Meta announced today that it's ending the third-party fact-checking program it introduced in 2016, and will rely instead on a Community Notes approach similar to what's used on Elon Musk's X platform.

The end of third-party fact-checking and related changes to Meta policies could help the company make friends in the Trump administration and in governments of conservative-leaning states that have tried to impose legal limits on content moderation. The operator of Facebook and Instagram announced the changes in a blog post and a video message recorded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

"Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political," Zuckerberg said. He said the recent elections "feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech."

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Here at Ars, we're judicious about which of the many, many Switch 2 rumors we decide to highlight on this page. For every report on hardware power or magnetic Joy-Cons that we share, there are probably five others we see and decide are too lightly sourced, too unlikely, or just too plain obscure to spread here.

But when we started hearing reports that the Switch 2's Joy-Cons could be cradled on their sides and manipulated like a full-fledged gaming mouse, we knew the concept was one you'd want to hear about.

Rumor: More images of Switch 2 Joy-Cons have immerged from China.

Source: https://t.co/MplOUwKhRi pic.twitter.com/5ZdFmVlggl

— Stealth (@Stealth40k) January 5, 2025

The rumors of mouse-like functionality on the Switch 2's included controllers got supercharged over the weekend when a Reddit poster shared detailed photos of purported Switch 2 Joy-Cons, sourced from an unnamed Chinese social media user. In between the longer shoulder buttons along the Joy-Con's inner edge (SL and SR) and a new central connector port, eagle-eyed viewers noticed what looks suspiciously like the optical sensor that sits on the bottom of practically every mouse these days.

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The Pixel 4a, a well-regarded release in Google's line of budget-minded phones with nice cameras and decent stock software, was not supposed to get any more updates. This week, it will receive a rather uncommon one—one that intends to lower its reported battery life.

The Pixel 4a, released in the summer of 2020, was discontinued at the end of 2022. It received its last official software update in the summer of 2023, followed by a surprise security update in November 2023. Throughout 2024, there were no updates. This week, owners of the 4a (and likely many former owners) are getting a new update, along with an email titled "Changes coming to your Pixel 4a."

The email addresses "an upcoming software update for your Pixel 4a that will affect the overall performance and stability of its battery." The automatic software update to Android 13 "introduces new battery management features to improve the stability of your device," which will "reduce your battery's runtime and charging performance."

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On Monday, Nvidia announced Project DIGITS, a small desktop computer aimed at researchers, data scientists, and students who want to experiment with AI models—such as chatbots like ChatGPT and image generators—at home. The $3,000 device, which contains Nvidia's new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, debuted at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. It will launch in May and can operate as a standalone PC or connect to a Windows or Mac machine.

At CES on Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described the new system as "a cloud computing platform that sits on your desk." The company also designed Project DIGITS as a bridge between desktop development and cloud deployment. Developers can create and test AI applications locally on Project DIGITS, then move them to cloud services or data centers that use similar Nvidia hardware.

The GB10 chip inside the Project DIGITS computer combines an Nvidia Blackwell GPU with a 20-core Grace CPU based on Arm architecture. Nvidia developed the chip in partnership with MediaTek, and it connects to 128GB of memory and up to 4TB of storage inside the Project DIGITS enclosure.

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HBO released a new one-minute teaser for the second season of its post-apocalyptic drama The Last of Us during CES last night, along with a release date of April 2025. Based on developer Naughty Dog's hugely popular video game franchise, S2 is set five years after the events of the first season and finds the bond beginning to fray between plucky survivors Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) while introducing several new characters.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

The series takes place in the 20-year aftermath of a deadly outbreak of mutant fungus (Cordyceps) that turns humans into monstrous zombie-like creatures (the Infected, or Clickers). The world has become a series of separate totalitarian quarantine zones and independent settlements, with a thriving black market and a rebel militia known as the Fireflies making life complicated for the survivors. Joel is a hardened smuggler tasked with escorting the teenage Ellie across the devastated US, battling hostile forces and hordes of zombies, to a Fireflies unit outside the quarantine zone. Ellie is special: She is immune to the deadly fungus, and the hope is that her immunity holds the key to beating the disease.

