Enlarge / When Tesla first started marketing its driver assists, it relied on radar, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors all working together. (credit: Tesla)

On Wednesday, Tesla announced that it is dropping yet another set of sensors from its electric vehicles. The latest casualty? Ultrasonic sensors, usually found embedded in the bumpers, that allow for assisted parking features.

At first, it will just be the Models 3 and Y that rely solely on cameras for the entire array of driver assists that Tesla offers. However, the automaker says that after rolling out this change globally, it will then do the same for the Models S and X in 2023.

Tesla says that despite dropping radar from its adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency braking functions—which now rely solely on cameras—its vehicles "have either maintained or improved their active safety ratings in the US and Europe and perform better in pedestrian automatic emergency braking (AEB) intervention."

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Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It's time for another mid-week Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a new low on Google's Pixel 6a smartphone. Priced $100 less than its original selling price, the $349 Pixel 6a delivers flagship performance in an already value-stuffed package. Using the same SoC as the Pixel 6 Pro, the Pixel 6a roared through benchmarks in our testing and offered the same competent photography we've come to expect from Pixel phones. The Pixel 7 is set to be announced tomorrow, but that device will likely cost more than double the 6a's current price, and the 7a is a bit farther off, with the line typically launched in spring.

Microsoft's Surface Pro 8 and Surface Laptop 4 are also on sale for record lows. In our review, we called the Pro 8 "the best version of [the tablet first, laptop second] that you can get." It showed laptop-class performance in a form factor that continues to improve its usability with a bigger screen, Thunderbolt 4 ports, and replaceable SSDs. The midrange i5 Core Intel Evo variant with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage is down from $1,000 to $865 at Amazon. You can also snag one from Best Buy with a TypeCover for $1,000, saving you about $20 on the separately sold accessory, on top of the noted discount.

Elsewhere around the web, we have discounts on our favorite 4K streaming stick, Google's Chromecast with Google TV ($40 $50); one of our top picks for an activity-tracking smartwatch, the Garmin Venu Sq ($149 $200); and continued price cuts on last year's 13-inch MacBook Pro and LG's C2 4K OLED TV, among many others. You can check out our full curated list of deals below.

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Enlarge / Artist's conception of Blizzard fighting off DDoS attackers.

When a highly anticipated online game launches, unforeseen server capacity issues and long entry queues are nothing out of the ordinary. In the case of this week's Overwatch 2 early access launch, though, the usual crowding problems are apparently being exacerbated by coordinated distributed denial of service attacks.

On Tuesday evening, Blizzard President Mike Ybarra issued a generic tweet warning that "Teams are working hard on server issues with Overwatch 2." Less than an hour later, though, he followed up with some more worrying specifics. "Unfortunately we are experiencing a mass DDoS attack on our servers," he said. "Teams are working hard to mitigate/manage. This is causing a lot of drop/connection issues."

Overnight, Overwatch 2 Game Director Aaron Keller posted an update saying that "we’re steadily making progress on server issues and stability, as well as working through a second DDoS attack. We’re all hands on deck and will continue to work throughout the night. Thank you for your patience—we’ll share more info as it becomes available."

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Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Patrick Pleul/dpa-Zentralbild/ZB)

Why did Elon Musk agree to buy Twitter again instead of continuing to argue his claims that Twitter violated the merger agreement by lying about bots? There are a few answers, but "the biggest one of all is that he's almost certain to lose [in Delaware Court of Chancery]. And of course, if he loses, he has to do exactly what he's just agreed to do, which is close the deal at the original price," law professor Robert Miller told Ars in a phone interview yesterday.

Miller is the F. Arnold Daum chair in corporate finance and law at the University of Iowa College of Law. "The Delaware Supreme Court and the Delaware Court of Chancery have cited Professor Miller's articles on material adverse effects, an issue the Court of Chancery has described as 'one of the most difficult issues under Delaware law,' more than forty times," his University of Iowa bio says. Musk's defense against Twitter's lawsuit depended heavily on whether he could prove that Twitter suffered a material adverse effect.

Musk tried to get out of the $44 billion deal by claiming that Twitter lied in its estimate that fewer than 5 percent of its monetizable daily active users (mDAU) are spam or fake. But his claims seemed to have no solid proof, and with the scheduled trial less than two weeks away, Miller says Musk probably finally realized his case likely isn't a winner.

