Europe’s major new interplanetary spacecraft has a slight problem

Enlarge / In this image, the 16-meter-long Radar for Icy Moons Exploration is seen in stowed configuration. (credit: ESA)

It has now been two weeks since the on-target launch of the European Space Agency's 1.5 billion euro probe that is bound for the moons of Jupiter.

This process had been going well until the space agency attempted to extend a 16-meter-long antenna that is part of its radar instrument. The Radar for Icy Moons Exploration, or RIME, is an important scientific instrument on the spacecraft because its ground-penetrating radar will allow for examinations of the interior of intriguing moons such as Europa and Ganymede.

On Friday, the European Space Agency said the long antenna remains stuck to its mounting bracket and is only extended about one-third of its full length. Engineers at the spacecraft's mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, are working to solve the issue.

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Dealmaster: Vitamix 5200, LG C2 4K TV, Samsung and SK Hynix SSDs, and more

Enlarge / The Vitamix 5200 is widely considered the best blender on the market.

Today's best deals include a range of Roomba robot vacuums, internal SSDs from Samsung and SK Hynix, one of the best blenders money can buy, and LG's well-reviewed 48-inch C2 4K TV. LG's C series TVs have been widely praised for delivering inky blacks, excellent contrast, wide viewing angles, smooth motion, and gaming-friendly features.

Compared to the C1, the 2022 C2 improves peak brightness (specifically in the 55-inch size, not the 42- and 48-inch models) and supports 48Gbps of bandwidth (up from 40Gbps) to the four HDMI 2.1 ports. The C2 also natively supports Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision, as well as a variable refresh rate for smoother gameplay. The 48-inch C2 is currently just $20 shy of the lowest price we've ever tracked, about $650 off MSRP and at least $100 off the typical street price.

• LG C2 (2022) 48-inch 4K OLED TV for $849 ($1,499) at Amazon, Walmart (price in cart)

Samsung's 980 Pro internal SSDs have been a crowd favorite for building high-performance gaming PCs or upgrading the storage on a PS5. Samsung rates its write speeds at up to 7,000MB, and it comes with or without a heatsink. It has been on sale for the past few weeks at lower prices than usual. So, although it's not currently at the lowest price we've tracked, it can still be a nice pick up. If you do nab one, make sure to update the device's firmware to the latest version. Samsung's 980 and 990 SSDs have recently been suffering some reliability and data loss issues, but Samsung says it has addressed the problems via updated firmware.

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OnePlus Pad hands-on: I did not know they still made displays this bad

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  The OnePlus Pad. It's got a keyboard. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Android tablets are supposed to be making a comeback, and along with Google's push for new software, which started in 2021, we're also getting waves of new Android tablet hardware. One of the most anticipated is probably the OnePlus Pad, a mid-range tablet that, at $479, looks squarely aimed at the entry-level iPad. OnePlus was probably hoping the headline-grabbing 144 Hz LCD at this price would convert some buyers, but it's not possible to get a good 144 Hz display at this price point. The OnePlus Pad's display is smeary and ugly, and it made me want to put it down about as soon as I picked it up.

The display looks fine if nothing is moving, but the second you have to scroll anywhere, everything turns to mush. Text on the display is a streaky, blurry mess in motion to the point where it's pretty hard to read smaller text sizes until scrolling stops. Smaller text gets noticeably thinner and lighter colored during scrolling, usually going from a solid black to a shimmery gray. It feels like either the display has a weird subpixel layout that doesn't look good in motion, or OnePlus' software uses a strange anti-alias effect during scrolling that looks different from a stationary picture.

Whatever happened here, the point is that scrolling a page with text on the OnePlus Pad is difficult to read and often physically uncomfortable to view. As one of the primary uses of a tablet, this is a total deal-breaker and completely negates whatever else is going on here. Apple's scale usually gives it better component prices. Considering that the base model $449 iPad still ships with a smaller (10.9-inch), lower resolution (2360×1640) display, the OnePlus cranking the spec sheet up to a 144 Hz, 11.61-inch, 2800×2000 panel seems to have involved completely throwing image quality out the window. Big displays are expensive, and I don't think this display stat line works at this price right now.

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Super Smash Bros. retro demake puts Wi-Fi into an NES cartridge

Enlarge / The Super Tilt Bro. cartridge contains Wi-Fi hardware for online gaming using Nintendo's 1985 NES console. (credit: Sylvain Gadrat)

In the heyday of the NES, if you didn't have a human nearby to play games with, you were out of luck for multiplayer gaming. But thanks to a new NES cartridge inspired by Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo's 8-bit console, you'll be able to play a new homebrew game with anyone on the Internet.

On Wednesday, Super Tilt Bro. reached its Kickstarter funding goal within 48 hours of its launch. Its NES cartridge, developed by Paris-based independent developer Sylvain Gadrat and published by Broke Studio, will include a Wi-Fi chipset and antenna that lets it connect to the Internet for one-on-one online play.

As Gadrat tells the story on the Super Tilt Bro. website, the game's history began in 2016 when Gadrat rediscovered his old NES console in a storeroom and became fascinated with the 8-bit processor that powered it. His interest led to an ambitious project: porting Super Smash Bros. to the NES. Over time, the project evolved, and by 2018, Gadrat released the first version of Super Tilt Bro. as a homebrew game developed entirely in assembly language.

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Magna’s new rearview mirror cleverly integrates a driver-monitoring system

Enlarge / An exploded view of Magna's driver monitoring system built into a rearview mirror. (credit: Magna)

Distracted driving continues to be a problem in the US. One solution to the problem might look something like a new rearview mirror made by the automotive supplier Magna. At first glance, it looks like any other auto-dimming rearview mirror, but it cleverly incorporates a driver-monitoring system, or DMS. It solves a common problem with dash-mounted DMSes, and it's self-contained, so it's mounted in the same way a regular rearview mirror attaches to a car.

