"Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," Musk said of a potential merger. He was speaking during a question-and-answer period as part of SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call. Musk said, ultimately, it not his decision. "But at the end of the day the shareholders have to be supportive of this."

Musk's talk of a merger comes after a busy year in which SpaceX already acquired Musk's artificial intelligence firm, xAI, in February. In June, SpaceX went public with the largest initial public offering on record.

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Under Kennedy, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in December that it had awarded the Danish researchers—led by married couple Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn of Bandim Health Project—an unsolicited $1.6 million grant to run the trial. Aaby and Stabell Benn are controversial vaccine researchers who claim vaccines cause overlooked harms. They have been repeatedly praised by Kennedy, but are currently under investigation for alleged scientific misconduct by Danish authorities.

Plans for the trial were halted in January as widespread condemnation erupted over the trial's design, which would potentially expose thousands of newborns in the country to hepatitis B, risking a lifelong infection that can lead to liver cirrhosis, cancer, and premature death. Outrage flared again after a Rolling Stone story earlier this month claimed the CDC set aside another $1.6 million in funding in late September and planned to move forward with the trial.

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That future console price range is based on what has "internally been projected" at the company, according to Fortune. But the price for consumers could come down if "Microsoft decides to subsidize the cost," the outlet says, as many console makers have done in the past.

While a $1,200 starting price would be historically high for the game console market, even accounting for inflation, it also reflects a new normal: The slowdown in Moore's Law and AI-driven component shortages mean cutting-edge gaming hardware just isn't as cheap as it used to be. This year, the Steam Machine broke the $1,000 starting price, while the 2-year-old technology in the PlayStation 5 Pro is now going for $900, and the 6-year-old Xbox Series X now starts at $750.

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Launched today, JustWatch TV offers some movies available for free with ads that aren’t free on any other streaming service, including Green Room (2015), Locke (2013), and Sing Sing (2023). Other free movies include Fiddlin’ (2018), Friday the 13th (1980), and Hotel Mumbai (2018). I could play movies available for free on JustWatch TV without creating an account.

JustWatch TV also has movies you can rent.

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Last week, Meta faced backlash after legal experts warned that the tech giant’s sweeping new commercial terms of service seemed to give Meta permission to endlessly scrape websites linked on business pages. Talking to Nieman Lab, experts suggested that Meta could possibly use the policy to avoid millions in licensing fees from news organizations by requiring all business users to share a wealth of AI training data simply for running a business page.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed that Meta did not alert users to the changed language following backlash. This potentially only adds to confusion ahead of the policy rollout. In response to backlash, Meta's spokesperson provided a statement to Ars, acknowledging Nieman Lab's initial report but not its follow-up report reiterating experts' concerns:

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As Google points out, a generative AI's outputs are better "when it knows the world and knows you," which is correct in an uncomfortable sort of way. The more context you can provide to a model, the better the output will be at the end of the token shuffle. Since Google has so much of your data already, it sees Personal Intelligence as a differentiator versus other AI systems. You don't have to provide the AI context because it already has it from apps like Gmail and Calendar.

Personal Intelligence is beginning its rollout in Android Auto today, and it will come to vehicles with Google built-in in the next few months. As an aside, "Google built-in" is questionable branding, but it refers to cars that run Google software in the infotainment system rather than projecting an interface from your phone. Very few vehicles have Google built-in, but Google often releases new car features on them first. This time, it's the other way around.

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The latest OpenBSD version brings new features and improvements across the board. These changes, particularly the new Intel Arc support and expanded virtual address space, should improve compatibility with modern graphics cards and allow the system to map more than 4GB of VRAM. Some of the major updates noted in the release newsletter are as follows:

• Added support for Intel Arc A-Series (DG2/Alchemist) graphics cards.
• 512GB kernel virtual address space on AMD64, up from 4GB, allowing VRAM mapping above 4GB.
• Added hibernation support for ARM64 systems.
• A new RPKI-to-router daemon: rtrd(8).
• RISC-V improvements including kernel support for the 'V' vector extension and support for Advanced Interrupt Architecture.
• Wireless network driver additions and improvements, including 802.11n and 40 MHz channels for the qwx(4) wireless driver.
• Added support for up to 64 virtual CPUs per guest virtual machine.
• Security and internal improvements for LibreSSL 4.4.0 and OpenSSH 10.6.
• Improvements to the vmm/vmd virtualization stack.

