Behold the world’s oldest sandals, buried in a “bat cave” over 6,000 years ago

Enlarge / Wooden mallet and esparto sandals from Cueva de los Murciélagos in Spain dated to the Neolithic period, 6,200 years ago. (credit: MUTERMUR project)

In the 19th century, miners in southern Spain unearthed a prehistoric burial site in a cave containing some 22 pairs of ancient sandals woven out of esparto (a type of grass). The latest radiocarbon dating revealed that those sandals could be 6,200 years old—centuries older than similar footwear found elsewhere around the world, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. The interdisciplinary team analyzed 76 artifacts made of wood, reeds, and esparto, including basketry, cords, mats, and a wooden mallet. Some of the basketry turned out to be even older than the sandals, providing the first direct evidence of basketry weaving among the hunter-gatherers and early farmers of the region.

Organic plant-based materials rarely survive the passage of thousands of years, but when they do, archaeologists can learn quite a bit about the culture in which they were produced. For example, last year we reported on the world's oldest known pants, produced in China around 3,000 years ago. With the help of an expert weaver—who created a replica of the pants—archaeologists unraveled the design secrets behind the 3,000-year-old wool trousers that were part of the burial outfit of a warrior now called Turfan Man, who died between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four techniques to create a garment specially engineered for fighting on horseback, with flexibility in some places and sturdiness in others.

A local landowner discovered Cueva de los Murciélagos  ("Cave of the bats") in 1831, and made good use of all that bat guano in the main chamber to fertilize his land. At some point it was also used to house goats, but then the discovery of galena turned the site into a mining operation. As the miners removed blocks to access the vein, they opened up a gallery containing several partially mummified corpses, along with an array of baskets, wooden tools, and other artifacts. Most of the plant-based artifacts were either burned or given to the local villagers.

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Galaxy S24 leaks show Samsung’s usual love for the iPhone

Enlarge / The Galaxy S24 render. This sure does look familiar. (credit: OnLeaks×SmartPrix)

It's Galaxy S24 leak season! The phone, which won't be out until early 2024, is already being detailed by OnLeaks and SmartPrix. The two have dueling posts for the S24 Ultra and another for the cheaper S24 and S24 Plus. As usual, these are CAD-derived renders that are usually passed around to accessory makers, so while all the important bits are in the right spot down to the millimeter, don't read too much into the unconfirmed finer details.

First up are the cheaper Plus and base models, which share a design. The first thing you'll notice this year is a switch from rounded color-matched sides to a flat metal band that wraps around the perimeter. The new flat band makes the S24 awfully close to an iPhone design, with only the camera block and lack of a dynamic island as the differentiators. Would you believe Samsung has also discovered an affection for titanium and upgraded the phones with slimmer bezels? I swear I've heard all this before somewhere recently.

The titanium band has a big oval cutout on the right side of the phone, and that's reportedly for a UWB (ultra-wideband) antenna. Previously, this was reserved for the Ultra and Plus models, but now even the base model is getting it. Samsung, and seemingly everyone else in the Android ecosystem, is working on coming up with Bluetooth tracker competitors to the AirTag, and UWB's directional location features will be a core part of that. UWB is not on many Android phones, though, so this is progress.

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Knots are untied as The Wheel of Time season two approaches its end

Enlarge / Egwene abides. (credit: Amazon Studios)

Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode of Amazon's new WoT TV series. Now they're doing it again for season two—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory. These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We're going to do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.

New episodes of The Wheel of Time season two will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Friday. This write-up covers episode seven, which was released on September 29.

Lee: We're rounding the bend to the end of the season with episode seven of eight here, and there's a lot of ground to cover before we get to that giant battle in the sky that nobody seems to be able to shut up about. (It's not spoilers if all the characters on screen are talking about it!) This episode involved a lot of moving pieces around on the board—a big chunk of the scenes exist in order to get all of our characters in Falme for next week, including and especially whatever the hell is going on with Mat right now.

But before we get to any of that, we have to talk about the opening for at least just a moment. Last season, we got to see Rand's birth on the slopes of Dragonmount as the Aiel War stumbled to a close, but now we're given a peek into the other important event that happened at the same time: the Aes Sedai Gitara Moroso (Hayley Mills) and her “Foretelling.”

Foretelling is apparently a rare talent that does not show up in Aes Sedai very often, and Gitara Sedai was apparently one of the strongest at it—or at least one of the most accurate. Proving that prophecy often comes at the most inconvenient of times, we're shown a flashback where a much younger Moiraine and Siuan enter Gitara's rooms in the White Tower, and Gitara almost immediately collapses under the weight of her vision of the Dragon's return to the world. The Aes Sedai seems to feel what Rand's mother is feeling during her battle, and we're led to believe that both Gitara Sedai and Rand's mother expire at the same time.

We know from the books that this is the moment that kick-starts Moiraine's and Siuan's secret-squirrel club—the reason why they're actively hunting the Dragon Reborn. The inconvenient bit, of course, is that no one else was there—no one else witnessed Gitara's Foretelling. Would certainly have been nicer if she'd collapsed in the middle of the Hall of the Tower with more witnesses, but so goes history, I guess.

Prophecy comes at the most inconvenient times. (credit: Amazon Studios)

Andrew: In the books and kind of, sort of in the show, Moiraine and Siuan take the relative privacy of the Foretelling as an opportunity to do things the way they want to do them, making sure that the Dragon Reborn wasn't captured or stilled so that he's available to save the world the way he's supposed to. Show-Siuan doesn't seem to be on board with that plan anymore as of this episode, just one of many liberties the show has taken. She views Moiraine's independent meddling as a failure and is now determined to do things by the book, though Moiraine has other ideas.

If there's one thing that is kind of bugging me about this episode it's that we have a lot of characters just asking for or accepting help or counsel from various Forsaken, especially Lanfear. You definitely do get little snippets of this kind of thing in the books, as different Forsaken plotted against each other, but both Lanfear and Ishamael have an awful lot of our protagonists directly under their control and/or in their debt, and I'm beginning to wonder why they aren't killing more heroes when they get the chance.

