The first warning of such a crypto scam came from the Greek maritime risk management company MARISKS on April 20, according to Reuters. The company alerted shipowners that scammers posing as Iranian authorities had sent messages to shipping companies asking for “transit fee” payments in bitcoin or tether.

That may be particularly confusing for shipping companies because of how Iran has asserted control over the Strait of Hormuz—a vital shipping channel and maritime chokepoint that normally allows Persian Gulf countries to provide one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supply. Iranian authorities have demanded cryptocurrency payments from oil tankers to pass through the waterway and required ships to follow a route near Iran’s coastline to undergo inspection.

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Revenue increased by 16 percent year over year to $22.4 billion. Automotive revenue grew by the same percentage to $16.2 billion, and Tesla saw a 42 percent increase in services (like Supercharger fees) and other revenue. But its energy storage business shrank in Q1, and revenues from this division fell by 12 percent to $2.4 billion.

An operating margin of 4.2 percent is far from the double-digit margins Tesla once boasted. But things were twice as bad in 2025. Although the company brought in more money from automotive sales, it only made $380 million from selling regulatory credits, compared to $595 million in Q1 2025. It also made less money from leasing. Operating expenses rose due to spending on AI and part of the $1 trillion compensation package that shareholders approved in November for CEO Elon Musk.

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Our approach comes from two convictions: that AI cannot replace human insight, creativity, and ingenuity, and that these tools, used well, can help professionals do better work. From those starting points, it was always clear what we wouldn't allow. AI would not become the author, the illustrator, or the videographer. These tools are best used by professionals in the service of their profession, not as a clever end run around it, and certainly not as a path to eventually replacing it.

The short version: Ars Technica is written by humans. Our reporting, analysis, and commentary are human-authored. Where we use AI tools in our workflow, we use them with standards and oversight, and humans make every editorial decision. Our policy covers how we handle text, research, source attribution, images, audio, and video.

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"Unless restrained by this Court, Nintendo stands to recover the same tariff payments twice—once from consumers through higher prices and again from the federal government through tariff refunds, including interest paid by the government on those funds," said the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Western District of Washington. "Nintendo has made no legally binding commitment to return tariff-related overcharges to the consumers who actually paid them. This lawsuit seeks to prevent that unjust result."

The plaintiffs, California resident Gregory Hoffert and Washington resident Prashant Sharan, "paid retail prices for those goods that were increased by Nintendo to account for the tariffs imposed on imported products," and "would not have paid those higher prices absent the unlawful tariffs and Nintendo’s pass-through of those tariffs to consumers," said the complaint filed by the Emery | Reddy, PC law firm.

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In a Congressional hearing Tuesday, Kennedy refused to commit to supporting evidence-based vaccine policy from the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the same time, he refused to say that he wouldn't interfere with the agency's recommendations.

Last week, Trump nominated Erica Schwartz to be the next CDC director, a role that requires Senate confirmation. Schwartz is a respected physician and former public health official who has championed the use of vaccines during her distinguished career. Outside experts were pleasantly surprised by the uncontroversial choice but wary of her ability to implement evidence-based policy under Kennedy. Last year, Kennedy—who has no medical, scientific, or public health background—ousted the previous Senate-confirmed director, Susan Monarez, who was, like Schwartz, a well-qualified and respected pick for the role. Monarez testified that she was pushed out for refusing to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from Kennedy's hand-selected anti-vaccine advisors. Monarez lasted as CDC director for just 29 days.

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This is because Orion largely communicated with Earth via radio waves, picked up by large dishes sprinkled around the world. This is pretty much the same way the Apollo spacecraft talked to Earth more than half a century ago.

However, unlike Apollo, the astronauts on Orion would periodically send batches of much higher-resolution data, including the stunning photographs of the far side of the Moon and the Solar eclipse observed from there. This was made possible by optical laser communications, and not just those built by NASA. The mission included a commercial component that could pave the way for vastly more data returning to Earth from space than ever before.

