Preview: Final Fantasy XVI is a bold new direction for the series

Enlarge / Get ready for a darker story than you might expect from the Final Fantasy franchise. (credit: Square Enix)

In so many ways, Final Fantasy XVI wants you to abandon everything you know about the franchise. It’s an action RPG with a heavy emphasis on the “action” part, built around only one playable character. It’s a darker, more violent story that, by the developers’ own admission, draws more from fantasy blockbusters in the West. And it’s seemingly trying to deliver the type of game a modern audience expects. While each entry in the series has tried something new, Final Fantasy XVI is arguably the biggest departure thus far.

After getting a hands-on with a preview demo—and talking to the creative business Unit III development team about the story, structure, and content of the game—the series diehard in me is starting to make out the vision being constructed here. Final Fantasy XVI is a bombastic, aggressive spectacle with prestige-level production values and a striking, self-serious vibe. But more than anything, the playable demo has me largely convinced that this new gameplay formula is actually the right move for the franchise.

[Disclaimer: Square Enix asked us to specify that this preview demo was a special version made for the media to experience and content may differ from the final version.]

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New Windows 11 update puts AI-powered Bing Chat directly in the taskbar

Enlarge / The "new Bing" running directly from the Windows 11 taskbar. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is adding support for Bing Chat and the other "new Bing" features to the Windows taskbar as part of 2023's first major Windows 11 feature update. Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay announced the updates in a blog post released today.

The Windows update doesn't open the new Bing preview to anyone who hasn't already signed up for it, and there's currently a waitlist for new users who want to try the feature. But if and when Microsoft expands the Bing preview to more of its users, millions of PCs that automatically install today's update will already have built-in support for it.

You can read about the other changes in the new Windows 11 updates here. Anyone running the Windows 11 2022 updates can download them manually via Windows Update starting today, and all of the new changes will roll out to those PCs automatically in March.

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Could deep boreholes solve our nuclear waste problem?

Enlarge / An artist’s impression of a deep borehole for nuclear waste disposal by Sandia National Laboratories in 2012. Red lines show the depth of mined repositories: Onkalo is the Finnish one, and WIPP is the US DOE repository for defense waste in New Mexico. (credit: Sandia National Laboratories)

There’s one thing every planned permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel has in common: They're all underground mines.

Like any mine, a mined repository for nuclear waste is a complex feat of engineering. It must be excavated by blasting or a boring machine, it must keep the tunnels stable using rock supports, and it must have ventilation, seals, and pumps to handle groundwater and make it safe for people and machinery. Unlike a mine, however, a repository must also transport and entomb canisters of radioactive waste, and it must be engineered to exacting standards that ensure the tunnels will keep the canisters safe for many millennia.

There is an alternative idea that dispenses with most of those downsides: disposal in deep boreholes. But can they be both feasible and safe?

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Shortly before liftoff, SpaceX cancels a crew launch due to igniter issues

Enlarge / SpaceX's Crew-6 mission is seen this weekend before leaving planet Earth. (credit: NASA)

At just over two minutes to go before SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket was due to launch a crew of four astronauts to the International Space Station early on Monday, the mission was scrubbed due to an issue with igniter fluid.

NASA's Crew-6 mission had been due to take off at 1:45 am ET from Launch Complex 39-A in Florida, at Kennedy Space Center. During the space agency's webcast, the host first mentioned the issue with the TEA-TEB igniter fluid about five minutes before the anticipated liftoff time. Mission operators were not able to clear the technical issue before the instantaneous launch window opened.

The crew was safe on board the Crew Dragon spacecraft. NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen, the mission commander, and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, its pilot, along with United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, both mission specialists, will egress the vehicle later on Monday morning after propellant is off-loaded from the rocket.

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Where a kid can be a kid: Recapping episode 7 of HBO’s The Last of Us

Enlarge / Even the apocalypse can't stop the standard teen wall full of posters...

New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who's played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.

Andrew: We're back again! FLASH-back, that is!

This one isn't as big a departure from the action as the Bill episode was a few weeks back, but it does mean that last week's cliffhanger goes mostly unresolved. Ellie does take a crack at patching Joel up, though it seems to me that sticking a decades-old unsanitized needle into an open wound is just as likely to kill him as save him...

Kyle: If the flashback here seems a bit out of place it's probably because this storyline was originally part of the game's "Left Behind" DLC, which was written and released well after the first game came out. I'm not totally against putting it here in the show's narrative—it's important background that should go somewhere—but it does step on one of the more dramatic moments in the game (though maybe that's still coming in the future?)

Given how we first met Ellie as a prisoner in the show, I definitely appreciate giving a little more time to showing what she was like trying to grow up as a normal kid under FEDRA's version of society.

Bored teens look the same, even under FEDRA control. (credit: HBO)

Andrew: Yeah, I don't have a problem with the episode, and people watching this in the future when the whole season is available to binge straight through probably won't be as bothered by the delayed cliffhanger.

This does flirt with a thing that I can find frustrating in fiction, though—this impulse to show/explain every single little thing about a character instead of letting things be implied or a little mysterious. I'm not overly bothered by it here, but if TLoU stretches into a second or third season I could see them leaning on flashback-as-filler in a way that could be less interesting.

Did you ever wonder, viewers, about how Ellie got her knife? How Bill got his truck?! Tune in next week!

Kyle: As long as they don't go full 50-years-of-Star-Wars-filler on it, I think it'll be OK...

Andrew: Anyway, those things aside, this episode lets us spend a big chunk of time with Ellie sans Joel for the first time, which I appreciate. It's a flashback to a few days? Weeks? Months? Before the start of the series, when Ellie is a just a Teen With A Bad Attitude in FEDRA high school instead of a Possible Savior of Humankind.

Kyle: In the game I believe it's set a few weeks before Ellie meets Joel, so let's go with that.

I was glad to see a well-acted version of Riley here, acting as a foil to push and pull Ellie in interesting directions. Even if I didn't know what was going to happen, though, I think it'd be pretty hard to get too attached to her. The pattern of "meet a new character; See them connect with the characters we love; Oops they're dead within an episode or two" is already getting a bit played out. It's possible to go to that well too often...