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Artist’s impression of a space ad seen from the Skoltech campus. (credit: Shamil Biktimirov/Skoltech)

On Wednesday the public relations department of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow issued a news release with a provocative title: "Ad-block this: Space advertisers ready to display commercials in the sky."

How about no.

The basis for the news release is a study in the journal Aerospace. Its authors assess the technical feasibility of flying satellites in formation, in space, to reflect sunlight and display commercials in the sky above cities. The authors wondered whether satellites could fly long enough, and in enough different formations over various cities, to make money back from advertising to cover their development and launch costs.

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Enlarge / We took our handsome pair of new Arc A700-series GPUs out for some glamour shots. While minding standard static-related protocols, of course. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

What's it like owning a brand-new Intel Arc A700-series graphics card? Is it the show-stopping clapback against Nvidia that wallet-pinched PC gamers have been dreaming of? Is it an absolute mess of unoptimized hardware and software? Does it play video games?

That last question is easy to answer: yes, and pretty well. Intel now has a series of GPUs entering the PC gaming market just in time for a few major industry trends to play out: some easing in the supply chain, some crashes in cryptocurrency markets, and more GPUs being sold near their originally announced MSRPs. If those factors continue to move in consumer-friendly directions, it will mean that people might actually get to buy and enjoy the best parts of Intel’s new A700-series graphics cards. (Sadly, limited stock remains a concern in modern GPU reviews. Without firm answers from Intel on how many units it's making, we’re left wondering what kind of Arc GPU sell-outs to expect until further notice.)

While this is a fantastic first-generation stab at an established market, it’s still a first-generation stab. In great news, Intel is taking the GPU market seriously with how its Arc A770 (starting at $329) and Arc A750 (starting at $289) cards are architected. The best results are trained on modern and future rendering APIs, and in those gaming scenarios, their power and performance exceed their price points.

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Enlarge / The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science." (credit: Niklas Elmehed/Nobel Prize Outreach)

Cornell University physicist N. David Mermin once described quantum entanglement as "the closest thing we have to magic," since it means that disturbances in one part of the universe can instantly affect distant other parts of the universe, somehow bypassing the cosmic speed-of-light limit. Albert Einstein memorably dubbed it "spooky action at a distance." Today, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored three physicists with the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on entanglement. Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger were recognized "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science."

When subatomic particles interact, they can become invisibly connected even though they may be physically separated. So knowledge about one partner can instantly reveal knowledge about its twin. If you measure the state of one, you will know the state of the other without having to make a second measurement because the first measurement determines the properties of the other particle as well.

There are many different ways particles can become entangled, but in every case, both particles must arise from a single "mother" process. For instance, passing a single photon through a special kind of crystal can split that photon into two new "daughter" particles. We'll call them "green" and "red" (shorthand for more abstract particle properties like spin or velocity). Those particles will be entangled. Energy must be conserved, so both daughter particles have a lower frequency and energy than the original mother particle, but the total energy between them equals the mother's energy. We have no way of knowing which is the green one and which is the red. We just know that each daughter photon has a 50-50 chance of being one or the other color. But should we chance to see one of the particles and note that it is red, we can instantly conclude that the other must be green.

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Enlarge / Elon Musk arrives for the 2022 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 2, 2022, in New York. (credit: Getty Images | Angela Weiss)

Elon Musk has told Twitter he is once again willing to buy the company at the originally agreed-upon price, according to a Bloomberg News report.

"Elon Musk is proposing to buy Twitter Inc. for the original offer price of $54.20 a share... Musk made the proposal in a letter to Twitter, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information," Bloomberg wrote.

The Wall Street Journal subsequently reported that Musk's "lawyers communicated the proposal to Twitter's lawyers overnight Monday and filed a letter confidentially with the Delaware Chancery Court ahead of an emergency hearing on the matter scheduled for Tuesday."

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Enlarge / "Sarah" from Virtua Fighter gets an AI makeover thanks to Stable Diffusion and a fan named Colin Williamson. (credit: Colin Williamson)

In 1993, Sega's Virtua Fighter arcade game broke new ground with fully 3D polygonal graphics, a first for a fighting game. Thanks to a Twitter thread from an artist named Colin Williamson, we can take a look at what those original boxy characters might look like with their angles smoothed out.

