Review: Intel’s “Raptor Canyon” NUC is a compact gaming PC without the stress

Enlarge / Intel's new "Raptor Canyon" NUC Extreme (rear) is a lot larger but also a lot more capable than previous NUC Extreme boxes (front). (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Intel's NUC (Next Unit of Computing) desktops rose to prominence about a decade ago by being small; they were essentially laptops without screens or batteries, crammed inside a tiny box.

But in the years since, Intel has flirted with larger NUCs. They have always been relatively small, but as they graduated from dedicated laptop GPUs to regular dedicated GPUs to even-larger dedicated GPUs, the NUC Extreme PCs have steadily grown to the point that they're now encroaching on do-it-yourself desktops built around mini ITX motherboards, small SFX power supplies, and other size-conscious components.

Enter "Raptor Canyon," the latest and largest in Intel's line of desktop PCs. It replaces the "Dragon Canyon" NUC design and improves upon it by making room for longer triple-slot GPUs—up to 12 inches (or just over 300 mm) long. That's not enough space for one of Nvidia's massive RTX 4090 and 4080 cards, but it can fit just about anything else.

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OpenAI upgrades GPT-3, stunning with rhyming poetry and lyrics

Enlarge / An AI-generated image inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. (credit: Ars Technica)

On Monday, OpenAI announced a new model in the GPT-3 family of AI-powered large language models, text-davinci-003, that reportedly improves on its predecessors by handling more complex instructions and producing longer-form content. Almost immediately, people discovered that it could also generate rhyming songs, limericks, and poetry at a level GPT-3 could not previously produce.

On Hacker News, commenters expressed amazement after convincing GPT-3 to write a short rhyming poem explaining Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Another commenter asked GPT-3 to re-write the poem in the style of John Keats, and it obliged, dropping lines like "Mass doth affect the shape of time."

Prompt: "Write a short rhyming poem explaining Einstein's theory of general relativity in easy but accurate terms"

If you want to understand Einstein's thought
It's not that hard if you give it a shot
General Relativity is the name of the game
Where space and time cannot remain the same
Mass affects the curvature of space
Which affects the flow of time's race
An object's motion will be affected
By the distortion that is detected
The closer you are to a large mass
The slower time will seem to pass
The farther away you may be
Time will speed up for you to see

OpenAI makes GPT-3 available as a commercial product with an API, but for a fee ($0.02 per 1,000 tokens), anyone with an OpenAI account can experiment with the AI through a special "Playground" website that requires no coding skill.

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Apple Watch Ultra becomes a diving computer with launch of Oceanic+

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  An Apple Watch showing dive metrics. [credit: Apple ]

In September, Apple announced a new wearable called the Apple Watch Ultra, and one of the company's key pitches for the device was its use as a diving computer. Now Oceanic+, the app that makes that feature possible, launched exclusively for the Ultra, Apple announced today.

The Watch Ultra has depth gauge and water temperature sensors that drive some of the features in the app. To access a few of those features—such as decompression tracking—you'll have to subscribe to the app's premium version for $4.99 per day, $9.99 per month, or $79.99 per year. There's also a family plan at $129.99 annually. If you don't subscribe, you can still use some key features like dive logs, depth tracking, and so on.

The app—which was developed in partnership with Apple by a company called Huish Outdoors, lets you track dive conditions like tides, water temperature, and more. Here's a quick summary from Apple's blog post announcement:

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Patent detects in-game “collusion” by tracking “external connections”

Enlarge / Call it a hunch, but something tells me these two players are working together...

Do you ever feel like your opponents in a free-for-all online game are trying to get you, specifically? It might not just be paranoia; it might be collusion among your opponents. And in a newly published patent application, Electronic Arts details some potential tools and data points—both inside and outside the game—that it could use to detect and root out this unfair practice.

EA's simply titled "Detecting Collusion in Online Games" patent, published earlier this month, defines collusion as when two or more players/groups that are "intended to be opponents" instead "contribute to a common cause" to "gain an unfair advantage" over others. In battle royale shooter, for instance, a small group of players communicating outside the game could stay together and gain a decided firepower advantage against their single opponents.

Many of the patent's potential methods for discovering this kind of collusion use simple and obvious in-game data. If two or more ostensibly opposed players or teams show abnormal amounts of "time spent in proximity... without engagement," for instance, there's a good chance they're working together. Even if those players show some cursory opposition at points, metrics like damage per second can be compared with the average to see if this is just opposition "for appearance sake."

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Comcast’s sneaky Broadcast TV fee hits $27, making a mockery of advertised rates

Enlarge / Comcast service van parked on residential street in Lafayette, California, September 28, 2021. (credit: Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado )

The Comcast "Broadcast TV" fee that isn't included in the company's advertised prices is rising again, tacking as much as $27 onto the monthly bills of cable TV users. Comcast's Broadcast TV and Regional Sports Network fees combined could add nearly $40 to a customer's monthly TV bill after next month's price hikes, all while Comcast advertises much lower prices than people actually pay.

"Comcast has started notifying customers and municipalities that it plans to raise video and Internet prices next month, including a whopping $7.35 a month increase for the Broadcast TV fee in one town," a TV Answer Man article said on Saturday. The $7.35-per-month increase is in Taunton, Massachusetts, where Comcast said the Broadcast TV fee will rise from $18.65 to $26.

The Broadcast TV fee is rising from $24.95 a month to $27.25 a month starting on December 20 in Sandown, New Hampshire, a letter from Comcast to town government officials said. In Sandown, the Regional Sports Network fee is rising from $11.85 to $12.

