A cache of high-resolution images began streaming down through this connection. NASA released the first batch to the public Tuesday. Most of the images were taken by the four Artemis II astronauts using handheld Nikon cameras fitted with wide-angle and telephoto lenses. They also had iPhones to capture views out the windows of their Orion Moon ship, named Integrity.

After reaching their farthest point from Earth, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen are accelerating back to Earth for reentry and splashdown Friday evening to wrap up the first crewed lunar mission in more than 53 years.

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The unprecedented proposal was quietly revealed in a short notice from the Office of Personnel Management in December, KFF notes. OPM said it is seeking "service use and cost data," which would be harvested from medical records such as "medical claims, pharmacy claims, encounter data, and provider data."

That list could give the federal government access to prescriptions employees have filled and their diagnoses, as well as provider information, doctors' notes, treatments, and visit summaries, among other sensitive health information. The collection would affect more than 8 million Americans and harvest data from 65 insurance companies, according to KFF.

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Each complaint has one named plaintiff and seeks to represent a proposed class including all LinkedIn users in the US. The complaints seem to rely heavily on the recent "BrowserGate" report by a German entity called Fairlinked, which describes itself as a trade association and advocacy group for commercial LinkedIn users.

Fairlinked appears to be run by the same people behind Teamfluence, an Estonian software company that sued LinkedIn in Munich in January. LinkedIn says Teamfluence distributed a browser extension that scraped LinkedIn user data in violation of the user agreement, and that its LinkedIn accounts were suspended.

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In an advisory published Tuesday, the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, National Security Agency, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, and US Cyber Command “urgently" warned that the APT, or advanced persistent threat group, is targeting PLCs, short for programmable logic controllers. These devices, typically the size of a toaster, sit in factories, water treatment centers, oil refineries, and other industrial settings, often in remote locations. They provide an interface between computers used for automation and physical machinery.

Operational disruption and financial loss

“Since at least March 2026, the authoring agencies identified (through engagements with victim organizations) an Iranian-affiliated APT-group that disrupted the function of PLCs,” the advisory stated. “These PLCs were deployed across multiple US critical infrastructure sectors (including Government Services and Facilities, Waste Water Systems (WWS), and Energy sectors) within a wide variety of industrial automation processes. Some of the victims experienced operational disruption and financial loss.”

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Muse Spark is the first release of Meta's Superintelligence Labs, formed a little less than a year ago with the grandiose goal of "deliver[ing] on the promise of personal superintelligence for everyone." The release represents a clean break from Meta's previous work on the open source Llama model family, which has received a middling reaction both from users and on independent LLM rankings. And while Spark will be a proprietary model, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads that the Muse family will "includ[e] new open source models" in the future.

Meta said that Muse Spark will take advantage of content posted across platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Threads, much as xAI's Grok is integrated with content posted on X. Currently, this means Muse Spark can link to public posts related to a location or trending topic that you ask about, for instance. In the future, Meta says this will expand to "new features that cite recommendations and content people share" and "Reels, photos, and posts woven directly into your answers, with credit back to the content creators."

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George Washington University law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson tackles that knotty question in his new book, Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance. Ferguson is an expert on the emergence of new surveillance technologies, policing, and criminal justice. His 2018 book, The Rise of Big Data Policing, covered the first real experiments with data-driven policing, predictive policing, and what were then new forms of camera surveillance. For this latest work, Ferguson wanted to focus specifically on what he calls self-surveillance: how the data we create potentially exposes us to incrimination, because there are so few laws in place to regulate how police and prosecutors can access and use that data.

"I liken this sort of police-driven self-surveillance to democratically mediated self-surveillance," Ferguson told Ars. "It's still self-surveillance with our tax dollars and everything else, but we are also creating nets of smart devices and surveillance devices in our homes, in our cars, in our worlds. And I don't think we've really processed how all of that information is available as evidence and can be used against us for good or bad, depending on the sort of political wins and whims of who's in charge. We're seeing today how that vulnerability can be weaponized by a government that wants to use it."