The new OpenBSD also retires support for Loongson architecture after the port stopped working with the Clang 22 compiler. If you're interested in reading over all the changes that come with the new OpenBSD 8.0, you can take a look at the release announcement.

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As of late morning Tuesday, browser makers and some major apps and programming languages had blocked all eight of the intermediate certificates. There are no reports of certificate transparency logs, which track the issuance of all browser-trusted certificates, showing the compromised keys being used maliciously. The threat remains far from over, however, because it will be hard and time-consuming to update other key parts of the Internet, such as Linux distributions and embedded and Internet of Things devices.

One word: bonkers

The eight intermediate certificates belong to India-based certificate authority eMudhra Limited. An informal advisory published to emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com over on Tuesday posted the message “We have a problem here - Wayne.” The words were digitally signed using the private key of one of the eMudhra certificates. With proof that the reporting party had control of the key, defenders scrambled because the same key could be used to sign unauthorized certificates that would be trusted by millions of servers worldwide.

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The timing is uncertain, as TP-Link's press release said it expects US-based assembly to begin "as early as" 2027. TP-Link's application to sell new routers in the US could be rejected by the Trump administration or remain pending long enough to push the US-based assembly to 2028.

"Pending US regulatory approval, TP-Link expects domestic assembly of its groundbreaking Wi-Fi 8 home networking product line to begin as early as next year," the company said. TP-Link said it signed a Letter of Intent with US company Keytronic, which agreed "to become a primary domestic manufacturing partner for TP-Link, supporting assembly of the company’s advanced networking portfolio in Corinth, Mississippi."

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The initial 100-series variant of the Antares rocket was kind of a hot mess. The rocket used old Soviet engines built during the era when Apollo astronauts were landing on the Moon. Decades later, in the 1990s, Aerojet acquired the engines and refurbished them for a rocket that would launch in the 2010s. Predictably, on the fifth launch of an Antares rocket in 2014, it exploded.

The Antares vehicle is the last of a dying breed of medium-lift rockets—defined as having a lift capacity of 2 to 20 metric tons—in the United States. Nearly a decade and a half later there is a new generation of medium-lift vehicles coming online, and they are starkly different from Antares, which had not just Russian engines but a core stage manufactured in Ukraine.

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The drone evacuation of the injured soldier took place at an undisclosed time and place on the frontline where the presence of Russian drones and landmines made it impractical to send in a wheeled ground robot, according to The Kyiv Independent. On October 19, Ukraine’s Army shared a video of the drone evacuation, showing the wounded soldier securing himself in a harness suspended beneath a heavy hexacopter drone with six rotors before being flown to safety.

“This is a historic event, the next stage of evacuating the wounded, which we will all come to,” said Napalm, a programmer of the 92nd separate assault brigade's unmanned ground systems company, who went by his callsign per Ukrainian military practice, in a statement. “Now the serious systematic work begins, so that such missions are carried out constantly.”

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Fortunately, several companies have demonstrated hardware where the error rate is not too high. Several demonstrations show logical qubits are beyond the breakeven point, where adding more qubits improves performance. The problem is that the improvement isn't very dramatic. To lower error rates to levels we'll need to run complex algorithms, we'd have to add a completely impractical number of qubits to each logical qubit.

On Monday, Quantinuum announced that its current generation of hardware is capable of scaling well beyond the breakeven point. Each step up in the size of logical qubits improved some measures of their performance by a factor of over 10.

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In a discovery order impacting a class action raised by book authors—including Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman—as well as a lawsuit from publisher Entrepreneur Media, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixon largely agreed that Meta must clearly identify key decision-makers. Following testimony from Meta staff who downloaded torrents, the order could expose a wider range of supervisors, managers, and executives whom staffers said greenlit the piracy.

Meta had been hoping to avoid detailing the chain of command, particularly for leadership involved in early AI training. According to a Meta court filing, its initial efforts to compile massive AI datasets were managed through an “informal approach" where supposedly nobody with authority made any decisions. Instead, Meta insisted that a “decision” was “made only in the sense” that some staffers “technically” downloaded torrents.