Don't get too attached, Ellie... (credit: HBO)

Andrew: Two's company, three's a crowd in The Last of Us universe, and if you spend any time with Ellie and Joel you'd better have an exit strategy figured out. I appreciate the commitment to keeping the focus narrow but what if more characters, like Tommy, were simply allowed to depart and keep having their own lives instead of dying horribly? I guess we'll never know.

Kyle: I guess it feels a little different in the game because these characters tend to linger with you a little longer—even if that time is often artificially lengthened by shootouts and whatnot. So the pattern is still there in the game, but it doesn't seem so predictably timed to end-of-episode breaks.

Andrew: Let's give some props to the set designers, though, who seem thrilled to work on something that isn't another run-down residential area. The design of the dilapidated, abandoned mall—the episode's big setpiece—has tons of fun details. I didn't go frame-by-frame to check and make sure that all the real stores mentioned/depicted were portrayed exactly as they would have been in September 2003, but the presence of an abandoned mall with all of its anchor stores intact is very true to the early '00s.

Other "society crumbled in September 2003!" things I liked: of course there would be a pop-up Halloween store in this mall, and Ellie is listening to a cut from 2002's Riot Act, the final in-universe Pearl Jam album. (Unless Eddie Vedder survived the apocalypse; of all the alternative rock stalwarts, he's the one I'd bet on, honestly.)

Kyle: I also liked all the little Ellie character callbacks that were paid off from earlier in the season: the pun book, Mortal Kombat II, even her interest in getting Joel's pistol can be traced to here somewhat.

I was kind of surprised that no one looted the lingerie store, though. You're telling me there's not a single sex-positive person who was worried about having enough hot nighttime wear to get through the apocalypse?

How did no one loot this store?

Andrew: Just not a very horny time, I guess. Though our pandemic proved that speculators will go for just about anything if they think they can make a buck from it, including but not limited to soap.

Kyle: Looter: "Do you have any idea what that lingerie is worth?" / Nick Offerman: "Presently, nothing..."

I wonder what you thought about Ellie and Riley's decision to "tough it out" at the end of the episode, rather than going out the painless, easy way. On the one hand, it is a pretty necessary thing for Ellie's narrative to continue. On the other hand, it's maybe a bit overly sentimental for these young, scared characters?

Remember how scared Sam was of turning just a few episodes ago? Or how Tess was willing to go out in a blaze of glory rather than face the same fate?

Andrew: That was the bit of the episode that felt the weirdest, to me. Like you said, not super consistent with how most characters we've seen approach the possibility of infection. But the "painless, easy way"... there's only one gun. Maybe the thought of being the person to go second was too horrifying for these teen girls (hardened, cynical teen girls, but teen girls nevertheless) to contemplate.

The scene might almost have worked better for me if the episode left off with that terrified look they share when they realize they've both been bitten. Ellie's still here, Riley isn't, let the audience imagine how that happened. Given the way the show uses flashback, I worry that we're going to have to return to this and watch Ellie gun down her best friend/putative girlfriend right at a point where the show needs to twist the emotional knife for some other reason.

Whose flashlight is better? (credit: HBO)

Kyle:Strangely enough, this kind of tangentially reminded me of a holocaust survivor that spoke to my Hebrew School class when I was a teen. She said she was often asked, of her horrible years in a concentration camp, whether she ever considered just ending it all herself? What she said to us was simply: "I didn't want to save them the bullet." And 50 years later she was still around to tell us that.

Not exactly the same situation, but it came to mind...

Andrew: It does make you think about what motivates people to persevere in times of horror and hardship; it might be as simple as "where there's life, there's hope."

It could also be that Ellie and Riley are being a little selfish here. The other characters you mentioned, Tess and Sam, had other uninfected loved ones they clearly didn't want to infect. Ellie and Riley mainly have each other. What do you care if you infect some stranger, or some FEDRA goon? It's a bit of self-centered nihilism that, again, feels specific and true to teenhood.

You mentioned this was adapted from DLC, which like a episode of TV also needs to balance being its own standalone unit of story/gameplay and extending the main campaign. Seems to me like it would be especially easy to adapt directly without changing much, anything big that they've added or subtracted in adapting it for TV?

Kyle: The biggest cut was a watergun fight that kind of served as a lighthearted take on the much more deadly shooting elsewhere in the games.

Andrew: Gotta have some combat in there! The episode should have had a section where Ellie needed to push some big boxes around to get the electricity working or some shit.

Kyle: There was also a big difference in the arcade. In the game, the arcade cabinet Ellie wants to play (a copyright-safe parody of Mortal Kombat) is busted. So Riley makes Ellie grab the controls and close her eyes while Riley describes what would be happening in an actual match. You have to respond to some quick time events while staring at a look of joy and concentration on Ellie's face and hearing imagined sound effects.

Probably hard to adapt that to a TV show in the same way, but I still think about that moment in the game. Kind of a "enjoy your games now, because these Apocalypse Kids can't even play them!" moment.

We'll always have puns... (credit: HBO)

Andrew: One does occasionally need to suspend one's disbelief on the show, like when Ellie and Riley stumble into a mostly functional arcade that has been sitting for 20 years, or where Joel can still siphon usable gasoline out of cars.

Kyle: I dunno, those solid-state electronics were built to last, especially if no one has touched them for all this time. Battery corrosion might be the main worry?

Andrew: The pinball machines might be in pretty sad shape, though. You'd also be worried about capacitors drying up I think.

Kyle: I'm sure the commenters will tell us way more than we wanted to know on the realism of post-apocalyptic arcade cabinet longevity...

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How an early-warning radar could prevent future pandemics

Enlarge (credit: Wladimir Bulgar via Getty Images)

On December 18, 2019, Wuhan Central Hospital admitted a patient with symptoms common for the winter flu season: a 65-year-old man with fever and pneumonia. Ai Fen, director of the emergency department, oversaw a typical treatment plan, including antibiotics and anti-influenza drugs.

