"It's very painful," Brockman told OpenAI lawyer Sarah Eddy during his second day on the stand.

Although he's not "ashamed" of any of the journal entries, he considers them to be deeply personal, he said. Rather than serving as a straightforward log of his actions or feelings, the entries reflect a stream of consciousness that meanders as it explores alternate viewpoints.

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The latest investment round of $140 million is intended to help the company Panthalassa complete a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, Oregon, and speed up deployments of wave-riding “nodes” designed to generate electrical power, according to a May 4 press release. Instead of sending renewable energy to a land-based data center, the floating nodes would directly power onboard AI chips and transmit inference tokens representing the AI models’ outputs to customers worldwide via satellite link.

“Panthalassa’s idea transforms an energy transmission problem into a data transmission problem,” Benjamin Lee, a computer architect and engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, told Ars. “Performing AI computation on the ocean would require transferring models to the ocean-based nodes and then responding to prompts and queries.”

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"The department’s investigation found that AI chatbot characters on Character.AI claimed to be licensed medical professionals, including psychiatrists, available to engage users in conversations about mental health symptoms," Governor Josh Shapiro's office said today in an announcement of the lawsuit. "In one instance, a chatbot falsely stated it was licensed in Pennsylvania and provided an invalid license number."

"We will not allow companies to deploy AI tools that mislead people into believing they are receiving advice from a licensed medical professional," Shapiro said in the announcement.

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Kaspersky, the security firm reporting the supply-chain attack, said it began on April 8 and remained active as of the time its post went live. Installers that are signed by the developer’s official digital certificate and downloaded from its website infect Daemon Tools executables, causing the malware to run at boot time. Kaspersky didn’t explicitly say so, but based on technical details, the infected versions appear to be only those that run on Windows. Versions 12.5.0.2421 through 12.5.0.2434 are affected. Neither Kaspersky nor developer AVB could be contacted immediately for additional details.

Hard to defend against

Infected versions contain an initial payload that collects MAC addresses, hostnames, DNS domain names, running processes, installed software, and system locales. The malware sends them to an attacker-controlled server. Thousands of machines in more than 100 countries were targeted. Out of the many machines infected, about 12 of them, belonging to retail, scientific, government, and manufacturing organizations, have received a follow-on payload—an indication that the supply-chain attack targets select groups.

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The MAHA event was focused on "overmedicalization," with participants broadly alleging—without evidence—that too many Americans, particularly youths, are overprescribed antidepressants in the class of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. This class includes common medications such as Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, and Lexapro, which are used to treat depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, among other conditions. Event participants focused on claims that the drugs are prescribed without informed consent, are harmful, and can be difficult to stop taking.

False claims

The topics closely echo Kennedy's claims. Among his many dangerous, evidence-free statements, he has suggested that too many people, including children, are put on SSRIs and that they make people violent. He has even suggested that they are the cause of mass shootings, including school shootings. In a podcast last year, he made the heinous claim that "every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence." His suggested solution is for black children to be "reparented" and work on farms.

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According to Google, Home users who have signed up for the early access channel should already have the update to Gemini 3.1. Google initially released this AI model on other platforms in February, but that rollout didn't include Google's smart speakers. With the expansion to Home, Google says those speakers will be able to take advantage of Gemini 3.1's "advanced reasoning to better interpret and execute complex, multi-step voice commands." Of course, it says something like that with every Gemini update.

Google has cited various AI evaluations that show Gemini 3.1 is better at parsing big, complex prompts. It showed gains in tests like ARC-AGI-2 and Humanity's Last Exam, both of which require tricky logic problems that need domain-specific knowledge. How much that kind of capability will benefit a smart speaker that specializes in brief interactions is unclear, but you can have long conversations with Gemini in your smart home devices if you want. Google notes the improved model can process multiple different tasks in a single prompt, saving you from breaking up tasks into multiple commands.