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A thousand years later, someone else invented the wheel—and the chariot—and humanity was ready to roll. Now, about five millennia since that first horseback ride, equestrianism is mostly a leisure activity, and we drive cars, propelled by motors with more power than an entire herd of beasts could muster.

Acceleration, top speed, and lap times are the usual ways we quantify that performance, and performance electric vehicles are currently in an arms race to see which one can hit 60 mph in the least amount of time. But measuring a car’s performance is easy—all you need is a stopwatch and a track. How about measuring the effect of car performance on the driver? That’s a question Polestar is trying to answer with researchers at the University of Oxford.

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Like many online services, Muse has allowed users to share searches, conversations, images, and similar content with other people. Such share features usually involve clicking an option to create a unique URL that anyone can use to load a page hosting the content. To keep potentially sensitive information from being accessible to unintended people, the URLs typically contain a long sequence of text that can’t be easily guessed.

A single query is all that's required

Muse, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month was “built from the ground up for privacy and security,” seems to take the same precautions. But a central design decision for constructing URLs has made the links easy to discover. As a result, researchers from security firm Claroc said they were able to enumerate 6,800 links Muse users created for sharing conversations with others. After opening a few hundred of them, the researchers found information that was clearly not intended to be publicly available, including:

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Last week, in a former Tesla store staffed by some former Tesla employees, Slate opened its first showroom. Located in the Fulton Market District just northwest of the Chicago Loop, the Slate Experience Center is a place for would-be buyers to poke around a prototype, check out customization options, buy some Slate merch, and even preorder a new Slate Truck with a $300 deposit.

Designed for the American obsession with pickup trucks, the Slate Truck is a bare-bones electric pickup truck retailing for $24,950. It sports plastic panels, a minimalist interior design sensibility, actual window winders, and a projected range of 205 miles. Ars went for a ride in a Slate Truck over the summer, but we haven't had a chance to shop for one. So I stopped by the Slate Experience Center so I could, er, experience the Slate.

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The robotic Martian Moons eXploration mission, known as MMX, lifted off at 3:41 pm EDT Monday (4:41 am Japan Standard Time Tuesday) from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan.

The MMX spacecraft rode into orbit atop a 207-foot-tall (63-meter) H3 rocket, Japan's flagship launch vehicle. The rocket assigned to MMX debuted a new souped-up configuration with four strap-on solid rocket boosters, full-throttle main engines, and an extended payload shroud to accommodate the demands of Japan's heaviest and most ambitious interplanetary mission to date.

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The alert included detailed clinical guidance for managing measles exposures and cases during pregnancy as well as cases in newborns. Many doctors have never seen such cases in their careers given the decades of successful use of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. But now, with vaccination rates slipping nationwide, the highly infectious virus is better able to get footholds in communities and spread rapidly through under-vaccinated pockets, as is happening in Pennsylvania.

As of October 19, Pennsylvania had reported 1,286 measles cases this year across 42 counties. Of those, 247 have been hospitalized, and six people have reportedly died (though the latest reported death is still pending an investigation by the state health department before it is added to the state tally).

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The Russian spacecraft, Kosmos 2612, "conducted a deliberate series of maneuvers toward ICEYE-X36, a US-operated commercial imaging satellite," LeoLabs said. "Kosmos 2612 closed from hundreds of kilometers away to extreme proximity to ICEYE-X36. It then maneuvered around ICEYE-X36, remained nearby for an extended period, and then began moving away."

US military officials and independent analysts have tracked Kosmos 2612 since its April launch on a Soyuz rocket from a spaceport in northern Russia. Within weeks, it became apparent that at least four of the six satellites from that launch were stalking ICEYE-X36 after they adjusted orbits to line up with the orbit of the ICEYE spacecraft.

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In a court filing Sunday, US attorney Craig Missakian argued that Abdulrahman Alfozan must continue to be detained while the US makes its case that Alfozan brazenly spied on OpenAI, either for his own personal business gain or to benefit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Evidence showed that Alfozan had been chatting with a member of the KSA royal family on WhatsApp, while pursuing opportunities to permanently move back to Saudi Arabia during the country's biggest AI push yet, the government argued. Shortly before his arrest, the FBI found he accessed a folder called "Saudi Gov Docs" on his iPhone, where he also allegedly stored photos of a second bug he planted in the offices.

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