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Tesla is the target of yet another federal safety probe, the fourth currently open by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation. Today's trouble concerns the automaker's "Smart Summon" and "Actually Smart Summon" features, which allow Tesla drivers to remotely control their vehicles via a smartphone app.

At least in theory, that is. In practice, NHTSA says it's aware of multiple crash allegations "where the user had too little reaction time to avoid a crash, either with the available line of sight or releasing the phone app button, which stops the vehicle’s movement."

Worse yet, Tesla has failed to report any of these incidents to the safety regulator, which has a standing general order that requires any automaker or operator of autonomous or partially automated vehicles to report crashes involving such systems that occur on publicly accessible roads.

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The annual Consumer Electronics Show got underway in Las Vegas this week, but Winter Storm Blair unraveled my plan to be on the ground to check things out in person. That means I still haven't had an in-person look at the Sony Honda Mobility Afeela, a new electric sedan that goes on sale in California later this year.

Sony stunned everyone by first showing off an electric concept car at CES in 2020. Meant to showcase the Japanese technology company's wide range of products, from sensors to digital entertainment, the concept left many scratching their heads about Sony's true intention here—surely the company wasn't also about to start making cars?

But that turned out to be exactly the plan. Although Sony began developing its EV with the contract manufacturer (and tier 1 supplier) Magna Steyr, the car—now called the Afeela 1—will be built by Honda, which formed a strategic alliance with Sony to create the aforementioned Sony Honda Mobility, which will sell the new car.

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In 2012, an industry-wide coalition of hardware and software makers adopted Secure Boot to protect Windows devices against the threat of malware that could infect the BIOS and, later, its successor, the UEFI, the firmware that loaded the operating system each time a computer booted up.

Firmware-dwelling malware raises the specter of malware that infects the devices before the operating system even loads, each time they boot up. From there, it can remain immune to detection and removal. Secure Boot uses public-key cryptography to block the loading of any code that isn’t signed with a pre-approved digital signature.

2018 calling for its BIOS

Since 2016, Microsoft has required all Windows devices to include a strong, trusted platform module that enforces Secure Boot. To this day, organizations widely regard Secure Boot as an important, if not essential, foundation of trust in securing devices in some of the most critical environments.

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Once again, we're back with our annual power ranking of US launch companies. 2024 was the third year Ars compiled a list of the most accomplished rocket companies in the United States with the goal of sparking debate, discussion, and appreciation for the challenge of operating a successful launch company.

This is a difficult business, both technically and financially. We salute all the engineers, technicians, and business development people out there giving this industry a go.

Please note that this is a subjective list, although hard metrics such as total launches, tonnage to orbit, success rate, and more were all important factors in our decisions. And our focus remains on what each company accomplished in 2024, not on what they might do in the future.

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Apple plans to release a software update that is meant to help users understand better that its notification summaries are AI-generated and may contain errors, according to a recent BBC news story. The update is a response to reports that the summaries gave users misleading information about world events.

For example, one false summary suggested to at least one user that Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had committed suicide. The notification in question was meant to summarize the most important tidbits from 22 BBC news app notifications, according to a widely circulated screenshot.

Apple hasn't publicly specified exactly what will be changed to better inform users—only that it will be a software change that will "further clarify" when the notifications have been generated via the feature that resides under the Apple Intelligence umbrella.

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Federal toxicology researchers on Monday finally published a long-controversial analysis that claims to find a link between high levels of fluoride exposure and slightly lower IQs in children living in areas outside the US, mostly in China and India. As expected, it immediately drew yet more controversy.

The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, is a meta-analysis, a type of study that combines data from many different studies—in this case, mostly low-quality studies—to come up with new results. None of the data included in the analysis is from the US, and the fluoride levels examined are at least double the level recommended for municipal water in the US. In some places in the world, fluoride is naturally present in water, such as parts of China, and can reach concentrations several-fold higher than fluoridated water in the US.

The authors of the analysis are researchers at the National Toxicology Program at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. For context, this is the same federal research program that published a dubious analysis in 2016 suggesting that cell phones cause cancer in rats. The study underwent a suspicious peer-review process and contained questionable methods and statistics.