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Rolls-Royce tests hydrogen-fueled aircraft engine in aviation world first

Enlarge / A Rolls-Royce hydrogen-fueled aircraft engine is tested at Boscombe Down in the UK. Flying is one of the most difficult industries to decarbonize, and hydrogen-powered aircraft are still years away from carrying a plane over long distances. (credit: Steve M. Smith / Rolls-Royce)

British engineer Rolls-Royce has successfully used hydrogen instead of conventional jet fuel to power a modern aircraft engine in a world first for the aviation industry, according to the company.

The ground test, which took place at a government test facility at Boscombe Down, used green hydrogen generated by wind and tidal power from the Orkney Islands in Scotland.

Rolls-Royce used a converted AE 2100-A turboprop engine that powers civil and military aircraft to conduct the test in partnership with easyJet.

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USB-C desktop power chargers tested—the best GaN-based boxes

Enlarge / GaN desktop chargers in their native habitat. From left: Ugreen Nexode 200W, Hyper 245W GaN Desktop Charger, and Anker 727 Power Station. (credit: Kevin Purdy / Ars Technica)

USB-C has made it easier to plug things in and connect them. Charging, though? Charging is still complicated. You get a different amount of power based on the device, the port, the battery level, and whatever else is drawing current. It can make you wish for a few ports that power whatever you plug in, whatever the size.

You used to need a big surge protector, packed with charging bricks crowding each other out, to get that kind of juice. But these days, gallium nitride-based chargers can put out serious power from a small space. We've scanned the marketplace, tried out a few of them, and have some recommendations for different power needs.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

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The evolution of whales from land to sea

Enlarge / Whales and their kin evolved from land-dwelling mammals, a transition that entailed major physiological and morphological changes—which geneticists have begun to parse. (credit: Hayes Baxley/National Geographic for Disney+)

Around 400 million years ago, the ancestor of all four-limbed creatures took its first steps onto dry land. Fast-forward about 350 million years, and a descendant of these early landlubbers did an about-face: It waded back into the water. With time, the back-to-the sea creatures would give rise to animals vastly different from their land-trotting kin: They became the magnificent whales, dolphins, and porpoises that glide through the oceans today.

Going back to being aquatic was a drastic move that would change the animals inside and out, in the space of about 10 million years—an eyeblink in evolutionary terms. Members of this group, now called cetaceans, dropped their hind limbs for powerful flukes and lost nearly all their hair. For decades, their bizarre body plans perplexed paleontologists, who speculated they might have arisen from creatures as varied as marine reptiles, seals, marsupials like kangaroos, and even a now-extinct group of wolf-like carnivores.

“The cetaceans are on the whole the most peculiar and aberrant of mammals,” one scientist wrote in 1945.

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The best Black Friday deals for Apple devices

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Black Friday is in full swing, and that's great news if you've had your eyes on an Apple device but have been waiting for a solid discount to pull the trigger. Apple devices are notoriously expensive, and you typically don't see many discounts throughout the year. Fortunately, Black Friday brings notable Apple deals not only from retailers, but Apple itself. Just as we do every year, we're cutting through the noise to bring you the best Black Friday Apple deals we can find.

Below are a few of the most worthwhile Apple deals we're seeing as of this writing. As always, we're focusing on products we'd actually recommend based on our time reviewing them and excluding any we don't think are worth your money. Lastly: there haven't been any huge iPhone deals we think are worth your time, so the focus here is on other products.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

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The best Black Friday laptop deals we can find

Enlarge / Microsoft's Surface Pro 8. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Black Friday laptop deals are as American as pumpkin pie. But tracking down worthwhile options can be tricky. Each model has variants, each of those variants have configurations with too many sound-alike model numbers (thank you, Intel), and many of the model names are unmemorable names.

We spend a lot of time looking at laptops and writing about them at Ars, so we've gone through the deals and highlighted the most noteworthy options, based on the laptops we've reviewed and know. Here are some laptop computer deals we think are worth knowing about.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

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Oxford scientists crack case of why ketchup splatters from near-empty bottle

Enlarge / Getting those few last dollops of ketchup out of the bottle can lead to unexpected splattering. (credit: Getty Images)

Ketchup is one of the most popular condiments in the US, along with mayonnaise, but getting those few last dollops out of the bottle often results in a sudden splattering. "It's annoying, potentially embarrassing, and can ruin clothes, but can we do anything about it?" Callum Cuttle of the University of Oxford said during a press conference earlier this week at an American Physical Society meeting on fluid dynamics in Indianapolis, Indiana. "And more importantly, can understanding this phenomenon help us with any other problems in life?"

The answer to both questions, per Cuttle, is a resounding yes. Along with his Oxford colleague, Chris MacMinn, he conducted a series of experiments to identify the forces at play and develop a theoretical model for ketchup splatter. Among the most interesting findings: squeezing the bottle more slowly and doubling the diameter of the nozzle helps prevent splatter. There is also a critical threshold where the flow of ketchup shifts suddenly from not splattering to splattering. A preprint paper has been posted to arXiv and is currently undergoing peer review.

Isaac Newton identified the properties of what he deemed an "ideal liquid." One of those properties is viscosity, loosely defined as how much friction/resistance there is to flow in a given substance. The friction arises because a flowing liquid is essentially a series of layers sliding past one another. The faster one layer slides over another, the more resistance there is, and the slower one layer slides over another, the less resistance there is.

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We now know why black hole jets make high-energy radiation

Enlarge / The jets of material ejected from around black holes can be enormous. (credit: NASA, ESA)

Active galactic nuclei, powered by the supermassive black holes they contain, are the brightest objects in the Universe. The light originates from jets of material hurled out at nearly the speed of light by the environment around the black hole. In most cases, these active galactic nuclei are called quasars. But, in rare instances where one of the jets is oriented directly toward Earth, they're called a blazar and appear brighter.