Lee: Yeah—I suppose it's a side-effect of having the Forsaken be such major characters on-screen, rather than doing most of their movement in the shadows. And they're just so damn likable—Fares Fares as Ishamael feels downright fatherly at times, and so far all Natasha O'Keeffe's Lanfear has done is wear revealing outfits, have crazy sex with Rand, kill an old guy, and blow up the Foregate. She's not exactly flaying children alive or defenestrating widows or anything.

Which I think is kind of doing the supposedly legendary status of the Forsaken no favors. Near the end of the episode, when Lanfear walks into the courtyard with Moiraine and Siuan and friends, no one freaks out at an actual living non-bound member of the Forsaken strolling into the courtyard—Moiraine is just like, “Oh damn, it's Lanfear.” My impression is that Lanfear walking up into your meeting, even if you're a supposedly all-powerful Aes Sedai, would be like actual-for-real Jason Voorhees unexpectedly shambling through the door to your house. The correct reaction is some kind of mix of “Oh my God wait Jason is real?!” and Scooby Doo-style cartoon panic-running in multiple directions simultaneously. Possibly with some pants-wetting tossed into the mix for good measure.

I also kind of want to talk about whatever the hell it is that Ishy was doing with Mat. I was kind of left feeling clueless by the scene with the tea, but my wife has kind of a theory.

Andrew: Yes, people are very much not acting like these people are monsters so brutal that their names have endured for millennia, or even like they're people who aren't to be trusted. They seem to think they can work with the Forsaken now and figure the rest out later. I suspect they'll be unpleasantly surprised by whatever happens next.

The Mat storyline continues to flail about a bit. The show has to do a lot to make interior character development happen in ways that are visible onscreen, and to translate things that a character thinks and feels into things that the character can show. Mat is probably the character it's hardest to do this with, because his "superpower" doesn't involve slinging fireballs or communicating with wolves.

So are we just taking a weird roundabout path to Book-Mat, who has the memories of 1,000 years' worth of wars and battles in his head, or is the show still off doing its own thing? It's hard to tell based on the brief, trippy sequence that Ishamael treats Mat to this week, though if I had to guess I'd think that what Ishamael tells him about "seeing the people who you used to be" means we're working in that direction.

Mat: "THIS IS FINE. THIS IS FINE. THIS IS FINE. THIS IS FINE." (credit: Amazon Studios)

Lee: I was a little let down by Ishy's promise that he was brewing up some tea to let Mat see past lives—I thought the same thing as you, that we might be about to give Mat the shove he needs to start doing the things he does in the book, but instead of actual past lives, we just got more weird stuff with Mat's (show-only) abusive mother and his (show-only) issues with his (show-only) abusive father. I'm genuinely not sure where it's supposed to be going, other than to just abuse Mat some more on screen and get him to the point where he's even more in thrall to the Forsaken.

My wife's quick-n-dirty theory is that the tea was just a sleeping brew, and that the sequence was actually Ishamael screwing with Mat in the World of Dreams. I'd class that as a definite “maybe”—the thing that keeps me from fully agreeing with it is I just don't see what the scene is for, whether it's Magic Spirit Journey Tea or just plain sleeping tea and the Magic Spirit Journey is in Tel'Aran'Rhiod.

Okay, I've got like… paragraphs to drop in here about Moiraine, but only if you're ready to turn to her, and to the resolution of one of this season's biggest mysteries.

Andrew: Oh yeah, lots to say. Some more book-vs-show, internal-vs-external stuff going on here; in the books, channelers can definitely, 100% for sure, tell the difference between being shielded (temporary) and being stilled (permanent, with an asterisk). Being shielded is a bit like having a thick layer of bulletproof glass in your brain between you and the One Power, but you still have your sense of it, you can still see other channelers at work, and there are even little mental acrobatics you can do to bust through a shield if you're strong enough, or if the shield is "tied off" and left unattended.

In the show, it turns out that there's no difference! Being shielded feels more like being stilled, in that you feel totally cut off from the One Power. We can't have learned this fact any earlier than we do, I suppose, because it would take what little tension there was out of the season-long "what's going on with Moiraine" mystery.

Lee: Exactly so. We learn that Moiraine was shielded this entire time, with the shield weaves tied off into knots and left to sit. But your point about the further-changed nature of shielding feels like it's part of the larger set of changes that have been made to how the One Power works with men and women in the show.

It's been kind of a mystery why Moiraine herself hasn't done some more extensive troubleshooting to find the extent of her issue. When a certain set of characters (to remain nameless, to spare non-book readers) eventually figures out how to remove the Aes Sedai Three Oaths in a future book, one of the VERY FIRST things those temporarily-oathless characters do is start lying and giggling—because, let's face it, being able to say “THE SKY IS GREEN!” for the first time in years is probably pretty exhilarating. Why wouldn't Moiraine have simply started busting out with the lies, if for nothing else than to test whether or not she's TRULY stilled?

There are two answers that I can think of. The first is the more in-universe one: few Aes Sedai have ever bothered studying the effects of being stilled. Stilling is simply too viscerally horrifying to confront, even for the knowledge-minded Browns. Stilled women tend to leave the White Tower so as not to be surrounded by reminders of their past and are thought to quickly die (as Lan makes evident when he asks Moiraine if she thought about ending her own life in the past few months). There are simply no records of what happens, other than that the women who DO survive the process tend to do so by thoroughly occupying themselves with important tasks that take the place of the One Power in their lives. Moiraine might simply have not known that stilling unbinds the Oaths, and having lived her life by them for decades, kept up the habits of living by them purely because she doesn't know any other way to be.

(Though, I guess the REAL answer is even more obvious: "Son, the reason the good cowboys don't just shoot the bad cowboys' horses is that if they did, there'd be no movie.")

The False Dragon Logain Ablar still has a role to play.

Andrew: There are all kinds of little nuances to the way the One Power and Aes Sedai work, doled out in bits and pieces over like seven books, that the show wades right into and needs to resolve pretty early by even introducing the concepts of stilling and shielding at this point in the story.

This show has no time to waste, and several of our heroes (particularly Mat, also Perrin a little) have been mostly sidelined all season so that this whole Moiraine/House Damodred arc could play out, and maybe it pays dividends, but we're headed toward a climactic confrontation in an entirely different location for our next episode. The stilling subplot is entirely an invention of the show's. The conflict it introduces between Moiraine/Lan and Moiraine/Siuan is an invention of the show's. Unlike most of the changes and additions the show has made, I'm still not exactly sure what the point of it was.