Six days later, the patient was still sick, and Ai was puzzled, according to news reports and a detailed reconstruction of this period by evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey. The respiratory department decided to try to identify the guilty pathogen by reading its genetic code, a process called sequencing. They rinsed part of the patient’s lungs with saline, collected the liquid, and sent the sample to a biotech company. On December 27, the hospital got the results: The man had contracted a new coronavirus closely related to the one that caused the SARS outbreak that began 17 years before.

The original SARS virus was sequenced five months after the first cases were recorded. This type of traditional sequencing reads the full genetic code, or genome, of just one organism at a time, which first needs to be carefully isolated from a sample. The researchers hired by Wuhan Central Hospital were able to map the new virus so quickly using a more demanding technique called metagenomic sequencing, which reads the genomes of every organism in a sample at once — without such time-intensive preparation. If the traditional approach is like locating a single book on a shelf and copying it, metagenomic sequencing is like grabbing all of the books off the shelf and scanning them all at once.

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The return of Flat Earth, the grandfather of conspiracy theories

Enlarge (credit: Martin Wimmer)

Off the Edge is not a book about conspiracy theories, exactly. It does get there, but really it is a book about the history of the Flat Earth movement as the sort of original conspiracy theory. It is the second such book, in fact; Christine Garwood wrote Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea in 2007. But it is a whole different world now, conspiracy-theory-wise, so Kelly Weill thought an update was in order.

Weill covers extremism, disinformation, and the Internet for The Daily Beast, a website whose tagline is “a smart, speedy take on news from around the world.” (A previous editor-in-chief described it as a “high-end tabloid.”) Like the site, the book is well-researched and makes for quick and entertaining, if disturbing, reading.

The pull of conspiracy

Weill started Off the Edge when she noticed Flat Earthers repeatedly cropping up in the far and alt-right chat groups and websites she was covering. She said that she initially thought they were a joke because “how could anyone really believe anything so ludicrous?” To find out, she entered their world; the book is in first-person, with Weill frequently recounting her misadventures meeting Flat Earthers and attending their conferences.

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Signal CEO: We “1,000% won’t participate” in UK law to weaken encryption

Enlarge / Signal app on a phone. (credit: Getty Images)

The nonprofit responsible for the Signal messenger app is prepared to exit the UK if the country requires providers of encrypted communications to alter their products to ensure user messages are free of material that’s harmful to children.

“We would absolutely exit any country if the choice were between remaining in the country and undermining the strict privacy promises we make to the people who rely on us,” Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker told Ars. “The UK is no exception.”

Whittaker’s comments came as the UK Parliament is in the process of drafting legislation known as the Online Safety Bill. The bill, introduced by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is a sweeping piece of legislation that requires virtually any provider of user-generated content to block child sexual abuse material, often abbreviated as CSAM or CSA. Providers must also ensure that any legal content that can be accessed by minors—including self-harm topics—is age appropriate.

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Dealmaster: The best deals on Intel laptops

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Whether you need a lightweight laptop with a long battery life or something more powerful with discrete graphics, we've found savings across a variety of notebook form factors. Most of the laptops in our list come with Intel's 12th Gen mobile processor, and a few include discrete GPUs.

Even though it's on the premium end of the pricing spectrum, the best deal we found is on Dell's XPS 15 laptop, which is available for $500 off its retail price. This versatile notebook may look buttoned up in its appearance, but it has the power inside to do double-duty as a mobile workstation or gaming rig. Another solid deal is on Lenovo's Yoga 7i, a convertible notebook that includes a 16-inch display and 12th Gen Core i5 processor—the laptop is on sale for $600. Check out our full curated list below for the best savings on Intel-powered notebooks.

Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 13.5-inch for $1,100 ($1,300) at Best Buy: This Intel Evo laptop comes with an Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of memory, and a 512GB solid-state drive. Available in a "sage" colorway, the Surface Laptop 5 gets a cool $200 discount.

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EU seeks input on making tech companies pay for ISPs’ network upgrades

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Alicia Llop)

The European Union government is seeking public input on a controversial proposal to make online platforms pay for telecom companies' broadband network upgrades and expansions. If it goes forward, tech companies like Google and Netflix and possibly many others could have to make payments toward the financing of broadband network deployment.

The European Commission's exploratory consultation released today said there "seems to be a paradox between increasing volumes of data on the infrastructures and alleged decreasing returns and appetite to invest in network infrastructure." Large telecom companies have been seeking payments from web companies, the consultation notes:

Some electronic communications operators, notably the incumbents, call for the need to establish rules to oblige those content and application providers ("CAPs") or digital players in general who generate enormous volumes of traffic to contribute to the electronic communications network deployment costs. In their view, such contribution would be "fair" as those CAPs and digital players would take advantage of the high-quality networks but would not bear the cost of their roll-out.

The tech companies that would have to start paying "argue that any payments for accessing networks to deliver content or for the amount of traffic transmitted would not only be unjustified, as the traffic is requested by end-users and costs are not necessarily traffic-sensitive (notably in fixed networks), but would also endanger the way the Internet works and likely breach net neutrality rules," the document notes.

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A world of hurt for Fortinet and Zoho after users fail to install patches

Enlarge

Organizations around the world are once again learning the risks of not installing security updates as multiple threat actors race to exploit two recently patched vulnerabilities that allow them to infect some of the most critical parts of a protected network.

The vulnerabilities both carry severity ratings of 9.8 out of a possible 10 and reside in two unrelated products crucial in securing large networks. The first, tracked as CVE-2022-47966, is a pre-authentication remote code execution vulnerability in 24 separate products from software maker Zoho that use the company’s ManageEngine. It was patched in waves from last October through November. The second vulnerability, CVE-2022-39952, affects a product called FortiNAC, made by cybersecurity company Fortinet and was patched last week.

Both ManageEngine and FortiNAC are billed as zero-trust products, meaning they operate under the assumption a network has been breached and constantly monitor devices to ensure they’re not infected or acting maliciously. Zero-trust products don’t trust any network devices or nodes on a network and instead actively work to verify they’re safe.

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Black Mesa gets shiny: Free Half-Life ray-trace mod adds subtle splendor

Enlarge / The familiar hallways of Black Mesa can be made new with some generative lighting. (credit: Valve)

Half-Life is a legendary game, a title that was ahead of its time in its storytelling, mechanics, and technology. Graphically, though, it can't help but look extremely 1998. A new, free ray-tracing mod makes the PC original a lot more compelling to revisit.

