Microsoft is accusing three individuals of running a "hacking-as-a-service" scheme that was designed to allow the creation of harmful and illicit content using the company’s platform for AI-generated content.

The foreign-based defendants developed tools specifically designed to bypass safety guardrails Microsoft has erected to prevent the creation of harmful content through its generative AI services, said Steven Masada, the assistant general counsel for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. They then compromised the legitimate accounts of paying customers. They combined those two things to create a fee-based platform people could use.

A sophisticated scheme

Microsoft is also suing seven individuals it says were customers of the service. All 10 defendants were named John Doe because Microsoft doesn’t know their identity.

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The US health department on Friday declared a public health emergency for California in response to devastating wildfires in the Los Angeles area that have so far killed 10 people and destroyed more than 10,000 structures.

As of Friday morning, 153,000 residents are under evacuation orders, and an additional 166,800 are under evacuation warnings, according to local reports.

Wildfires pose numerous health risks, including exposure to extreme heat, burns, harmful air pollution, and emotional distress.

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Meta has reportedly ended diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that influenced staff hiring and training, as well as vendor decisions, effective immediately.

According to an internal memo viewed by Axios and verified by Ars, Meta's vice president of human resources, Janelle Gale, told Meta employees that the shift was due to "legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing."

It's another move by Meta that some view as part of the company's larger effort to align with the incoming Trump administration's politics. In December, Donald Trump promised to crack down on DEI initiatives at companies and on college campuses, The Guardian reported.

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The Consumer Electronics Show is a reliable source of announcements about iterative updates to PCs and PC components. A few of those announcements are significant enough in some way that they break through all that noise—Nvidia's RTX 50-series GPUs and their lofty promises about AI-generated frames did that this year, as did Dell's decision to kill multiple decades-old PC brands and replace them with a bland series of "Pro/Premium/Plus" tiers.

But CES is also a place where PC companies and accessory makers get a little weird, taking some bigger (and occasionally questionable) swings alongside a big batch of more predictable incremental refreshes. As we've covered the show from afar this year, here are some of the more notable things we've seen.

Put an E-Ink screen on it: Asus NUC 14 Pro AI+

The NUC 14 Pro AI+ finds a way to combine E-Ink, AI, and turn-of-the-millennium translucent plastic into a single device. Credit: Asus

The strangest CES PCs are usually the ones that try to pull away from "a single screen attached to a keyboard" in some way. Sometimes, those PCs have a second screen stashed somewhere; sometimes, they have a screen that stretches; sometimes, they get rid of the keyboard part and extend the screen down where you expect that keyboard to be.

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Welcome to Edition 7.26 of the Rocket Report! Let's pause and reflect on how far the rocket business has come in the last 10 years. On this date in 2015, SpaceX made the first attempt to land a Falcon 9 booster on a drone ship positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. Not surprisingly, the rocket crash-landed. In less than a year and a half, though, SpaceX successfully landed reusable Falcon 9 boosters onshore and offshore, and now has done it nearly 400 times. That was remarkable enough, but we're in a new era now. Within a few days, we could see SpaceX catch its second Super Heavy booster and Blue Origin land its first New Glenn rocket on an offshore platform. Extraordinary.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Our annual ranking of the top 10 US launch companies. You can easily guess who made the top of the list: the company that launched Falcon rockets 134 times in 2024 and launched the most powerful and largest rocket ever built on four test flights, each accomplishing more than the last. The combined 138 launches is more than NASA flew the Space Shuttle over three decades. SpaceX will aim to launch even more often in 2025. These missions have far-reaching impacts, supporting Internet coverage for consumers worldwide, launching payloads for NASA and the US military, and testing technology that will take humans back to the Moon and, someday, Mars.

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The GNU General Public License (GPL) and its "Lesser" version (LGPL) are widely known and used. Still, every so often, a networking hardware maker has to get sued to make sure everyone knows how it works.

The latest such router company to face legal repercussions is AVM, the Berlin-based maker of the most popular home networking products in Germany. Sebastian Steck, a German software developer, bought an AVM Fritz!Box 4020 (PDF) and, being a certain type, requested the source code that had been used to generate certain versions of the firmware on it.

According to Steck's complaint (translated to English and provided in PDF by the Software Freedom Conservancy, or SFC), he needed this code to recompile a networking library and add some logging to "determine which programs on the Fritz!Box establish connections to servers on the Internet and which data they send." But Steck was also concerned about AVM's adherence to GPL 2.0 and LGPL 2.1 licenses, under which its FRITZ!OS and various libraries were licensed. The SFC states that it provided a grant to Steck to pursue the matter.

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When an 84-year-old man in Hong Kong was admitted to a hospital for a condition related to an enlarged prostate, doctors noticed something else about him—he was oddly gray, according to a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

His skin, particularly his face, had an ashen appearance. His fingernails and the whites of his eyes had become silvery. When doctors took a skin biopsy, they could see tiny, dark granules sitting in the fibers of his skin, in his blood vessels, in the membranes of his sweat glands, and in his hair follicles.