Compare that to another change from the end of last season—Rand faking his death and going off on his own into the wilderness, to protect his friends from who and what he is. It's another big change from the books! But it's certainly in character, and in that isolated state he's more susceptible to Lanfear's overtures. I get why they did it that way. The Moiraine thing isn't as easy for me to read. This show definitely doesn't have a "there wouldn't be any movie if X contrivance didn't exist" problem! There is plenty of story to get through without introducing extra obstacles.

Lee: Agreed—and there are even more of those contrivances popping up around how the One Power seems to function, especially around stilling and gentling and shielding. As you correctly point out, being shielded in the show does indeed seem to do more or less what being stilled does in the books—for women, at least. Male channelers, on the other hand, seem to have gotten some upgrades. Logain—gentled and definitely not-screwing-around cut off from the Source by Liandrin—apparently retains the ability to both judge another man's strength with the One Power, and also to actually see weaves. The books make it very clear that being stilled or gentled is a permanent and total thing that transforms the channeler into a normal human with no more than normal human abilities, so this is a major swerve.

And why did they do it? So that Logain can teach Rand a few things, which has happened, and also so that Logain can do exactly what he did and tell someone that he sees Moiraine surrounded by weaves. That particular Chekov's gun has now been fired.

Why couldn't Rand see the weaves around Moiraine earlier? Horses, movie, etc, I suppose. It's not how I would have done it, at least.

But! On the positive side of things, we actually get a scene that I think every single reader has been waiting for—Lan gives Rand a crash course on how to appear confident before the Amyrlin, and Rand then takes that knowledge and makes a good showing in front of Siuan.

Siuan Sanche arrives in Falme. You can tell she's the Amyrlin because she's got the biggest hat. (credit: Amazon Studios)

Andrew: On the Rand front, he does clearly have to concentrate to be able to see the weaves on Moiraine at all. I'm willing to chalk it up to some combination of Forsaken ingenuity and Rand being a total channeling noob. Book-Rand is still in pretty serious denial about his channeling ability at this point, where show-Rand has been more accepting of it. But either way, he still doesn't know much.

So far the show has been way less into gender essentialism than the books are, but we get a hint of it from Lan here: a man accepts his fate and faces it on his feet. And he does face down the Amyrlin, and if Siuan is impressed by his assuredness, she is not impressed by how little he knows and by how weak his nascent channeling abilities are. In this sequence, the show makes some tweaks that quickly and smartly plant seeds of Rand's all-consuming savior complex and his strong distrust of the White Tower and most Aes Sedai.

Siuan decides Rand needs to be caged in the White Tower after all, but at this point Moiraine's Dragon Reborn Circle of Trust has extended to Alanna and Verin and their Warders, who all conspire to help Rand escape with Moiraine and Lan. He's got to go to Falme, because the prophecies say it's where the Dragon will be introduced to the world. (My book memory of this is that the sky-battle just kind of happens and people find prophecies that fit the facts later; usually when characters try to fulfill or not fulfill a specific prophecy in the books they end up doing a whole bunch of other things by accident.)

This city also happens to be the one that Perrin and Aviendha have headed toward, the one where Mat has been whisked to, and the one where Egwene and Nynaeve and Elayne have all been for a few episodes now.

The Horn of Valere—remember that thing? It's still in its box with High Lord Turak. (credit: Amazon Studios)

Lee: Yes—and let's cut over to Nynaeve and Elayne, doing their thing. They still have the a'dam snatched by Ryma (formerly of the Yellow Ajah, and now wearing a collar herself), and after some discussion with Loial, they ambush a lone sul'dam in an alleyway and snap the thing around her neck.

It's a big moment in the show, since it's the first real indication that the Seanchan are actually vulnerable in any meaningful way—their weapons can be used against them! But we lack the extra context—so far, at least—that the books are able to provide when the event happens. After all, an a'dam only works as a leash on a woman who can channel. So why does it work on a sul'dam?

Needless to say, there are potential implications for, oh, the entirety of Seanchan society—implications we'll likely learn more about next week during the finale. (And if not, look to season three!)

The last bit I'd love to talk about is Perrin and Aviendha, who are also converging on Falme with fan-favorites Bain and Chiad in tow. I was a little confused about the geography—for a minute, it looked like the scene was starting off in the Aiel Waste (as evidenced by the Vince Gilligan-esque yellow color grading), but apparently there's a desert surrounding Toman Head and Falme?

Andrew: Yeah, it's kind of visible on some of the color maps of Randland, if you squint, though, yeah, if we spend much time in the Aiel Waste next season the show is going to want to save its good desert-y filming locations for that.

We get a little more Aiel world-building in this episode, further explaining elements of the ji'e'toh honor system to Perrin (who is mostly here as a spectator this week, sorry Perrin). You can incur toh (obligation) for all kinds of reasons, and it can be fulfilled in all kinds of ways, too. In the book it usually just meant doing weird chores, though in the show Aviendha's friends just end up beating the tar out of her until they feel better. Physical punishment is sometimes used in the books (Jordan loved spankings), but I don't recall a scene where anyone is just whaled on until they can't stand up.

There's not much else to say about the scene because there's not much to it; Aviendha explains ji'e'toh to Perrin as they walk through an aggressively day-for-night-filmed desert, and they arrive at Falme in time for our grand reunion/confrontation.

Lee: And, with a final scene of Egwene calmly informing her sul'dam that Egwene is definitely going to kill her at some point, we finish this week's recap. The board is set, the pieces are moving, and we come to it at last—the battle in the sky where the Dragon is going to proclaim himself. I mean, I assume we come to it. We haven't seen the last episode yet, but you'd need to go back in time and get yourself an actual-for-real telegraph to telegraph the finale any harder.

There are a few things unsettled, though—what about that Horn of Valere? The thing that all those hunters have been getting branded for in earlier episodes? And—and lots of other things I can't really articulate because of potential spoilers!