Sultim Tsyrendashiev, working on GitHub as sultim-t, has worked on graphics upgrades and ports of many games and tools, including the Serious Engine and Quake. The Xash3D: Ray Traced project, now ready for public use with Half-Life 1, tweaks an alternative version of Half-Life's Source engine to add a custom path-traced renderer. The tech that moves applications from fixed to real-time path tracing is interesting and promises even more ray-traced nostalgia kicks to come.

Release trailer for sultim_t's "Half-Life: Ray Traced" mod.

But what most of us are interested in is how it works in Half-Life. It's very pretty, and while the effect is mostly subtle, it can steal the show in big moments (sorry, tentacle giant that needs to go). I played through the first level and a bit into the second one with the mod installed, and I visited a few other levels with map warp cheats (though I quickly died in most since I couldn't get weapon cheats to work). The textures aren't upgraded (unless you do so yourself with other mods), but modern-day lighting can make a big difference in how some of the game's areas look.

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This tool lets you see how much time and money is wasted commuting

Enlarge / New York City has the slowest car travel in the country. (credit: Alan Schein/Getty Images)

Yet another annual traffic survey has found London firmly in first place—or worst place, perhaps—for 2022. This time it's TomTom's data that shows the Big Smoke is hell on wheels, with an average travel time of more than 35 minutes to go six miles (10 km) last year. Instead of just releasing a static report, TomTom has used its data to create a tool that lets you calculate the costs of commuting in 389 cities and their metropolitan areas, from A Coruña in Spain to Zwolle in the Netherlands, with 80 US cities in between.

Of course, the 2022 data is worth a look. Here in the US, TomTom's trends show my own city of Washington, DC, did pretty badly over the past 12 months—the time to travel six miles went up by a minute and a half to 21 minutes. Indianapolis saw travel times also grow by 90 seconds year on year, but you could complete those six miles in 14 minutes, according to TomTom's data.

As you might expect, transit-friendly New York City had the longest travel times to go six miles—25 minutes, which was an increase of 70 seconds over 2021. And New Yorkers spent the most time in rush hour during 2022, a total of 236 hours. (DC, in second place, lost 196 hours.)

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Starlink to charge users in “limited-capacity” areas $30 more than others

Enlarge / The original round version of the SpaceX Starlink satellite dish mounted on the roof of a rural home. (credit: Getty Images | The Bold Bureau)

Starlink notified users of new monthly prices in which people who live in "limited-capacity" areas will pay $30 more per month than users in "excess-capacity" areas. The changes consist of a price hike for many users and a decrease for others.

The original price of Starlink was $99 a month, but SpaceX has been charging all residential users $110 since a price hike imposed in March 2022. Emails sent yesterday and today notified residential users of a "$10 increase in areas with limited capacity" for a new price of $120 a month, and a "$20 decrease in areas with excess capacity" for a new price of $90 a month.

The email to users in limited capacity areas said, "As a current customer in an area with limited capacity, your monthly service price will increase to $120/month beginning April 24, 2023. For new customers in your area, the price increase is effective immediately. If you do not wish to continue service, you can cancel at any time on your account page."

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Biden won’t save the Apple Watch from potential ban

Enlarge / AliveCor and Apple's battle started with the Apple Watch Series 4. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Apple will continue fighting California-based AliveCor over the startup's electrocardiogram (ECG) technology. On Tuesday, AliveCor announced that US President Joe Biden had decided not to veto the US International Trade Commission's (ITC) December ruling that could lead to an import ban on the Apple Watch Series 4 and later.

It's unlikely that Apple's watch will be totally banned. But as The Verge pointed out, AliveCor could walk away with a licensing agreement from Apple to use its patents in the Apple Watch.

According to AliveCor, which has around 150 workers to Apple's 80,000, it shared its ECG sensor technology with Apple in 2015 while building a business relationship, The Hill reported earlier this month. In 2018, Apple released the Apple Watch Series 4, which not only introduced an ECG sensor to the smartwatch but also blocked outside heart monitoring apps. AliveCor said this forced it in 2019 to stop selling KardiaBand, an ECG band that the company announced for Apple Watches in 2016.

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Neanderthals spread diverse cultures across Eurasia (before we came along)

Enlarge / This artist's conception shows how Neanderthals might have faced down the mammoth task of butchering a freshly-killed elephant. (credit: Benoit Clarys, courtesy of Schoeningen Project)

Two recent studies of Neanderthal archaeological sites (one on the coast of Portugal and one in central Germany) demonstrate yet again that our extinct cousins were smarter and more adaptable than we’ve often given them credit for. One study found that Neanderthals living on the coast of Portugal 90,000 years ago roasted brown crabs—a meal that’s still a delicacy on the Iberian coast today. The other showed that 125,000 years ago, large groups of Neanderthals came together to take down enormous Ice Age elephants in what’s now central Germany.

Individually, both discoveries are fascinating glimpses into the lives of a species that's hauntingly similar to our own. But to really understand the most important thing these Neanderthal diet discoveries tell us, we have to look at them together. Together, they show that Neanderthals in different parts of Europe had distinct cultures and ways of life—at least as diverse as the cultures that now occupy the same lands.

Neanderthal beach party

On the Iberian coast 90,000 years ago, groups of Neanderthals living in the Gruta de Figueira Brava cave spent their summers catching brown crabs in tide pools along the nearby shore, then feasting on crab roasted over hot coals back in the cave.

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Generative AI is coming for the lawyers

Enlarge (credit: James Marshall / Getty Images)

David Wakeling, head of London-based law firm Allen & Overy's markets innovation group, first came across law-focused generative AI tool Harvey in September 2022. He approached OpenAI, the system’s developer, to run a small experiment. A handful of his firm’s lawyers would use the system to answer simple questions about the law, draft documents, and take first passes at messages to clients.