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The January 2025 lawsuit, filed in the last days of the Biden administration, relates to how Musk purchased a 9 percent stake in Twitter in 2022 and failed to disclose it within 10 days as required under US law. The Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that "Musk was able to continue purchasing shares at artificially low prices, allowing him to underpay by at least $150 million for shares he purchased after his beneficial ownership report was due.”

Twitter's stock price soared after Musk belatedly disclosed his stake, and he bought the company outright later in 2022. The Biden SEC's January 2025 lawsuit demanded that Musk "pay disgorgement of his unjust enrichment as a result of his violation," plus interest and a separate civil penalty. But the SEC had investigated the late disclosure and related matters for nearly three years before filing the lawsuit, leaving no time to litigate the case before the Trump administration took over.

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It’s bleak out there.

Still, Ford has decided to stay in the game with its “Universal Electric Vehicle,” which it announced in late 2025. This highly modular platform is designed to underpin all of the Blue Oval’s electric vehicles going forward. The work has been largely conducted at Ford’s Electric Vehicle Development Center (EVDC) in sunny Long Beach, California, and Ars Technica was recently invited to tour the facility to see what makes it different from any of Ford’s other operations.

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Over the last year, Christopher Nolan and Universal Pictures have been trickling out sneak peeks and teasers for Nolan's forthcoming film version of The Odyssey, adapting Homer's classic poem. The studio recently dropped a new two-and-a-half-minute trailer stuffed with the glorious visuals, high emotions, and soaring music befitting such an epic saga.

As previously reported, most of us read some version of The Odyssey in high school, so we’re familiar with the story: Odysseus, legendary Greek king of Ithaca, begins the long journey home after 10 years of fighting in the Trojan War. But the journey does not go smoothly, as Odysseus and his men encounter the cyclops Polyphemus, the Sirens, and an enchantress named Circe, among other obstacles. Meanwhile, his long-suffering wife, Penelope, is warding off hundreds of suitors eager to usurp Odysseus’ position.

Nolan loves an epic tale and compared Homer's Odyssey to today's superhero movies during a recent appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “Even comic book culture, whether you’re talking about Marvel or DC or all the rest, a lot of it comes pretty directly from the Homeric epics,” Nolan told Colbert. “The thing about Homer is, nobody knows if that was a person. Homer, in a way, is the sort of George Lucas of his time.”

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Among the goals Musk must meet if he wants all 423.7 million shares in his new contract—current market value $1.7 trillion: Over the next decade Tesla needs at least 10 million subs on the hook. Those kinds of numbers are unachievable if he has to rely just on North American users; Tesla needs Europe and China to say yes, too.

But neither China nor the EU has quite the same attitude toward consumer safety that we do in the US, where our government has decided to implicitly trust companies like Tesla at their word when they say a new product is safe. Instead, Chinese and European regulators require premarket approval before letting something loose on their roads.

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Lawyers for the man, who has not been named, are alarmed in part because they say that the man has not entered the United States in more than a decade. “I don’t know what the government knows about our client’s residence, but it’s clear that the government isn’t stopping to find out,” says Michael Perloff, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia who is representing the man in a lawsuit against Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of DHS, over the summons. The lawsuit alleges that DHS violated the customs law that gives the agency the power to request records from businesses and other parties.

Perloff argues that the government is using the fact that big tech companies are based in the US to request information it would not otherwise be able to get. “It’s using that geographic fact to get information that otherwise would be totally outside of its jurisdiction,” he says. “I mean, we’re talking about the physical movements of a person who lives in Canada.”

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Instead, a new overlay popped up, saying, "Get the app to keep using Reddit."

There was no way to skip, bypass, or close the overlay. It did not provide any instructions or alternatives for continuing to use the mobile web version. What it did offer was a large button I could press to get the app. If I did so, the overlay told me, I would be able to "search better" and "personalize your feed"—two things I don't care to do.

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I'm not a devoted user of the app, but I was aware of its history, which is why I was surprised to see news of a "Notepad++ for Mac" port making the rounds last week, as though it were a port of the original available from the Notepad++ website.

Apparently, this news surprised Ho as well, who claims that the Mac version and its author, Andrey Letov, are "using the Notepad++ trademark (the name) without permission."