Magna gave Ars a demo of the DMS on Wednesday as the company was visiting Washington, DC, for National Distracted Driving Month. That's an awareness thing, not a call to engage in more of it, although newly released crash statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show a national trend headed in the wrong direction. More than 3,500 people were killed by distracted driving in 2021, a 12 percent increase over the year before.

Distracted driving encompasses many things—eating, shaving, and applying makeup all count. But technology shoulders a large share of the blame. Between smartphones and infotainment systems, drivers are overloaded with information, and the consequences can be as gory as a Max Headroom episode.

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UK government says the Nintendo Switch can’t handle Call of Duty

Enlarge / If the Xbox 360 could handle Call of Duty 2, then the Switch could handle a scaled-down modern CoD port, right? (credit: Activision)

Since their surprise December announcement of a 10-year deal to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo consoles, Microsoft and Activision have expressed confidence that the Switch hardware can handle their popular shooter series. But that confidence didn't convince the UK government, which says that it has "seen no evidence to suggest that [Nintendo] consoles would be technically capable of running a version of CoD that is similar to those in Xbox and PlayStation in terms of quality of gameplay and content."

That blunt assessment is just a minor part of the Competition and Markets Authority's sprawling, 418-page final report on Microsoft's proposed Activision purchase. That report blocked the proposed merger over concerns surrounding the cloud gaming market, but when it comes to judging Microsoft's console competition, the government body clearly considers the Switch in a class by itself.

"Overall, the evidence shows that the product characteristics of Nintendo Switch are significantly different from those of Xbox and PlayStation, including its technical specifications, capability to host graphically intensive games and prices," the CMA writes. "Xbox and PlayStation are more similar in this respect."

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As sea levels rise, the East Coast is also sinking

Enlarge / Chesapeake Bay is subsiding up to 5 millimeters a year, greatly exacerbating sea-level rise. It's a growing problem up and down the Atlantic coast. (credit: Marli Miller/Getty Images)

Climate scientists already know that the East Coast of the United States could see around a foot of sea-level rise by 2050, which will be catastrophic on its own. But they are just beginning to thoroughly measure a “hidden vulnerability” that will make matters far worse: The coastline is also sinking. It’s a phenomenon known as subsidence, and it’s poised to make the rising ocean all the more dangerous, both for people and coastal ecosystems.

New research published in the journal Nature Communications finds that the Atlantic coast—home to more than a third of the US population—is dropping by several millimeters per year. In Charleston, South Carolina, and the Chesapeake Bay, it’s up to 5 millimeters (a fifth of an inch). In some areas of Delaware, it’s as much as twice that.

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Apple Watch buying guide: Which wearable is best for you?

Enlarge (credit: Corey Gaskin)

If you’re an iPhone user who wants a smartwatch, the Apple Watch should be at the top of your list. Unless you’re a serious athlete who needs more robust tracking, the Apple Watch can satisfy most moderate exercisers' needs with a growing list of health and fitness tracking features and improvements. It's also a great companion for controlling smart home devices, contactless payments with Apple Pay, and a wealth of third-party app integrations. And, of course, it can receive all your iPhone notifications.

Apple currently offers three models in stores: the Series 8, the second-gen SE, and the new Apple Watch Ultra. Among those, there are multiple variants that differ in size, connectivity, design, and price. Then there are older-but-still-updated generations you can dig up from third-party retailers like Best Buy and Amazon, as well as options to buy refurbished devices. Suffice it to say, there's a lot to choose from.

Apple is expected to launch new models in the fall, but for those wanting to take the plunge today, we’ve sifted through the market of old, new, and refurbished Apple Watches and tested the current options to help determine the best one for you. If you'd like to upgrade from an older model or hop aboard for the first time, allow us to do your research for you.

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The most important part of the new Lamborghini Revuelto? Character.

Enlarge / There's probably no mistaking the Revuelto for anything other than a Lamborghini. (credit: Alex Kalogiannis)

Ten years ago, the then-"holy trinity" of supercars kicked off a new era of performance by showing the world that electrification wasn't just for drivers looking to stretch a mile. That year, Ferrari, Porsche, and McLaren debuted limited-run hybrids that informed what would soon come to pass for each brand, with all three embracing electrons for the powertrains of at least one of their production vehicles.

Lamborghini's name has been mostly absent from the discussion of hybrid supercars, and while the company teased us with electrified possibilities over the years, it was happy to let its V10 and V12 engines do all the talking. Now, the V10s are screaming off into the sunset, and Lamborghini is on the precipice of a new electrified future, one that begins with the Revuelto, the replacement for the V12 Aventador and the brand's first production plug-in hybrid.

During the 2023 New York International Auto Show, Ars had a chance to check out the Revuelto up close and to speak to Lamborghini Chief Technical Officer Rouven Mohr about the car's development, its challenges, and what to expect from Lamborghini in the future.

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Ars Technica System Guide: Four PC builds for spring 2023

Enlarge (credit: NZXT)

It's a weird time to build a PC. That's partly because fewer people are doing it—sales for parts and prebuilt PCs are down across the industry, as people continue to make do with the stuff they bought early in the pandemic. And GPU prices, while closer to "normal" than they have been over the last two years, are still historically high.

But that doesn't mean it's a bad time to build a PC. Storage and memory are mostly cheap, and you can buy a lot of CPU power for not a lot of money (especially if what you're used to is an older quad-core processor you picked up five or six years ago). Intel and AMD have also released new CPUs since our last system guide update in July, and Intel has finally jumped into the GPU business after years of false starts and delays.

