A federal judge this week rejected Google's motion to throw out a class-action lawsuit alleging that it invaded the privacy of users who opted out of functionality that records a users' web and app activities. A jury trial is scheduled for August 2025 in US District Court in San Francisco.

The lawsuit concerns Google's Web & App Activity (WAA) settings, with the lead plaintiff representing two subclasses of people with Android and non-Android phones who opted out of tracking. "The WAA button is a Google account setting that purports to give users privacy control of Google's data logging of the user's web app and activity, such as a user's searches and activity from other Google services, information associated with the user's activity, and information about the user's location and device," wrote US District Judge Richard Seeborg, the chief judge in the Northern District Of California.

Google says that Web & App Activity "saves your activity on Google sites and apps, including associated info like location, to give you faster searches, better recommendations, and more personalized experiences in Maps, Search, and other Google services." Google also has a supplemental Web App and Activity setting that the judge's ruling refers to as "(s)WAA."

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Most crossword puzzle fans have experienced that moment where, after a period of struggle on a particularly difficult puzzle, everything suddenly starts to come together, and they are able to fill in a bunch of squares correctly. Alexander Hartmann, a statistical physicist at the University of Oldenburg in Germany, had an intriguing insight when this happened while he was trying to solve a puzzle one day. According to his paper published in the journal Physical Review E, the crossword puzzle-solving process resembles a type of phase transition known as percolation—one that seems to be unique compared to standard percolation models.

Traditional mathematical models of percolation date back to the 1940s. Directed percolation is when the flow occurs in a specific direction, akin to how water moves through freshly ground coffee beans, flowing down in the direction of gravity. (In physical systems, percolation is one of the primary mechanisms behind the Brazil nut effect, along with convection.) Such models can also be applicable to a wide range of large networked systems: power grids, financial markets, and social networks, for example.

Individual nodes in a random network start linking together, one by one, via short-range connections, until the number of connections reaches a critical threshold (tipping point). At that point, there is a phase shift in which the largest cluster of nodes grows rapidly, giving rise to more long-range connections, resulting in uber-connectivity. The likelihood of two clusters merging is proportional to their size, and once a large cluster forms, it dominates the networked system, absorbing smaller clusters.

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When X CEO Linda Yaccarino took the stage as a keynote speaker at CES 2025, she revealed that "90 percent of the advertisers" who boycotted X over brand safety concerns since Elon Musk's 2022 Twitter acquisition "are back on X."

Yaccarino did not go into any further detail to back up the data point, and X did not immediately respond to Ars' request to comment.

But Yaccarino's statistic seemed to bolster claims that X had made since Donald Trump's re-election that advertisers were flocking back to the platform, with some outlets reporting that brands hoped to win Musk's favor in light of his perceived influence over Trump by increasing spending on X.

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In the wake of the successful Nintendo Switch and Valve Steam Deck, we have seen a wave of PC-based, Android-based, and even FPGA-based handheld gaming systems that can sometimes be hard to tell apart. The upcoming Atari GameStation Go sets itself apart with what we're relatively sure is a first for portable gaming: built-in trackball, spinner, and number pad controls.

Gamers who cut their teeth after 1990 or so might not remember an era when arcade and home console games often relied on controls that went beyond the usual D-pad/joystick and action buttons. But there are plenty of classics from the early days of electronic gaming that just don't feel right unless you have a trackball (Centipede, Missile Command, Crystal Castles), spinner (Arkanoid, Tempest), or number pad (Star Raiders, Intellivision sports games). Many modern retro re-releases try to re-create these kinds of games with more standardized joystick and button controls, but the results can be limited at best and unplayable at worst.

The Atari GameStation Go, on the other hand, seems to be aiming for maximum retro authenticity by packing a whole host of control options into its $150, 7-inch display portable. While a prototype shell for the GameStation Go was briefly shown at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show a year ago, this year's CES is the official announcement party for a playable version of the GameStation Go.

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The Raspberry Pi foundation has spent the last year filling out the Pi 5 lineup—in August, we got a cheaper $50 version with 2GB of RAM, and in December, we got the Pi 500, a Pi-inside-a-keyboard intended specifically for general-purpose desktop use. Today, the Pi 5 board achieves what may be its final form: a version with 16GB of RAM, available for $120.

The 16GB version of the Pi 5 includes the revised "d0" stepping of the Pi 5's BCM2712 processor. For the Pi's purposes, this chip is functionally identical to the original version but uses slightly less power and runs slightly cooler because it cuts out silicon used for features that the Pi 5 didn't take advantage of.

Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton writes that the 16GB version of the Pi 5 is possible because of other tweaks made to the d0 stepping of the Pi 5's processor, plus an updated LPDDR4X chip from Micron that could fit eight 16 Gbit RAM dies inside a single package that could fit on the Pi 5's board.

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Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers sounds like a very niche local meetup, one with hats and T-shirts that barely fit the name. But it's really a "neutral space" for funding and support, corralling together some big names with a stake in the future of Chrome's open source roots, Chromium.

The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit started in 2000 that has grown to support a broader range of open source projects, spurred the initiative. In a press release, the Foundation states that the project will allow "industry leaders, academia, developers, and the broader open source community" to work on Chromium, with "much-needed funding and development support for open development of projects."

A few names you don't often see together are already on board: Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera. Krystian Kolondra, executive vice president of browsers at Opera, stated in a release that "as one of the major browsers contributing to the Chromium project," Opera would "look forward to collaborating with members of the project to foster this growth and keep building innovative and compelling products for all users."

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The Internet has become the most prevalent communications technology the world has ever seen. Though there are more fixed and mobile telephone connections, even they use Internet technology in their core. For all the many uses the Internet allows for today, its origins lie in the cold war and the need for a defense communications network that could survive a nuclear strike. But that defense communications network quickly became used for general communications and within only a few years of the first transmission, traffic on the predecessor to today’s Internet was already 75 percent email.

In the beginning

Arpanet was the vital precursor of today’s Internet, commissioned by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1969. In his interesting account of why Arpanet came about, Stephen Lukasic, director of DARPA from 1970–75, wrote that if its true nature and impact had been realized it would never have been permitted under the US government structure of the time. The concept for a decentralized communications technology that would survive a nuclear attack would have placed it outside DARPA’s remit (as defense communications specifically were assigned to a different agency), so the focus changed to how to connect computers together so that major applications could be run on the most appropriate system available.

This was in the era of time-sharing computers. Today’s familiar world of the ubiquitous “personal computer” on each desk was decades away. Computers of this time were generally very large, filling entire rooms, and comparatively rare. Users working at connected terminals would submit jobs to the computer that would allocate processing time for the job when available. The idea went that if these computers were networked together, an available remote computer could process a job even when the computers closer to the users were full. The resulting network was called Arpanet, and the first packets of data traversed the network in September 1969.

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Five years ago, a small company in Houston named Intuitive Machines had just 30 employees, a couple of 3D printers, and a few soldering irons.

Oh, and it had some big dreams. The company's founders wanted to open a business on the Moon.

On Wednesday morning, when I drove into the company's new headquarters at Spaceport Houston, there were no spaces to park in a lot filled with hundreds of cars. Inside, the offices were buzzing. And a large integration hangar was packed with hardware: two lunar landers, two lunar rover mock-ups, a hopper, and other spaceflight vehicles.

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The list of electric vehicles that qualify for the IRS clean vehicle tax credit has changed with the arrival of the new year. No longer linked to battery capacity, the credit of up to $7,500 is now tied to the sourcing of battery components—each year, an increasing amount must be extracted or refined in the US (or a free trade partner) to be eligible. The total number of eligible EVs has actually increased in 2025, from 24 last year to 27 this year, but a number of automakers' products have also dropped off the list in the process.

The $7,500 tax credit is split into two components. $3,750 is available if the battery components are made or assembled in the US. The other half now requires that 60 percent of the critical minerals in the battery—things like lithium, nickel, and so on—be extracted or refined in the US (or by a free trade partner). Last year, this threshold was 50 percent; next year, it will increase to 70 percent.

Additionally, national security concerns mean that no EV is eligible if any of its battery components are manufactured by a "foreign entity of concern," which means any company with direct links to the governments of China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia. While the latter three have no domestic EV production they're trying to sell in the US, that obviously does not apply to China, which heavily subsidizes its domestic car makers to allow them to export their vehicles at rock-bottom prices to undermine local industry in other regions.

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A sprawling 3,500-year-old fortress offers tantalizing clues about a culture that once dotted the southern Caucasus mountains with similar walled communities.

Archaeologists recently used a drone to map a sprawling 3,500-year-old fortress in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Georgia. The detailed aerial map offers some tantalizing clues about the ancient culture whose people built hundreds of similar fortresses in a mountainous region that spans the modern countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey. Based on their survey and excavations within the fortress walls, Cranfield University archaeologist Nathaniel Erb-Satullo and his colleagues suggest the fortified community may have been a place where nomadic herders converged during their yearly migration, but the evidence still leaves more questions than answers.