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Disney is buying Fubo and plans to merge the sports streaming platform with its Hulu + Live TV service, gaining 70 percent ownership of the company that up until today was suing it over antitrust concerns and allegations of anticompetitive practices.

According to Fubo’s announcement today, the unified company will be known as Fubo, and Fubo executives will run it. People will also continue to be able to subscribe to Fubo without subscribing to Hulu + Live TV and vice versa. Also part of the announcement is the revelation that Fubo has settled its antitrust lawsuit against Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) over Venu, a joint venture sports app that the companies plan to launch and that Fubo was seeking to block, citing the three firms' allegedly anticompetitive practices.

Fubo had previously claimed that Disney, Fox, and WBD had forced it to pay for irrelevant channels that don’t appeal to sports fans by bundling those networks with sports networks. Fubo’s lawsuit accused Disney and Fox of forcing it to spend millions on unwanted content and forcing it “to drop valuable channels” through price hikes.

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The Waymo self-driving company says it has fixed a problem that caused a car to repeatedly circle a parking lot for about five minutes while its rider was trying to get to an airport.

Last month, Mike Johns posted a video on LinkedIn showing what happened after he was picked up by a Waymo self-driving car in Scottsdale, Arizona. Johns' post said the car made eight circles. After a Waymo support agent helped get the car moving in the right direction, he was driven to the airport in time to make his flight.

"Why is this happening to me on a Monday? I'm in a Waymo car and this car is just going in circles... I got a flight to catch, why is this thing going in a circle? I'm getting dizzy," he said in the video.

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AMD's CES announcements include a tease about next-gen graphics cards, a new flagship desktop CPU, and a modest refresh of its processors for handheld gaming PCs. But the company's largest announcement, by volume, is about laptop processors.

Today the company is expanding the Ryzen AI 300 lineup with a batch of updated high-end chips with up to 16 CPU cores and some midrange options for cheaper Copilot+ PCs. AMD has repackaged some of its high-end desktop chips for gaming laptops, including the first Ryzen laptop CPU with 3D V-Cache enabled. And there's also a new-in-name-only Ryzen 200 series, another repackaging of familiar silicon to address lower-budget laptops.

Ryzen AI 300 is back, along with high-end Max and Max+ versions

Ryzen AI is back, with Max and Max+ versions that include huge integrated GPUs. Credit: AMD

We came away largely impressed by the initial Ryzen AI 300 processors in August 2024, and new processors being announced today expand the lineup upward and downward.

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AMD's batch of CES announcements this year includes just two new products for desktop PC users: the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D. Both will be available at some point in the first quarter of 2025.

Both processors include additional CPU cores compared to the 9800X3D that launched in November. The 9900X3D includes 12 Zen 5 CPU cores with a maximum clock speed of 5.5 GHz, and the 9950X3D includes 16 cores with a maximum clock speed of 5.7 GHz. Both include 64MB of extra L3 cache compared to the regular 9900X and 9950X, for a total cache of 144MB and 140MB, respectively; games in particular tend to benefit disproportionately from this extra cache memory.

But the 9950X3D and 9900X3D aren't being targeted at people who build PCs primarily to game—the company says their game performance is usually within 1 percent of the 9800X3D. These processors are for people who want peak game performance when they're playing something but also need lots of CPU cores for chewing on CPU-heavy workloads during the workday.

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Nearly two years ago, AMD announced its first Ryzen Z1 processors. These were essentially the same silicon that AMD was putting in high-end thin-and-light laptops but tuned specifically for handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally X. As part of its CES announcements today, AMD is refreshing that lineup with three processors, all slated for an undisclosed date in the first quarter of 2025.

Although they're all part of the "Ryzen Z2" family, each of these three chips is actually much different under the hood, and some of them are newer than others.

The Ryzen Z2 Extreme is what you'd expect from a refresh: a straightforward upgrade to both the CPU and GPU architectures of the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. Based on the same "Strix Point" architecture as the Ryzen AI 300 laptop processors, the Z2 Extreme includes eight CPU cores (three high-performance Zen 5 cores, five smaller and efficiency-optimized Zen 5C cores) and an unnamed RDNA 3.5 GPU with 16 of AMD's compute units (CUs). These should both provide small bumps to CPU and GPU performance relative to the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, which used eight Zen 4 CPU cores and 12 RDNA 3 GPU cores.

