Where things stand

When and how did the attack come about?

The first indications were social media posts and a report from a news organization in Ireland. Messages posted by purported Stryker employees or their family members on social media said workers’ phones and computers had been wiped. A report the Irish Examiner published Wednesday morning, citing multiple anonymous sources, made the same claims and said some employees witnessed login pages on wiped devices displaying the logo of Handala Hack, a group that researchers who have followed it for years say is aligned with the Iranian government.

What is the status now?

Stryker said Thursday that it’s in the midst of responding to a “global network disruption to our Microsoft environment as a result of a cyber attack.” The update went on to say responders have no indication that ransomware or malware—the usual causes for such outages—were involved. The responders believe the incident is now contained and limited to the internal Microsoft environment.

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Live Nation has tried to exclude Slack messages from a trial that seeks a breakup of Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary, claiming the messages are irrelevant to the case, "highly prejudicial," and would "inflame the jury." The US government and state attorneys general opposed the motion to exclude evidence. US District Judge Arun Subramanian of the Southern District of New York hasn't ruled on the motion yet, but ordered the documents unsealed yesterday.

Live Nation has touted the experiences it offers concertgoers at amphitheaters but sought "to exclude candid, internal messages in which the individual who is currently Head of Ticketing for these amphitheaters calls fans 'so stupid,' explains that he 'gouge[s]' them, and brags that Live Nation is 'robbing them blind, baby,'" said a memorandum of law filed by the US and states.

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The Int’l ITC is a nonprofit trade group that says it represents North American “toner and inkjet cartridge re-manufacturers, component suppliers, and cartridge collectors."

It’s important to note that the Int’l ITC may be considered biased because its members could greatly profit when printer manufacturers commit to supporting aftermarket cartridges in devices.

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The former Democratic megadonor apparently hopes that a right-wing pivot might help him escape a 25-year prison sentence ordered after Joe Biden's Department of Justice proved he stole more than $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange.

These days, Bankman-Fried frequently praises Trump's policies and quotes his Truth Social posts on X, where his bio confirms that posts are: "SBF's words. Posted through a proxy." He also regularly rants against Democrats, including Biden officials who, he claimed in a motion for a new trial, intimidated FTX employees into lying on the stand or refusing to testify in order to take down Bankman-Fried as a political foe.

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"Today, we’re keeping the same Lucid product and technology DNA intact, while applying increased scale, capital efficiency, and cost discipline, and materially reduced costs, to enable a great business with a clear and credible path to profitability and free cash flow, supported by what we are executing now and what we are building for the future," said Marc Winterhoff, interim CEO at Lucid.

The company has provided a few details about the first two SUVs due on the new midsize platform. The Lucid Earth is aimed at "trendsetting achievers" and will be the more spacious one. The Lucid Cosmos we expect to be sportier—this one is targeting "upscale nurturers." The unnamed third SUV will likely be something a bit more off-roady, filling the same niche that Rivian has gone for with its R2.

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Much like the cloud-based version, Personal Computer asks users to describe general objectives rather than specific computing tasks—an introductory video shows Personal Computer's questions in a sidebar asking things like, "Create an interactive educational guide" and "create a podcast about whales." But Personal Computer, running on a Mac Mini, also gives Perplexity's agents local access to your files and apps, which it can open and manipulate directly to attempt to complete those tasks.

That should sound familiar to users of the open source OpenClaw (previously Moltbot), which similarly allows users to let AI agents loose on their personal machines. From the outside, Personal Computer looks like a more buttoned-up, user-friendly version of the same concept, with an easy-to-read, dockable interface that can help users track multiple tasks. Perplexity users can also log in remotely to their local copy of Personal Computer, making it "controllable from any device, anywhere," Perplexity says.

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Australian National University conservation geneticist George Olah and his colleagues recently studied feathers from a headdress in a Ychsman noble’s tomb, dating to 1100–1400 CE (the centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire). DNA and chemical isotopes reveal that the parrots the feathers came from (still bright blue, yellow, and green after all these centuries) were born in the wild on the far side of the Andes but kept in captivity somewhere on the Peruvian coast. To pull off importing live parrots from hundreds of miles away across the steep, towering Andes, the Ychsma (who the Inca annexed around 1470) must have had a far-reaching trade network that spanned at least half a continent.

