The ads were displayed all over the Web, including on high-traffic maps, weather, real-estate, document-hosting, and sports sites. Users who called the number were then urged to pay hefty fees, grant remote access to their devices, or divulge personal information. From August 31 to September 14, security firm Netskope observed users from 619 customer organizations click on the malicious ads, although none of them were actually scammed because Netskope blocked the content.

Roughly 62 percent of the organizations were based in the US, with Japan and Australia accounting for the Nos. 2 and 3 spots. Since the firm has visibility into only a tiny sliver of Internet activity, the number of people exposed to the ads—including those who fell victim to it—is likely much higher. Netskope tracked more than 250 Google Ads campaign IDs across at least 284 legitimate publisher sites.

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Of course, not too much has changed since the iPhone 17 Pro. There's the new variable aperture and other camera controls for those who want to get granular with their mobile photography, a welcome addition given the iPhone's reputation for inflexibly opinionated computational photography.

Beyond that, though, all the most important changes are under the hood: a new chip, better battery life, and much-improved thermals that both give the phone better sustained performance and make it cooler to the touch in many situations.

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In "The Early Impacts of AI on Employment Among Recent College Graduates," researchers Robert Fairlie and Jane Wu said they decided to focus on recent graduates "because changes in labor demand may first appear through reductions in hiring." As AI gets good enough to at least perform the "relatively standardized tasks" in many entry-level office jobs, they argue, firms could reduce new hiring for simpler roles rather than laying off more experienced long-term employees.

There's some reason to believe 2026's graduating job seekers might be more at risk of AI displacement than those graduating just a year or two prior. The CESifo researchers point to a recent sharp increase in the number of firms "replacing a large number of employee tasks with AI" in a Census survey, as well as broad increases in AI spending per employee and ChatGPT Enterprise token use in the last 12 months.

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Twelve states led by California sued to block the deal in July and were able to delay it when US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled that Paramount combining with Warner Bros. would likely reduce competition substantially and violate antitrust laws. Despite that initial victory, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a settlement with Paramount earlier this week and the other states involved in the lawsuit signed on to the deal.

Martínez-Olguín must decide whether to approve the settlement. A coalition of free speech and media advocacy groups told the judge in a filing yesterday that the deal will give residents of the states that sued Paramount "virtually nothing." The filing was submitted by the Committee for the First Amendment, Free Press, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Future Film Coalition, and International Documentary Association.

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The top line item is that energy use is continuing to rise, albeit not as quickly as headlines about data centers might lead people to believe. Beyond data centers, there's a growing electrification—things like EVs and heat pumps—that is shifting energy demands onto the grid. Despite all of this, electricity use has risen by only 2 percent compared to the same period last year. At this time the previous year, demand had risen by 3 percent compared to the year prior.

Some of this may be due to continued improvements in efficiency, which had largely kept electricity demand stable throughout the early 2000s. And some of it may be because more data centers are generating their own power so that demand doesn't show up on the grid. So far, the growth in demand hasn't reached apocalyptic levels.

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But Copilot+ PC branding is nowhere to be found on the new Surface PCs Microsoft announced this week.

Speaking with Windows Central, Brett Ostrum, corporate VP of Surface, said that the new Surface computers “are not called Copilot+ PCs” despite meeting the label’s requirements.

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"Little did we know what the world had in store for us," said Trevor Bennett, an engineer who co-founded Starfish Space after a few years at Blue Origin. "But that's kind of become part of our story, showing some resilience along the way."

At Blue Origin, he saw, up close, the ambitions of billionaires to build big rockets and put massive numbers of satellites into orbit. Bennett and his co-founder, another engineer from Blue Origin named Austin Link, began to think about the implications. How would humanity deal with that increased volume of satellites in orbit? Could low-Earth orbit be preserved?

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China might have a much younger driving culture than North America or Europe, but it has still been long enough to condition those drivers to how long it takes to fill a tank of gas. For all their many improvements over internal combustion engine vehicles—far greater efficiency, instant torque, very little NVH, more reliabiity, and so on—EVs do still take longer to recharge than it takes to refuel a car with a liquid.

At least until now, it seems.

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The PRIMA mission will be the first of NASA's Probe Explorers, a new line of observatories intended to do more science for less money. The agency's space telescopes typically fall into lower-cost "Explorer-class" missions, with cost caps in the range of a few hundred million dollars, or flagship observatories like the recently launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which came with a price tag of some $4.3 billion.

With the Probe Explorers, NASA officials seek to find a better balance between the smaller Explorer missions and multibillion-dollar flagships. NASA has studied potential Probe Explorer mission concepts for several years after an independent panel of scientists recommended the new mission category. But it wasn't clear until recently whether NASA's science budget, which is under pressure from the Trump administration, would be sufficient to actually start developing one.

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The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed an application to intervene in a pair of cases brought by Musk and X seeking annulment of the penalty, which will be heard at the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg.

“The European Commission inappropriately attempted to expand its regulatory authority to reach American companies not present or operating within its jurisdiction,” assistant attorney general Brett Shumate said.

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Not long after, media outlets began relaying the disastrous outcomes: technical difficulties, long delays in decisions and care, puzzling denials, frustrated doctors, and patients suffering in pain. Those reports were largely confirmed earlier this month when the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a tranche of federal documents about the program, called WISeR, that the group obtained amid litigation. The documents included feedback from healthcare providers, including one who called the program "a disgrace to the human race" and reported seeing patients crying in pain as they waited for care.