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After ditching the traditional Dell XPS laptop look in favor of the polarizing design of the XPS 13 Plus released in 2022, Dell is killing the XPS branding that has become a mainstay for people seeking a sleek, respectable, well-priced PC.

This means that there won't be any more Dell XPS clamshell ultralight laptops, 2-in-1 laptops, or desktops. Dell is also killing its Latitude, Inspiron, and Precision branding, it announced today.

Moving forward, Dell computers will have either just Dell branding, which Dell’s announcement today described as “designed for play, school, and work,” Dell Pro branding “for professional-grade productivity,” or be Dell Pro Max products, which are “designed for maximum performance." Dell will release Dell and Dell Pro-branded displays, accessories, and "services," it said. The Pro Max line will feature laptops and desktop workstations with professional-grade GPU capabilities as well as a new thermal design.

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Nvidia is widely expected to announce specs, pricing, and availability information for the first few cards in the new RTX 50 series at its CES keynote later today. AMD isn't ready to get as specific about its next-generation graphics lineup yet, but the company shared a few morsels today about its next-generation RDNA 4 graphics architecture and its 9000-series graphics cards.

AMD mentioned that RDNA 4 cards were on track to launch in early 2025 during a recent earnings call, acknowledging that shipments of current-generation RX 7000-series cards were already slowing down. CEO Lisa Su said then that the architecture would include "significantly higher ray-tracing performance" as well as "new AI capabilities."

AMD's RDNA 4 launch will begin with the 9070 XT and 9070, which are both being positioned as upper-midrange GPUs like the RTX 4070 series. Credit: AMD

The preview the company is providing today provides few details beyond those surface-level proclamations. The compute units will be "optimized," AI compute will be "supercharged," ray-tracing will be "improved," and media encoding quality will be "better," but AMD isn't providing hard numbers for anything at this point. The RDNA 4 launch will begin with the Radeon RX 9070 XT and 9070 at some point in Q1 of 2025, and AMD will provide more information "later in the quarter."

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We've all had a good seven years to figure out why our interconnected devices refused to work properly with the HDMI 2.1 specification. The HDMI Forum announced at CES today that it's time to start considering new headaches. HDMI 2.2 will require new cables for full compatibility, but it has the same physical connectors. Tiny QR codes are suggested to help with that, however.

The new specification is named HDMI 2.2, but compatible cables will carry an "Ultra96" marker to indicate that they can carry 96GBps, double the 48 of HDMI 2.1b. The Forum anticipates this will result in higher resolutions and refresh rates and a "next-gen HDMI Fixed Rate Link." The Forum cited "AR/VR/MR, spatial reality, and light field displays" as benefiting from increased bandwidth, along with medical imaging and machine vision.

A bit closer to home, the HDMI 2.2 specification also includes "Latency Indication Protocol" (LIP), which can help improve audio and video synchronization. This should matter most in "multi-hop" systems, such as home theater setups with soundbars or receivers. Illustrations offered by the Forum show LIP working to correct delays on headphones, soundbars connected through ARC or eARC, and mixed systems where some components may be connected to a TV, while others go straight into the receiver.

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On Sunday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offered two eye-catching predictions about the near-future of artificial intelligence. In a post titled "Reflections" on his personal blog, Altman wrote, "We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it." He added, "We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents 'join the workforce' and materially change the output of companies."

Both statements are notable coming from Altman, who has served as the leader of OpenAI during the rise of mainstream generative AI products such as ChatGPT. AI agents are the latest marketing trend in AI, allowing AI models to take action on a user's behalf. However, critics of the company and Altman immediately took aim at the statements on social media.

"We are now confident that we can spin bullshit at unprecedented levels, and get away with it," wrote frequent OpenAI critic Gary Marcus in response to Altman's post. "So we now aspire to aim beyond that, to hype in purest sense of that word. We love our products, but we are here for the glorious next rounds of funding. With infinite funding, we can control the universe."

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