the results were preliminary, awaiting peer review. But it was an intriguing possibility nonetheless.
Now further analysis and peer review are complete, and there is a new paper, published in the journal Nature, reporting on the findings. It's still not definitive proof that there was water-based life on Mars billions of years ago, but the results are consistent with a biosignature. It's just that other non-biological processes would also be consistent with the data, so definitive proof might require analysis of the Martian samples back on Earth. You can watch NASA's livestream briefing here.
"We have improved our understanding of the geological context of the discovery since [last year], and in the paper, we explore abiotic and biological pathways to the formation of the features that we observe," co-author Joel Hurowitz, an astrobiologist at Stony Brook University in New York, told Ars. "My hope is that this discovery motivates a whole bunch of new research in laboratory and analog field settings on Earth to try to understand what conditions might give rise to the textures and mineral assemblages we've observed. This type of follow-on work is exactly what is needed to explore the various biological and abiotic pathways to the formation of the features that we are calling potential biosignatures."
AI vs. MAGA: Populists alarmed by Trump’s embrace of AI, Big Tech
Flanked by Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives in the White House last week, Melania Trump hailed artificial intelligence as potentially “the greatest engine of progress in the history of the United States of America.”
Less than a mile from the first lady, in a hotel ballroom packed with MAGA faithful, top Republican Josh Hawley had a different message.
AI “threatens the common man’s liberty” and could even undermine the Republic itself, the senior US senator from Missouri said.
Pay-per-output? AI firms blindsided by beefed up robots.txt instructions.
Leading Internet companies and publishers—including Reddit, Yahoo, Quora, Medium, The Daily Beast, Fastly, and more—think there may finally be a solution to end AI crawlers hammering websites to scrape content without permission or compensation.
Announced Wednesday morning, the "Really Simple Licensing" (RSL) standard evolves robots.txt instructions by adding an automated licensing layer that's designed to block bots that don't fairly compensate creators for content.
Free for any publisher to use starting today, the RSL standard is an open, decentralized protocol that makes clear to AI crawlers and agents the terms for licensing, usage, and compensation of any content used to train AI, a press release noted.
New iPhones use Apple N1 wireless chip—and we’ll probably start seeing it everywhere
Apple's most famous chips are the A- and M-series processors that power its iPhones, iPads, and Macs, but this year, its effort to build its own wireless chips is starting to bear fruit. Earlier this spring, the iPhone 16e included Apple's C1 modem, furthering Apple's ambitions to shed its dependence on Qualcomm, and today's iPhone Air brought a faster Apple C1X variant, plus something new: the Apple N1, a chip that provides Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread support for all of today's new iPhones.
Apple didn't dive deep into the capabilities of the N1, or why it had switched from using third-party suppliers (historically, Apple has mostly leaned on Broadcom for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth). However, the company's press releases say that it should make Continuity features like Personal Hotspot and AirDrop more reliable—these features use Bluetooth for initial communication and then Wi-Fi to establish a high-speed local link between two devices. Other features that use a similar combination of wireless technologies, like using an iPad as an extended Mac display, should also benefit.
These aren't Apple's first chips to integrate Wi-Fi or Bluetooth technology. The Apple Watches rely on W-series chips to provide their Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity; the Apple H1 and H2 chips also provide Bluetooth connectivity for many of Apple's wireless headphones. But this is the first time that Apple has switched to its own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip in one of its iPhones, suggesting that the chips have matured enough to provide higher connectivity speeds for more demanding devices.
Reddit bug caused lesbian subreddit to be labeled as a place for “straight” women
Reddit has addressed a problem where the description of subreddits originally written by moderators appeared different—and, often, inaccurate—on Reddit’s Android app. For weeks, the problem was largely suspected to be caused by Reddit clumsily using generative AI to create new subreddit descriptions. However, Reddit says that the changes were the fault of a bug tied to its AI-powered translation technology.