While the general outline of how a blazar operates has been worked out, several details remain poorly understood, including how the fast-moving material generates so much light. Now, researchers have turned a new space-based observatory called the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) toward one of the brightest blazars in the sky. The data from it and other observations combined indicate that light is produced when the black hole jets slam into slower-moving materials.

Jets and light

The IXPE specializes in detecting the polarization of high-energy photons—the orientation of the wiggles in the light's electric field. Polarization information can tell us something about the processes that created the photons. For example, photons that originate in a turbulent environment will have an essentially random polarization, while a more structured environment will tend to produce photons with a limited range of polarizations. Light that passes through material or magnetic fields can also have its polarization altered.

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Americans remain resistant to the lure of EVs, which are still unaffordable

Enlarge / The Chevrolet Bolt EUV is one of the cheapest EVs on sale, starting at $27,200. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

You might have noticed that our car coverage is rather heavily biased toward electrified vehicles. Partly that's in recognition of the fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are now far higher than at any time since humans have walked the planet. But as I drive more and more EVs, it's also clear that they're actually just better in nearly every metric one might choose, other than when it comes to energy density and how long it takes to recharge. But this viewpoint puts me in a minority of Americans, according to a new survey of Americans, Canadians, and Australians.

The survey was conducted by Consider the Market, an Australian insurance comparison site, which found that only 33.8 percent of Americans say they'd prefer an EV to a traditional vehicle. By contrast, more than half (52.9 percent) say they want to stick with gasoline or diesel, a number that goes up to 70 percent in the 55–64 age bracket. Meanwhile, 43 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds would prefer an EV.

Which is unfortunate, because very few in that age bracket can afford them. In fact, purchase price ranked second as a barrier to EV adoption, at 54.5 percent. (The highest barrier to adoption was battery life and replacement costs, at 56.4 percent of survey respondents, which, as we've explained before, is more a problem of perception than reality.)

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Sneaky ways cops could access data to widely prosecute abortions in the US

Enlarge (credit: David McNew / Contributor | Getty Images News)

It's not clear yet what role tech companies will play in helping police access data to prosecute abortions in post-Roe America, but it has already become apparent that law enforcement is willing to be sneaky when seeking data.

Cops revealed one potential tactic they could use back in June, when Meta faced scrutiny from reproductive rights activists for complying with a search warrant request from police in Madison County, Nebraska. The Nebraska cops told Meta they were investigating a crime under the state’s “Prohibited Acts with Skeletal Remains.”

But what they were actually investigating was a case involving a woman, Jessica Burgess, who was suspected of aiding her 17-year-old daughter, Celeste Burgess, in procuring an unlawful abortion in the state at 23 weeks. The mother and daughter previously told police that Celeste miscarried, but—in part because of data Meta supplied—the mother is now being prosecuted for unlawfully aiding her daughter in an abortion. Celeste is being prosecuted as an adult for other crimes.

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Musk: Paid checkmarks won’t return until Twitter can stop impersonation

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

When Elon Musk first launched his Twitter Blue subscription service, the whole point was to make it possible to buy the blue checkmark as a coveted status symbol. Now, the billionaire is backtracking (for now, at least), announcing in a tweet that the relaunch of Blue Verified checkmarks will be delayed, and likely when it does roll out, checkmarks distinguishing between Blue Verified subscribers and official verified accounts will be different colors.

“Holding off relaunch of Blue Verified until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation,” Musk tweeted. “Will probably use different color check for organizations than individuals.”

Many Twitter users suggested this obvious solution before the fake-account scandal found the platform sprinkled with popular but chaotic brand impersonations. That ultimately led Musk to revoke the option to pay $8 for a Blue Verified subscription.

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How Cupra made an electric hot hatch alternative to the Volkswagen ID.3

Enlarge / The Cupra Born is a sporty alternative to the Volkswagen ID.3. (credit: Cupra)

Recently, we reviewed Audi's RS e-tron GT, a handsome four-door electric vehicle that, while closely related to the Porsche Taycan, still manages to feel quite distinctive to drive. As I detailed in that article, the practice of sharing common platforms or architectures has been a fact of life in the automotive industry for decades.

That's particularly true at Volkswagen Group, which uses a handful of platforms as the starting point for its collection of 10 brands. One of the newest of these platforms is known as MEB (Modularer E-Antriebs-Baukasten or Modular Electrification Toolkit), and so far Ars has sampled MEB-based EVs in the form of the Volkswagen ID.4 crossover and then, more recently, the ID. Buzz minivan and the Audi Q4 e-tron crossover.

Not every MEB-based EV is destined for America, however. Volkswagen isn't bringing the Golf-sized ID.3 hatchback over to this side of the Atlantic, although based on European colleagues' takes on that car I'm not so sure we're missing out heavily. It is more unfortunate that US roads may also never see the Cupra Born, an electric hot hatch from a brand that got spun out of Seat in 2018 as a more performance-focused OEM. Friend of Ars Jonny Smith recently drove the Born and came away impressed, particularly since he was one of those reviewers underwhelmed by the ID.3.

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NASA’s new rocket blows the doors off its mobile launch tower

Enlarge / The Orion spacecraft approaches the Moon on Monday. (credit: NASA)

So far, NASA's ambitious Artemis I mission seems to be going swimmingly. The Orion spacecraft has performed a number of propulsive burns, flying smoothly past the Moon, and will now test out its capabilities in deep space.