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The canary trap is a simple tool often used to identify leakers or double agents. To make one, you simply share a document, image, or database but make tiny changes that are unique to each recipient. That way, if those changes show up verbatim in any leak of the information, you know immediately which recipient was behind the leak.

You don't often see canary traps in the news, though they have long been a staple of spy fiction (and practice), so an account out of Canada last week caught my eye.

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“The paper's authors made some very attention-grabbing claims about the benefits of ChatGPT on learning outcomes,” said Ben Williamson, a senior lecturer at the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, in an email to Ars. “It was treated by many on social media as one of the first pieces of hard, gold standard evidence that ChatGPT, and generative AI more broadly, benefits learners.”

The retracted paper attempted to quantify “the effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking” by analyzing results from 51 previous research studies. Its meta-analysis calculated the effect size between various studies’ experimental groups that used ChatGPT in education and control groups that did not use the AI chatbot.

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"GameStop’s ~1,600 US locations give eBay a national network for authentication, intake, fulfillment, and live commerce," GameStop Chairman and CEO Ryan Cohen wrote in a letter to eBay Chairman Paul Pressler.

eBay's market capitalization is over four times larger than GameStop's. GameStop faces skepticism about the viability of its offer but says it will obtain debt financing and pay with a mix of cash and stock.

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As we learned a couple of weeks ago, there have been tweaks to the amount of energy that the cars' new hybrid power units can regenerate and deploy via the electric motor that contributes almost half of the car's power output. The first three races of this season were frenetic, but they alarmed many longtime fans, as the cars are now too energy-limited to be driven flat-out during qualifying; that energy limitation also led to cars swapping positions multiple times, derisively dubbed "yo-yo" racing by critics.

The new limits on harvesting energy from the V6 to charge the battery on the move should reduce the potential for huge speed differentials like the one that caused Oliver Bearman's crash in Japan, and energy management was (thankfully) not much of a topic this weekend. Miami's layout definitely helps there, with plenty of braking zones to help regenerate much of the now-allowed 7 MJ each lap.

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In patch series notes for an amdgpu driver update posted on Friday (and noticed by Phoronix), AMD's Harry Wentland says that the company is finally adding HDMI FRL (Fixed Rate Link) support to the popular Linux display driver. That's the feature that allows for higher bandwidth on compatible HDMI cables compared to the TMDS standard found on HDMI 2.0 and earlier. That in turn enables direct support for higher resolutions, dynamic HDR, and features like Variable Refresh Rate that aren't supported in HDMI 2.0.

Wentland notes that this update is still just "a representative subset of HDMI compliance," in part because it is missing the code to support the Display Stream Compression (DSC) that allows for even higher resolutions and frame rates up to 10K at 100 Hz. But Wentland adds that DSC support "is still being tested and will be sent out later," and that "a full compliance run" for HDMI 2.1 is "in the works." An AMD driver developer with the handle agd5f also commented on Phoronix, noting that "a full implementation [of HDMI 2.1] will ultimately be available once the patches are ready and have completed compliance testing."

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According to a Sunday court filing from OpenAI, Musk messaged OpenAI President Greg Brockman two days ahead of the trial to "gauge interest" in a possible settlement. Brockman promptly responded, suggesting that "both sides" drop their claims. But Musk refused, then appeared to grow threatening enough that the court may allow Brockman to testify on the message as evidence supposedly revealing Musk's true motives for pursuing the litigation.

"By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America," Musk responded to Brockman's suggestion that all claims be dropped. "If you insist, so it will be."

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Now, the $599 entry-level Mac mini has also been removed from Apple's store. The cheapest Mac mini you can currently order from Apple costs $799, which gets you an M4 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage.

This isn’t technically a price hike; Apple has charged the same amount for these specs since launching the M4 Mac mini in late 2024. But now that the basic model with 256GB of storage has apparently been discontinued, it’s no longer possible to buy a Mac mini for its original $599 starting price unless you can find stock left over at some third-party retailer somewhere.

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