To create the images, Williamson took vintage Virtua Fighter game graphics and fed them through an "img2img" mode of the Stable Diffusion image synthesis model, which takes an input image as a prompt, combines it with a written description, and synthesizes an output image. (In particular, Williamson used the "AUTOMATIC1111" release, which comes with a nice web-based user interface.)

Stable Diffusion doesn't work magically, so it can take some trial and error and a keen eye to figure out prompting to get worthwhile results. Still, Williamson enjoyed the process. "Just describe the character, and img2img does its best," Williamson told Ars. "Though the hardest part was simply figuring out how to describe the characters' clothes."

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

VideoLAN is threatening to sue India's government, saying it has received no explanation for why the VLC website has been blocked by Indian ISPs for the past six months.

"In March 2022, to our shock and dismay, the URL 'https://www.videolan.org/' appeared to have been blocked for viewing in India without any prior notice to me or any other person in the organization," VideoLAN president and lead VLC developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote in a September 30 letter to India's Department of Telecommunications. "Despite reportage and uproar on social media, no reasons for blocking the URL were provided to us, or to the Indian public."

The letter said attempts to reach the URL in India resulted in the message, "Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from the Department of Telecommunications, Government of India."

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Enlarge (credit: Matthew Horwood / Contributor | Getty Images News)

Over the past decade, Google has consistently documented its efforts to remove links from its search results to content that the tech giant considers pirated, and recently, the total number of Google takedowns since its reporting began has shot past 6 billion. It's a milestone that Torrent Freak suggested shows that, "[w]hile copyright infringement can't be eradicated entirely, Google is slowly but steadily presenting itself as a willing partner in the anti-piracy fight."

Google's slow evolution into an anti-piracy champion began ramping up in 1998. That's when the Federal Communications Commission granted safe harbor to online service providers like Google, protecting them from copyright infringement claims about third-party content, with a condition that the providers disclose information on any users alleged to be infringers. A decade later in 2009, it seemed like Google wasn't doing enough, though, and the FCC again intervened, responding to news publishers lashing out at Google and others. At that time, the publishers accused service providers of profiting off ad placements next to links from aggregators and scrapers, who were accused of grabbing and republishing news content without permission.

Back then, Google promised to address the issue by making it easier for rights holders to flag infringing content in search results. Then it launched its first transparency report in 2010, but that initial report only shared information on government requests for takedowns. Two years later, Google expanded its report, publicly counting every takedown notice that it received and "providing information about who sends us copyright removal notices, how often, on behalf of which copyright owners and for which websites."

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Enlarge / After the sedan came the SUV: the 2023 Mercedes-Benz EQS SUV. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

DENVER, Colo.—Mercedes-Benz isn't really hanging around when it comes to new electric vehicles, all launched under the new Mercedes-EQ sub-brand. It has electrified its popular little crossover, the GLB, to create the EQB, which does everything the gas-powered car does, but much more efficiently. But it has also built an entirely new EV-specific platform called EVA2, for larger, more premium Mercedes EVs. The first of those hit the road last year—its flagship EQS sedan—followed by a slightly smaller, slightly cheaper follow-up called the EQE sedan.

But big sedans don't sell anything like the way they used to, particularly here in North America. No, Americans want SUVs, particularly if they're looking for a big luxury one, as determined by the sheer number of Mercedes GLSes I see when I visit California. Mercedes is wise to this, and EVA2 is designed to make SUVs and sedans—as is the case with the 2023 EQS SUV. In fact, Mercedes is so confident of US market sales for the EQS SUV, it builds them in Alabama so they don't have to be imported.

The EQS SUV is 201.8 inches (5,126 mm) long, 77.1 inches (1,958 mm) wide and 67.6 inches (1,717 mm) tall. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Mercedes' first big electric SUV comes to America in three flavors, each with an identical 107.8 kWh usable battery capacity. The $104,400 EQS 450+ SUV features a single rear-mounted, permanently excited synchronous motor, outputting 355 hp (265 kW) and 419 lb-ft (568 Nm) of torque. This is also the longest-legged EQS SUV, using its 107.8 kWh to travel 305 miles (490 km) thanks to a very slippery drag coefficient—for an SUV—of just 0.26. Unfortunately, it didn't have any of these variants in Denver for us to drive.

