But assuming you can avoid pagan magic and the "old gods," Nordic countries do well on many other measures of human development. In the most recent World Happiness Report, for example, Finland tops the list while Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are all in the top six. (Costa Rica is the non-Nordic exception here, taking the fourth spot.)

These countries are also near the top in global average life expectancy.

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The drones did not succeed in striking the spaceport, but the attempted attacks come as Russia ramps up activity at Plesetsk Cosmodrome to deploy a new constellation of Internet and data relay satellites akin to SpaceX's Starlink, a space-based network underpinning much of Ukraine's military communications infrastructure. Plesetsk is a military base located in Russia's Arkhangelsk region, some 500 miles north of Moscow.

The Russian space agency's first acknowledgment of an attempted drone attack at Plesetsk came a few weeks ago, when the head of Roscosmos, the Russian state corporation for civilian spaceflight, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin.

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But Musk stumbled at least seven times in ways that possibly put his chances at winning in jeopardy. Most notable, 1) OpenAI's lawyer managed to get him to make several concessions over his own lawyer's objections. 2) He also lost a fight to keep xAI's safety record off the table, calling his reputation as a supposed AI savior defending OpenAI's mission into question. 3) He repeatedly appeared dishonest, as OpenAI's lawyer showed documents contradicting his testimony. And he twice appeared disingenuous, 4) first when confronted with calling OpenAI's safety team "jackasses," 5) and then again when admitting that he didn't know what "safety cards" are, even though his own AI firm issues them. Perhaps most embarrassing, 6) he testified that he never loses his temper before raising his voice at OpenAI's lawyer. And finally, 7) his lawyers failed to keep his ties to Donald Trump off the record, with the judge agreeing to hear discussions that might further discredit Musk's testimony.

Musk faced Altman while testifying

Since he was called as the trial's first witness, Musk has spent more than seven hours over the past two days testifying that OpenAI made a "fool" out of him. He repeatedly claimed that OpenAI executives "stole a charity" after accepting $38 million in donations. Musk insists he was conned into giving "free funding" to start a nonprofit that Altman supposedly always intended to turn into an $800 billion company—not for the benefit of humanity, but to enrich Altman and his co-conspirators.

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The vulnerability and exploit code that exploits it were released Wednesday evening by researchers from security firm Theori, five weeks after privately disclosing it to the Linux kernel security team. The team patched the vulnerability in versions 7.0, 6.19.12, 6.18.12, 6.12.85, 6.6.137, 6.1.170, 5.15.204, and 5.10.254) but few of the Linux distributions had incorporated those fixes at the time the exploit was released.

A single script hacks all distros

The critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-31431 and the name CopyFail, is a local privilege escalation, a vulnerability class that allows unprivileged users to elevate themselves to administrators. CopyFail is particularly severe because it can be exploited with a single piece of exploit code—released in Wednesday’s disclosure—that works across all vulnerable distributions with no modification. With that, an attacker can, among other things, hack multi-tenant systems, break out of containers based on Kubernetes or other frameworks, and create malicious pull requests that pipe the exploit code through CI/CD work flows.

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According to a BBC report today, “less than two months” after a report from Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten and Kenya-based freelance journalist Naipanoi Lepapa came out featuring Sama workers complaining about watching explicit footage shot from Ray-Ban Metas, “Meta ended its contract with Sama.”

Sama is a Kenya-headquartered firm that Meta contracted to perform data annotation work, including working with video, image, and speech annotation for Meta’s AI systems for Ray-Ban Metas. Sama claims that Meta's cancellation of the contract affected 1,108 workers.

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Most hypotheses suggest that earlier forms of life had partial genetic codes and used fewer than 20 amino acids. To test these hypotheses, a team from Columbia and Harvard decided to see if they could get rid of one of the 20 currently in use. And, as a first attempt, they engineered a portion of the ribosome that worked without using an otherwise essential amino acid: isoleucine.

Changing the code

First off, why would you do this? Most work in the field has focused on altering the genetic code in ways that are useful, such as using more than 20 amino acids to enable interesting chemistry.

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"As part of a hardworking team of specialists, technicians, and engineers you will be the Senior Manager of Gen 2.0 Tank Fabrication, and will own the production execution of the most structurally complex and schedule-critical subsystem on the vehicle—the propellant tank," the job posting states.