"You're a funny sul'dam, Renna—I like you. That's why I'm going to kill you last." (credit: Amazon Studios)

Andrew: What's the deal with Mat? Will we see Min again? Will Loial get a chance to be in the show for longer than 90 seconds per episode? And what traps will the Forsaken spring on our heroes? The Wheel of Time turns—and we will re-turn next week after we've seen how the season wraps up.

(credit: WoT Wiki)

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Microsoft will stop old Windows product keys from activating new Windows installs

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

RIP to one of my favorite loopholes: Microsoft quietly announced earlier this month (via Neowin) that users will no longer be able to install and activate Windows 10 or Windows 11 with old Windows 7 and Windows 8 product keys.

At least for now, though, it seems like this change will only apply to future Windows versions. We were able to activate a fresh Windows 11 Pro 22H2 install with a Windows 8 Pro product key as of this morning, as was Neowin. But Neowin was unable to activate a newer Insider Preview build of Windows, suggesting that the change will mostly affect newer Windows versions. We've asked Microsoft for clarification and will update this story if we receive any.

When Windows 10 originally launched in 2015, it did so as a free upgrade to all users of Windows 7 and Windows 8—the vast majority of the Windows user base at the time. Microsoft wanted to encourage developers to use its new technologies by giving them the largest possible install base of people on the newest version of Windows. Not only would people running Windows 7 and Windows 8 be offered the option to upgrade-in-place to Windows 10, but product keys from those versions of Windows would activate the analogous editions of Windows 10.

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The three-row Kia EV9 SUV will cost $54,900, on sale later this year

Enlarge / This is a prototype of the new Kia EV9 electric SUV, which goes on sale in the last quarter of 2023. (credit: Kia)

Kia has announced pricing for its next electric vehicle as it gets closer to release toward the end of this year. It's the EV9, a three-row SUV that uses the company's E-GMP architecture, also used to good effect in smaller EVs like the Kia EV6 and Hyundai Ioniq 5. When the EV9 arrives in showrooms, the range will start at $54,900 (plus destination charge).

"We knew we had to get the EV9 pricing right, and we believe today's announcement will be a wake-up call to the industry," said Kia America's COO, Steve Center.

"A well-equipped three-row SUV EV doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive. It should offer the perfect balance of standard features, the ability to fast charge, and be equipped with the technology savvy EV buyers are looking for. The EV9 provides all of this, and we can’t wait for it to go on sale later this year," he said.

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Our 10-point scale will help you rate the biggest misinformation purveyors

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The world has been flooded with misinformation. Falsehoods and conspiracy theories bubble up on everything from the weather to vaccines to the shape of the Earth. Purveyors of this garbage may be motivated by attention, money, or simply the appeal of sticking it to the educated elite. For people who try to keep both feet planted in the real world, it's enough to make you want to scream. Even if you spend 24 hours a day pushing back against the wrongness on the Internet, it seems impossible to make a dent in it.

I've been pondering this, and I've decided that we need a way to target the worst sources of misinformation—a way to identify the people who are both the most wrong and the most dangerous. So, as a bit of a thought experiment, I started playing with a simplified scoring system for misinformation merchants.

I'm calling it the 10-point Ladapo scale in honor of the surgeon general of Florida, for reasons I hope are obvious. Any person can be given a score of zero or one (fractions are discouraged) for each of the following questions; scores are then totaled to provide a composite picture of just how bad any source is. To help you understand how to use it, we'll go through the questions and provide a sense of how each should be scored. We'll then apply the Ladapo scale to a couple of real-world examples.

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As the EA Sports FC era dawns, FIFA 23 is removed from digital platforms

Enlarge / A new, FIFA-less era begins for EA Sports. (credit: EA)

EA has suddenly removed downloadable versions of FIFA 23 from multiple digital storefronts. The delisting comes earlier than expected for the title and coincides with the company's launch of the newly FIFA-license-free EA Sports FC 24.

While many reports suggest there has been a recent mass purge of all legacy FIFA games from online stores, EA has a history of delisting older sports titles at a pretty regular cadence. FIFA 22, for instance, was delisted from digital storefronts in May, roughly seven months after the launch of the subsequent FIFA 23. And FIFA 21 wasn't taken down from Steam until June 2022, about eight months after FIFA 22's launch.

EA Sports FC 24

• $70 PlayStation 5 at Amazon
• $60 Nintendo Switch at Amazon
• $70 Xbox Series X at Amazon
• $70 PlayStation 4 at Amazon

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

FIFA 23, on the other hand, has been delisted less than a year from its October 2022 launch. SteamDB tracking data suggests that the delisting came on September 21, the day before the new EA Sports FC became available for a 10-hour early access trial for EA Play members. The Steam store page for FIFA 23 now notes that the delisting comes "at the request of the publisher" and that the game "will not appear in search." The game also no longer appears on Steam's EA publisher page.

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How climate change could make fungal diseases worse

Enlarge / Histoplasma capsulatum is a species of parasitic, yeast-like dimorphic fungus that can, if inhaled, cause a type of lung infection called histoplasmosis. (credit: Nanoclustering/Science Photo Library)

Back at the turn of the 21st century, Valley fever was an obscure fungal disease in the United States, with fewer than 3,000 reported cases per year, mostly in California and Arizona. Two decades later, cases of Valley fever are exploding, increasing more than sevenfold and expanding to other states.

And Valley fever isn’t alone. Fungal diseases in general are appearing in places they have never been seen before, and previously harmless or mildly harmful fungi are turning deadly for people. One likely reason for this worsening fungal situation, scientists say, is climate change. Shifts in temperature and rainfall patterns are expanding where disease-causing fungi occur; climate-triggered calamities can help fungi disperse and reach more people; and warmer temperatures create opportunities for fungi to evolve into more dangerous agents of disease.

For a long time, fungi have been a neglected group of pathogens. By the early 2000s, researchers were already warning that climate change would make bacterial and viral infectious diseases like cholera and dengue more widespread. “But people were not focused at all on the fungi,” says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist and immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That’s because, until recently, fungi haven’t troubled humans much.

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We try out the first legal level 3 automated driving system in the US

Enlarge / The front panel of a Drive Pilot-equipped EQS conceals its lidar and other sensors. (credit: Mercedes-Benz)

LOS ANGELES—Mercedes-Benz has never shied away from new technology. Historically, the carmaker has been an early adopter and developer of systems such as antilock brakes, stability control, airbags, and adaptive cruise control. With its EQ line of all-electric vehicles well underway, Mercedes-Benz is now making a push toward automated driving.