Amid the worrying reports, lawmakers have been trying to get answers and shut the program down. Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office determined in May that Trump officials did not follow proper procedure in setting up the program, calling its legality into question. Still, it appears to be moving ahead unabated, with plans to expand in the years to come.

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As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

The best-named rocket in the world is sadly delayed. French launch startup HyPrSpace announced that it has pushed the inaugural flight of its Baguette One suborbital rocket to 2027, European Spaceflight reports. The 10-meter Baguette One rocket is a single-stage vehicle is capable of carrying up to 300 kg. It is powered by the company’s hybrid propulsion system, which combines liquid oxygen with solid polyethylene fuel.

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On Wednesday, Ars Technica reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had still not opened ordering for 2026–2027 COVID-19 vaccines through the Vaccines for Children program. That was despite the vaccines having been approved by the Food and Drug Administration in late August.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told Ars on Wednesday that “CDC has not yet finalized procurement decisions" for the shots. The department's statement further suggested Trump officials were questioning whether children should receive them. "HHS and CDC are committed to responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources and to ensuring that vaccines purchased through federally funded programs are appropriate for the populations those programs serve," the department said.

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On this day 65 years ago (September 24, 1961), Disney introduced the "renowned scientist, lecturer, psychologist [and] world traveler," Ludwig Von Drake. A member of the Duck family (he is the "brilliant and eccentric" uncle of Donald Duck), Von Drake was "the outstanding genius of the century" (per Disney himself) who helped to explain scientific principles and technological concepts to the millions of people who tuned in every Sunday to watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on NBC.

A few years later, after expertly (but often absent-mindedly) addressing topics such as how color television works, the health benefits of exercising, and the history of aviation, Von Drake dove into the topic for which he said he wrote the book on, in the February 10, 1963, episode "Inside Outer Space."

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The new F-Droid client was redesigned from scratch in Kotlin Compose, which is the standard for modern Android apps. This makes the store much more responsive, and there's optional support for Android's Material theming. The interface has also been cleaned up considerably, making the most important functions easier to access and hiding some others in overflow menus.

While the new F-Droid looks nicer, the update was largely about making it easier to find and install apps. When F-Droid first appeared, there wasn't much to see, but now it has thousands of open source apps. Unlike the Play Store, F-Droid doesn't track your taps and installs to push ads and suggestions—it helps you find things and gets out of the way.

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“By running an unlicensed gambling operation, Polymarket has done more than just knowingly violate state law, they have put New Yorkers at risk, especially those underage who are most vulnerable to problem gaming," Governor Kathy Hochul said in a press release announcing the lawsuit.

Polymarket is "sidestepping its obligation to pay taxes like licensed casinos and mobile sports gambling platforms do," New York said. "This tax revenue from gambling regulation funds public schools, sports programs for underserved youth, and problem gambling education and treatment."

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Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney has never been one to shy away from controversy. His latest feature, Musk, has stirred up plenty even before its release, drawing the ire of its subject, Elon Musk, and threats of a defamation lawsuit. After the film debuted two weeks ago at the Venice International Film Festival, rumors swirled that Universal Pictures was getting cold feet about theatrically releasing the film in international markets.

Those rumors appear to be unfounded (at least for now). And Musk is still on track for a US theatrical release, thanks to the folks at domestic distributor Bleecker Street Media, which released the official trailer today.

Gibney has been making documentaries since the 1980s, covering such varied subjects as Jimi Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism, WikiLeaks, Scientology, Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes (the subject of another forthcoming documentary, You Can See Everything, featuring comedian Nathan Fielder), Boris Becker, The Sopranos creator David Chase, alleged Russian interference in the US 2016 presidential election, the opioid epidemic, and cyclist Lance Armstrong. He snagged his first Oscar nomination for 2005's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature two years later for Taxi to the Dark Side.

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The Ukrainian Third Army Corps revealed a “world-first” airborne assault involving robots and drones that took place within Russian-held territory on September 21, 2026, according to the Ukrainian government media platform United24. Heavy bomber drones air-dropped explosive ground robots more than six miles behind Russian frontlines, helping the robots bypass tough terrain and enemy defenses to attack supply lines in the rear.

This is not the first time that Ukraine has used heavy drones to deliver robots closer to their intended targets. But the incident is reportedly the most ambitious robotic airborne assault to date.

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DataOne got hit with the fine after an investigation by The Guardian and Floodlight News in August shared thermal drone footage showing that 45 of the 62 gas generators were operating. None of the generators had permits required for generators with 37-kilowatt capacity or higher, despite running at 1,982-kw capacities more than 50 times higher than the state limit.

States track gas generators like DataOne uses because they emit “carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and other combustion-related pollutants,” officials from New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) noted. Those pollutants can worsen asthma, trigger heart attacks, and cause early deaths.

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The satellite, dubbed MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator. Inside, it has four of Google's custom TPU AI accelerators, which are used to train AI models and run inference to generate tokens for AI workloads. On Earth, a data center will run thousands of these chips, which consume massive amounts of power—one of the reasons putting solar-powered AI hardware in space is so attractive.

MVP is starting small, with solar panels that supply only about one kilowatt of power, The New York Times reports. That's enough to power a microwave or a hair dryer. Google did not build the satellite from scratch. While the AI hardware inside is Google's, the spacecraft comes from a satellite imagery firm called Planet Labs. The initial plan was to launch two custom satellites in 2027, but Google wanted to accelerate its efforts. So the company opted to integrate its chips into a satellite that Planet Labs had already built for an early test.

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