Quattro is the company's nickname for a more powerful upper stage for the New Glenn rocket, which will feature four BE-3U engines instead of the two currently powering the booster. Blue Origin revealed plans for this more powerful variant of New Glenn, 9x4 (nine first stage engines, and four upper stage engines), last November.

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The Resident Evil film franchise has grossed over $1.2 billion worldwide since the first film debuted in 2002, but an attempt to reboot it a few years ago floundered. Sony Pictures is trying again, this time tapping Zach Cregger—who wrote, produced, and directed last year's Oscar-winning horror hit Weapons—for the project. The studio showed the first teaser for Cregger's Resident Evil during CinemaCon and just released it to the wider public.

When the first Resident Evil game debuted in 1996, it was an immediate commercial and critical success, spawning several sequel games, comics, novels, and a very lucrative film franchise directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and starring Milla Jovovich. But those films were only loosely based on the games, keeping a few primary characters and the basic concept, but little else. Reviews were mixed, despite the films' massive box office success.

Work on the first reboot started in 2017, eventually producing 2021's Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Director Roberts Johannes wanted to bring a very different tone to his film. He wanted to stay closer to the Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 games—even employing the same fixed angles of Spencer Mansion in the first game. Alas, Welcome to Raccoon City was critically panned and had a disappointing box office showing, grossing just $42 million globally against its $25 million budget. The studio nixed its plans for a direct sequel, and a 2022 Netflix series was also canceled after a less-than-stellar first season.

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Chinese officials are refining drone regulations because “enforcement and rules have been uneven or unclear,” said Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow on the Chinese economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis in New York City. Now it appears that Beijing officials are “experimenting with a more comprehensive, front-end approach” by implementing the citywide ban on drone sales and rentals—not to mention restricting the storage of drones and drone components within the city.

“What’s pretty notable here is that this is not just about regulating use but also about controlling the entire lifecycle—sales, transport, and storage—of drones,” Lee told Ars. “That’s a much more preventive, system-level approach to eliminating unauthorized drone activity rather than just policing them after the fact.”

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On March 16, US District Judge Brian Murphy issued a temporary injunction on those changes, essentially blocking the appointment of Kennedy's advisors, nullifying all votes they made on federal vaccine policy, and undoing the changes to the CDC childhood vaccination schedule. Murphy ruled that Kennedy's advisors were unqualified, and their appointment and the changes to vaccine recommendations violated federal procedures. The ruling stems from a case brought against Kennedy and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

Prior to the ruling, lawyers for the government argued that Kennedy's actions were "unreviewable" and his authority was such that he could advise Americans to actively inject themselves with measles virus rather than the vaccine if he wanted. Murphy rejected that argument in his ruling and found the AAP would likely succeed with their claim that Kennedy's changes were illegal.

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Finding aerodynamic downforce started as something of a dark art. The use of wind tunnels to simulate its effect on scale models of cars was in its infancy, so teams were mostly limited to expensive and sometimes dangerous track testing. But wind tunnels can run day and night, rain or shine, and you can't crash a car or injure a driver (or worse) in the process. Wind tunnel work became even more important when F1 began restricting on-track testing to help teams cut budgets. Consequently, teams would do as much work with models as possible before validating the results during the limited test sessions they were allowed.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation came next. In racing, everyone is looking for an advantage over their competitors, and it was finally possible to model, with some fidelity, the effect of airflow on a virtual model of a car. Not only were CFD sims cheaper than wind tunnel time, but they were also much faster at iterating. Early design work is now done in silico before being validated with scale models in a wind tunnel, as most series—including Formula 1, the World Endurance Championship, Formula E, and NASCAR—have tightly restricted on-track testing.

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Today's source release is so old that it predates the MS-DOS branding, and it includes "sources to the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, several development snapshots of the PC-DOS 1.00 kernel, and some well-known utilities such as CHKDSK," write Microsoft's Stacey Haffner and Scott Hanselman in their co-authored post about the release.