We sampled the new Drive Pilot system, which will be available on the 2024 Mercedes-Benz S-Class and EQS sedans, on some of the most congested highways in Los Angeles. It’s the first level 3 automated driving system approved for use in the US, but initially it will only be available and active in California and Nevada. Drive Pilot allows for hands-free highway driving similar to other systems, such as Super Cruise from GM, BlueCruise from Ford, or Highway Assistant from BMW, but goes further by allowing the driver to also take their eyes off the road.

A defined operation design domain

Certain conditions must be satisfied before you can activate Drive Pilot, an important concept in autonomous driving known as the “operational design domain.”

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Windows 11 23H2’s new features and version number are arriving separately

Enlarge / A PC running Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)

Today, Microsoft is beginning to roll out a major batch of new Windows updates, including its Copilot generative AI assistant, wide-ranging improvements for built-in apps, and other user interface tweaks. Normally, updates of this magnitude would only arrive in one of Windows' big yearly feature updates, but the company said last week that all of these changes would be added to the current revision of Windows 11, version 22H2.

In a blog post released today, Microsoft said that Windows is getting its yearly update later this year but that the Windows 11 2023 Update won't include new features or fixes. Instead, it's what Microsoft calls an "enablement package," essentially an update that will bump up the version number without making any other changes to the underlying code.

Microsoft says that this 23H2 update "will be cumulative with all the newly announced features," so any new install media created with Windows 23H2 will include Copilot and all the other updates that Microsoft is rolling out today. It's just that the new features and the new version number are technically arriving separately instead of being grouped together as they would have been in past years. Microsoft says people running Windows 11 22H2 can get most of the new features by manually installing the optional October update that's available in Windows Update today or by enabling the "get the latest updates as soon as they’re available" toggle in Windows Update. The non-optional November update will enable all these features on all Windows 11 PCs.

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FTC files “the big one,” a lawsuit alleging Amazon illegally maintains monopoly

Enlarge / FTC Chair Lina Khan speaks during the Spring Enforcers Summit at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, on Monday, March 27, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general today sued Amazon, claiming the online retail giant illegally maintains monopoly power.

"Our complaint lays out how Amazon has used a set of punitive and coercive tactics to unlawfully maintain its monopolies," FTC Chair Lina Khan said. "The complaint sets forth detailed allegations noting how Amazon is now exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform and the hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on Amazon to reach them. Today's lawsuit seeks to hold Amazon to account for these monopolistic practices and restore the lost promise of free and fair competition."

The FTC announced that it filed the lawsuit in US District Court for the Western District of Washington. The FTC press release said it is "seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that would prohibit Amazon from engaging in its unlawful conduct and pry loose Amazon's monopolistic control to restore competition."

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Unity dev group dissolves after 13 years over “completely eroded” company trust

Enlarge / A partnership of 13 years has ended over a complete lack of trust in the company behind the Unity engine. (credit: Boston Unity Group)

The "first official Unity user group in the world" has announced that it is dissolving after 13 years because "the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded." The move comes as many developers are saying they will continue to stay away from the company's products even after last week's partial rollback of some of the most controversial parts of its fee structure plans.

Since its founding in 2010, the Boston Unity Group (BUG) has attracted thousands of members to regular gatherings, talks, and networking events, including many technical lectures archived on YouTube. But the group says it will be hosting its last meeting Wednesday evening via Zoom because the Unity of today is very different from the Dave Helgason-led company that BUG says "enthusiastically sanctioned and supported" the group at its founding.

"Over the past few years, Unity has unfortunately shifted its focus away from the games industry and away from supporting developer communities," the group leadership wrote in a departure note. "Following the IPO, the company has seemingly put profit over all else, with several acquisitions and layoffs of core personnel. Many key systems that developers need are still left in a confusing and often incomplete state, with the messaging that advertising and revenue matter more to Unity than the functionality game developers care about."

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ChatGPT update enables its AI to “see, hear, and speak,“ according to OpenAI

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On Monday, OpenAI announced a significant update to ChatGPT that enables its GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 AI models to analyze images and react to them as part of a text conversation. Also, the ChatGPT mobile app will add speech synthesis options that, when paired with its existing speech recognition features, will enable fully verbal conversations with the AI assistant, OpenAI says.

OpenAI is planning to roll out these features in ChatGPT to Plus and Enterprise subscribers "over the next two weeks." It also notes that speech synthesis is coming to iOS and Android only, and image recognition will be available on both the web interface and the mobile apps.

OpenAI says the new image recognition feature in ChatGPT lets users upload one or more images for conversation, using either the GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 models. In its promotional blog post, the company claims the feature can be used for a variety of everyday applications: from figuring out what's for dinner by taking pictures of the fridge and pantry, to troubleshooting why your grill won’t start. It also says that users can use their device's touch screen to circle parts of the image that they would like ChatGPT to concentrate on.

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Pixel 8 leak promises 7 years of OS updates—even more than an iPhone

Enlarge / Leaked pictures from Google's promo site show off the Pixel 8 Pro in a lovely blue. (credit: Kamila Wojciechowska )

The Pixel 8 is rapidly approaching its October 4 unveiling, but before then there are a bunch of leaks out there. Reliable leaker Kamila Wojciechowska has a whole list of Pixel 8 and 8 Pro specs over at 91mobiles, along with some Pixel market materials. The big news is that Google is finally giving its Pixel phones a longer support window. Pixel phones are getting seven years of updates, which is longer than Apple. Google pitches the Pixel phones as the flagship of the Android ecosystem, and now, if this spec sheet pans out, the OS maker is finally giving them an update plan to match.

Currently, Pixel phones have three years of OS updates and five years of security updates, which is not only beaten by Apple's update policy but is also inexplicably worse than many of Google's Android partners. For instance, Samsung and OnePlus offer four years of OS updates, albeit with some caveats around arrival times and the security update cadence. Apple doesn't have a policy written in stone anywhere, but with the iPhone X not making the jump to iOS17, that makes for a five-year major OS update policy if you're counting to 2022's iOS16, though with some point updates in 2023 you could argue six years.