It's as good a time as any for a new version of our PC building guide, so we've put together four different sample builds focused on different budgets and use cases. You can buy the specific components we recommend and get a good, functional PC, or you can use them as starting points and make changes based on what you want and need.

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UK government blocks Microsoft’s proposed Activision purchase

Enlarge / Taking a close look... (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

In its long-awaited final report, the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority said that Microsoft's proposed $69 billion acquisition of Activision would "result in a substantial lessening of competition" (SLC) in the supply of cloud gaming services in the UK." As such, the regulator said that "the only effective remedy to this SLC and its adverse consequences is to prohibit the Merger."

The final report cites Microsoft's "strong position" in the cloud gaming sector, where the company has an estimated 60 to 70 percent market share that makes it "already much stronger than its rivals." After purchasing Activision, the CMA says Microsoft "would find it
commercially beneficial to make Activision’s titles exclusive to its own cloud gaming service."

Microsoft has in recent months signed deals with Nvidia and smaller cloud gaming providers in an attempt to "mak[e] even more clear to regulators that our acquisition of Activision Blizzard will make Call of Duty available on far more devices than before," as Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said in a statement last month. But the CMA said these kinds of cloud-gaming deals—which Microsoft submitted to the CMA as a proposed remedy for any anticompetitive effects of the merger—were "limited to cloud gaming providers with specific business models" and thus not sufficient to address the regulator's concerns.

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AMD’s Ryzen Z1 chips could power a new wave of handheld Steam Deck clones

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen Z1 chips are APUs tuned specifically for handheld gaming PCs. (credit: AMD)

Nvidia GPUs power the vast majority of gaming PCs, but for more integrated game systems like consoles and handhelds, AMD's ability to offer tightly integrated Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs has earned it many customers (and lots of revenue). The most notable of these is Valve's Steam Deck, which combines a Zen 2-based CPU and RDNA 2-based GPU cores to provide passable performance for most games.

Though AMD designed the Steam Deck's chip exclusively for Valve, today, the company is announcing a pair of Ryzen chips aimed at the growing number of Steam Deck-esque handheld PCs from other companies. The Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme (respectively) combine 6 or 8 Zen 4-based CPU cores with 4 or 12 RDNA 3-based GPU cores, using AMD's latest architectures and a 4 nm manufacturing process to outrun the Steam Deck's APU.

The Z1 and Z1 Extreme are new APUs made specifically for handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck. (credit: AMD)

AMD says (via The Verge) that the Ryzen Z1 can run games about 55 percent faster than the Steam Deck, reflecting the improved performance and efficiency of the newer architectures and manufacturing process. Interestingly, the Z1 Extreme's extra GPU cores (12, up from 4 in the Z1) improve gaming performance, but they don't come anywhere near tripling or even doubling it. The extra hardware helps, but we're still dealing with integrated GPUs here, attached to a relatively slow pool of DDR5 that they share with the rest of the system rather than dedicated GDDR6 or GDDR6X memory.

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Here’s a look at Lucid’s next luxury EV, the Gravity SUV

Enlarge / After showing us how it could redefine the electric luxury sedan, Lucid turned its attention to the SUV. (credit: Lucid)

The luxurious Lucid Air might be expensive, but it is rather good. But one model alone is not enough to sustain a car company, particularly when that model is a sedan, a form factor now rather less in vogue than it once was. Lucid's next model will be something entirely more in fashion. It's an SUV called the Lucid Gravity, and Lucid sent over a couple of shots of its newest electric vehicle testing on public roads.

"I am excited to see the Gravity SUV moving forward so quickly in its development, as it builds upon everything this company has achieved thus far and drives further advancements of our in-house technology to create a luxury electric SUV like none other," said Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson. "The Lucid Air redefined the sedan category, and as our technology continues to evolve and lead the market, we are in a place where the Gravity is positioned to change the world of SUVs."

Concrete details about the Lucid Gravity are hard to come by right now. Lucid says that it will be a comfortable seven-seater, with good driving dynamics and more range than any other electric SUV on sale currently.

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33 practical gift ideas for Mother’s Day 2023

These Mother's Day gifts are mom-approved! (credit: Soleil Summer | Condé Nast)

There’s no such thing as a perfect Mother’s Day gift—not in the abstract. Motherly figures vary too much for there to be any one ideal gift for the day we’ve set aside to thank mothers for their contributions.

But we have some ideas, 33 to be specific, ranging from the coldly practical to the borderline ornamental. It’s up to you to decide between them. Be warned, while the motherly figures in your life might be someone who wants a robotic vacuum, your mother may be the type of person who's not into that.

Knowing who your mother is—and not just clicking the buy button—is your most important contribution. We’ve provided some ideas below, all approved by mothers in our lives and ready for delivery by Sunday, May 14. Good luck!

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A Japanese company is about to attempt a Moon landing

Enlarge / A photo of the Moon taken by the ispace lander's on-board camera from an altitude of about 100 km above the lunar surface. (credit: ispace)

It's nearly time for a privately developed Japanese lunar lander to make a historic attempt to touch down on the Moon.

After spending five months in transit to reach the Moon—following a looping but fuel-efficient trajectory—the Hakuto-R mission will attempt to land on the Moon as early as Tuesday. If its mission operators decide to proceed, the landing attempt will begin as soon as 11:40 am ET on Tuesday (15:40 UTC). It will be livestreamed.

The landing attempt will start from an altitude of about 100 km above the lunar surface, where the spacecraft is presently in a circular orbit. It will begin with a braking maneuver by a firing of the spacecraft's main engine, to be followed by a pre-programmed set of commands during which the lander will adjust its attitude with respect to the Moon's surface and decelerate to make a soft landing. The process should take about an hour.