On Monday evening, after flying around the Moon, the spacecraft returned images of the flyby back to Earth via the Deep Space Network. While no humans are on board Orion during this test flight, they will be during its next mission. The views of the Moon from human spacecraft—the first in more than half a century—were brilliant.

"Today was a terrific day," said Howard Hu, program manager for the Orion spacecraft, speaking about the spacecraft's performance and its images. "This is a dream for many of us who work at NASA. We were like kids in a candy store."

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Orion soars around the Moon with a lonely Earth in the distance

Enlarge / This image taken by NASA's Orion spacecraft shows its view just before the vehicle flew behind the Moon. (credit: NASA)

NASA's Orion spacecraft flew to within 130 km of the Moon's surface on Monday morning after executing one of the most demanding maneuvers of its 25-day mission.

Since launching on top of the Space Launch System rocket last Wednesday, Orion's European Service Module had conducted four "trajectory correction burns" on the way to the Moon. These were brief firings of the service module's main engine, an Aerojet-built AJ10 engine. However, the propulsion system faced a stiffer test on Monday as part of a maneuver to enter orbit around the Moon. It passed with flying colors.

The AJ10 engine burned for 2 minutes and 30 seconds as Orion passed behind the Moon, out of contact with NASA back on Earth. When Orion reemerged from the lunar shadow, all was well, and the spacecraft was positioned to reach its temporary destination—a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon.

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Here are all the best early Black Friday deals live now

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Black Friday week is here, and a barrage of early Black Friday deals has gone live over the weekend. Black Friday and the ensuing days/weeks create a notoriously hectic and overloaded shopping event, but it's also the best time to find year-long low prices on some of our most highly recommended tech. Naturally, we've done days of research and hunting to deliver the best tech deals this event has to offer, and we'll continue to do so as things change shape through Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Each brings its own cascade of new deals.

The biggest retailers and manufacturers, like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Best Buy, Target, and Walmart, have all posted early Black Friday deals lists. There's already a lot to highlight for big-ticket items like 4K TVs, Apple iPads, MacBooks, and Surface devices. A range of 4K TVs made our list, from higher-end offerings from Samsung and LG to more reasonably priced options from Hisense and TCL, and much more. All of which received strong reviews from trusted sources like Rtings.com, among many others. If you're looking for smart home devices like smart speakers, video doorbells, and streaming sticks, Amazon and Google have large chunks of their lineups on sale, matching or beating record lows. Likewise with robot vacuums from Roomba.

As for smaller items, Target's buy-two-get-one-free deals on books and video games are an excellent value, packed with a good mix of new releases and modern classics. Xbox and Playstation have also launched video game sales in their respective stores, bringing down prices often by 50 percent on a number of in-demand titles. For stocking stuffers, we have deals on our favorite chargers from Anker, as well as microSD and SSD storage solutions from SanDisk, Western Digital, and Samsung.

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A history of ARM, part 2: Everything starts to come together

Enlarge / The Acorn Archimedes 3000, released in May 1989. (credit: Wikipedia)

The story so far: At the end of the 1980s, Acorn Computers was at a crossroads. A small team, led by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, had invented a powerful new computer chip, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM). Acorn released a new computer line, the Archimedes, that used these ARM chips. But the world wasn’t beating a path to the company's door. (Read part one here.)

From the beginning, it was hard to get anyone to care about this amazing technology. A few months after the first ARM chips had shipped, Acorn Computers' Steve Furber called a tech reporter and tried to get him to cover the story. The reporter replied, “I don’t believe you. If you’d been doing this, I’d have known.” Then he hung up.

As Acorn struggled, Furber tried to imagine how the ARM chip could be spun off into a separate company. But he couldn’t figure out how to make the business model work. “You’d have to sell millions before royalties start paying the bills,” he said in an interview. “We couldn’t imagine selling millions of these things.”

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Laser-driven fusion’s internal energies not matching up with predictions

Enlarge / Where the action happens inside the National Ignition Facility. (credit: Damien Jemison/LLNL)

On Monday, a paper was released that describes some confusing results from the National Ignition Facility, which uses a lot of very energetic lasers focused on a small target to begin a fusion reaction. Over the past few years, the facility has passed some key milestones, including ignition of fusion and creating what's termed a burning plasma.

Now, researchers have analyzed the properties of the plasma as it experiences these high-energy states. And to their surprise, they found that burning plasmas appear to behave differently from those that have experienced ignition. At the moment, there's no obvious explanation for the difference.

Ignition vs. burning

In the experiments at issue here, the material being used for fusion is a mix of tritium and deuterium, two heavier isotopes of hydrogen. These combine to produce a helium atom, leaving a spare neutron that's emitted; the energy of the fusion reaction is released in the form of a gamma ray.

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Musk tells Twitter staff: Agree to work “long hours at high intensity” or quit now

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Elon Musk has sent an ultimatum to all Twitter staff—commit to an "extremely hardcore" approach to work or quit your job by Thursday.

"Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade," Musk wrote in the all-staff email.

The email's subject line was, "A Fork in the Road."

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Researchers break security guarantees of TTE networking used in spacecraft

Enlarge / People look inside an Orion spacecraft simulator, which is used to train for docking to the Gateway space station, at the Johnson Space Center's System Engineering Simulator facility in Houston. (credit: Getty Images)

Wednesday's scheduled launch by NASA of the Artemis I mission will be the first integrated test of the agency’s SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, which have been in development for 16 years and are expected to usher in a new era of space exploration. The uncrewed mission will also be only the second time a network standard known as time-triggered Ethernet has been taken into space, with the first being Orion's orbital test flight in 2014.