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Enlarge / Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos Inc., arrives at federal court in San Jose, California, on Thursday, September 1. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

On the brink of sentencing for her four fraud convictions in January, disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes will get a new evidentiary hearing in which the judge in the criminal case will weigh "limited, but serious" allegations that government prosecutors manipulated testimony from a key witness, former Theranos lab director Adam Rosendorff.

The new evidentiary hearing is scheduled for October 17, the day on which Holmes was previously set to be sentenced. Her sentencing is now delayed, with rescheduling possible between November and January.

The new evidentiary hearing stems from an unusual incident in August, in which an allegedly distraught Rosendorff showed up at Holmes' home to try to talk with her. According to court documents, Rosendorff first called Holmes' lawyer at around 5 pm on August 8 and left a voicemail in which he asked for an arranged meeting with Holmes at her house. The lawyer has a recording of the voicemail. An hour or so after leaving that message, Rosendorff—having not heard back from the lawyer—showed up at Holmes' home. Holmes did not speak with Rosendorff, but her partner, William Evans, did.

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Enlarge / EU's USB-C charging mandate is moving forward across 13 device cateogories (credit: Getty)

The European Union is moving forward with legislation requiring USB-C charging on a variety of consumer electronics. Today, the EU Parliament formally approved the agreement that it and the EU Council agreed upon in September. The EU Council has to formally approve the agreement next, and it will then be published in the EU's Official Journal.

The Parliament's announcement confirmed a timeline and additional affected device categories. The legislation requires a USB-C port on all phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones, headsets, earbuds, portable speakers, handheld video game consoles, e-readers, keyboards, mice, and navigation systems that are sold in the EU, use wired charging, and support power delivery of up to 100 W "by the end of 2024," the Parliament said.

Laptops will have to have USB-C charging "from spring 2026," the announcement said.

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Enlarge / The four Nest Wifi Pro colors you can buy for your bird's-egg-style connectivity. From left: Linen, Snow, Fog, Lemongrass. (credit: Google)

Google's Nest Wifi Pro system, previously seen at the Federal Communications Commission and in accidental retail listings, has been made official. The system expands the wireless powers of a Nest mesh system and adds Thread and Matter support, but it can't work with older Nest Wifi hardware.

The big upgrade in the Pro system is Wi-Fi 6E, which makes use of newer spectrum space in the 6–7 GHz band, along with the common 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. For those living in a crowded Wi-Fi environment, 6E could mean better, faster connections, though at reduced range and with less wall and floor penetration than 2.4 GHz. If you have very new devices that work with Wi-Fi 6E, you'll immediately see the change. For most of us, at the moment, 6E is more future-proofing than signal-boosting, though each device that uses the newer standard takes some load off the network.

Google says that Nest Wifi Pro's router unit ($199) can cover up to 2,200 square feet per piece, which is 200 questionable feet more than the Eero Pro 6E and has a theoretical top speed of 5.4Gbps. Notably, each Wifi Pro piece comes with two 1 Gbps Ethernet ports, not just the router, allowing for both wired backhaul between multiple units and for connecting select devices via Ethernet (likely with the addition of a network switch). That's an improvement over the prior Wi-Fi 5-based Nest Wifi, which was an otherwise all-around decent performer in our benchmark testing.

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Enlarge / The White House, Blue Sky, Red Trees, and Green Grass (credit: Getty Images / Benj Edwards)

Today, the White House proposed a "Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights," a set of principles and practices that seek to guide "the design, use, and deployment of automated systems," with the goal of protecting the rights of Americans in "the age of artificial intelligence," according to the White House.

The blueprint is a set of non-binding guidelines—or suggestions—providing a "national values statement" and a toolkit to help lawmakers and businesses build the proposed protections into policy and products. The White House crafted the blueprint, it said, after a year-long process that sought input from people across the country "on the issue of algorithmic and data-driven harms and potential remedies."

The document represents a wide-ranging approach to countering potential harms in artificial intelligence. It touches on concerns about bias in AI systems, AI-based surveillance, unfair health care or insurance decisions, data security—and much more—in the context of American civil liberties, criminal justice, education, and the private sector.