Google has messed around in the past by calling its current "three years of major OS updates and five years of security updates" plan "five years of updates," but this spec sheet very clearly says "seven years of OS, security, and feature drop updates." That would comfortably lead all major manufacturers, leaving only Google and Fairphone at the top of the charts.

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Donna Noble is back and ready for a fight in trailer for Doctor Who specials

Doctor Who returns with three specials starring David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor, reunited with Donna Noble (Catherine Tate).

Doctor Who marks its 60th anniversary this year with three specials featuring David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor, with the first slated to air in November. The latest trailer shows the good Doctor reunited with his former companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) and facing off against two classic adversaries from the Whovian archives: an alien race called the Meeps and a celestial being known as The Toymaker, played by Neil Patrick Harris.

(Spoilers below for prior seasons of Doctor Who.)

When the BBC announced that Ncuti Gatwa would succeed Jodie Whittaker's Thirteenth Doctor as the new incarnation of Doctor Who, fans naturally expected Gatwa to make his first appearance in the traditional regeneration sequence. Instead, in the 2022 special "The Power of the Doctor," Whittaker's Doctor regenerated into an incarnation bearing a striking similarity to the Tenth Doctor—both played by Tennant. It was a savvy marketing move, given the enormous popularity of Tennant's Doctor. With showrunner Chris Chibnall stepping down and Russell T. Davies re-assuming the reins for the show's 60th anniversary, what better time to revisit that character, along with my personal favorite of the companions, Donna Noble?

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Getty Images subscribers to get access to AI image generator

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Getty Images will give hundreds of thousands of users access to a new artificial intelligence image-generating tool, as a global intellectual property debate intensifies around the fast-moving technology.

The US photo agency, one of the world’s largest with more than 135 million copyrighted images in its archives, on Monday launched an AI tool that can create pictures based on user prompts. It also set out a payment plan for those whose images were used to train the AI system.

Getty added a pledge to protect the more than 800,000 users with an uncapped indemnification tied to the product, meaning the agency will assume full legal and financial responsibility on behalf of its business customers for any potential copyright disputes.

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A partial car substitute? Trek’s new cargo bike, reviewed

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As I watched a few berries I had just carted home roll gently down my driveway and into the road, it was hard to escape the sense that my plan to use nothing but a cargo bike for two weeks might have been overly ambitious. Several weeks filled with Canadian wildfire smoke and tornado warnings later, it was pretty clear that I had greatly underestimated the complexities involved.

The e-bike I used for my testing, the newly introduced Trek Fetch+ 2, is very good, and it readily hauled whatever I asked of it. But using a cargo bike is very different from any other biking experience I've had—and that's saying something, given the large range of bike styles I've now had the pleasure of sampling.

So this review will be divided into two parts. In the first, I'll talk a bit about the cargo bike experience; if you already know what that's like, you can skip ahead to the second half, where we'll go in-depth on the Fetch+ 2.

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Inside the race to stop a deadly viral outbreak in India

Enlarge / Road blockade due to Nipah affected areas at Chathamangalam panjayat on September 8, 2021, in Kozhikode, India. (credit: DeFodi Images News / Getty)

On the morning of September 11, critical care specialist Anoop Kumar was presented with an unusual situation. Four members of the same family had been admitted to his hospital—Aster MIMS in Kozhikode, Kerala—the previous day, all similarly sick. Would he take a look?

He gathered his team of doctors to investigate. Soon they were at the bedsides of a 9-year-old boy, his 4-year-old sister, their 24-year-old uncle, and a 10-month-old cousin. All had arrived at the hospital with fever, cough, and flu-like symptoms. The 9-year-old was in respiratory distress, struggling to breathe properly, and had needed to be put on a noninvasive ventilator, with air pumped through a mask to keep his lungs expanded.

Their symptoms were concerning and mysterious—none of the team could pinpoint what was wrong. But delving into their family history, Anoop and his colleagues soon uncovered a clue. The father of the two young siblings, 49-year-old Mohammed Ali, an agriculturalist, had died less than two weeks previously. And when the team at Aster MIMS got in touch with the hospital that had treated Ali, they found that he had been admitted with similar symptoms, pneumonia and fever.

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RSV vaccine during pregnancy gets seasonal sign-off from CDC

Enlarge / An intensive care nurse cares for a patient suffering from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), who is being ventilated in the children's intensive care unit of the Olga Hospital of the Stuttgart Clinic in Germany. (credit: Getty | picture alliance)

A Pfizer vaccine designed to protect newborns and infants from severe RSV illness won a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Friday—but only for seasonal use.

The vaccine is Pfizer’s bivalent RSVpreF vaccine, called Abrysvo, and is administered to pregnant people late in gestation, between 32 and 36 weeks.

RSV, or respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus, is the leading cause of hospitalization for infants in the US. Each year, 1.5 million children seek out-patient care for RSV, with 58,000 to 80,000 ending up in the hospital and 100 to 300 tragically dying from the infection.

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FCC closing loophole that gave robocallers easy access to US phone numbers

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In one of its many attempts to curb robocalls, the Federal Communications Commission said it is making it harder for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers to obtain direct access to US telephone numbers.

Robocallers make heavy use of VoIP providers to bombard US residents with junk calls, often from spoofed phone numbers. Under the rules in place for most of the past decade, VoIP providers could easily gain access to US phone numbers.

"This VoIP technology can allow bad actors to make spoofed robocalls with minimal technical experience and cost," the FCC said.

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Amazon adding ads to Prime Video in 2024 unless you pay $2.99 extra

Enlarge (credit: YouTube/Amazon Prime)

Next year, watching TV shows and movies on Amazon Prime Video without ads will cost more than it does now. In early 2024, Amazon will show ads with Prime Video content unless you pay $2.99 extra.

Amazon announced today that Prime Video users in the US, Canada, Germany, and the UK will automatically start seeing advertisements "in early 2024." Subscribers will receive a notification email "several weeks" in advance, at which point they can opt to pay $2.99 extra for ad-free Prime Video, Amazon said.

That takes the price of ad-free Prime Video from $8.99/month alone to $11.98/month and from $14.99/month with Prime to $17.98/month.