And they must have really liked birds.

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One less-advertised change that may make the Neo more appealing to businesses, schools, and the accident-prone is that its internal design is a bit more modular and easier to repair than other modern MacBooks. That's our takeaway after spending some time thumbing through the official MacBook Neo repair documentation that Apple published on its support site this week.

Replacements for pretty much any component in the Neo are simpler and involve fewer steps and tools than in the M5 MacBook Air. That includes the battery, which in the MacBook Air is attached to the chassis with multiple screws and adhesive strips but which in the Neo comes out relatively easily after you get some shielding and flex cables out of the way.

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"Generations have grown up opening baseball card packs and blind boxes and bags, and then trading and selling the items they receive," Valve wrote. "On the physical side, popular products used in this way include baseball cards, Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, and Labubu."

Though that may seem like an apt comparison on the surface, Valve's loot boxes differ from these real-world examples in large part because of Valve's control of the Steam Marketplace, which serves as the only legitimate way to exchange or resell those items. While owners of real-world items are free to trade or sell them however they want, Valve has cracked down on many third-party sites that enable the exchange of in-game items—especially when those items are used as glorified chips for gambling games.

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As a new automaker Rivian often does things its own way, but with the R2 launch it's following industry practice and starting with the more superlative version first. That's the R2 Performance, which starts at $57,990 with the launch package (but not including a $1,495 delivery charge). You get quite a lot of electric SUV for that, however: up to 330 miles (531 km) from a single charge of the 87.9 kWh battery pack, with 656 hp (489 kW) and 609 lb-ft (825 Nm) from the dual motor powertrain. Fast charging takes 29 minutes from 10-80 percent.

The Performance features semi-active suspension, a rear window that drops into the tailgate, an interior with birch accents, heating for the front and rear seats with ventilation for the former as well, a nine-speaker sound system, matrix LED headlights, and some other neat touches like the flashlight that lives in the side of the door, similar to the way some cars hide an umbrella there.

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As of March 2026, measles has been continuously circulating around the US for more than a year, starting with an outbreak in Texas that lasted from January to August 2025. Before that outbreak was declared over, an outbreak on the Utah and Arizona border began in August and is ongoing. An outbreak in South Carolina began in September, drastically increased in January 2026, and continues.

Thirty states have had measles cases this year; 47 have seen cases since the start of 2025. Health officials across the US have confirmed 1,300 infections already this year as of March 6, putting the country on track to surpass 2025’s numbers, which were the highest in 35 years.

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Only now, they won't. Earlier today, Honda announced that it's facing heavy losses for the financial year: between $5.1 billion and $7 billion (820 billion–1.12 trillion yen). To help stanch the flow, it's sacrificing the Honda 0 SUV, Honda 0 sedan, and the electric Acura RSX, EVs it revealed at CES last year in "nearly production" state.

Honda says there are several reasons for killing off its new EVs before they even reach the market. The first is extremely predictable: the ongoing chaos of the trade war and its tariffs, which have eaten into the profitability of the cars it imports into the US. A second is the US government's revanchist decision to cease enforcing emissions and fuel economy standards on the auto industry. Although Honda says that "striving for carbon neutrality" is a "responsibility Honda... must fulfill for the future," it seems that responsibility only applies when being forced by a government.

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The latest AI shift in Maps is called Ask Maps, and you can probably guess what it does just from its title. Ask Maps is a Gemini-powered conversational system that can plan trips and answer complex questions about locations across the app's millions of cataloged points of interest.

The new chatbot will be accessible via a button up near the search bar. You can ask it anything you're likely to find in Google Maps without jumping into another app. You can ask for directions, of course, but it can also plan out road trips and vacations from a single prompt. Ask Maps works like a chatbot, so it accepts follow-up prompts to refine and expand on its suggestions.