To understand the context, here's a very brief history of what would become MS-DOS: Programmer Tim Paterson originally created 86-DOS (previously known as QDOS, for "quick and dirty operating system") for an Intel 8086-based computer kit sold by Seattle Computer Products. Microsoft, on the hook to provide an operating system for the still-in-development IBM PC 5150, licensed 86-DOS and hired Paterson to continue developing it, later buying the rights to 86-DOS outright. Microsoft then licensed this operating system to IBM as PC-DOS while retaining the ability to sell the operating system to other companies. The version sold by Microsoft was called MS-DOS, and the proliferation of third-party IBM PC clones over the '80s and '90s made it the version of the operating system that most people ended up using.

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Analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a non-profit research and advocacy group, found that long-shot bets—defined as wagers of $2,500 or more at odds of 35 percent or less—on the platform had an average win rate of around 52 percent in markets on military and defense actions.

That compares with a win rate of 25 percent across all politics-focused markets and just 14 percent for all markets on the platform as a whole.

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Just minutes into a special session on Tuesday, Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez announced that the Republican-led chamber would not take up a proposal from DeSantis to allow children to opt out of certain school vaccination requirements. The move effectively killed the proposal, which had been backed by the Senate.

Perez, a father from Miami with three young children, said he was concerned by the idea of "children being in school without measles and mumps and polio and chickenpox vaccines that have been working for decades," according to The New York Times, which reported from the State Capitol. "That was something that I was uncomfortable with."

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But to hear Google tell it, generative AI is the future, and the company's products have to change to keep up with the technical reality. As a result, Gemini is seeping into every nook and cranny of the Google ecosystem. Generative AI feeds on data, and Google has a lot of your data in products like Gmail and Drive. What does that mean for your privacy, and what happens if you don't want Gemini peeking over your shoulder? Well, it's kind of a mess.

The amount of data Gemini retains depends on how you access the AI, and opting out of data collection can mean running straight into so-called "dark patterns," UI elements that work against the user's interest.

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In 1996, Congress made it a lot harder for the FCC to take away a broadcast license, even when it's up for renewal. "Since the NAB [National Association of Broadcasters] got an amendment in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, denying renewal to a broadcaster faces an almost insurmountable burden," Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior counselor of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, told Ars this week.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was a major update to the Communications Act, the 1934 law that established the FCC and provides the agency with its legal authority.

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The explicit operational warning was made public last week as part of the latest open source code for Codex CLI that OpenAI posted on GitHub. The prohibition is repeated twice in a 3,500-plus word set of "base instructions" for the recently released GPT-5.5, alongside more anodyne reminders not to "use emojis or em dashes unless explicitly instructed" and to "never use destructive commands like 'git reset --hard' or 'git checkout --' unless the user has clearly asked for that operation."

Separate system prompt instructions for earlier models contained in the same JSON file do not contain the specific prohibition against mentioning goblins and other creatures, suggesting OpenAI is fighting a new problem that has popped up in its latest model release. Anecdotal evidence on social media shows some users complaining about GPT's penchant for focusing on goblins in completely unrelated conversations in recent days.

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Roku debuted Howdy in August. The subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service is $3 per month and doesn't have commercials.

In an announcement today, Antenna estimated that almost 300,000 people signed up for Howdy in August and that the service gained 100,000 subscribers in each subsequent month.

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Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024 for "masterminding one of the largest financial frauds in American history," US District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in his order. He was convicted on all charges, including wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, commodities fraud, and money laundering.

There is already an appeal pending in another court, the judge noted. But Bankman-Fried filed a separate motion for a new trial, claiming that there were "newly discovered" witnesses and evidence that might have helped his defense, if Joe Biden's Department of Justice hadn't intimidated them into refusing to testify or, in one case, lying on the stand. He also asked for a new judge, wanting Kaplan to recuse himself.

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The damaged data center is owned by Pure Data Centre Group, a London-based company that is operating or developing more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “No one’s going to run into a burning building, so to speak,” Pure DC CEO Gary Wojtaszek told CNBC. “No one’s going to put in new additional capital at scale to do anything until everything settles down."

Data center developers are already eating the costs of uninsurable war damage from the conflict, which began with a US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28. Iran primarily responded by attacking shipping to shut down the Strait of Hormuz trade corridor along with striking US military bases and energy infrastructure across the Gulf region.

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