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Microsoft is finally on the verge of closing its Activision deal

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

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has given its provisional approval to recently proposed modifications to Microsoft's proposed Activision purchase. While the approval is not final, the announcement suggests that Microsoft will soon clear the final regulatory hurdle in its proposed $68.7 billion acquisition, which was first announced over 20 months ago.

The CMA initially blocked the Activision acquisition back in April, saying that the purchase would "substantially lessen competition" in the nascent cloud gaming market. But after the US Federal Trade Commission's attempt at a merger-blocking injunction lost in court in April, Microsoft and the CMA went back to the drawing board to negotiate a settlement.

That led to Microsoft's August announcement that it would sell those Activision streaming rights to Ubisoft. The CMA now says it "has provisionally concluded" that this sale "should address these [previously identified] issues."

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Law geeks shine a light on secretive Google antitrust trial

(credit: Shutterstock)

Months out of law school, Yosef Weitzman already has a huge courtroom role in the biggest antitrust trial of the century. In a US federal trial that started last week, Google is accused of unlawfully monopolizing online search and search ads. The company’s self-defined mission is to make the world's information universally accessible, yet Google successfully opposed livestreaming the trial and keeping the proceedings wholly open to the public. Enter Weitzman.

The fresh law graduate is among a handful of legal or antitrust geeks trying to attend most, if not all, of the public portions of the trial, fearing a historic moment of tech giant accountability will escape public notice. Some have pushed off day jobs or moved near to the Washington, DC, courthouse. All are obsessively documenting their observations through social media and daily email newsletters.

The trial is scheduled to run near-daily through November, and few news outlets can dedicate a reporter to a courtroom seat for eight hours a day for the duration. Most reporters focused on Google are based in San Francisco. Legal and regulatory publications that can commit charge hundreds of dollars for content subscriptions. Any antitrust junkie—or frustrated Google Search user—wanting an affordable readout from the sparsely attended, era-defining trial, must rely on Weitzman, or a handful of others firing off tweets, skeets, and Substacks. “Regardless of your view on this trial and Big Tech, it will affect everyone, so it’s important that the public is aware of what’s going on as the trial unfolds and to record what happens,” Weitzman says.

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Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop Go 3 is officially no longer a budget PC

Enlarge / Meet the Surface Laptop Go 3. It looks a lot like the Laptop Go 2.

NEW YORK—Microsoft is updating two of the cheapest, cutest Surface devices today, announcing internal refreshes for the Surface Laptop Go and the Surface Go tablet. The Surface Laptop Go 3 and the Surface Go 4 are externally identical to their predecessors, but both are getting respectable internal upgrades that should provide enough power for budget-minded PC buyers. But only the laptop will be available to the general public; the new Go tablet will only be offered to Microsoft's business customers.

Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3

From $800 at Microsoft

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

The Laptop Go 3 is getting a new higher starting price of $800, which is $200 higher than the starting price of the Laptop Go 2. That said, the $600 configuration of the Laptop Go 2 was essentially impossible to recommend, thanks to its 128GB SSD and (especially) its paltry 4GB of RAM. The new base config comes with a serviceable 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD, with a 16GB RAM upgrade available for another $200. These upgrade prices are steep and arguably take the Go out of the "budget laptop" category, but they do have the benefit of making it much more usable, and the laptop costs the same amount as the 8GB/256GB version of the Laptop Go 2.

The Laptop Go 3 is available for preorder now in four different colors and will launch on October 3.

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Next major Windows update is available September 26, with new AI (and not-AI) features

Enlarge / Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella formally announces the ready-for-the-public version of Copilot. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

NEW YORK—Microsoft will be releasing its next major Windows update with "over 150 new features" later this month, the company announced in a presentation today. The update furthers Microsoft's crusade to tuck generative AI into all of its products, though, as usual, it makes a ton of smaller iterative changes to the OS and its apps.

Microsoft says these new features "start becoming available September 26," which could mean that some are available on that day and others are available later. It could also be a reference to Microsoft's standard practice of rolling major Windows updates out to smaller groups of users first, checking for problems, and expanding the rollout to larger groups afterward.

Curiously, Microsoft says this version of Windows will still be called "22H2," where we'd normally expect it to be released as the 23H2 update. Microsoft hasn't formally announced any changes to its "annual feature update cadence," though these days, it seems to run counter to the company's "release new features whenever they're ready and we feel like doing it" policy.

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Jaguar jettisions CCS charger plug, negotiates Tesla Supercharger access

Enlarge / Jaguar is the latest automaker to negotiate a switch from the Combined Charging Standard to the North American Charging Standard. (credit: Jaguar)

The North American Charging Standard has another new convert. On Thursday, Jaguar announced that it's the latest automaker to decide to change its charger plugs on its battery electric vehicles to the Tesla-style NACS port, securing all-important access to the Tesla Supercharger network in the process. As with all the other NACS announcements we've seen since May, when Ford went first and opened the floodgates, native NACS ports will appear on Jaguars in 2025.

Coincidentally, that's when the next new electric Jaguar will appear, too. The British brand was an early entrant to the long-range electric vehicle segment with the I-Pace, a bespoke BEV that wowed road testers in 2018. But despite a big order from Waymo to use I-Paces as robotaxis, the I-Pace's relatively small interior and high purchase price put off potential private customers, making it a relatively rare sight on North American roads outside of the Bay Area.

The I-Pace got a mild midlife refresh at the beginning of this year, but it remains the sole EV in Jaguar's lineup for now. We were supposed to see an electric replacement for the venerable Jaguar XJ sedan, and development of the car was at an advanced stage when it was suddenly canceled in 2021, mere months from its debut.

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Judge “in a pickle” after Google demands DOJ stop sharing public trial exhibits

Enlarge / Ian Madrigal, dressed as the Monopoly Man, outside federal court on the first day of the Justice Department's antitrust trial against Google. (credit: Win McNamee / Staff | Getty Images North America)

This morning, Bloomberg published more than a dozen public exhibits that Google argued the public shouldn't have access to from the Department of Justice's 10-week antitrust trial examining Google's search business. The DOJ had hastily removed those exhibits from its website earlier this week after Google complained to the court that the DOJ was sharing trial exhibits online.