A blood test made clear what the problem was: the concentration of silver in his serum was 423 nmol/L, over 40 times the reference level for a normal result, which is less than 10 nmol/L. The man was diagnosed with a rare case of generalized argyria, a buildup of silver in the body's tissue that causes a blueish-gray discoloration—which is generally permanent.

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A British judge ruled against a man who wants to excavate a landfill where he says a hard drive with access to thousands of bitcoins was mistakenly dumped over 11 years ago.

Since 2013, James Howells has been hoping to recover a laptop hard drive that he says contains the private key for cryptocurrency which he says he mined in 2009. We wrote about it at the time, noting that the value of a bitcoin had just passed $1,000, making 7,500 bitcoins worth $7.5 million.

The alleged number of bitcoins has changed a bit, with Howells now saying he lost 8,000 bitcoins. The bitcoin price exceeded $100,000 last month and was worth over $95,636 as of this writing, or $765 million for 8,000 bitcoins.

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Over the last 24 hours or so, the major organizations that keep track of global temperatures have released figures for 2024, and all of them agree: 2024 was the warmest year yet recorded, joining 2023 as an unusual outlier in terms of how rapidly things heated up. At least two of the organizations, the European Union's Copernicus and Berkeley Earth, place the year at about 1.6° C above pre-industrial temperatures, marking the first time that the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5° has been exceeded.

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both place the mark at slightly below 1.5° C over pre-industrial temperatures (as defined by the 1850–1900 average). However, that difference largely reflects the uncertainties in measuring temperatures during that period rather than disagreement over 2024.

It’s hot everywhere

2023 had set a temperature record largely due to a switch to El Niño conditions midway through the year, which made the second half of the year exceptionally hot. It takes some time for that heat to make its way from the ocean into the atmosphere, so the streak of warm months continued into 2024, even as the Pacific switched into its cooler La Niña mode.

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On Wednesday, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its Future of Jobs Report 2025, with CNN immediately highlighting the finding that 40 percent of companies plan workforce reductions due to AI automation. But the report's broader analysis paints a far more nuanced picture than CNN's headline suggests: It finds that AI could create 170 million new jobs globally while eliminating 92 million positions, resulting in a net increase of 78 million jobs by 2030.

"Half of employers plan to re-orient their business in response to AI," writes the WEF in the report. "Two-thirds plan to hire talent with specific AI skills, while 40% anticipate reducing their workforce where AI can automate tasks."

The survey collected data from 1,000 companies that employ 14 million workers globally. The WEF conducts its employment analysis every two years to help policymakers, business leaders, and workers make decisions about hiring trends.

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OpenAI says it has cut off API access to an engineer whose video of a motorized sentry gun controlled by ChatGPT-powered commands has set off a viral firestorm of concerns about AI-powered weapons.

An engineer going by the handle sts_3d started posting videos of a motorized, auto-rotating swivel chair project in August. By November, that same assembly appeared to seamlessly morph into the basis for a sentry gun that could quickly rotate to arbitrary angles and activate a servo to fire precisely aimed projectiles (though only blanks and simulated lasers are shown being fired in his videos).

Earlier this week, though, sts_3d started getting wider attention for a new video showing the sentry gun's integration with OpenAI's real-time API. In the video, the gun uses that ChatGPT integration to aim and fire based on spoken commands from sts_3d and even responds in a chirpy voice afterward.

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Yesterday, Tesla revealed a facelift for its bestselling Model Y crossover. Or at least it did if you live in China—customers in the US and Europe will need to continue to wait for the revamped electric vehicle.

Better efficiency was a goal—in the past, Tesla simply ignored complaints over its exaggerated range claims, but now it says the Model Y, codenamed "Juniper," has updated suspension, wheels, and tires that "make the driving experience smoother and quieter."

Tesla says that range has increased from 427 miles (688 km) to 446 miles (719 km), albeit under the Chinese efficiency testing regime, which produces very different numbers from the more realistic tests used by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

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It has been more than a week since reports first emerged about a "glowing ring of metal" that fell from the sky and crashed near a remote village in Kenya.

According to the Kenya Space Agency, the object weighed 1,100 pounds (500 kg) and had a diameter of more than 8 feet (2.4 meters) when measured after it landed on December 30. A couple of days later, the space agency confidently reported that the object was a piece of space debris, saying it was a ring that separated from a rocket. "Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans," the space agency told The New York Times.

Since those initial reports were published in Western media, a small band of dedicated space trackers have been using open source data to try to identify precisely which space object fell into Kenya. So far, they have not been able to identify the rocket launch to which the large ring can be attributed.

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Only 5 percent of US consumers want their next vehicle to be a battery electric vehicle, according to a new survey by Deloitte. The consulting company gathered data from more than 31,000 people across 30 countries as part of its 2025 Global Automotive Consumer Study, and some of the results are rather interesting, as they pertain to technologies like new powertrains, connectivity, and artificial intelligence.