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The Universe sucks: The mysterious Great Attractor that’s pulling us in

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Our Milky Way galaxy is speeding through the emptiness of space at 600 kilometers per second, headed toward something we cannot clearly see. The focal point of that movement is the Great Attractor, the product of billions of years of cosmic evolution. But we'll never reach our destination because, in a few billion years, the accelerating force of dark energy will tear the Universe apart.

Whispers in the sky

Beginning as early as the 1970s, astronomers noticed something funny going on with the galaxies in our nearby patch of the Universe. There was the usual and expected Hubble flow, the general recession of galaxies driven by the overall expansion of the Universe. But there seemed to be some vague directionality on top of that, as if all of the galaxies near us were also heading toward the same focal point.

Astronomers debated whether this was a real effect or some artifact of Malmquist bias, the bias we get in our observations because bright galaxies are easier to observe than dim ones (for fans of statistics, it’s just another expression of a selection effect). It could be that a complete census of the nearby cosmos, including the much more numerous small and dim galaxies, would erase any apparent extra movement and return some sanity to the world.

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From the original series to Picard, we’ve ranked every starship Enterprise [Updated]

Enlarge / These are the voyages... (credit: Memory Alpha)

Update: The events of the Star Trek: Picard finale has required a slight re-ordering of our list. Accordingly, the list contains some major spoilers for Star Trek: Picard. We've left most of the original text as-is.

Original story: It's the day Star Trek: Picard fans have been waiting for all season: this week we finally get to Frontier Day! A fleet-wide celebration of the Federation and Starfleet, where everything goes according to plan and nothing surprising happens!

As part of the festivities, the episode gives us a good look at USS Enterprise-F, a ship which has existed for a decade-plus in Star Trek Online but is only making its first canonical appearance in Picard. It is, depending on how you count, the newest and most advanced version of the Enterprise we've seen in action in any Trek movie or TV show (yes, we talk about the Enterprise-J later).

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How physicist Sameera Moussa went from a role model to a target

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Wikipedia)

Science and the technology it enables have always had a close relationship with warfare. But World War II saw science's destructive power raised to new levels. As the threat of nuclear annihilation remained high for much of the Cold War, many in the public became uneasy with their governments and the scientists working for them.

Many physicists realized that the genie was out of the bottle and recognized this mistrust—or shared it. They created conferences or drafted policies to distance themselves from the nuclear threat. Others tried to spin nuclear technology more positively by focusing on the advances it enabled in energy or medicine. These efforts to reassure the public have continued through today as scientists have taken similar actions for newer, potentially destructive technologies such as gene editing.

During World War II, Sameera Moussa, a relatively unknown Egyptian physicist, was one of the key individuals who tried to use atomic energy for good and made efforts to involve the public in that choice. Her work makes her a worthy role model for women and physicists worldwide, but she’s largely unknown because her crusade for peaceful nuclear power would eventually cost her her life. Moussa was assassinated at age 35 in a case that remains unsolved today.

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MSI Afterburner GPU overclocking app finally updated with RTX 4000, RX 7000 support

Enlarge / Nvidia's RTX 4080 (rear) and 4070 (front). (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Anyone who has ever attempted to squeeze a little more performance out of a graphics card is probably familiar with MSI Afterburner, software used for GPU overclocking and undervolting and performance monitoring. Despite the MSI branding, it’s actually widely compatible with Nvidia and AMD GPUs from all vendors, and for years it has been a simple-but-effective tool for people trying to get the most out of their hardware.

The app's stable version was updated earlier this week for the first time since late 2021, adding official support for Nvidia's RTX 4000 series cards and AMD's RX 7000 series cards, partial Intel Arc support, and a few other additions and fixes.

The long gap between the release of version 4.6.4 and 4.6.5 is a side effect of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The software is maintained primarily by Alexey Nicolaychuk, a Russian national who has been developing it continually since it was introduced in 1997 as RivaTuner.

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Elephants must adapt to a rapidly changing world in Secrets of the Elephants

Enlarge / An African Savannah elephant roams through Kimana Sanctuary in Kenya in the new documentary series Secrets of the Elephants. (credit: NatGeo for Disney/Nichole Sobecki)

It's almost Earth Day, and to mark the occasion, National Geographic and Disney+ have released a new documentary series called Secrets of the Elephants. The four-part series is a sequel of sorts to the remarkable 2021 documentary Secrets of the Whales, which was narrated by Sigourney Weaver and produced by James Cameron.

NatGeo and Disney+ hope to recapture some of that same magic with Secrets of the Elephants. Cameron once again produced, with Natalie Portman stepping in for narration duty. Per the official premise, "The series travels the world—from the Savannahs of Africa to the urban landscapes of Asia—to discover the strategic thinking, complex emotions, and sophisticated language of elephants, shaping a unique and dynamic culture."

Each episode focuses on an elephant population in a different environment—the desert, the rainforest, Asia, and the African Savannah—and highlights the unique changes taking place in each environment and the ways the elephants have adapted to survive there. For instance, a female desert elephant gives birth in a harsh environment ravaged by drought, taking a refreshing shower in the afterbirth—the first time this behavior has been caught on camera. (Mud baths are more common, providing a natural form of sunscreen for desert elephants.)

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Here’s how Bugatti is approaching electric car design

Enlarge / The Bugatti Mistral is the brand's final W16-powered road car. (credit: Bugatti)

BMW provided flights from DC to San Francisco and back, plus five nights in a hotel, so we could attend Monterey Car Week. While I was there, I spoke to Bugatti's deputy design director. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif.—We're big fans of electric propulsion here at Ars. Electric motors are smooth, quiet, and efficient, but they can also generate enormous amounts of torque almost immediately, which means they offer something for all tastes. Electrification has already made its mark on the high-end hypercar; EVs like the Pininfarina Battista and Rimac Nevera offer truly high-end specs, whether in power output or price tag. Electrification is even coming for Bugatti, which is on something of a farewell tour for its W16 engine.