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  The Pixel 4 XL. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

The Pixel 4 is officially hitting its end of life this month after three short years of service. We sometimes see these dead Google phones get one more wrap-up update before Google cuts the cord, but the Android October 2022 update is the end of the line here.

The Pixel 4 was a big batch of Google experiments passed off as a consumer product, and we did not take kindly to it. It was the first (and only) Google phone to attempt to copy Apple's FaceID by using a grid of IR dots and extra hardware to scan the user's face. The system was much slower than the fingerprint reader on the Pixel 3, and it oddly worked on sleeping people for several months after launch.

The Pixel 4 was the first and only Google phone to integrate "Project Soli," a tiny Google radar chip that can detect motion. The laboratory versions of Soli promised that the technology could capture "sub millimeter motions of your fingers," but the commercial implementation in the Pixel 4 could only (sometimes) capture giant arm movements. Soli lives on in Google smart displays for sleep tracking, but the phone version is dead. Combine that with very high prices for the two device sizes ($800 and $900) and very small batteries (2800 mAh and 3700 mAh), and you have the makings of a very bad device.

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Enlarge (credit: Future Publishing | Getty Images)

Two months ago, Sundar Pichai announced a new era of belt-tightening at Google, leading to the shutdown of the Pixel laptop hardware team, a culling of half of the experimental projects at Area 120, a spinoff of Project Loon's technology, and the death of Google Stadia. Next up for the icy hand of Google's budget department might be YouTube. MacRumors reports that YouTube is experimenting with paywalling 4K video resolution for videos, making it exclusive to subscribers of YouTube Premium.

Reports of this experiment hitting some users have been popping up for the past month. When selecting a resolution, every option is available except for "2160p" (4K), which has a little "Premium" tag next to it. That will be $11.99 a month if you want to access videos in the highest resolution. Google's recently killed game-streaming service, Stadia, had a similar billing setup, where 4K was a premium add-on.

So, after testing up to 12 ads on YouTube for non-Premium users, now some users reported that they also have to get a Premium account just to watch videos in 4K. pic.twitter.com/jJodoAxeDp

— Alvin (@sondesix) October 1, 2022

This isn't the only YouTube revenue-boosting experiment Google has tried lately. Last month, some users saw as many as 10 unskippable ads before a video. Criticism was strong, and Google later called the move an "experiment" that it "concluded," which apparently means it's not happening. We could see something similar happen to the idea of paywalling the 4K resolution, depending on how the reception goes. We asked Google PR for comment, but the company said it has nothing to share right now.

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Enlarge (credit: Juan Gaertner / Getty Images)

There’s a video that’s shown in almost every introductory neuroscience course. It doesn’t look like much—a bar of light shifting and rotating across a black screen while the background audio pops and crackles like the sound of a faraway fireworks show. Dry stuff, until you learn that the pops represent the firing of a single neuron in the brain of a cat, who is watching the bar move on the screen. When the bar reaches a specific location and lies at a particular angle, the popping explodes in a grand finale of frantic activity. The message is clear: This neuron really, really cares about that bar.

The experiment shown in the video was performed by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in the 1960s and helped scientists infer basic principles about how the visual system works. For decades since, neuroscientists have stuck thin, metal electrodes into the brains of mice, finches, and monkeys to spy on individual neurons and figure out what sets them off. There are neurons that respond to specific colors or shapes; or to particular locations in space or the direction of one’s head; or to whole faces or individual features.

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Enlarge / An Atlas V rocket launches the GOES-T mission for NASA's Launch Services Program on March 1, 2022. (credit: ULA)

On Friday NASA closed the bidding process to select a launch vehicle for an upcoming Earth science mission to measure changes in sea level, Sentinel-6B. The mission is expected to launch into low Earth orbit about four years from now, and the space agency is finalizing its choice of a rocket.

Such bidding processes are secretive to protect the competitive interests of the bidders in terms of prices and capabilities. However, realistically, there is no mystery about who will win the Sentinel-6B contract. Like the spacecraft's twin, Sentinel-6A, we can expect this mission to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket sometime in 2026.

This is because, at present, there are no other bidders for NASA's medium and large science missions beyond SpaceX and its fleet of Falcon rockets.

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