This map shows an aerial map of the ancient megafortress at Dmanisis Gora. Credit: Erb-Satullo et al. 2025

An abandoned ancient megafortress

The half-buried Bronze Age ruins of Dmanisis Gora perch on a windswept promontory a few kilometers away from a cave where Homo erectus (or a close relative) lived 1.8 million years ago. Deep, steep-sided gorges run along two sides of the promontory, and sometime between 1500 and 1000 BCE, people stacked boulders into a double layer of high, thick walls to block off the end of the plateau from the plains to the west. Sheltered between the 4-meter high, 2.5-meter wide walls and the 60-meter-deep gorges, people built dugout houses, then later aboveground stone ones, along with stone animal pens and other buildings.

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The people overseeing the security of Google’s Chrome browser explicitly forbid third-party extension developers from trying to manipulate how the browser extensions they submit are presented in the Chrome Web Store. The policy specifically calls out search-manipulating techniques such as listing multiple extensions that provide the same experience or plastering extension descriptions with loosely related or unrelated keywords.

On Wednesday, security and privacy researcher Wladimir Palant revealed that developers are flagrantly violating those terms in hundreds of extensions currently available for download from Google. As a result, searches for a particular term or terms can return extensions that are unrelated, inferior knockoffs, or carry out abusive tasks such as surreptitiously monetizing web searches, something Google expressly forbids.

Not looking? Don’t care? Both?

A search Wednesday morning in California for Norton Password Manager, for example, returned not only the official extension but three others, all of which are unrelated at best and potentially abusive at worst. The results may look different for searches at other times or from different locations.

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The Italian government is considering the purchase of satellite Internet services from SpaceX's Starlink constellation, and the potential deal has triggered controversy along political, economic, and spaceflight lines in Europe.

The story was initially broken by Bloomberg on Sunday, which reported that Italy is in "advanced talks" with SpaceX to purchase $1.6 billion worth of secure telecommunication services from SpaceX. The publication said an agreement, for which talks began in mid-2023, had been stalled until Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni visited President-elect Donald Trump in Florida recently.

This report set off a firestorm of responses that highlight the increasing sensitivity of European countries to partnering with SpaceX—the success of which has put serious pressure on Europe's launch industry—as well as the Trump administration and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

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It's pretty easy to see the problem here: The Internet is brimming with misinformation, and most large language models are trained on a massive body of text obtained from the Internet.

Ideally, having substantially higher volumes of accurate information might overwhelm the lies. But is that really the case? A new study by researchers at New York University examines how much medical information can be included in a large language model (LLM) training set before it spits out inaccurate answers. While the study doesn't identify a lower bound, it does show that by the time misinformation accounts for 0.001 percent of the training data, the resulting LLM is compromised.

While the paper is focused on the intentional "poisoning" of an LLM during training, it also has implications for the body of misinformation that's already online and part of the training set for existing LLMs, as well as the persistence of out-of-date information in validated medical databases.

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Just when you thought you had seen every possible Doom mod, two game developers released a free browser game that reimagines the first level of 1993's Doom as an art gallery, replacing demons with paintings and shotguns with wine glasses.

Doom: The Gallery Experience, created by Filippo Meozzi and Liam Stone, transforms the iconic E1M1 level into a virtual museum space where players guide a glasses-wearing Doomguy through halls of fine art as classical music plays in the background. The game links each displayed artwork to its corresponding page on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website.

"In this experience, you will be able to walk around and appreciate some fine art while sipping some wine and enjoying the complimentary hors d’oeuvres," write the developers on the game's itch.io page, "in the beautifully renovated and re-imagined E1M1 of id Software's DOOM (1993)."

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There's a good chance you've seen headlines about HMPV recently, with some touting "what you need to know" about the virus, aka human metapneumovirus. The answer is: not much.

It's a common, usually mild respiratory virus that circulates every year, blending into the throng of other seasonal respiratory illnesses that are often indistinguishable from one another. (The pack includes influenza virus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), adenovirus, parainfluenza virus, common human coronaviruses, bocavirus, rhinovirus, enteroviruses, and Mycoplasma pneumoniae, among others.) HMPV is in the same family of viruses as RSV.