We caught up with Bugatti's deputy design director, Frank Heyl, at Monterey Car Week last summer to get his take on how going electric will (or won't) change Bugattis.

Throughout its long history (and at the risk of sounding like Bart Simpson delivering a bad book report), Bugatti has often had a thing for contrasts. In its early days, its cars were engineering marvels, but they were designed so they could be built by the relatively unskilled laborers working for Ettore Bugatti. In its first incarnation, the company turned high-tech with an all-carbon construction, yet contemporary tests often complained about it being too heavy. And then came Ferdinand Piech, who wanted a road car with 1,000 horsepower and a top speed of 260 mph but one tame enough that his grandmother could drive it to the shops.

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China building cyberweapons to hijack enemy satellites, says US leak

Enlarge / The Dragon SpaceX satellite. China’s ambitious cyber attacks aim to mimic the signals that satellites receive from their operators, tricking them into being taken over or to malfunction. (credit: European Space Agency.)

China is building sophisticated cyber weapons to “seize control” of enemy satellites, rendering them useless for data signals or surveillance during wartime, according to a leaked US intelligence report.

The US assesses that China’s push to develop capabilities to “deny, exploit or hijack” enemy satellites is a core part of its goal to control information, which Beijing considers to be a key “war-fighting domain.”

The CIA-marked document, which was issued this year and has been reviewed by the Financial Times, was one of dozens allegedly shared by a 21-year-old US Air Guardsman in the most significant American intelligence disclosures in more than a decade.

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Musk vows to sue as Microsoft drops Twitter from its ad platform

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The Microsoft Advertising platform will drop support for its Twitter integration starting on April 25, according to a recently updated support page. Microsoft allows advertisers to manage their campaigns, create posts, and view engagement data on multiple social sites via one centralized interface, and they'll still be able to do so for posts on Facebook, Instagram Business, and LinkedIn. But Twitter is no longer on that list.

The change comes a few days before Twitter plans to deprecate the old API tiers that allowed third-party apps and services to post to Twitter and access its data. The new Enterprise tier, which Microsoft would need to use to continue providing the same level of service to advertisers as before, can cost between $42,000 and $210,000 a month, depending on how many tweets per month you need to be able to access.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk apparently isn't happy about Microsoft's decision. Responding to a post about the news, Musk asserted that Microsoft has "illegally" used Twitter data to train AI models and that he plans to take legal action.

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With Tesla profits down, Musk dangles Cybertruck, FSD this year

Enlarge / Could 2023 be the year we finally see these on the road? (credit: Tesla)

Tesla is selling plenty of electric vehicles these days, thanks in large part to a string of heavy price cuts this year. But those sales haven't translated to higher profits, according to Tesla's Q1 2023 financial results. In fact, net income dropped 24 percent year on year. Earnings per share fell by nearly as much, down 23 percent to $0.73 per share.

The seemingly never-ending price cuts did not help, but they weren't the only cause. Tesla says that many of its costs—raw materials, commodities, logistics, and warranties—have gone up, and trying to increase production of its new 4680 lithium-ion battery cell has not been cheap. It's also making less money from selling regulatory credits—just $564 million this quarter compared to $679 million this time last year. Free cash flow fell 80 percent from Q1 2022 to $441 million.

It wasn't all bad news for the automaker. Its automotive revenues grew 18 percent compared to Q1 2022, and total revenue increased by 24 percent to $23.3 billion. It was a good quarter for Tesla's battery storage and solar operations. These grew revenue by 148 percent year on year, deploying 40 MW of photovoltaics and 3.9 TWh of energy storage—a 360 percent increase compared to the 846 GWh of batteries it shipped in Q1 2022.

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RTX 4070 review: An ideal GPU for anyone who skipped the graphics card shortage

Enlarge / Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 is here. It's the company's first launch in over a year of a graphics card that could charitably be described as "mainstream," both in performance and in price. It costs $600.

It's not productive to keep going back to the also-$600 GTX 1080, at the time the fastest graphics card you could buy anywhere from anyone, and wondering how we got here from there (some of it is inflation, not all of it). But I keep doing it as a reminder that $600 is still more than many people pay for their entire PC, tablet, smartphone, or high-end game console. No other component in a gaming PC has seen its price shoot up like this over the same span of time; a Core i5 CPU cost around $200 in 2016 and costs around $200 now, and RAM and SSDs are both historically cheap at the moment.

To review the 4070 is to simultaneously be impressed by it as a product while also being frustrated with the conditions that led us to an "impressive" $600 midrange graphics card. It's pretty fast, very efficient, and much more reasonably sized than other recent Nvidia GPUs. In today's topsy-turvy graphics card market, I could even describe it as a good deal. But if you're still yearning for the days when you could spend $300 or less on a reasonably performant GPU with the latest architecture and modern features, keep waiting.

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Used routers often come loaded with corporate secrets

Enlarge (credit: aquatarkus/Getty Images)

You know that you're supposed to wipe your smartphone or laptop before you resell it or give it to your cousin. After all, there's a lot of valuable personal data on there that should stay in your control. Businesses and other institutions need to take the same approach, deleting their information from PCs, servers, and network equipment so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. At the RSA security conference in San Francisco next week, though, researchers from the security firm ESET will present findings showing that more than half of secondhand enterprise routers they bought for testing had been left completely intact by their previous owners. And the devices were brimming with network information, credentials, and confidential data about the institutions they had belonged to.