Among US consumers, internal combustion engines (ICE) remain number one, with 62 percent indicating that their next car will not be electrified. Another 1 in 5 would like a hybrid for their next vehicle, with a further 6 percent desiring a plug-in hybrid. (The remaining survey respondents either did not know or wanted some other powertrain option.)

By contrast, only 38 percent of Chinese consumers want to stick with ICE; meanwhile, 27 percent of them want a BEV next. That's a far higher percentage than in other large nations—in Germany, only 14 percent want a BEV; in the UK and Canada, only 8 percent are BEV-bound; and in Japan, the number is a mere 3 percent.

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Venu Sports, the sports streaming app that Fox, Disney, and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) announced as part of a joint venture in February, will no longer launch, the three companies said today.

The app was supposed to give subscribers access to all three conglomerates' linear channels that show sports, including ABC, Fox, ESPN, FS1, and TruTV. Original content wasn’t expected to launch with the app, but the joint multichannel video programming distributor was expected to represent about 85 percent of the US sports rights market. The app was planned to cost $43 per month.

In a joint statement shared today, the companies said:

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A lawyer for Elon Musk has called on the California and Delaware attorneys general to force OpenAI to auction off a large stake in its business, intensifying a bitter fight with the company’s chief executive Sam Altman.

In a letter to the states’ top law officers seen by the Financial Times, Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff said he was writing on behalf of big artificial intelligence investors who wanted to participate in an open and competitive bidding process for the OpenAI stake.

OpenAI had no plans for such an auction, according to a person with knowledge of the ChatGPT-maker’s thinking. Musk’s camp simply “want more chaos,” they added.

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In April last year, the Environmental Protection Agency released its latest attempt to regulate the carbon emissions of power plants under the Clean Air Act. It's something the EPA has been required to do since a 2007 Supreme Court decision that settled a case that started during the Clinton administration. The latest effort seemed like the most aggressive yet, forcing coal plants to retire or install carbon capture equipment and making it difficult for some natural gas plants to operate without capturing carbon or burning green hydrogen.

Yet, according to a new analysis published in Thursday's edition of Science, they wouldn't likely have a dramatic effect on the US's future emissions even if they were to survive a court challenge. Instead, the analysis suggests the rules serve more like a backstop to prevent other policy changes and increased demand from countering the progress that would otherwise be made. This is just as well, given that the rules are inevitably going to be eliminated by the incoming Trump administration.

A long time coming

The net result of a number of Supreme Court decisions is that greenhouse gasses are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and the EPA needed to determine whether they posed a threat to people. George W. Bush's EPA dutifully performed that analysis but sat on the results until its second term ended, leaving it to the Obama administration to reach the same conclusion. The EPA went on to formulate rules for limiting carbon emissions on a state-by-state basis, but these were rapidly made irrelevant because renewable power and natural gas began displacing coal even without the EPA's encouragement.

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At the end of 2024, a US court authorized the Department of Justice to sell 69,370 bitcoins from "the largest cryptocurrency seizure in history."

At bitcoin's current price, just under $92,000, these bitcoins are worth nearly $6.4 billion, and crypto outlets are reporting that DOJ officials have said they're planning to proceed with selling off the assets consistent with the court's order. The DOJ had reportedly argued that bitcoin's price volatility was a pressing reason to push for permission for the sale.

Ars has reached out to the DOJ for comment and will update the story with any new information regarding next steps.

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More than 130,000 residents in Southern California face the catastrophic loss of property, and possibly life, as a series of wildfires have brought devastation to the region this week.

The most notable fire developed late Monday or early Tuesday in the Santa Monica Mountains, to the north of Los Angeles, and quickly spread to threaten the Pacific Palisades neighborhood. This fire has already become the most destructive fire in the history of the Los Angeles region, and by some estimates, it may become the costliest wildfire of all time, anywhere in the world.

Several additional wildfires have broken out in the vicinity of Los Angeles, and firefighters there have struggled to contain the multiple outbreaks, including the ongoing Palisades fire. To date, more than 2,000 structures have been burned and that total will assuredly increase. Ongoing, on-the-ground coverage is available from the Los Angeles Times, which has removed its paywall around fire-related news for now.

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Networks protected by Ivanti VPNs are under active attack by well-resourced hackers who are exploiting a critical vulnerability that gives them complete control over the network-connected devices.

Hardware maker Ivanti disclosed the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-0282, on Wednesday and warned that it was under active exploitation against some customers. The vulnerability, which is being exploited to allow hackers to execute malicious code with no authentication required, is present in the company’s Connect Secure VPN, and Policy Secure & ZTA Gateways. Ivanti released a security patch at the same time. It upgrades Connect Secure devices to version 22.7R2.5.

Well-written, multifaceted

According to Google-owned security provider Mandiant, the vulnerability has been actively exploited against “multiple compromised Ivanti Connect Secure appliances” since mid-december December, roughly three weeks before the then zero-day came to light. After exploiting the vulnerability, the attackers go on to install two never-before-seen malware packages, tracked under the names DRYHOOK and PHASEJAM on some of the compromised devices.

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