Time-triggered Ethernet (TTE) is an example of a mixed-criticality network, which is capable of routing traffic with differing levels of timing and different fault tolerance requirements over the same set of hardware. Until now, spacecraft generally relied on one network to transmit safety-critical or mission-critical messages and one or more completely segregated ones for carrying video conferencing and other types of less-critical traffic.

Illustration of how time-triggered Ethernet works. (credit: TTTech)

Engineers built a better mousetrap. The mice defeat it anyway

Orion is the first spacecraft to rely on a TTE network to route mixed-criticality traffic, whether, NASA says, it's for vital systems like navigation and life support, file transfers that are critical for delivery but not timing, or non-critical tasks such as crew videoconferencing. TTE—which will also be used in NASA’s Lunar Gateway space station and the ESA’s Ariane 6 launcher—is crucial for reducing the size, weight, cost, and power requirements of modern spacecraft.

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Global investigators pounce as FTX collapse leaves up to 1 million creditors

Enlarge (credit: Stefani Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)

The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire has sparked a vast global investigation, with dozens of authorities circling the company as lawyers warn there could be 1 million creditors in its bankruptcy proceeding.

FTX said in court filings it was in contact with US federal prosecutors, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and “dozens of federal, state, and international regulatory agencies” in the three days since the cryptocurrency exchange and more than 100 affiliated companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware.

The companies face at least 100,000 creditors, but that number could expand to more than 1 million, according to the filing. Most of the creditors were clients of Sam Bankman-Fried’s companies.

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“Project Volterra” review: Microsoft’s $600 Arm PC that almost doesn’t suck

Enlarge / Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023 is meant to get the Arm version of Windows into the hands of more developers. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Microsoft has released two new systems based on Qualcomm's Arm processors lately. The first, a 5G version of the Surface Pro 9, has mostly been panned by reviewers, with software compatibility being a major pain point even after two generations of the Arm-powered Surface Pro X. The second is the $600 Windows Dev Kit 2023, formerly known by the much cooler name "Project Volterra," and it's supposed to help solve that software problem.

Microsoft has tried doing Arm Windows developer boxes before—namely, the $219 ECS LIVA QC710 it began selling about a year ago (it's no longer for sale, at least not through Microsoft's store). But with its 4GB of memory, 64GB of pokey storage, and underpowered Snapdragon 7c processor, using it was like revisiting the bad netbook days. Maybe you could get some basic browsing done on it. But actual work, even for someone like me who primarily works with text and medium-resolution photos all day? Nope.

The Dev Kit 2023 is nearly three times as expensive, but the hardware is powerful enough that it mostly just feels like a typical midrange mini-desktop in day-to-day use. Freed from the limitations of cruddy hardware, the machine makes it much easier to evaluate Windows-on-Arm's remaining software limitations. For this review, we won't be using it as a developer box, but it does give us a good chance to evaluate where the Windows-on-Arm project is right now, both in hardware and software—especially relative to the Mac, the other hardware and software ecosystem that is making a much cleaner, wider-ranging, and more graceful transition from x86 software to Arm.

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When is a Porsche not a Porsche? When it’s a 2022 Audi RS e-tron GT

Enlarge / Danish racing driver Tom Kristensen leads another pair of Audi RS e-tron GTs through the corkscrew corner at Laguna Seca. (credit: Audi)

Call it platform sharing, call it badge engineering, call it what you like—car companies have collaborated with each other to make cars for much of the automobile's history. Sometimes these link-ups happen between companies that might normally be considered rivals: Honda and Rover in the 1980s; the BMW/Toyota project that gave us the new Supra; or perhaps the forthcoming electric vehicle platform-sharing between Ford and Volkswagen or General Motors and Honda.

More often, it occurs among the shared brands of a single OEM—Chrysler Group's K platform in the 1980s is a good example. But few automakers have exploited the advantages of that quite like Volkswagen Group, which builds hundreds of different vehicles across its 10 brands around the world using just a handful of different platforms. The vast majority of these—and we're talking several million cars a year—are built on VW Group's MQB platform, which can give rise to anything from an Audi A3 to a Volkswagen Transporter van, with cars and crossovers and SUVs of most sizes and shapes.

The RS e-tron GT is a little draggier than the Taycan, with a Cd of 0.24. (credit: Audi)

But even as you go up the price scale, this practice is still widely used. For example, for decades Bentleys were basically Rolls-Royces with a slightly different nose; today, they share platforms with Porsche's Panamera and Cayenne. And it's why the handsome four-door EV in this review wears Audi RS e-tron GT badging yet features very Porsche Taycan-like specifications—a consequence of sharing the same J1 platform.

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The first cubesat to fly and operate at the Moon has successfully arrived

Enlarge / The CAPSTONE payload is seen here, atop an Electron rocket in New Zealand. (credit: Rocket Lab)

After a journey of nearly five months, taking it far beyond the Moon and back, the little CAPSTONE spacecraft has successfully entered into lunar orbit.

"We received confirmation that CAPSTONE arrived in near-rectilinear halo orbit, and that is a huge, huge step for the agency," said NASA's chief of exploration systems development, Jim Free, on Sunday evening. "It just completed its first insertion burn a few minutes ago. And over the next few days they'll continue to refine its orbit, and be the first cubesat to fly and operate at the Moon."

This is an important orbit for NASA, and a special one, because it is really stable, requiring just a tiny amount of propellant to hold position. At its closest point to the Moon, this roughly week-long orbit passes within 3,000 km of the lunar surface, and at other points it is 70,000 km away. NASA plans to build a small space station, called the Lunar Gateway, here later this decade.