The researchers bought 18 used routers in different models made by three mainstream vendors: Cisco, Fortinet, and Juniper Networks. Of those, nine were just as their owners had left them and fully accessible, while only five had been properly wiped. Two were encrypted, one was dead, and one was a mirror copy of another device.

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Can an e-bike’s fat tires be offset by a fat battery?

Enlarge (credit: John Timmer)

For many years, talking about fat-tire bikes meant you were referring to mountain bikes. But a more recent generation of bikes has dared to ask, "You call that fat?" These bikes, equipped with comically wide tires, promised to retain traction on just about any surface imaginable and to soften bumps without requiring a suspension.

Earlier this year, I had the chance to try out my first ultra-fat tire electric bike. Unfortunately, it was also my first mountain bike frame and the first folding frame I had tested. There were so many new things about the experience that it was tough to evaluate which aspects of the ride (good and bad) were due to the product and which were due to my unfamiliarity with the bike's features.

In an attempt to get a better perspective on things, I will be spending this spring riding a dedicated ultra-fat-tire e-bike, a dedicated folding e-bike, and a dedicated mountain e-bike. First up: the $1,500 Velotric Nomad 1, which falls in the ultra-fat tire category.

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Building telescopes on the Moon is becoming an achievable goal

Enlarge / The far side of the Moon is an attractive place to carry out astronomy. (credit: Ernie Wright/NASA)

Lunar exploration is undergoing a renaissance. Dozens of missions, organized by multiple space agencies—and increasingly by commercial companies—are set to visit the Moon by the end of this decade. Most of these will involve small robotic spacecraft, but NASA’s ambitious Artemis program aims to return humans to the lunar surface by the middle of the decade.

There are various reasons for all this activity, including geopolitical posturing and the search for lunar resources, such as water-ice at the lunar poles, which can be extracted and turned into hydrogen and oxygen propellant for rockets. However, science is also sure to be a major beneficiary.

The Moon still has much to tell us about the origin and evolution of the solar system. It also has scientific value as a platform for observational astronomy.

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Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket is turning into a space policy disaster

Enlarge / Under the stars with the Ariane 6 launch base at Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana. (credit: ESA)

After much political wrangling among Germany, France, and Italy, the member governments of the European Space Agency formally decided to move ahead with development of the Ariane 6 rocket in December 2014.

A replacement rocket for the Ariane 5 was needed, European ministers decided, because of cost pressure from commercial upstarts like SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket. With the design of the Ariane 6, they envisioned a modernized version of the previous rocket, optimized for cost. Because Ariane 6 would use a modified Vulcan engine and other components from previous Ariane rockets, it was anticipated that the new rocket would debut in 2020.

European space policy, however, is every bit as political as that of the United States, if not more so. Member nations of Europe make financial allocations to the European Space Agency and expect roughly that amount of money in return in terms of space projects. So the development and production of Ariane 6 was spread across a number of nations under management of a large conglomerate, France-based ArianeGroup.

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Apple’s Macs have long escaped ransomware, but that may be changing

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Security researchers are examining newly discovered Mac ransomware samples from the notorious gang LockBit, marking the first known example of a prominent ransomware group toying with macOS versions of its malware.

Ransomware is a pervasive threat, but attackers typically don't bother creating versions of their malware to target Macs. That's because Apple's computers, while popular, are much less prevalent than those running Windows, Linux, and other operating systems. Over the years, though, samples of seemingly experimental Mac ransomware have cropped up a couple of times, creating a sense that the risk could escalate at any moment.

Spotted by MalwareHunterTeam, the samples of ransomware encryptors seem to have first cropped up in the malware analysis repository VirusTotal in November and December 2022, but went unnoticed until yesterday. LockBit seems to have created both a version of the encryptor targeting newer Macs running Apple processors and older Macs that ran on Apple's PowerPC chips.

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Porsche bumps battery capacity, charging speed for 2024 Cayenne hybrid

Enlarge / The Porsche Cayenne is getting a midlife restyle for model year 2024. (credit: Porsche)

At the end of March, we got our first look at the interior of the refreshed Porsche Cayenne. The midlife update for model-year 2024 was notable because Porsche has put some buttons and other physical controls back where they belong, after the all-touchscreen dalliance that is the Taycan electric car. This evening, the German automaker showed off the rest of the 2024 Cayenne and released some technical details, including what sounds like a decent upgrade to the plug-in hybrid version.

As is normally the case with a midlife update, there's new styling for the Cayenne front end that in this case includes new headlight clusters as well as a new front bumper and hood. The taillights and rear fascia are also new, and Porsche has added three new colors, including a pair of metallic blues.

There are new taillights. (credit: Porsche )

There have been some more significant changes under the skin of the Cayenne E-Hybrid, the plug-in variant that for 2024 will start at $91,700.

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Sega Sammy launches $772 million offer for Angry Birds-maker Rovio

Enlarge / Angry Birds launched in 2009 and became one of the most downloaded apps of all time. (credit: Bloomberg)

Sega Sammy, the Japanese games maker behind the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, has launched a 706 million euro ($776 million) offer for Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish group that gave the world Angry Birds.

The 9.25 euro a share offer values the mobile games pioneer at almost 20 percent below the price at which Rovio went public five and a half years ago, when it debuted with a market valuation of 896 million euro.

In a joint statement, Sega Sammy said it had based its bid on projections that the global gaming market would expand to $263.3 billion by 2026. In particular, it said, the share of mobile gaming would grow to 56 percent of the overall market.

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iSIM vs eSIM vs SIM: The constantly shrinking ways carriers ID your phone

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Every month, you pay a bill for cell phone service. Somehow, that access needs to make it to your device. The SIM card, or "subscriber identity module," connects your phone with your phone bill.