The trial started small, Wakeling says, but soon ballooned. Around 3,500 workers across the company’s 43 offices ended up using the tool, asking it around 40,000 queries in total. The law firm has now entered into a partnership to use the AI tool more widely across the company, though Wakeling declined to say how much the agreement was worth. According to Harvey, one in four at Allen & Overy’s team of lawyers now uses the AI platform every day, with 80 percent using it once a month or more. Other large law firms are starting to adopt the platform too, the company says.

The rise of AI and its potential to disrupt the legal industry has been forecast multiple times before. But the rise of the latest wave of generative AI tools, with ChatGPT at its forefront, has those within the industry more convinced than ever.

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Hyundai reveals Ioniq 6 pricing, starting at $41,600

Enlarge / The Ioniq 6 is going to be very keenly priced. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Hyundai has announced the pricing structure for its next electric vehicle, the Ioniq 6. And it's competitive, especially with the introduction of a smaller battery option. As a result, the curvaceous EV starts at just $41,600, with the range topping out at $56,100.

Hyundai says that the $41,600 Ioniq 6 SE RWD standard range, which will use a 53 kWh battery pack for a range of 240 miles (386 km), will be "available in limited quantities this summer," suggesting it might be hard to track one down.

An EV range of 240 miles is probably enough to evoke range anxiety in many non-EV drivers. But don't fret; the Ioniq 6 SE RWD long range, which uses a 77.4 kWh battery pack to best effect and 361 miles (581 km), is the next-cheapest at just $45,500. Adding a second motor to the long-range Ioniq 6 bumps the price up to $49,000 and drops the range to a still-impressive 316 miles (509 km).

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ChatGPT failed my course: How bots may change assessment

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

One of the most unpleasant aspects of teaching is grading. Passing judgment on people is never fun, and it’s even less fun when you’ve spent months interacting with those people on a daily basis. Discovering that your students have tried to get a leg up by using an AI chatbot like ChatGPT has made the process even more unpleasant. From a teacher's perspective, it feels a bit like betrayal—I put in all this effort, and you respond by trying to do an end-run around the assessment.

Unfortunately, the bot-writing horse bolted long ago. The stable is not just empty; it's on fire.

So what is the right response to ChatGPT in education? Is there even a single correct response?

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Russia claims an “external impact” damaged its Progress spacecraft

Enlarge / The European robotic arm is seen investigating Soyuz MS-22 after a leak occurred in mid-December. (credit: NASA TV)

Russia's main space corporation, Roscosmos, provided updates on Tuesday about its two spacecraft that recently suffered failures to their cooling systems while attached to the International Space Station.

Although there were several items of note in these updates—which are not readily available to Western audiences due to Russian Internet restrictions—perhaps the most surprising claim is that both the Soyuz MS-22 and Progress MS-21 spacecraft were damaged near their heat radiators by "external impacts." This seems highly improbable, to say the least.

For those who haven't been paying attention to the Russian roulette in space in recent months, here's a summary of what has happened since mid-December:

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Original iPhone from 2007 auctioned for $63,356, topping prior sales

Enlarge / The original iPhone started at $499 for 4GB in 2007. (credit: Getty)

When we reviewed the first iPhone in 2007, one of our top complaints was that the phone was locked to AT&T. At the time, carrier lock-in discouraged Karen Green, a Verizon customer, from opening an iPhone she received as a gift. What was once a limiting inconvenience has led to Green making big bucks, as that unopened iPhone was recently auctioned for $63,356.40—10,477 percent more than the $599 it cost about 16 years ago.

The first iPhone's specs are laughable by today's standards and include 8GB of Samsung flash memory storage, a 2MP camera (decent for a camera phone at the time), and a 3.5-inch LCD screen.

As reported by Business Insider on Monday, Green sold the phone via LCG Auctions to fund her business after seeing how much other unopened first-generation iPhones had sold for recently. In August, one auctioned for $35,414, and in October, another unopened 2007 iPhone sold for $39,339.60. The auction for Green's phone, which closed on Sunday, greatly surpassed those sales.

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Changes at the top and in US production as Toyota reiterates its EV strategy

Enlarge / Toyota has shown us plenty of electric vehicle concepts and renderings but last year built just 24,000 battery EVs. (credit: Toyota)

It's all change at the top of the world's largest car maker. Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company's founder and CEO since 2009, is being replaced by former Lexus boss Koji Sato as Toyota's new president and CEO. Toyoda will assume the role of company chairman.

The management changes are seen in large part as the company responding to a need to embrace battery-electric vehicles, a huge growth area in the industry but one that Toyota has seemingly neglected in favor of hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles.

At a press conference, Sato and his new management team faced many questions about the company's BEV strategy—or lack thereof. BEVs are important to the company, but "this is by no means a rapid change of direction toward BEVs," Sato said.

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Amazon hamstrings free app that makes Fire TV remotes reprogrammable

Enlarge / The Fire TV Stick 4K Max. You're pretty much stuck with those streaming-service buttons on the bottom of the remote. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon doesn't want you messing with the Fire TV remote's buttons. After all, those buttons connecting users to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu are a source of ad revenue for Amazon. The company recently issued a software update to the Fire TV Stick 4K Max that blocks the functionality of Remapper, a free app that lets users reprogram the remote's third-party app-launcher buttons.

Buttons dedicated to a specific TV-streaming service, like Disney+ or Peacock, have been a way for streaming services to attempt to drive subscriptions and viewership since 2011 when Netflix started doing it. Companies like Amazon and Roku receive money for placing a button for a streaming service on their remotes. Amazon hasn't disclosed how much money it makes from this function, but in 2019, Bloomberg reported that Roku charges streaming companies $1 for every remote sold with one of the service's buttons.

With that in mind, Amazon's apparent resistance to Remapper isn't surprising. But for users who don't have a Netflix subscription, for example, they may want to reprogram a Fire TV remote's dedicated Netflix button to launch a service they have a subscription to.

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Lance Bass was kicked off a Russian spaceflight two decades ago—now he’s back

Enlarge / Lance Bass attends the 2022 iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas. (credit: Gabe Ginsberg/Getty Images for iHeartRadio)

At the height of his fame as a member of the internationally famous boy band NSYNC, Lance Bass came within about two weeks of going to space in 2002.