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The software maker said Tuesday evening that the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-40372, affects versions 10.0.0 through 10.0.6 of the Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection NuGet, a package that’s part of the framework. The critical flaw stems from a faulty verification of cryptographic signatures. It can be exploited to allow unauthenticated attackers to forge authentication payloads during the HMAC validation process, which is used to verify the integrity and authenticity of data exchanged between a client and a server.

Beware: Forged credentials survive patching

During the time users ran a vulnerable version of the package, they were left open to an attack that would allow unauthenticated people to gain sensitive SYSTEM privileges that would allow full compromise of the underlying machine. Even after the vulnerability is patched, devices may still be compromised if authentication credentials created by a threat actor aren’t purged.

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Users took to Reddit and X to point out that Anthropic's pricing page for Claude explicitly showed Claude Code as not supported in the Pro plan. (It remained in the $100/month+ Max plan.) Some new users signing up for Pro subscriptions were unable to access Claude Code. Meanwhile, existing subscribers saw no interruption.

After speculation and frustration spread, Anthropic's head of growth, Amol Avasare, took to social media to clarify that this was a "small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups." As for the reasoning, he explained:

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Warner Bros.' bizarre 2023 decision to shelve its live-action/animated film, Coyote vs. Acme, sparked outrage both in the industry and among fans online. But the film is finally being released, and Ketchup Entertainment, its new distributor, recently released the trailer. All I can say after watching that trailer is, what the heck was Warner Bros. even thinking? Granted, a killer trailer doesn't automatically mean it's a great film, but all the winning elements are here.

The concept alone is sheer brilliance: Wile E. Coyote, after decades of ACME equipment failing him in his efforts to catch that darned Road Runner, decides to sue the corporation. It's based on a well-known satirical piece by Ian Frazier (also titled "Coyote vs. Acme") published in The New Yorker in 1990. Development of a film version didn't start until 2018, but some pretty talented people worked on the script, including James Gunn. Big stars signed on for the main cast, and the film was completed and slated for release in July 2023.

Then Warner Bros. changed its mind and scheduled Barbie in that slot. Now, Barbie is a brilliant film, and that decision gave us the summer of "Barbenheimer," so it's hard to argue with the marketing strategy there. But rather than simply rescheduling Coyote vs. Acme, the studio canceled it to take a tax write-off. (The same fate befell two other Warner films, Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt.)

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The new TPUs come in two flavors, providing Google and its customers with an AI platform that is faster and more efficient, the company says. Google is pushing the idea that the "agent era" is fundamentally different from the AI systems that came before, necessitating a new approach to the hardware. So engineers have devised the TPU8t (for training) and the TPU 8i (for inference).

Before AI models become something you can use to analyze data or make silly memes, they need to be trained. The TPU 8t was designed specifically for this part of the AI lifecycle to reduce the training time for frontier AI models from months to weeks.

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Pointing to tabloid reports from The Daily Mail and The New York Post, Republican members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sought information about each missing or departed scientist. In letters to the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Reps. James Comer (R-Ky.) and Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) said the tabloid reports had raised "questions about a possible sinister connection between a string of mysterious deaths and disappearances."

"If the reports are accurate, these deaths and disappearances may represent a grave threat to US national security and to US personnel with access to scientific secrets," the letters said.

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“There were many calculations in the last 60 years or so, and as they got more and more precise, they all pointed toward a discrepancy and a new interaction that would upend known laws of physics,” said co-author Zoltan Fodor, a physicist at Penn State University. “We applied a new method to calculate this discrepancy quantity, and we showed that it’s not there. This new interaction we hoped for simply is not there. The old interactions can explain the value completely.”

As previously reported, the muon (a member of the lepton classification) is the heavier second-generation cousin of the electron—the tau is the third-generation cousin—and that makes muons particularly sensitive to virtual particles popping into and out of existence in the quantum vacuum, since they can briefly interact with those virtual particles. Muons are special to physicists because they are light enough to be plentiful yet heavy enough to be used experimentally to probe the accuracy of the Standard Model of particle physics.

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While the ruling is good news for companies looking to develop non-polluting energy sources, it leaves intact one of the only attempts the government has made to rationalize its animosity toward renewable power.