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How North Korea became a mastermind of crypto cybercrime

Enlarge (credit: Financial Times)

Created by a Vietnamese gaming studio, Axie Infinity offers players the chance to breed, trade and fight Pokémon-like cartoon monsters to earn cryptocurrencies including the game’s own “Smooth Love Potion” digital token. At one stage, it had more than a million active players.

But earlier this year, the network of blockchains that underpin the game’s virtual world was raided by a North Korean hacking syndicate, which made off with roughly $620 million in the ether cryptocurrency.

The crypto heist, one of the largest of its kind in history, was confirmed by the FBI, which vowed to “continue to expose and combat [North Korea’s] use of illicit activities—including cyber crime and cryptocurrency theft—to generate revenue for the regime.”

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The oracle who predicted SLS’s launch in 2023 has thoughts about Artemis III

Enlarge / NASA's Artemis I mission is due to launch this year. But will Artemis III also fly on the Space Launch System rocket? (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

On a chilly night in early December 2017, I met a couple of industry sources at a southeast Houston restaurant called Nobi. Located just down the road from Johnson Space Center, Nobi serves Vietnamese cuisine and has an amazing range of beers on tap. We partook.

These space industry figures are not well known outside the business, but they are very informed and shrewd observers of spaceflight. And perhaps most importantly to me as a reporter, they were particularly candid in this setting.

They were in town for a space conference, so we gossiped and chatted and talked shop. Deep into our cups, speculation turned toward NASA's Space Launch System rocket. When, I asked, do you really think the big rocket will launch?

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A Polestar-Tuned Polestar 2 is the best Polestar

Enlarge / You can tell this Polestar 2 is a bit more special than most Polestar 2s by the great big stripe and the large number two. (credit: Roberto Baldwin)

Polestar tunes Volvos. Polestar used to only tune Volvos. Taking a Volvo and making it better was Polstar’s only real job until it became one of the dozens of EV startups that have burst on the scene in the past 10 years. Now the company builds intriguing electric vehicles under the watchful eye of parent company Geely and quasi-parent Volvo.

But Polestar couldn’t deny its inclinations.

That’s how the Polestar 2 BST edition 2 (a garbled mouthful of a name) was born. A skunkworks project to tune a Polestar 2 by… well, Polestar. The chassis team wanted to make an “extraordinary version of the EV Christian Samson, Polestar’s head of product attributes told Ars Technica.

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Electric doesn’t mean boring—Porsche’s EV future includes plenty of power

Enlarge / The exterior clues that this is a Porsche 718 GT4 ePerformance and not a 718 GT4 Clubsport are subtle; it's 140 mm (5.5 inches) wider, and the headlight projectors look more like a Taycan's than a Cayman's. But it's an all-electric car with more than a thousand horsepower on tap. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Porsche provided a flight from DC to Milan and back, and plus two nights in a hotel so we could get briefed on VW Group's next EV platform. We also saw the reveal of its new Formula E car, which you were able to read about last week. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

FRANCIACORTA, ITALY—The auto industry is in the midst of a mass transformation as we move towards product lineups that are mostly or even entirely electric. Some are handling this transformation better than others, as supply chain problems caused by the pandemic and invasion of Ukraine add further complications. Witness the sorry state of Jaguar, which cancelled an electric replacement for the XJ sedan at the last minute, or the repeated electric vehicle-related missteps we've seen from Toyota, Honda, and Mazda of late.

There appear to be no such woes at Porsche, however. In 2019 it debuted the Taycan, a four-door electric sportscar that remains one of the best EVs on sale. Since then it's added new Taycan variants, two different flavors of EV wagon included, all built in a factory in Zuffenhausen, Germany that's already carbon-neutral. (Porsche's Zuffenhausen factory uses a very heavy mix of renewable energy and biogas from waste materials, and has been independently certified by Germany's DGNB.)

But Porsche isn't resting on its laurels. Fine though the Taycan is, it really is just the start of the OEM's electrified journey—as long as you aren't counting some of Ferdinand Porsche's very earliest vehicles, like the Egger-Lohner C2 Phaeton of 1898. Future battery EVs from Porsche will use an all-new flexible architecture called PPE—for premium platform electric—which the company is developing together with fellow VW Group sibling Audi (with Porsche taking the lead here).

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For many disabled patients, the doctor is often not in

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Ben Salentine, associate director of health sciences managed care at the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System, hasn’t been weighed in more than a decade. His doctors “just kind of guess,” his weight, he said, because they don’t have a wheelchair-accessible scale.

He’s far from alone. Many people with disabilities describe challenges in finding physicians prepared to care for them. “You would assume that medical spaces would be the most accessible places there are, and they're not,” said Angel Miles, a rehabilitation program specialist with the Administration for Community Living, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Not only do clinics often lack the necessary equipment—such as scales that can accommodate people who use wheelchairs — but at least some physicians actively avoid patients with disabilities, using excuses such as “I’m not taking new patients,” or “you need a specialist,” according to a paper in the October 2022 issue of Health Affairs.

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The weekend’s best deals: Buy two get one free video games, Razer Blade, Apple, GoPro and more

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It's the weekend, and that means it's time to round up the week's best deals. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are only two weekends away, which means there's a steady trickle of popular electronics going on sale for year-long low prices. Both Target and Amazon are currently running a "buy two, get one free" deal on over 500 video games and thousands of books. You can peruse the list or easily search it using the landing pages' dedicated search bars if you're looking for something specific. The list includes newer games like Resident Evil 4, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, FIFA '23, Madden '23, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and older games like those from the Grand Theft Auto franchise, Mario games, and much more.