While you might expect authentication to happen over a network with a simple username and password, cell phones predate the Internet, so SIM cards can seem a little old-fashioned. Still, the industry is trying to modernize itself while maintaining backward compatibility with older devices, and that has led to the rise of many different SIM card formats. The newest is iSIM, the latest advancement in a never-ending quest to save space in your smartphone.

Ye olde physical SIM card

Common physical SIM card sizes. (credit: Wikipedia)

Physical SIM cards have been around forever. They're the hunks of plastic you get from your phone carrier and slide into your cell phone. A small gold chip printed on the card—much like those on credit cards—makes electrical contact with the slot in your phone. Even these physical cards have their own standards and have shrunk over time; there's Mini SIM, Micro SIM, and Nano SIM, which all use the same chip with differing amounts of plastic around it.

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Setting expectations on the eve of Starship’s historic launch

Enlarge / SpaceX's Starship rocket is stacked for the final time on Saturday before a launch attempt. (credit: SpaceX)

STARBASE, Texas—It's about to get lit.

Probably.

SpaceX completed final preparations to its Starship and Super Heavy vehicles on Saturday, re-stacking the them with a flight termination system that will be engaged if the rocket flies off course.

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This adorable sloth briefly stole the spotlight during JUICE launch

Enlarge / "S'up?" An adorable sloth briefly mugged for the camera during the ESA's livestream of the JUICE launch on Friday. (credit: European Space Agency)

Remember the Ariane 5 rocket that successfully lifted off from French Guiana on Friday morning, carrying the JUICE (Jupiter Ice Moons Explorer) spacecraft? As exciting as the launch was for space fans, a random sloth stole plenty of hearts when it photo-bombed the live-streamed feed on ESA Web TV. The plucky sloth—nicknamed Gerard, or Jerry, by viewers—stared calmly into a European Space Agency (ESA) camera with the rocket poised for launch just behind it.

As Eric Berger previously reported, with a mass of 6 metric tons, JUICE is the largest deep space mission launched by the ESA and one of the largest by any nation to the outer planets. The mission will explore Jupiter's environment and probe beneath the surface of its icy moons (between 80 and 95 in all). It should arrive at the planet by July 2031. But on launch day, all eyes were briefly on Jerry. "Apart from the launch, this guy is definitely the star of the telecast," science writer Nadia Drake wrote on the ESA's Facebook page.

As far as anyone knows, nothing bad happened to Jerry and he's alive and well and looking forward to watching the next rocket launch. Past animals who've stumbled into the vicinity of a launch have been less fortunate. Remember "Space Toad"? Back in 2013, as NASA's unmanned LADEE rocket launched, one of three still cameras set up around the launch area captured a small frog mid-leap in the air against a fiery plume in the background.

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Bethesda adds Denuvo to Ghostwire: Tokyo one year after the game was cracked

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Bethesda slamming Denuvo protections on a game that has been widely pirated for over a year. (credit: Bethesda Softworks)

Denuvo no longer provides the kind of uncrackable, piracy-protecting armor that it used to. Still, publishers often pay for the protection in an attempt to extend a "piracy-free" time window around a game's release, when most legitimate sales occur for most titles.

So it's a bit odd that Bethesda Softworks has just quietly added Denuvo protections to Ghostwire Tokyo, a game that was quickly cracked after its Denuvo-free release just over a year ago.

The late addition was confirmed by DSOGaming, which says it triggered the new Denuvo protections in the game's latest Steam update by simulating frequent changes in the CPU. While fresh Denuvo protection seems unlikely to impact piracy for the long-cracked title, it could serve as a shield for new DLC and expansion content.

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Parler shuts down as new owner says conservative platform needs big revamp

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado )

Parler, the self-described "uncancelable free speech platform," has been sold and shut down while its new owner conducts a "strategic assessment." The platform will be back eventually, new owner Starboard says.

The Parler website is now a simple page containing only today's press release announcing the acquisition, which was completed without financial terms being disclosed. "No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more," the acquisition announcement said, promising a revamp.

"While the Parler app as it is currently constituted will be pulled down from operation to undergo a strategic assessment, we at Starboard see tremendous opportunities across multiple sectors to continue to serve marginalized or even outright censored communities—even extending beyond domestic politics," the press release said. No timing for a return was mentioned.

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SwiftKey for iOS was dead, then it wasn’t, and now it has Bing Chat in it

Enlarge / SwiftKey for iOS is getting Bing Chat support. (credit: Microsoft)

Six short months ago, it seemed like Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard for iPhones and iPads was dead. It seemed that way because Microsoft had said it was dead and went so far as to delist it from the App Store.

The next month, with little explanation, the keyboard was re-listed on the App Store, and Microsoft execs hinted (without getting specific) that there were plans for developing it further. The month after that, SwiftKey got its first boilerplate "bug fixes and performance improvements" update since August 2022.

Yesterday, SwiftKey for iOS got a major feature update—and because we're talking about a Microsoft product in 2023, the update involves Bing's AI-powered chatbot, which (along with other AI features) has quickly made its way into Windows, Edge, Skype, and other apps in the last few months.

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Intel’s Core i5 is the best bargain in CPUs right now, but which should you get?

Enlarge / Intel's Core i5-13400. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Fancy expensive processors are fun, but for most people who just want to build a decent middle-of-the-road PC for gaming (and anything else), the best advice is usually to buy a Core i5 or Ryzen 5 for somewhere in the $200–$250 range and pair it with the fastest graphics card you can afford.