As one viral disease epidemiologist at the US Centers for Disease Control summarized in 2016, it's usually "clinically indistinguishable" from other bog-standard respiratory illnesses, like seasonal flu, that cause cough, fever, and nasal congestion. For most, the infection is crummy but not worth a visit to a doctor. As such, testing for it is limited. But, like other common respiratory infections, it can be dangerous for children under age 5, older adults, and those with compromised immune systems. It was first identified in 2001, but it has likely been circulating since at least 1958.

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AT&T, following last year's embarrassing botched update that kicked every device off its wireless network and blocked over 92 million phone calls, is now promising full-day bill credits to mobile customers for future outages that last at least 60 minutes and meet certain other criteria. A similar promise is being made to fiber customers for unplanned outages lasting at least 20 minutes, but only if the customer uses an AT&T-provided gateway.

The "AT&T Guarantee" announced today has caveats that can make it possible for a disruption to not be covered. AT&T says the promised mobile bill credits are "for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers."

The full-day bill credits do not include a prorated amount for the taxes and fees imposed on a monthly bill. The "bill credit will be calculated using the daily rate customer is charged for wireless service only (excludes taxes, fees, device payments, and any add-on services," AT&T said. If an outage lasts more than 24 hours, a customer will receive another full-day bill credit for each additional day.

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This article is a summary of my personal experiences with using generative models while programming over the past year. It has not been a passive process. I have intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming to learn about them. The result has been that I now regularly use LLMs while working, and I consider their benefits to be net-positive on my productivity. (My attempts to go back to programming without them are unpleasant.)

Along the way, I have found oft-repeated steps that can be automated, and a few of us are working on building those into a tool specifically for Go programming: sketch.dev. It’s very early, but so far, the experience has been positive.

Background

I am typically curious about new technology. It took very little experimentation with LLMs for me to want to see if I could extract practical value. There is an allure to a technology that can (at least some of the time) craft sophisticated responses to challenging questions. It is even more exciting to watch a computer attempt to write a piece of a program as requested and make solid progress.

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For nearly four years, NASA's Perseverance rover has journeyed across an unexplored patch of land on Mars—once home to an ancient river delta—and collected a slew of rock samples sealed inside cigar-sized titanium tubes.

These tubes might contain tantalizing clues about past life on Mars, but NASA's ever-changing plans to bring them back to Earth are still unclear.

On Tuesday, NASA officials presented two options for retrieving and returning the samples gathered by the Perseverance rover. One alternative involves a conventional architecture reminiscent of past NASA Mars missions, relying on the "sky crane" landing system demonstrated on the agency's two most recent Mars rovers. The other option would be to outsource the lander to the space industry.

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Nintendo still isn't ready to officially reveal any details about the Switch 2 (beyond a brief mention of backward compatibility in November). But that hasn't stopped gaming accessory maker Genki from giving us one of the best looks yet at the size and shape of Nintendo's upcoming hardware, as well as a video glimpse of how the console's new Joy-Cons will attach to the base tablet.

Genki is reportedly using a scale 3D model of the Switch 2 to show off its console cases behind closed doors at the Consumer Electronics Show. A video from French tech site Numerama shows that 3D model dwarfing an original Switch model in both length and width.

VIDEO — La Nintendo Switch 2 en avant-première au #CES2025.

L'accessoiriste Genki indique posséder la vraie console et expose une maquette 3D + des accessoires.

Les détails ici : https://t.co/5LDlnR2zC1 pic.twitter.com/IJ6taQggIQ

— Numerama (@Numerama) January 8, 2025

In a longer write-up of Genki's Switch 2 mock-up, Numerama reports that Genki says its 3D model was derived from an actual Switch 2 console, not merely "3D blueprints." Genki's model also includes a second USB-C port atop the system, Numerama reports, as well as a mysterious C button underneath the home button on the right Joy-Con.

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In just 20 minutes this morning, an automated license-plate-recognition (ALPR) system in Nashville, Tennessee, captured photographs and detailed information from nearly 1,000 vehicles as they passed by. Among them: eight black Jeep Wranglers, six Honda Accords, an ambulance, and a yellow Ford Fiesta with a vanity plate.

This trove of real-time vehicle data, collected by one of Motorola’s ALPR systems, is meant to be accessible by law enforcement. However, a flaw discovered by a security researcher has exposed live video feeds and detailed records of passing vehicles, revealing the staggering scale of surveillance enabled by this widespread technology.

More than 150 Motorola ALPR cameras have exposed their video feeds and leaking data in recent months, according to security researcher Matt Brown, who first publicized the issues in a series of YouTube videos after buying an ALPR camera on eBay and reverse engineering it.

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