Among the bigger ticket deals, we have a bunch of Apple devices, including iPads, M1- and M2-powered MacBooks, AirPods Pro (first and second-gen), HomePod Mini, and $200 off Apple's 5K Studio display ($1,799 $2,000). We reviewed Apple's 5K display in March, noting that it was one of the few 5K monitors on the market, which largely remains true. That aside, it portrays very pleasing images with great sound to match. It also has Apple's A13 chip within, meaning it can upgrade to include new features as new macOS versions deploy. The sale applies to the more expensive tilt- and height-adjustable version of the monitor.

A few of our favorite fitness wearables are also on sale for record lows. Garmin's Fenix 7 ($585 $700) is our top pick for the outdoor explorer in our forthcoming guide on the best fitness trackers. We chose the Fenix 7 for its robust hardware and similarly replete software. Garmin uses materials like titanium and sapphire to ensure this watch works just as well 100 meters underwater as it does soaking up solar power atop the highest mountains. The bevy of Garmin's proprietary training metrics, preloaded topographical maps, and wide-ranging activity tracking gives users the most data, and the most useful analysis of any fitness wearable right now.

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How “Wordle editor” became a real job at The New York Times

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

On the surface, there are few word games that would seem to need active editing less than Wordle. After all, the daily Wordle puzzle boils down to just a single five-letter word. Picking that word each day doesn't exactly require the skill or artistry of, say, crafting an entire crossword puzzle or designing a more algorithmic game like Knotwords.

Despite this, on Monday, The New York Times announced that "Wordle finally has an editor." Which kind of leads to an obvious follow-up question: What does a Wordle editor actually do all day?

The answer, it turns out, is more than you might think. In a conversation with Ars Technica, newly named Wordle editor Tracy Bennett said that picking the daily Wordle word involves balancing difficulty, variety, and potential player frustration, while keeping an eye out for derogatory hidden meanings and player complaints.

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Dung beetle moms protect their offspring from a warming world by digging deeper

Enlarge / A road sign in Bursa, Turkey, warns drivers of the presence of dung beetles, stating "Attention! It may come out, don’t crush it please!" (credit: Ugur Ulu/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

If the TV series Dirty Jobs covered animals as well as humans, it would probably start with dung beetles. These hardworking critters are among the insect world’s most important recyclers. They eat and bury manure from many other species, recycling nutrients and improving soil as they go.

Dung beetles are found on every continent except Antarctica, in forests, grasslands, prairies, and deserts. And now, like many other species, they are coping with the effects of climate change.

I am an ecologist who has spent nearly 20 years studying dung beetles. My research spans tropical and temperate ecosystems and focuses on how these beneficial animals respond to temperature changes.

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Surface 9 Pro teardown reveals modular parts, Microsoft’s 2023 repair plans

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There's not much new to the Surface Pro 9 on the outside, as our review points out. Inside, however, there is evidence of a lot of work by Microsoft to make the device more repairable, as shown in an iFixit teardown.

iFixit has consulted with Microsoft's hardware teams for a while now, providing advice on making devices more repairable. As evidence of this, Microsoft claims in a statement that it will:

• Make repair guides available for the Surface Pro 9's components by the end of the year
• Work with "a major US retailer" to build out an authorized (in-store) repair network by early 2023
• Offer parts to individuals and repair shops by the first half of 2023

All these factors improve repairability, both in practice and in iFixit's (and French, European, and potentially other nations') repair scores.

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Twitter quietly drops $8 paid verification; “tricking people not OK,” Musk says

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

When a wave of imposter accounts began using the verified checkmarks from Twitter's Blue paid subscription service to post misleading tweets while pretending to be some of the world’s biggest brands, it created so much chaos that Elon Musk seemingly had no choice but to revoke the paid checkmarks entirely.

“Basically, tricking people is not OK,” Musk tweeted, as some users began reporting that the option to pay $7.99 for a Twitter Blue subscription had disappeared, while others who had been verified previously found that their "Official" blue checkmarks had been reinstated.

Reuters reported that Twitter announced today that it had reinstated the "Official" badges on some accounts, but because Twitter has no communications department (according to The Verge), it’s difficult to verify if paid verification is actually gone for good or just temporarily disabled. According to the tech site Platformer's managing editor Zoe Schiffer, this message was posted in the Twitter Slack to clarify: "An update on what we did tonight: hid the entry point to Twitter Blue, added the 'official' label for ONLY advertisers. Note: here is at least one way for users to sign up for Blue. Legacy Blue users can go to subscriptions and upgrade. Note 2: Existing Blue subscribers will still have access to their Blue features."

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Game over for FTX as CEO-founder quits and company files for bankruptcy

Enlarge / Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and chief executive of FTX, has resigned. (credit: Financial Times)

FTX has filed for bankruptcy protection in the US after it was unable to meet a torrent of withdrawals, marking a stunning collapse for Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire that was valued at $32 billion just months ago.

The filing in a federal court in Delaware on Friday includes FTX’s US entity, Bankman-Fried’s proprietary trading group Alameda Research, and about 130 affiliated companies.

The collapse of FTX comes after a whirlwind 10 days in which Bankman-Fried desperately sought billions of dollars to save his company after customers rushed to pull their assets out of the business following concerns surrounding its financial health and links between the exchange and Alameda, also founded by Bankman-Fried.

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California climate measure fails after “green” governor opposed it

Enlarge (credit: Education Images/Getty)

The only statewide climate measure on California’s ballot Tuesday failed, even though it would have raised billions to help meet the state’s ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets by subsidizing electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, among other things. Its downfall resulted largely from the high-profile opposition of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has arguably worked harder than any other governor to position himself as a climate leader.