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Prior to the G Stylus announcement, Moto had three 2026 G-series phones—the Moto G Play, Moto G, and Moto G Power. They used to sell for $180, $200, and $300, respectively. In the past day, the Moto G Play rose to $250, which is a 38 percent increase. The 2026 Moto G went to $300—a whopping 50 percent price bump. Finally, the top model in Moto's budget lineup, the Moto G Power, is now $400. That's a 33 percent jump, putting it close to Samsung's latest mid-range phones and $100 shy of the new Moto G Stylus.

Seeing a higher price tag on the new Moto G Stylus wasn't a surprise given current hardware conditions, and the phone does have a few small upgrades. The battery capacity is slightly larger, and the stylus has basic pressure sensitivity support now. However, that hardly justifies a $100 increase over last year's model, which had the same display and memory. It makes more sense in the context of an across-the-board price increase for Moto's budget lineup.

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Musk "is not seeking a single dollar for himself," according to his lawyer, Marc Toberoff.

Toberoff told The Wall Street Journal that the new remedies that Musk is seeking strip away distracting claims from OpenAI that the lawsuit is intended to harass and harm the AI firm that Musk helped co-found but today is one of his biggest rivals.

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Hamid Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas, and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union, told the FT on Wednesday that Iran wanted to collect tolling fees from any tanker passing and to assess each ship.

“Iran needs to monitor what goes in and out of the strait to ensure these two weeks aren’t used for transferring weapons,” said Hosseini, whose industry association works closely with the state.

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As noted in SteamTracking's automated Steam client change notes (and picked up by some forum and social media users), the April 3 Steam client update contains explicit references to a "Framerate Estimator" in a store UI JSON file. A subheader listed in that file describes the ability to "Select an App and a PC config to get a chart of estimated framerates, based on the framerates of other Steam users."

Based on the inputs referenced in the JSON data, it looks like generated framerate estimates will be based on CPU, GPU, and system RAM levels selected by the user (or saved as a hardware configuration in the Steam client) rather than any sort of automated system scanning software. Users will be able to see per-game frame rate estimates as well as the "Number of matching training... entries" those estimates are based on for that game and/or the applicable CPU/GPU.

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The change (as reported by Good E-Reader and elsewhere) affects all Kindles introduced and sold in 2012 or earlier, going all the way back to the original Kindle from 2007. Users will still be able to read books that have already been downloaded to those devices, but they won't be able to download more, and if they reset those Kindles to their factory defaults, the devices won't be able to sign back in to an Amazon account.

"Affected devices include Kindle 1st and 2nd Generation, Kindle DX and DX Graphite, Kindle Keyboard, Kindle 4, Kindle Touch, Kindle 5, and Kindle Paperwhite 1st Generation," reads the message from the Kindle team. Older 2011 and 2012-era Kindle Fire tablets will also lose access to the Kindle Store.

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No, I won't take your word for it

Bringing a new vehicle to market is a rather different process in the EU than in the US. Here, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration practices something called self-certification. Essentially, an OEM tells NHTSA that its new car or truck complies with all the relevant federal motor vehicle safety statutes, then NHTSA takes that company at its word and the car goes on sale. Should that vehicle later turn out to have a defect, NHTSA can order a recall to remedy it. But there's no pre-approval process by the government before sales can begin.

As you might imagine, self-certification is great for companies but less great for consumer safety.

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The US space agency announced six weeks ago that it was modifying its Artemis timeline to insert a mission before beginning planned lunar landings. This new mission, designated Artemis III and intended to fly in Earth orbit rather than to the Moon, would attempt to "buy down" risk to give the lunar landing mission (now Artemis IV) a higher chance of success.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Tuesday afternoon that the space agency is debating about which orbit to fly Artemis III in before locking in a blueprint, noting that the first "senior level" Artemis III mission design discussion had taken place earlier in the day.