Bass had completed four months of rigorous training in Russia's Star City during the spring and summer of that year, learning Russian and passing several challenging pre-launch tests. The plan was to fly up to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft alongside two cosmonauts and spend about 10 days in orbit.

This was not a well-trodden path, especially for a 23-year-old musician who would have been by far the youngest person to fly into space. By mid-2002, only two wealthy businessmen, Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth, had ever taken privately paid trips to space.

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Is your Facebook account worth $12 a month? Meta rolls out subscription program

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

Yesterday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Instagram that his company is testing out a new subscription service to help Facebook and Instagram users “get extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you.” Called Meta Verified, the monthly service will cost $11.99 on the web and $14.99 on iOS and Android. It’s being rolled out in Australia and New Zealand starting this week, and there are plans to offer the service in other countries soon.

Reactions on Instagram were mixed, with approximately 35,000 users reacting with thumbs up, hearts, tears, laughter, anger, and shock emoji.

A Meta blog went into further detail on how the monthly subscription service works. Users will show a government ID to authenticate their accounts and will receive a verified badge. Meta will then begin proactively monitoring to block impostor accounts while providing additional account support. Similar to Twitter Blue, the Meta Verified service offers users “increased visibility and reach.” Announced before Twitter Blue launched, the monthly subscription service is designed partly in response to top creator requests “for broader access to verification and account support,” Meta’s blog said. Subscribers will also have access to “exclusive features” like stickers to help their posts stand out even more from basic accounts.

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Atomic Heart impressions: Shock-ingly good shooting

Enlarge / The glorious future that awaits you in Atomic Heart involves dismantling a lot of the glorious future constructed by an alternate-history Soviet Russia. (credit: Mundfish / Focus Entertainment)

Note: Atomic Heart arrived to us in the middle of last week, with its embargo falling on a holiday Monday. What follows is not a full review but impressions of the first few hours. There are very light spoilers for the first 6-7 hours of gameplay.

One of the best things a first-person action game can have is a great kick. As a backup when ammo is scarce, or a crowd control tactic, a solid boot adds gravity to combat that can otherwise become detached crosshair clicking.

In Atomic Heart, you don't have a kick, but the humanoid robots sure do. Give them a chance, and they'll fling themselves into a two-footed jump-kick that hits like a fishtailing Chevy. If you don’t dash out of the way, you spin and hit the ground with a thud, slowly getting up from your hands while vulnerable to more damage. It's some of the most visceral melee fighting I've seen in a first-person shooter. And the gunplay has a similar oomph.

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Hope and doubt collide in an eventful episode 6 of The Last of Us

Enlarge / Will someone please get this girl an electric heater?

New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who has played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here right after the episodes air. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episodes, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.

Kyle: Besides the obvious "move the plot forward" bits reuniting of Joel and his brother Tommy, I was surprised at how deep this episode went on the mental and physical anguish of an aging, obviously traumatized Joel. This kind of thing is hinted at in the games, especially the sequel, but it's more of a vague undercurrent beneath Joel's general image as "Unflappable Survivor Badass."

Andrew: The three-month time jump following last week's emotional wringer is enough time for Joel and Ellie to have made it from Missouri to southern Wyoming. Their dynamic doesn't seem to have changed much, but we do see Joel struggling with something that looks an awful lot like panic attacks. And then Joel finds his brother, who it turns out doesn't need so much saving after all.

The Jackson commune where they end up might be the only place outside of flashbacks that we've seen that feels genuinely safe, maybe even genuinely comfortable. There's no FEDRA, no vigilantes waving don't-tread-on-me flags, no sign of infected. They aren't doomsday preppers trying to go it alone. They have Christmas lights! They have movie nights.

Something about that setting plus seeing his brother again—it's easy to revert to a previous version of yourself when you see a close friend or family member you haven't seen in a while—totally shatters Joel's defenses, and all the emotional subtext of his relationship with Ellie just comes tumbling out.

She's obviously very worried about COVID

Kyle: Kind of a tangent, but this episode, and episode 3 before it, really hammer home how crucial consistent electricity is to a modern peacful society. Just having the ability to give the people some running water, heat, and movies to keep the kids busy seems to be the main difference between fascist dystopia and Jackson's idealized commune.

Andrew: There's some real truth to that. I was living in New Jersey (and my now-wife was out of town) when Hurricane Sandy hit, and our apartment complex took the better part of a week to get power restored. I was living a nomadic existence for a few days, bouncing between places with electricity while I waited for ours to come back. New Jersey still has these gigantic malls that are dying out most other places in the country, and you could go to one and see people gathered around those outlets they embed in the floors, all waiting for their phones to charge.

Having electricity and alcohol really seems to have taken the edge off for the people in this episode; if it weren't for the barricades (and the handwritten labels on all the whiskey bottles at the bar, a nice touch), Jackson could almost be a normal town.

How about this for a slogan: Jackson, city of brotherly love. Is that taken?

Kyle: I found myself wondering if Jackson's example could be replicated in other far flung communities in this world. Being in the middle of nowhere and unknown to short-wave radios seems pretty key to keeping them safe from Infected and raiders. Being a relatively small community also probably helps—harder to get up to no good if the entire town knows you by sight.

All that said, feels like a couple dozen guys from Kansas City with heavy artillery could overtake this idyllic hamlet and ruin it incredibly quickly.

Andrew: We're just going to quietly hope that no one does that!

It also doesn't hurt that Jackson has a consistent source of hydroelectric power, something that just won't be possible in a lot of other places.

Kyle: Yeah, if this outbreak had just happened 20 years later there would be tons of solar panels around to repurpose!

Andrew: Giant wind farms to tap into! Not to get political but I think renewable energy might be good?

Kyle: We need the Green New Deal to protect us from the zombie apocalypse!

Andrew: "I can't believe these commies want to take away our right to get infected by the deadly mushroom virus" says Tucker Carlson.

Just Ellie enjoying the best meal of her life...

Kyle: Speaking of politics, I loved Tommy's reaction to the undeniable fact that he has been living under communism for years and loving it. You can almost see his brain rewiring itself in real time.

Andrew: "Sure, we live in a commune, and everything belongs to everyone, but it’s not communism."