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For my then-fundamentalist Christian family, the so-called "Eastern mysticism" of Star Wars was a bridge too far, something that could apparently corrupt my impressionable young evangelical mind irreversibly. Star Trek was OK, though, because my parents didn't feel it condoned witchcraft, or what have you, and they liked the original series from when they were younger.

Because of all that, my first true immersion in the Star Wars universe wasn't the movies, it was the video games, and one in particular—Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, which you can nab on GOG.

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But what if your course is 100 miles (161 km) from nowhere? It's 1,000 miles (1,610 km) long, and the only way to access it is on bumpy, dirty access roads that require four-wheel drive and plenty of clearance. If you want to watch the whole race with your own eyes, you’ll need to hire a helicopter. And broadcasting it live on TV? Good luck.

All that is changing with the advent of StarStream, a video and content streaming service that can be used with Starlink, the low-Earth-orbit satellite Internet system that has changed the way off-road race teams communicate. But George Hammel, a former motocross and UTV racer, saw even more potential: a way to bring fans into the cockpit, live.

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Windows will be presented as a core part of the Google Play platform with these updates. The mobile and web Play Store will soon have a Windows tab, which will highlight content that is optimized for desktop gaming. The store will direct you to install the Windows client to play these titles on a computer, but you can also wishlist them from any platform. When you do that, developers will be able to push notifications of sales that could entice people to buy something. This will only be available on mobile at first, but it will come to PC later.

Finding something worth playing in Google Play on a PC has been a challenge, but Google says it's working on that. The company promises a slate of premium games are coming to the Google Platform. Sledding Game, 9 Kings, Potion Craft, and Moonlight Peaks will launch in Google Play this year, and Low Budget Repairs will come in 2027. If you're unsure about dropping money on a game up front, Google plans to offer trials for select games. It will start with select games like Dredge and only on Android, but Google will make the trial option available to more developers and Windows down the line.

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The Post reported Wednesday that Kennedy's hand-selected committee of vaccine advisors—who share his anti-vaccine views—have abruptly abandoned plans to attack mRNA vaccines in an upcoming meeting.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is scheduled to meet March 18–19. While no agenda has been published for the meeting, a Federal Register notice stated that the meeting would include discussion of "COVID-19 vaccine injuries," and may include a vote to change the CDC's vaccine recommendations. Sources close to the committee told the Post that Kennedy's advisors have been looking for ways to remove mRNA COVID-19 vaccines entirely from federal recommendations. And according to clearly stated goals in a meeting of Kennedy's anti-vaccine allies earlier this week, the long-term goal is to eliminate all childhood vaccine recommendations and remove the shots from the market.

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Everyone pretty much fights with everyone, but of late, the exchanges between SpaceX and Amazon have turned a bit nasty. And on Wednesday, the FCC chairman weighed in against Amazon.

The issue of the moment is SpaceX's recent application to the FCC for permission to launch up to 1 million satellites to form a megaconstellation to provide data center services from space.

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The malware—dubbed KadNap—takes hold by exploiting vulnerabilities that have gone unpatched by their owners, Chris Formosa, a researcher at security firm Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, told Ars. The high concentration of Asus routers is likely due to botnet operators acquiring a reliable exploit for vulnerabilities affecting those models. He said it’s unlikely that the attackers are using any zero-days in the operation.

A botnet that stands out among others

The number of infected routers averages about 14,000 per day, up from 10,000 last August, when Black Lotus discovered the botnet. Compromised devices are overwhelmingly located in the US, with smaller populations in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Russia. One of the most salient features of KadNap is a sophisticated peer-to-peer design based on Kademlia, a network structure that uses distributed hash tables to conceal the IP addresses of command-and-control servers. The design makes the botnet resistant to detection and takedowns through traditional methods.

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The difference between the two is one of degree: A pet peeve may drive me nuts but does not appear to impact anyone else. A Ways that Technology is Changing our World story must be about something that drives a lot of people nuts.

"But where is the threshold?" I hear you asking plaintively. "It's extremely important that I know when something crosses the line from pet peeve to important, chin-stroking journalism topic!"

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