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Its new model, Claude Mythos Preview, would be available only to vetted organizations, including Broadcom, Cisco, and CrowdStrike, Anthropic said on Tuesday. The company added it was also in discussions with the US government about its use.

The announcement follows a data leak by the San Francisco start-up last month, when descriptions of the Mythos model and other documents were discovered in a publicly accessible data cache.

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An estimated 18,000 to 40,000 consumer routers, mostly those made by MikroTik and TP-Link, located in 120 countries, were wrangled into infrastructure belonging to APT28, an advanced threat group that’s part of Russia’s military intelligence agency known as the GRU, researchers from Lumen Technologies' Black Lotus Labs said. The threat group has operated for at least two decades and is behind dozens of high-profile hacks targeting governments worldwide. APT28 is also tracked under names including Pawn Storm, Sofacy Group, Sednit, Tsar Team, Forest Blizzard, and STRONTIUM.

Technical sophistication, tried-and-true techniques

A small number of routers were used as proxies to connect to a much larger number of other routers belonging to foreign ministries, law enforcement, and government agencies that APT28 wanted to spy on. The group then used its control of routers to change DNS lookups for select websites, including, Microsoft said, domains for the company’s 365 service.

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We say "traditional games" because it's important to clarify that this does not stream VR games—only the sorts of games you would play on a traditional 2D display like a computer monitor or a TV. That said, this could lay some groundwork for VR games sometime in the future. But to be clear, Valve has not made any announcements about supporting SteamVR games on the Vision Pro.

There were previously Steam Link apps for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. Users could sync controllers with those devices and play Steam games over the local network—not just games from other Apple devices, but also from Windows or Linux gaming PCs.

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For its “Failing the Fix (2026): Grading laptop and cell phone companies on the fixability of their products" report, PIRG analyzed the 10 newest laptops and phones that were available in January via manufacturers’ French websites. PIRG uses devices available in France because much of its criteria stems from the French repairability index, a grading system for device repairability that must be displayed on products sold in France. The group, along with other right-to-repair advocates, believes vendors should apply the French requirements to devices sold in other geographies as well.

To calculate laptop vendors' grades, PIRG used the French index but gave more “weight to the physical ease of disassembling the product” because it believes that “is what consumers generally expect a ‘repair score’ to refer to.” The other French repairability index categories are:

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Consider, for instance, Altman's blog post "A Gentle Singularity," published last year and read by nearly 600,000 people. Its central thesis seems to be that AI is all upside; everything has been great so far, and everything will be even greater in the future! I mean, just wait until we build robots that we can shove these AIs into—then tell those robots to go make more robots.

If we have to make the first million humanoid robots the old-fashioned way, but then they can operate the entire supply chain—digging and refining minerals, driving trucks, running factories, etc.—to build more robots, which can build more chip fabrication facilities, data centers, etc, then the rate of progress will obviously be quite different.

Everything is getting better; indeed, it's getting better faster thanks to "self-reinforcing loops" like this. Downsides? Trick question! There aren't any real downsides because people get used to things. Quickly. Just listen to how great it's gonna be:

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What made this outage notable for many Bluesky users, though, was the instant assumption that it was the result of sloppy, AI-assisted "vibe coding" by the Bluesky development team.

Amid Monday's service issues, many Bluesky feeds were filled with hundreds of posts that laid the blame on developers who were allegedly relying on unreliable AI tools to ship faulty code. Some posters used memes, others used alt text, still others used irony or wry humor to call out Bluesky's development team for this alleged sloppiness.

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Yesterday's ruling follows a precedent-setting decision last month in which the Supreme Court threw out a 4th Circuit ruling against Cox Communications, another ISP accused by record labels of not doing enough to fight piracy. In the case involving Cox and Sony, the court said that "a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights."

Cox is one of several cases in which record labels sought financial damages from ISPs that continued to serve customers whose IP addresses were repeatedly traced to torrent downloads or uploads. In October 2024, record labels Universal, Warner, and Sony got a win over Grande when the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit decided the ISP was liable for contributory copyright infringement.

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