I do think the Big Emotional Decision in this episode feels just a little rushed. Joel bares his soul, Joel talks Tommy into taking Ellie, and then in the morning Joel has changed his mind and that’s that. It does work, it’s just a big pivot point for their relationship and it all happens pretty quickly.

Kyle: Yeah it felt kind of like an episode of Full House where Danny goes through a crisis of faith in his parenting and Uncle Jesse convinces him to just be cool about it and it all works out just in time for an all new Family Matters.

Are my timely sitcom metaphors working for you?

Andrew: Yes, this is a hip and current reference and I'm glad you made it.

Like a lot of the show's action sequences, the one at the science lab is a bit hard to comment on because it's pretty straightforward. A small roving band of Generic Jerks comes upon Our Heroes and fighting ensues. It is thematically resonant that Joel's fears about his own capabilities are proven "right" so soon after he acknowledges them.

And then the whole sequence with the monkeys and the university and everything set off my "this feels like a video game" sensors. Am I off the mark?

Joel at a respawn point.

Kyle: You're not. The whole last 15 minutes of the episode were pretty faithful to the games, as far as I remember. Which is a good opportunity for me to turn it around in you and ask you to predict what happens to Joel and Ellie after this cliffhanger...

Andrew: Well I don't want to spoil anything for anyone, but if Joel dies he just respawns at the last save point. So the only question for viewers is how much of the monkey-college sequences we'll need to watch a second or third time while Joel tries to get a handle on the enemies' attack patterns.

I suspect that Ellie, having been trained in the ways of survival, will suddenly find herself in the role of Unlikely Protector while Joel convalesces, may make an unlikely friend or two in trying to find him help. I am not sure about that but I'm more sure than I am that the show is going to let a main character die this early.

Kyle: I’d point you to the first season of Game of Thrones as a counterexample, but I’m pretty sure no one at HBO is using that as a guiding document for this...

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Man beats machine at Go in human victory over AI

(credit: Flickr user LNG0004)

A human player has comprehensively defeated a top-ranked AI system at the board game Go, in a surprise reversal of the 2016 computer victory that was seen as a milestone in the rise of artificial intelligence.

Kellin Pelrine, an American player who is one level below the top amateur ranking, beat the machine by taking advantage of a previously unknown flaw that had been identified by another computer. But the head-to-head confrontation in which he won 14 of 15 games was undertaken without direct computer support.

The triumph, which has not previously been reported, highlighted a weakness in the best Go computer programs that is shared by most of today’s widely used AI systems, including the ChatGPT chatbot created by San Francisco-based OpenAI.

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Germany raises red flags about Palantir’s big data dragnet

Enlarge / German police officers sit in their vehicle at the Neuenburg junction of the A5 motorway and observe the traffic from France. (credit: Philipp von Ditfurth/Getty Images)

Britta Eder’s list of phone contacts is full of people the German state considers to be criminals. As a defense lawyer in Hamburg, her client list includes anti-fascists, people who campaign against nuclear power, and members of the PKK, a banned militant Kurdish nationalist organization.

For her clients’ sake, she’s used to being cautious on the phone. “When I talk on the phone I always think, maybe I'm not alone,” she says. That self-consciousness even extends to phone calls with her mother.

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TNG reunion injects a little fun into Star Trek: Picard’s uneven final season

Enlarge / Jonathan Frakes is my dad. (credit: Paramount+)

Few involved in the making or watching of 2002's Star Trek Nemesis would say that it was a fantastic send-off for the beloved characters of The Next Generation. Over seven seasons, TNG became one of Trek's most nuanced and consistent entries (though still one that was capable of producing terrible, silly, and just plain weird episodes). But Nemesis is a flat action movie defined by thin characterization, a cheesy one-note villain, and distracting plot contrivances, and it did so poorly ($67 million on a $60 million budget, in a time before "maybe it will make a lot of money in China" was a thing) that it foreclosed any possibility of another sequel. The cast and those characters, the thinking generally went, deserved better closure.

Star Trek: Picard has been the TNG continuation you'd get if you wished for a TNG sequel on a monkey's paw. The first two seasons made only intermittent use of any non-Picard characters, and the new characters were either annoying or bland or both. The show's creative staff uses "convoluted twists" as a stand-in for clear and interesting storytelling. It's a show strictly for die-hard Trek completists, and it's easily the worst of the five Trek shows in active production as of this writing.

The show's third and final season has been pitched as a true TNG reunion, and if nothing else, it's nice to see the clear affection these performers still have for one another. But Picard is still Picard, and many of the characters and plot points in the season so far (we've seen the first six episodes of a planned 10, though this piece will only refer to specific events from the season premiere and the trailers) are eerily reminiscent of the ones that made Nemesis so unsatisfying.

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Let’s-a go to Super Nintendo World, Hollywood’s new interactive theme park

Enlarge / Watch out, if SMB3 is any guide, he breathes lasers...

Nintendo is often referred to as "the Disney of video games." But while Nintendo has long matched Disney's reputation for family-friendly home entertainment, it had nothing that could compare to Disney's domination in the physical world of theme parks.

That started to change in 2021, when Super Nintendo World finally opened in Osaka's Universal Studios Japan. Now, a very similar experience is coming to America with the opening of the Super Nintendo World section of Universal Studios Hollywood.

Ars got a sneak peek at the new section of the park just ahead of its Friday opening and came away utterly enchanted by the charming interactivity and Disney-esque attention to detail apparent throughout the park's newest themed area.

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Geekbench’s creator on version 6 and why benchmarks matter in the real world

Enlarge (credit: Primate Labs)

We review a lot of hardware at Ars, and part of that review process involves running benchmark apps. The exact apps we use may change over time and based on what we're trying to measure, but the purpose is the same: to compare the relative performance of two or more things and to make sure that products perform as well in real life as they do on paper.

One app that has been a consistent part of our test suite for over a decade is Geekbench, a CPU and GPU compute benchmark that is releasing its sixth major version today. Partly because it's small, free, and easy to run; partly because developer Primate Labs maintains a gigantic searchable database spanning millions of test runs across millions of devices; and partly because it will run on just about anything under the sun, Geekbench has become one of the Internet's most-used (and most-argued-about) benchmarking tools.