Arbitrary and capricious again

In December, a different judge in the same court ruled that the federal government's decision to withdraw all areas of the continental shelf from potential offshore wind development violated the Administrative Procedures Act. The problem, the court determined, was that the rules were arbitrary and capricious; the only justification the government offered was that they implemented a Trump executive order.

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The 22-year-old aspiring orthopedic surgeon from northern India got some money from his parents, but he says he spent most of it subsidizing his licensing exams, and he’s still saving up to hopefully emigrate to the US after graduation. So he started searching for ways to make additional money online.

Sam, who requested a pseudonym to avoid jeopardizing his medical career and immigration status, tried a few things, with varying degrees of legitimacy and success. He made YouTube shorts and sold study notes to other med students. It wasn’t until he started scrolling through his Instagram feed that he landed on an idea: Why not make an AI-generated girl using Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro and sell bikini photos of her online?

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As we saw with yesterday's news from CATL, EV batteries are getting more and more capable by the day. Increasing power can reduce charge times, as long as the battery can take it—BYD's new Blade battery can charge at up to 1.5 MW, and megawatt chargers are already common across China.

Once again, you can see how badly the US is lagging in EVs. Most Tesla Superchargers max out at 250 kW, Electrify America stops at 350 kW, and even the new IONNA stations top out at 400 kW per plug. So the Express Solo's 600 kW—as powerful as a Formula E pit stop—sets a new benchmark, particularly for a standalone charger that could live in an urban gas station or convenience store parking lot.

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While there have been some notable modifications from the dandy horse to the penny-farthing, since the advent of the “safety bicycle” in the 1880s, the fundamentals of bike design haven't changed all that much. Put another way, most bike riders today could understand how to use a bike made in the 1890s.

Still, for any bike fan, Sea Otter Classic—the biggest consumer trade cycling show in the world—showcases all kinds of new rigs and creative accessories. It’s basically Christmas for bike dorks.

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If Democrats retake control of Congress this fall, they may succeed in quickly passing legislation banning the president and his family from profiting from the shady token that has deeply disturbed government ethicists.

Trump launched his official memecoin before his inauguration in January 2025, becoming the first president to release his own cryptocurrency. Since then, Trump's family has reportedly made more than $280 million, while the memecoin's value has tanked.

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The proposed spending on drone and autonomous warfare technologies within the FY2027 budget proposal for the US Department of Defense would surpass most countries’ defense budgets and rank among the top 10 in the world for military spending, ahead of countries such as Ukraine, South Korea, and Israel.

Specifically, the Pentagon is requesting $53.6 billion to boost US production and procurement of drones, train drone operators, build out a logistics network for sustaining drone deployments, and expand counter-drone systems to defend more US military sites. The funding request is budgeted under the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), an organization established in late 2025 that would see a massive budget increase after receiving about $226 million in the 2026 fiscal year budget.

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Mozilla added some important data to that debate Tuesday, writing in a blog post that early access to Mythos Preview had helped it pre-identify 271 security vulnerabilities in this week's release of Firefox 150. The results were significant enough to get Firefox CTO Bobby Holley to enthuse that, in the never-ending battle between cyberattackers and cyberdefenders, "defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively."

"We've rounded the curve"

Holley didn't go into detail on the severity of the hundreds of vulnerabilities that Mythos reportedly detected simply by analyzing the unreleased source code of Firefox's latest version. But by way of comparison, he noted that Anthropic's Opus 4.6 model found only 22 security-sensitive bugs when analyzing Firefox 148 last month.

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AT&T and Verizon, which were fined a total of $104 million for selling users’ real-time location data without consent, claim the FCC's penalty system deprived them of the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. During oral arguments today, justices repeatedly pointed out that carriers could have obtained a jury trial if they chose not to pay the fines and waited for the government to begin an enforcement action in court.

But even if AT&T and Verizon lose this case, they could get a victory of sorts because the FCC and justices seem to agree that FCC fine decisions are nonbinding and require a court decision to enforce them. A government lawyer told justices that the FCC may change the language of its forfeiture orders to make it clearer that fines don't have to be paid until after a jury trial.

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