“Just so we understand what’s at stake here, every document [the DOJ's lawyers] push into evidence they post on their website, and it gets picked up far and wide,” Google lawyer John Schmidtlein said in an objection raised on Tuesday. The dramatic moment followed sealed testimony from Google’s vice president for finance, Michael Roszak, regarding a document that Google claimed was "embarrassing" and Roszak claimed was “full of hyperbole and exaggeration," Bloomberg reported.

“This isn’t a business record, and it’s totally irrelevant to these proceedings,” Schmidtlein argued.

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What can we do about ultraprocessed foods?

Enlarge (credit: Cathy Scola via Getty Images)

From breakfast cereals and protein bars to flavored yogurt and frozen pizzas, ultraprocessed foods are everywhere, filling aisle upon aisle at the supermarket. Fully 58 percent of the calories consumed by adults and 67 percent of those consumed by children in the United States are made up of these highly palatable foodstuffs with their highly manipulated ingredients.

And ultraprocessed foods are not just filling our plates; they’re also taking up more and more space in global conversations about public health and nutrition. In the last decade or so, researchers have ramped up efforts to define ultraprocessed foods and to probe how their consumption correlates to health: A wave of recent studies have linked the foods to heightened risk for conditions ranging from cardiovascular disease and cancer to obesity and depression.

Still, some researchers—and perhaps unsurprisingly, industry representatives—question the strength of the evidence against ultraprocessed foods. The category is too poorly defined and the studies too circumstantial, they say. Plus, labeling such a large portion of our grocery carts as unhealthy ignores the benefits of industrial food processing in making food affordable, safe from foodborne pathogens, easy to prepare and in some cases more sustainable—such as through the development of plant-derived products designed to replace meat and milk.

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Amazon’s generative-AI-powered Alexa is as big a privacy red flag as old Alexa

Enlarge / Alexa using generative AI to create a taco poem. (credit: Amazon News/YouTube)

Amazon is trying to make Alexa simpler and more intuitive for users through the use of a new large language model (LLM). During its annual hardware event Wednesday, Amazon demoed the generative-AI-powered Alexa that users can soon preview on Echo devices. But in all its talk of new features and a generative-AI-fueled future, Amazon barely acknowledged the longstanding elephant in the room: privacy.

Amazon's devices event featured a new Echo Show 8, updated Ring devices, and new Fire TV sticks. But most interesting was a look at how the company is trying to navigate generative AI hype and the uncertainty around the future of voice assistants. Amazon said users will be able to start previewing Alexa's new features via any Echo device, including the original, in a few weeks.

Alexa's added features are enabled by a new LLM that Amazon says was fine-tuned for voice conversations and that uses algorithms for body language and intonation recognition. The company was clear that Alexa will focus on generative AI going forward. But the new features are in their early stages, Amazon noted, so bumps, bugs, and errors are expected at first.

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Permission denied for reentry of Varda’s orbiting experiment capsule

Enlarge / Varda's reentry capsule measures nearly 3 feet (1 meter) in diameter, and will jettison from its Rocket Lab-built carrier spacecraft when the mission is ready to return to Earth. (credit: Varda Space Industries)

A first-of-its-kind commercial spacecraft owned by an in-space manufacturing startup called Varda Space Industries has been in orbit two months longer than originally planned, waiting for government approval to return to Earth with a cache of pharmaceutical specimens.

Varda's satellite launched on June 12 for what was originally supposed to be a month-long mission to demonstrate the company's technology for producing commercial materials, mainly pharmaceuticals, inside a recoverable capsule designed to return the products to Earth for laboratory analysis and eventual commercial exploitation.

However, the recovery of Varda's capsule is on hold after the Federal Aviation Administration and the US Air Force recently declined to give Varda approval to land its spacecraft in a remote part of Utah. TechCrunch first reported the FAA turned down Varda's application for a commercial reentry license.

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OpenAI’s new AI image generator pushes the limits in detail and prompt fidelity

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On Wednesday, OpenAI announced DALL-E 3, the latest version of its AI image synthesis model that features full integration with ChatGPT. DALL-E 3 renders images by closely following complex descriptions and handling in-image text generation (such as labels and signs), which challenged earlier models. Currently in research preview, it will be available to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise customers in early October.

Like its predecessor, DALLE-3 is a text-to-image generator that creates novel images based on written descriptions called prompts. Although OpenAI released no technical details about DALL-E 3, the AI model at the heart of previous versions of DALL-E was trained on millions of images created by human artists and photographers, some of them licensed from stock websites like Shutterstock. It's likely DALL-E 3 follows this same formula, but with new training techniques and more computational training time.

Judging by the samples provided by OpenAI on its promotional blog, DALL-E 3 appears to be a radically more capable image synthesis model than anything else available in terms of following prompts. While OpenAI's examples have been cherry-picked for their effectiveness, they appear to follow the prompt instructions faithfully and convincingly render objects with minimal deformations. Compared to DALL-E 2, OpenAI says that DALL-E 3 refines small details like hands more effectively, creating engaging images by default with "no hacks or prompt engineering required."

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Linux gives up on 6-year LTS kernels, says they’re too much work

(credit: Sean Nguyen)

The LTS (long-term support) period for the Linux kernel is being cut down. In 2017, the kernel jumped from two years of support to six. Now, six years later, it turns out that's a lot of work. ZDNet reports that at the Open Source Summit Europe this week (videos will be out in a few weeks), Linux Weekly News executive editor Jonathan Corbet announced the Linux kernel will return to two years of LTS support.

The plan to cut back down to two years isn't instant. The Linux community is still honoring the current end-of-life timelines, so 6.1, 5.15, 5.10, 5.4, 4.19, and 4.14 are still six years, but new kernels will only get two years. Even this six-year window was supposed to be an optional thing when it started, with the release page FAQ saying, "Each new longterm kernel usually starts with only a 2-year projected EOL that can be extended further if there is enough interest from the industry at large to help support it for a longer period of time." The reality was that everything received a six-year life span, and now that will no longer be the case.

Corbet cited a mix of lack of use and a lack of support for why Linux is cutting back on LTS kernels. Corbet says, "There's really no point to maintaining [old kernels] for that long because people are not using them." The other big problem is the burnout from maintainers, which are often unpaid and could use a lot more support from the billion-dollar companies that benefit from using Linux.

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