Intel's Core i5-13400 (and the graphics-less 13400F) caught our eye when Intel announced it because it was adding a cluster of four E-cores to the Core i5-12400, which was one of Intel's best mid-range desktop CPUs in years. E-cores don't matter much for games, but they can help when you're trying to run background tasks behind your game, and they can also provide a decent boost to heavily multithreaded CPU workloads like video encoding or CPU-based rendering.

This is nominally a review of the Core i5-13400, which is a good CPU and (when considered together with the cost of a motherboard and RAM) one of the better bargains you'll find if you're building a PC right now. The problem is that Intel sells a lot of very similar 12th- and 13th-generation Core i5 chips, and the prices are constantly bouncing around in that $160–$250 band. The one you should usually get depends on what you're doing and which one happens to be the cheapest at the moment you're buying.

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Banks say they’re acting on climate but continue to finance fossil fuel expansion

Enlarge / A protester wearing a mask holds an anti-fossil fuels banner during the demonstration outside the Bank of England. (credit: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

If money makes the world go round, it should be no surprise that fossil fuel still powers the global economy. Ever since world leaders reached the Paris climate agreement in 2015 to limit warming and slash the pollution driving it, environmental groups have chronicled the continued flow of finance from the wealthiest banks to the oil and gas industry.

Climate advocates have been increasing the pressure on banks to change course, and many lenders have responded by adopting policies to reduce the climate pollution generated by their vast portfolios. Some have also pledged to stop financing certain types of fossil fuel extraction altogether, such as coal mining and Arctic drilling. But have those policies made any difference?

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Rocket Report: SpaceX may lease High Bay 1 in the VAB; China to fight price war

Enlarge / Starship and Super Heavy are ready to fly, with Starhopper in the foreground for scale. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 5.33 of the Rocket Report! Phew, there is a lot going on this week. The "Heavy rockets" section of this week's report is loaded with news this week about Starship, New Glenn, and Vulcan. Be sure to check it out. And maybe also reserve some time your calendars Monday morning.

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.

Relativity Space retires Terran 1, goes bigger. This may be one of the final times that Relativity Space falls under the "small rocket" category in this report. Why? Because Relativity Space made a flurry of announcements on Wednesday about its past and future, including the retirement of its Terran 1 rocket after just a single launch attempt last month. "Terran 1 was always meant to develop technologies that were pushing the bounds for what was needed for Terran R," the company's chief executive, Tim Ellis, told Ars.

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22 interesting tidbits hidden in the final Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom trailer

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  0:15—Amid the floating islands on display here, we briefly see a mountaintop with smoky tendrils on the left side of the scene. The smoke is extremely reminiscent of Ganondorf's flowing red hair, which we'll see up close at 1:18. [credit: Nintendo ]

For years after Nintendo's 2019 announcement of a Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sequel, we had to subsist on one relatively brief gameplay trailer for any hint of how the much-anticipated Tears of the Kingdom would play. Today, as we approach the game's planned May release, Nintendo has shared what it says is the final trailer for the game, the third public gameplay tease in as many months.

As we wait for our first hands-on time with the first Zelda title in six years, we've gone through that last trailer practically frame by frame to pick out every interesting feature and speculative tidbit we could. Here's a quick look at some moments that your eyes may have quickly glossed over on first viewing, along with trailer time codes to check them out in full context for yourself.

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Eco-friendly tires: Bridgestone goes green in new tire test

Enlarge / This woody desert shrub called guayule could be coming to a tire near you before too long. (credit: Cassidy Araiza/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In 2022, the tire company Bridgestone used the IndyCar racing series to debut a new sustainable natural rubber that it has been testing as a replacement for less environmentally friendly rubber. The new tires used rubber from a desert shrub called guayule (Parthenium argentatum). Now, Bridgestone is ready to try the rubber in a more practical application and has produced a demonstration run of road-going tires using guayule rubber and a high percentage of recycled materials. The company will conduct tests with automakers to prove the concept.

The world produces about 2 billion tires each year, and while synthetic rubbers are used in modest amounts, most road tires use a lot of natural rubber from the para rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis). But 90 percent of para rubber is grown in Southeast Asia and has to be shipped around the world to reach tire factories.

Bridgestone has been looking at guayule as an alternative for a little over a decade now. The guayule plant is a short, woody shrub that grows easily in the deserts of the American southwest and requires much less water than crops such as alfalfa or cotton, which are grown in places like Arizona, where Bridgestone has been breeding guayule and conducting research and development on its use in tire-making.

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A small town became the center of a QAnon storm. Now it’s fighting back

Enlarge (credit: Anjali Nair; Getty Images)

Bodegraven is the type of well-heeled Dutch town where young moms push their prams past smart restaurants, people say hello to each other as they pass in the street and packs of children roam around by bicycle. In March, the only sign that something strange has happened here is the insistence of the groundsman in the local graveyard that he cannot speak to passing journalists.

Two years ago, this graveyard was overwhelmed with visitors who turned up from out of town to leave flowers and messages of outrage for children buried here, believing they had died at the hands of a satanic pedophile ring involving the prime minister and a Dutch virologist, the Netherlands’ equivalent of Anthony Fauci.

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From the original series to Picard, we’ve ranked every starship Enterprise

Enlarge / These are the voyages... (credit: Memory Alpha)

Minor spoilers for this week's Star Trek: Picard are below.

It's the day Star Trek: Picard fans have been waiting for all season: this week we finally get to Frontier Day! A fleet-wide celebration of the Federation and Starfleet, where everything goes according to plan and nothing surprising happens!

As part of the festivities, the episode gives us a good look at USS Enterprise-F, a ship which has existed for a decade-plus in Star Trek Online but is only making its first canonical appearance in Picard. It is, depending on how you count, the newest and most advanced version of the Enterprise we've seen in action in any Trek movie or TV show (yes, we talk about the Enterprise-J later).

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