Reports of subreddits suddenly having inaccurate summaries when viewed on Reddit’s Android app started surfacing on Reddit a couple of weeks ago. On August 29, a moderator reported on the r/ModSupport subreddit for moderators that the r/ThronesAndDominions subreddit's description changed from “The wayward adventures of Dylan Carlson and the band Earth” to “The crazy adventures of Dylan Carlson and the band Earth.” The problem got more attention when r/actuallesbians’ Android app description described the community as “a place for straight and transgender lesbians …” instead of “a place for cis and trans lesbians …”
Other complaints followed, including from r/autisticparents, a subreddit for parents with autism whose description was changed to say that it is a group for “parents of autistic children.” A moderator who asked to be referred to by their Reddit username, Paige_Railstone, described the confusion that the changes brought to their subreddit:
Hands-on with Apple’s new iPhones: Beauty and the beast and the regular-looking one
CUPERTINO, Calif.—We're a long way from the days when a new iPhone launch just meant one new phone. It shifted to "basically the same phone in two sizes" a decade or so ago, and then to a version of "one lineup of regular phones and one lineup of Pro phones" in 2017 when the iPhone 8 was introduced next to the iPhone X.
But thanks to Apple's newly introduced iPhone Air, the iPhone 17 lineup gives new phone buyers more choices and trade-offs than they've ever had before. Apple's phones are now available in a spectrum of sizes, weights, speeds, costs, and camera configurations. And while options are great to have, it also means you need to know more about which one to pick.
We've gone hands-on with all four of Apple's new phones, and while more extensive tire-kicking will be required, we can at least try to nail down exactly what kind of person each of these phones is for.
Pfizer says this season’s COVID shot boosts immune responses fourfold
Pfizer and BioNTech report that their updated mRNA COVID-19 vaccine for the 2025–2026 season produced strong immune responses, boosting neutralizing antibody levels by at least fourfold in older people and those with underlying medical conditions.
The positive results come as Americans face a confusing, state-by-state patchwork of access to the shots under health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an ardent anti-vaccine activist who has unilaterally restricted access. Prior to the second Trump administration, all Americans ages 6 months and older had access to the vaccines. But under Kennedy, the Food and Drug Administration limited COVID-19 vaccine approvals to people 65 and older, and people under 64 years only if they have an underlying medical condition.
In Pfizer and BioNTech's latest trial, the companies limited enrollment to these groups. The phase 3 trial included 100 people total, 50 people age 65 or older and 50 people age 18 to 64 with an underlying condition. Those conditions included asthma, diabetes, heart conditions, HIV, mental health conditions, Parkinson's disease, obesity, or smoking. All participants had gotten last season's COVID shot at least six months prior to the trial and had not gotten any other COVID-19 vaccines or a COVID-19 infection since then.
Claude’s new AI file-creation feature ships with security risks built in
On Tuesday, Anthropic launched a new file-creation feature for its Claude AI assistant that enables users to generate Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and other documents directly within conversations on the web interface and in the Claude desktop app. While the feature may be handy for Claude users, the company's support documentation also warns that it "may put your data at risk" and details how the AI assistant can be manipulated to transmit user data to external servers.
The feature, awkwardly named "Upgraded file-creation and analysis," is basically Anthropic's version of ChatGPT's Code Interpreter and an upgraded version of Anthropic's "analysis" tool. It's currently available as a preview for Max, Team, and Enterprise plan users, with Pro users scheduled to receive access "in the coming weeks," according to the announcement.
The security issue comes from the fact that the new feature gives Claude access to a sandbox computing environment, which enables it to download packages and run code to create files. "This feature gives Claude Internet access to create and analyze files, which may put your data at risk," Anthropic writes in its blog announcement. "Monitor chats closely when using this feature."
After early struggles, NASA’s ambitious mission to Titan is “on track” for launch
A new independent report finds that although NASA's ambitious mission to fly across the surface of Titan is delayed and over budget, the fault is due to the space agency's management rather than the program itself.
Released Tuesday by NASA's Office of Inspector General, the report found that the mission's budget has soared from an initial figure of $850 million upon its selection in 2019 to $3.35 billion today. Additionally, the launch target has slipped from the year 2026 to 2028.
However, the cost increase and schedule slippages are not new. The space agency disclosed these issues nearly a year and a half ago. What is notable about the new report from NASA's inspector general is that the cause of these problems was not a serious technical problem or a flawed design of a vehicle intended to spend years flying across Titan.
SAP warns of high-severity vulnerabilities in multiple products
As hackers exploit a high-severity vulnerability in SAP’s flagship Enterprise Resource Planning software product, the software maker is warning users of more than two dozen newly detected vulnerabilities in its other widely used products, including a security flaw with a maximum-severity rating of 10.
