Developer Alliance Arts highlighted this trend over the weekend, delaying the launch of a planned public demo for its demon-themed Russian Roulette drinking game Drunken Goddess Reflex, which had been planned to go live with today's launch of Steam Next Fest.

In a post on social media Friday evening, the Alliance Arts team wrote that, in addition to concerns about managing streaming restrictions, "we're concerned that the demo's content could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game's presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools and that such works could be released before our launch."

Read full article

Comments

In a notice posted Friday, FLHSMV confirmed that it took “immediate steps” after discovering that “a malicious actor accessed certain department records on September 4, 2026, using compromised credentials.” There’s “no evidence” that data has yet been misused, the department said, but law enforcement “determined the information potentially affected includes driver license and motor vehicle data, to include document images, and other personal information.”

FLHSMV is sending out letters to everyone affected, offering victims one year of credit monitoring from Sontiq, Inc. However, the state acknowledged that it may not have current contact information for many former Florida residents whose data was still being stored. Those potential victims can confirm if their data was stolen by emailing FLHSMV at customerinquiry@flhsmv.gov, officials said.

Read full article

Comments

In the past few years, Character.AI has faced multiple private lawsuits over the safety of its chatbots, as well as investigations from regulators around the world. In a declaration filed as part of the bankruptcy, Character.AI’s newly appointed CEO explained that the goal of the bankruptcy was to reach a “consensual resolution” with personal injury claimants and a group of states investigating the company, while maximizing the value of the company’s assets for shareholders.

The Disney deal seems to be structured so that whatever is left of Character.AI will retain responsibility for those legal battles, some of which are still ongoing.

Read full article

Comments

The rocket's flight on September 15 lasted between 75 and 80 minutes, and it came down without completing a full orbit of the Earth. Social media posts at the time showed streaks of fiery debris falling from the sky, heading north over Kansas toward Minnesota. The overnight spectacle was also visible on the western horizon from Wisconsin.

The exact time, location, and direction of the debris allowed experts to connect it to the launch of a Zhuque-2E rocket, a medium-lift vehicle built by a Chinese company called LandSpace. The rocket had launched from Dongfeng, a commercial launch zone co-located with the military-run Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, less than two hours before.

Read full article

Comments

(Spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

There are two primary storylines. The first takes place in 2016 with a mass shooting at a local football game in Rushville, Nebraska. Current Green Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and his new trainee, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), get involved in the investigation, to the annoyance of Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), who initially doesn't think the case has any extraterrestrial connection. She is soon proved wrong when the suspect (an alien) self-detonates. Hal's power ring controls the damage, but the mystery remains.

Read full article

Comments

But by then momentum for alternate realities of every acronym was already in steady decline, and it only dwindled from there. The rate of development of new headsets has slowed, with many companies (including Apple) scaling back or shelving their efforts. While new releases like the Steam Frame and Pimax Dream Air are still happening, many of the most interesting developments in the space these days are on the enthusiast front.

That's right, DIY VR is a thing, and with a couple hundred dollars in components, plus many hours of your time, you too can enter the immersive world of virtual reality while also experiencing the highs and lows of soldering, firmware flashing, and 3D printing. I rode that rollercoaster myself and learned why this is still a decidedly niche movement.

Read full article

Comments

The trans-Pacific flight that took place over a month between August and September 2026 was the most notable milestone yet for Sceye, a US aerospace company based near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sceye has developed an uncrewed platform filled with helium for buoyancy and equipped with an electric-powered propeller for active propulsion, allowing it to resist most strong winds and keep hovering over the same location for long periods. The platform also uses top-mounted solar panels and onboard batteries to stay powered for stratospheric operations around the clock.

“We can stay over an area of operation, and we do that in the stratosphere right around 60,000 feet, so we're twice as high as air traffic and we're above the jet stream, and yet 30 times closer than low-Earth orbit satellites,” Mikkel Frandsen, founder and CEO of Sceye, told Ars. “We can fly through day and night until the sun comes up the next morning and recharges the batteries, at which point we're still at the same altitude and still over the same area of operation.”

Read full article

Comments

METR, a nonprofit that has worked with leading labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, now has a team embedded in the Claude maker’s office with access to its hardware and internal systems.

A greater role for third-party evaluators is among the main concrete steps the labs have proposed in response to rising concern about the dangers more capable AI systems could pose to the economy, cyber security, and humanity at large.

Read full article

Comments

Given the enormous time spent in workplace meetings, do we know what they accomplish or how to make them as worthwhile as possible? For decades, the answer was… not really. Meetings weren’t a particularly accessible subject of study. But that has changed. Once a tiny niche area, “meeting science” is a growing specialization among organizational and social psychologists. The field is accelerating as archived virtual meetings provide vast swaths of data. And it is providing a fascinating window into human behavior.

Meeting to talk helps fulfill basic human needs to connect, communicate, and cooperate. People have long come together—in caves, fields, market squares, and town halls—to get something done, share ideas, get on the same page, or just to remark on the weather. But meeting scientists define their subject as gatherings of people “with some goal or structure to the event,” says organizational psychologist Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology, who coauthored a review of over three decades of meeting science in the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.

Read full article

Comments

Neverwinter Nights was made by the studio that produced seminal RPGs Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. It sold well and was critically acclaimed at launch. Yet, somehow, it has not been canonized in most gamers' minds over the decades the same way the games that came before and after it were.

Nonetheless, more than two decades later, it still has a tight-knit and surprisingly active community that none of those other games can rival. I think that's partly because it was a completely different beast.