Official ballot materials said Proposition 30 would provide funding for programs to reduce air pollution and prevent wildfires by increasing tax on personal income over $2 million. The roughly 35,000 Californians who make more than $2 million would have been required to pay an additional 1.75 percent on income above that amount.

The tax on these high-income earners—0.08 percent of Californians—would raise about $3.5 billion to $5 billion annually, according to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office.

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For $8, Twitter Blue users create a wave of checkmarked imposter accounts

Enlarge / Don't let the blue check mark fool you; "Nintendoofus" is not an official account...

Twitter has begun rolling out its $8-a-month Twitter Blue subscriptions, complete with "verified" checkmarks for paid users. But the social network is also fighting to suspend a wave of accounts that are exploiting confusion over those checkmarks, imitating major brands and celebrities to spread authentic-looking fake information.

In the video game sphere, fraudulent "checkmarked" accounts appearing Wednesday night included Nintendo of America supposedly showing Mario flipping the bird, Valve supposedly announcing Ricochet: Neon Prime, and Rockstar Games supposedly announcing a new trailer date for Grand Theft Auto VI. In the world of sports, a fake Lebron James claimed he was requesting a trade, a fake Aroldis Chapman said he had re-signed with the Yankees, and a fake version of ESPN's Adam Schefter "reported" on the supposed departure of Las Vegas Raiders coach Josh McDaniels.

Following sports transactions and news could become a total mess with the new verification system

Already fake LeBron and Aroldis Chapman tweets going around pic.twitter.com/vQgMqws1W0

— Joon Lee (@joonlee) November 9, 2022

Checkmarked accounts also gleefully imitated political figures, from Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani to former British MP Tony Blair and former US President George Bush. One bold checkmarked scammer even imitated Twitter itself, advertising a fake "free" Twitter Blue deal for crypto/NFT owners who "authenticate their wallet assets."

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The best wireless mechanical keyboards

Enlarge (credit: Scharon Harding)

It's no secret that mechanical keyboards provide some of the best tactile typing experiences available. It's also not a secret that wireless keyboards can be a productivity boon, reducing workspace clutter and easily connecting with numerous device types. Thankfully, wireless mechanical keyboard selection has grown so much in recent years that you can find options with feature sets on par with the priciest wired keyboards.

When exploring today's selection of cable-free mechanical keyboards, there's plenty to consider beyond switch type. For example, how many devices do you want the keyboard to be able to toggle across? Should any of those wireless connections use a USB receiver? Battery life is also paramount (all the options here are rechargeable) and, just as with any other premium keyboard, features like programmability, onboard memory, and quality keycaps are important.

With those qualifications in mind, we sought out the best wireless mechanical keyboards for power users.

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NASA leaves its Artemis I rocket exposed to winds above design limits

Enlarge / The upper part of the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft likely faced the strongest wind gusts on Thursday morning. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

Early on Thursday morning, Hurricane Nicole made landfall near Vero Beach, on Florida's eastern coast. Because Nicole had a very large eye, nearly 60 miles in diameter, its strongest winds were located well to the north of this landfalling position.

As a result of this, Kennedy Space Center took some of the most intense wind gusts from Nicole late on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. While such winds from a Category 1 hurricane are unlikely to damage facilities, they are of concern because the space agency left its Artemis I mission—consisting of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft—exposed on a pad at Launch Complex-39B. The pad is a stone's throw from the Atlantic Ocean.

How intense were the winds? The National Weather Service hosts data from NASA sensors attached to this launch pad's three lighting towers on a public website. It can be a little difficult to interpret the readings because there are sensors at altitudes varying from 132 feet to 457 feet. Most of the publicly available data appears to come from an altitude of about 230 feet, however, which would represent the area of the Space Launch System rocket where the core stage is attached to the upper stage. The entire stack reaches a height of about 370 feet above the ground.

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FTX on brink of collapse after Binance abandons rescue

Enlarge (credit: Leon Neal/Getty Images)

FTX is on the brink of collapse as chief Sam Bankman-Fried races to secure billions of dollars to salvage his empire after Binance ditched an eleventh-hour rescue of one of the world’s biggest crypto exchanges.

Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital said it would mark down its $214 million investment in FTX to zero after a run on the exchange in recent days blew a massive hole in its balance sheet and cast serious doubts over its survival.

“In recent days, a liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX,” Sequoia said in a note on Wednesday to investors in its fund.

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Nurse who called 911 on her ER talks chaos, fear amid understaffing crisis

Enlarge / Emergency department staff members work at Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, California, on November 1. Orange County's health officer has declared a local health emergency in response to increases in respiratory illnesses and an onslaught of the quickly spreading RSV, a respiratory virus that is most dangerous in young children. (credit: Getty | Orange County Register)

The charge nurse who called 911 last month when her emergency department became overwhelmed with patients is speaking candidly about the chaos, fear, and unsafe conditions that continue to plague her hospital and others around the country.

Kelsay Irby, the ER charge nurse at St. Michael’s Medical Center in the greater Seattle area, penned an eye-opening essay for Nurse.org Tuesday, offering context, commentary, and more details around the infamous night of October 8.

That evening, the hospital's emergency department was "even more short-staffed than normal, operating at less than 50 percent of our ideal staffing grid," Irby said, and there were around 50 people in the waiting room. The nurses were becoming increasingly nervous that some of the people stuck waiting in the lobby had cardiac and respiratory problems, and there were also children with very high fevers. With only one nurse available to keep an eye on people waiting, they could be "unmonitored for extended periods of time."

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