SAP on Tuesday said the highest-severity vulnerability—with a rating of 10 out of a possible 10—was found in NetWeaver, a platform that serves as the technical foundation for many of the company’s other enterprise applications. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-42944, makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to execute commands by submitting malicious payloads to an open port.
The maximum-severity threat stems from a deserialization vulnerability. Serialization is a coding process that translates data structures and object states into formats that can be stored or transmitted and then reconstructed later. Deserialization is the process in reverse.
SpaceX’s lesson from last Starship flight? “We need to seal the tiles.”
It has been two weeks since SpaceX's last Starship test flight, and engineers have diagnosed issues with its heat shield, identified improvements, and developed a preliminary plan for the next time the ship heads into space.
Bill Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX executive in charge of build and flight reliability, presented the findings Monday at the American Astronautical Society's Glenn Space Technology Symposium in Cleveland.
The rocket lifted off on August 26 from SpaceX's launch pad in Starbase, Texas, just north of the US-Mexico border. It was the 10th full-scale test flight of SpaceX's Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage, combining to form the world's largest rocket.
Former WhatsApp security boss in lawsuit likens Meta’s culture to a “cult”
Over the past year, Meta has blanketed TV screens around the world with commercials touting the privacy of Whatsapp, its encrypted messenger with a monthly user base of 3 billion people.
“It’s private,” one ad campaign featuring the former cast of the Modern Family TV show says. “On Whatsapp, no one can see or hear your personal messages … not even us,” a different series of ads declares.
“Serious risks to user data”On Monday, the former head of security for the Meta-owed messaging app filed a federal whistleblower lawsuit that tells a far different narrative. The suit, filed in US District Court for the District of Northern California, recites a litany of purported security and privacy flaws that Meta not only didn’t fix after becoming aware of them, but also kept secret, allegedly in violation of a $5 billion settlement then-Whatsapp parent company Facebook reached with the Federal Trade Commission. The complaint was filed by Attaullah Baig, who became head of WhatsApp security in 2021.
In court filing, Google concedes the open web is in “rapid decline”
Is the web thriving or faltering? Google has an unexpected take in a new legal filing. Google is heading back to court soon in hopes of convincing a judge that it should not have to split up its ad business. The company lost its adtech antitrust case earlier this year, and now it's up to the court to decide on remedies for the illegal conduct. In its response to the Department of Justice's requested remedies, Google made a startling claim: "The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline."
Google says that forcing it to divest its AdX marketplace would hasten the demise of wide swaths of the web that are dependent on advertising revenue. This is one of several reasons Google asks the court to deny the government's request. The DOJ also tried to force a divestment of Chrome in the search antitrust trial, but the judge in that case declined to order that in the remedies.
Google's advertising business has turned it into an unrivaled Internet juggernaut. Google increasingly is the Internet—websites have no choice but to adhere to Google's standards for search and ads because there's no substantial competition. The court in this case ruled that in tying its display ad services with the AdX marketplace, Google suppressed the adoption of rival technologies, and this gave it an opportunity to preference its own services in ad auctions.
Nobel laureate David Baltimore dead at 87
Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist and former Caltech president David Baltimore—who found himself at the center of controversial allegations of fraud against a co-author—has died at 87 from cancer complications. He shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology for his work upending the then-consensus that cellular information flowed only in one direction. Baltimore is survived by his wife of 57 years, biologist Alice Huang, as well as a daughter and granddaughter.
"David Baltimore's contributions as a virologist, discerning fundamental mechanisms and applying those insights to immunology, to cancer, to AIDS, have transformed biology and medicine," current Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum said in a statement. "David's profound influence as a mentor to generations of students and postdocs, his generosity as a colleague, his leadership of great scientific institutions, and his deep involvement in international efforts to define ethical boundaries for biological advances fill out an extraordinary intellectual life."
Baltimore was born in New York City in 1938. His father worked in the garment industry, and his mother later became a psychologist at the New School and Sarah Lawrence. Young David was academically precocious and decided he wanted to be a scientist after spending a high school summer learning about mouse genetics at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine. He graduated from Swarthmore College and earned his PhD in biology from Rockefeller University in 1964 with a thesis on the study of viruses in animal cells. He joined the Salk Institute in San Diego, married Huang, and moved to MIT in 1982, founding the Whitehead Institute.