Read full article

Comments

The company on Thursday issued reports of four new incidents, all of which occurred in June. They come after the company revealed in July that internal test agents exploited a zero-day vulnerability in a tool designed to restrict their access to the Internet. They then broke into the network of AI tool provider Hugging Face. The agents took that illegal action to steal answers to a hacking test that weren’t available when completing the tasks on their own. The incident—which likely would have resulted in criminal charges had they been performed directly by a person—has further heightened concerns that widespread AI use could have harmful effects on an unprecedented scale.

Easier to beg for forgiveness than ask permission

In two of the cases reported Thursday, OpenAI agents tasked with retrieving information from websites hacked them when the models ran into obstacles obtaining it directly. In one incident during reinforcement training, a model that received access denials when trying to retrieve historical hospital-bed statistics on a government statistics website “used the site's file-download feature to retrieve server configuration and application files, including sensitive credentials,” OpenAI said. “It inspected the application code, bypassed the statistics endpoint's authorization checks, and retrieved data that had previously been denied. The model saved the data locally.”

Read full article

Comments

In the US, cops have vowed to crack down on AI CSAM since at least 2024, when the Department of Justice made one of the earliest arrests. After charging a Wisconsin man with spreading “thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors” across Telegram and Instagram, the DOJ clarified to law enforcement that “CSAM generated by AI is still CSAM.”

On Thursday, New Jersey officials accused 51-year-old Fitzgerald of using AI to make photos from social media of real minors into sexualized images that he then distributed on social media.

Read full article

Comments

A new bill proposed by Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) aims to establish new regulations that would ensure that "buying a video game would give the consumer ownership of the game rather than a license to play it," including assurances that they can continue to access the games for years after they are released.

The announcement names NBA 2K25 as an example of the problem the bill aims to solve; that game launched on September 6, 2025, but is scheduled to become unplayable on December 31 due to server shutdowns. The bill, which is called the Power to Players Act, directs the FTC to take action to prevent outcomes like that in the future.

Read full article

Comments

This week, some users reported online that their Ray-Ban Metas were recording without their consent. A person going by Kindly-Audience-137 on Reddit, for example, said this happened to them across three Meta Ray-Bans and that they had the “Respond without Hey Meta” setting turned off. The person said the Meta AI app “saves audio recordings and text transcripts of these conversations in my conversation history.”

“I believe this deserves a serious technical investigation. Customers should not have to wonder whether their private conversations are being captured when they have not intentionally activated their glasses’ AI assistant,” the Reddit user said.

Read full article

Comments

The FDA submitted an "Interim Access Policy" on peptides for review by the White House, according to a filing notice posted on an Office of Management and Budget website. The posting does not provide information on the proposed policy. But people familiar with the proposal told The Associated Press that it would give the FDA "enforcement discretion" on certain peptide drugs. This would allow the agency to choose not to enforce current restrictions on peptides and provide an assurance to specialty pharmacies eager to start making them that they will not be targeted by the agency.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, did not respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.

Read full article

Comments

Kicking in on October 30, the TOS update won’t allow businesses to opt out, instead suggesting that businesses stop using Meta services if they won’t agree to let Meta bots freely crawl their linked content.

As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta's terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans.

Read full article

Comments

Two global election markets on Polymarket’s offshore platform, for instance, generated over $600 million in trading volume, far more than most political markets typically attract. Most of the activity took place buying and selling contracts tied to long-shot candidates who ultimately did not win.

This summer, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party cruised to victory in federal elections, winning 438 parliamentary seats and paving the way for him to serve another five-year term. The closest competitor won 13 seats. On prediction markets, trading volume—the total value of contracts bought and sold—typically tracks roughly with the odds of a given outcome; frontrunners attract far more volume than long shots. But in this case, the trading patterns deviated sharply from the norm. Just $173,000 was wagered on Ahmed winning, compared to more than $41 million traded on his chief of staff, Shimelis Abdisa, becoming the country’s next leader. Altogether, the volume traded added up to over $285 million, nearly all on losing candidates.

Read full article

Comments

The new Roadster, we’re told, will be unlike anything else, although the angular, wedge-shaped styling owes more than a little to Giorgetto Giugiaro’s original Lotus Esprit—Musk is known to own a James Bond prop car—as well as the more recent Lamborghini Gallardo. At the rear are four giant exhaust pipes; these do not signal Tesla’s sudden embrace of hydrocarbons beyond those emitted by private aviation.

Rather, it’s where 100,000 psi jets of compressed nitrogen shoot out. It’s early in the morning and the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Statutes are dense reading, so I am yet to find the section where it explains how and when it’s legal to use such a thing on the road.

Read full article

Comments

In a documentary premiering Saturday—Super Scam Me—investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller goes deep into this toxic love-bombing terrain. In a clip that Ars is exclusively debuting below, you can see how van Zeller worked with an ethical hacker, Arman the Cyber, to use a fake bitcoin receipt and bait the fake Bon Jovi, giving the victim some much-needed closure.

Scamming a romance scammer

Broadcasting on National Geographic at 9 pm ET and available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu, the documentary takes viewers on an empathetic quest to understand how the line between “lover” and “fraud victim” gets blurred in romance scams that the Federal Trade Commission says cost Americans nearly $1.5 billion in losses each year.

Read full article

Comments

Microsoft is throwing both arms around the new Nvidia RTX Spark platform with the Surface Laptop Ultra—and setting its sights on the would-be MacBook Pro buyer, or as the company called it, "a high performance audience." The bet is that rather than a gaming desktop for fun and a development laptop for work, buyers will pay more for one machine that does both.

The Surface Laptop Ultra arrives at a strange time in personal computing. Recent industry numbers showed a 20 percent drop in total PC shipments year over year in the third quarter of 2026. That's not just consumer purchasing either—that's across the board. Between the RAMpocalypse that has exploded consumer prices and an industry fixated on enterprise money, there hasn't been much new hardware to excite PC enthusiasts.

Read full article

Comments