"I'm really glad that people seem to have latched onto it," Primate Labs founder and Geekbench creator John Poole told Ars of Geekbench's popularity. "I know Gordon Ung at PCWorld basically calls Geekbench the official benchmark of Twitter arguments, which is the fallout from that."

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Rocket Report: New Glenn scores NASA contract; SpaceX matches global launch output

Enlarge / India's Small Satellite Launch Vehicle takes flight on Feb. 10 2023. (credit: ISRO)

Welcome to Edition 5.26 of the Rocket Report! This week, I would like to congratulate the Indian space agency ISRO on the successful second flight of the SSLV rocket, which adds a new micro-launch capability to the nation's growing fleet of rockets. This is a difficult business, and success should definitely be celebrated when it is finally attained.

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.

India's SSLV soars on second launch. The second test flight of India’s Small Satellite Launch Vehicle was successful last Friday, delivering Indian and US-owned payloads into orbit, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission followed the first SSLV test flight in August, which failed during separation of the second stage about six minutes after liftoff, when vibrations threw off the vehicle’s inertial navigation system.

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Microsoft officially blesses Parallels as a way to run Windows on M1, M2 Macs

Enlarge (credit: Parallels)

In the absence of a version of Boot Camp that runs on Apple Silicon Macs, the best way to run Windows on them has been to use a virtualization app like Parallels or (more recently) VMware Fusion. The problem is that, until now, the Arm version of Windows that runs on Apple Silicon Macs hasn't technically been allowed to run on anything other than Arm PCs that come with it due to Microsoft's licensing restrictions.

These licensing problems haven't technically stopped people from running the Arm version of Windows on other hardware, including Apple Silicon Macs and the Raspberry Pi, but it could be more of an issue for IT managers who wanted to deploy Windows on Macs without worrying about legal liability.

Today, Microsoft is formally blessing Parallels as a way to run the Professional and Enterprise versions of Windows 11 on Apple Silicon Macs. Windows running under Parallels has some limitations—no support for DirectX 12 or newer OpenGL versions, no support for the Linux or Android subsystems, and a few missing security features. But it can run Arm-native Windows apps as well as 32- and 64-bit x86 apps thanks to Windows 11's code translation features; pretty much anything that isn't a game should run tolerably well, given the speed of Apple's M1 and M2 chip families.

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Doobie-us: Pot ads come to Twitter amid cannabis industry collapse

Enlarge / Then-future Technoking Elon Musk enjoying some cannabis on Joe Rogan's podcast. (credit: Joe Rogan)

Elon Musk’s fondness for 420 jokes is well-documented on Twitter, where the CEO loves responding to tweets with comments like “420 haha.” So it makes sense that Musk is well aware of opportunities for cannabis advertisers to reach Twitter users who like tweeting about marijuana as much as he does. It comes as no surprise, then, that Twitter announced yesterday that it would become the weed-friendliest social platform and start allowing some previously restricted cannabis ads to appear in Twitter feeds of users in states that have legalized weed.

“As of today, in certain US states, we have taken measures to relax our cannabis ads policy to create more opportunities for responsible cannabis marketing—the largest step forward by any social media platform,” Alexa Alianiello, Twitter’s lead of ad sales and partnerships, wrote in a blog post.

This policy change sets Twitter apart from other advertising giants like Meta, which bans both CBD and THC ads, and Google, which allows some CBD ads but bans marijuana ads, including instructional content.

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Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill

Enlarge (credit: Jerry Holt/Star Tribune via Getty Images)

When New York became the first state to pass a heavily modified right-to-repair bill late last year, it was apparent that lobbyists had succeeded in last-minute changes to the law's specifics. A new report from the online magazine Grist details the ways in which Gov. Kathy Hochul made changes identical to those proposed by a tech trade association.

In a report co-published with nonprofit newsroom The Markup, Maddie Stone writes that documents surrounding the drafting and debate over the bill show that many of the changes signed by Hochul were the same as those proposed by TechNet, which represents Apple, Google, Samsung, and other technology companies.

The bill would have required that companies that provide parts, tools, manuals, and diagnostic equipment or software to their own repair networks also make them available to independent repair shops and individuals. It saw heavy opposition from trade groups before its passing. New York Assemblymember Patricia Fahy, the bill's sponsor, told Grist that backers had to make "a lot of changes to get it over the finish line in the first day or two of June." The bill passed with broad bipartisan support, but it was pared down to focus only on small electronics.

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Why being declared dead when you’re alive still occurs

Enlarge / This photo taken on March 30, 2018, shows a Thai teenager trying out a traditional coffin at the Kid Mai Death Awareness Cafe, an exhibition space built to educate the public about death and Buddhism, in Bangkok. (credit: LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP via Getty Images)

An 82-year-old woman who was recently pronounced dead at a New York nursing home was later discovered to be alive by funeral home staff. This follows a similar incident in Iowa where a 66-year-old woman with early-onset dementia was declared dead by a nurse, only to be found gasping for air when funeral home staff unzipped the body bag.

Fortunately, these events are very rare. But fear of them is visceral, which might explain an old naval custom. When sewing the canvas shroud for a dead sailor, the sailmaker would take the last stitch through the nose of the deceased. Having a sailcloth needle through the nose was presumed to be a potent enough stimulus to wake any sailor who was actually still alive.

Confirmation of death these days is thankfully a lot less brutal.

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Report: Musk had Twitter engineers boost his tweets after Biden got more views

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Samuel Corum)

Twitter CEO Elon Musk had Twitter engineers set up a "special system" to boost his tweets after his post about the Super Bowl got fewer views than a tweet from President Biden, according to a report by Platformer yesterday.

Biden's tweet supporting the Philadelphia Eagles has 29.1 million views, while Musk's now-deleted tweet also supporting the Eagles received a mere 9.1 million. Hours after the Eagles' loss, Musk's cousin James Musk posted a message in Twitter's Slack asking anyone "who can make dashboards and write software" to help with "debugging an issue with engagement across the platform," the report said. James Musk's Slack message reportedly called the situation one of "high urgency."

Additionally, Elon Musk "flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team."

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