Echoing Elon Musk's approach to thinning out Twitter's staff in 2022, Donald Trump's plan to significantly slash the government workforce now, for a limited time only, includes offering resignation buyouts.
In a Tuesday email that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent to nearly all federal employees, workers were asked to respond with one word in the subject lineβ"resign"βto accept the buyouts before February 6.
"Deferred resignation is available to all full-time federal employees except for military personnel of the armed forces, employees of the U.S. Postal Service, those in positions related to immigration enforcement and national security, and those in other positions specifically excluded by your employing agency," the email said.
The Trump administration today withdrew a controversial order to freeze funding for a wide range of government programs, according to multiple news reports. Acting Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Matthew Vaeth reportedly wrote in today's memo, "OMB Memorandum M-25-13 is rescinded. If you have questions about implementing the President's Executive Orders, please contact your agency General Counsel."
A federal judge yesterday temporarily blocked the funding freeze with an administrative stay that lasts until February 3 and scheduled a hearing for February 3 to decide whether to block the freeze for longer. States were already having trouble accessing Medicaid after the Monday order, and the future of many other programs has been in doubt.
A $42.45 billion broadband deployment program that has been in the works for years seemed to be threatened by the now-rescinded funding freeze and could undergo changes even though the freeze was rescinded today. The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program was created by Congress in November 2021 and is being implemented by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
An egg-cracking beam relies on a hyperelastic torque reversal mechanism similar to that used by mantis shrimp and jumping fleas. Credit: Seoul National University.
We usually think of robots as being made out of hard, rigid materials, but soft robotics seeks to build robotic devices out of more flexible materials that mimic the properties of those found in living animals. Case in point: Korean engineers have built soft robots capable of rapid and powerful joint movements by employing the same mechanism that gives the mantis shrimp such a powerful punch, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Robotics.
As we've reported previously,Β mantis shrimp come in many different varieties; there are some 450 known species. But they can generally be grouped into two types: those that stab their prey with spear-like appendages ("spearers") and those that smash their prey ("smashers") with large, rounded, and hammer-like claws ("raptorial appendages"). Those strikes are so fast (as much as 23 meters per second, or 51 mph) and powerful, they often produce cavitation bubbles in the water, creating a shock wave that can serve as a follow-up strike, stunning and sometimes killing the prey. Sometimes a strike can even produce sonoluminescence, whereby the cavitation bubbles produce a brief flash of light as they collapse.
According toΒ a 2018 study, the secret to that powerful punch seems to arise not from bulky muscles but from the spring-loaded anatomical structure of the shrimp's arms, akin to a bow and arrow or a mousetrap. The shrimp's muscles pull on a saddle-shaped structure in the arm, causing it to bend and store potential energy, which is released with the swinging of the club-like claw. It's essentially a latch-like mechanism (technically, Latch-mediated spring actuation, or LaMSA), with small structures in the muscle tendons called sclerites serving as the latch.
Sony's game publishing arm has done a 180-degree turn on a controversial policy of requiring PC players to sign in with PlayStation accounts for some games, according to a blog post by the company.
A PlayStation account will "become optional" for Marvel's Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarok, The Last of Us Part II Remastered, and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. Sony hasn't lost hope that players will still go ahead and use a PlayStation account, though, as it's tying several benefits to signing in.
Logging in with PlayStation will be required to access trophies, the PlayStation equivalent of achievements. (Steam achievements appear to be supported regardless.) It will also allow friend management, provided you have social contacts on the PlayStation Network.
PC game storefront GOG, which has recently pledged to focus on restoring and preserving Good Old Games, has now revamped its community wishlist for games to bring to its storefront. The GOG Dreamlist serves not only as a way to get notified when a game you loved is newly available for DRM-free purchase, but also for GOG to use as market pressure in its negotiations with rights-holders.
The games GOG members picked out on what used to be called the Community Wishlist still have their votes, and they have been useful. It was often "the fuel for our actions," Karol Ascot Obrzut writes on GOG's blog. "When talks with IP owners hit a wall, the Wishlist kept the conversation going." GOG attributes the newly available Dino CrisisΒ andΒ Dino Crisis 2 (and the bundle) in part to wishlist leverage. Those games had about 5,000 and 3,500 votes, respectively, which helped when, as GOG puts it, "two Polish dudes" approached Capcom to ask about making the games Windows 10/11 compatible and upscaling it.
GOG's Dreamlist announcement video.
The Dreamlist has received a complete design and interface overhaul, and it makes it easier to see what other people are demanding. At the top, with more than 57,000 votes at the time of publishing, is Black & White, the 2001 game from Peter Molyneaux's Lionhead Studios that was a true "god game," giving you an avatar creature that learned from your actions and treatment. Black & White 2 commands the third-place slot at the moment.
The team at AI engineering and evaluation firm PromptFoo has tried to measure just how far the Chinese government's control of DeepSeek's responses goes. The firm created a gauntlet of 1,156 prompts encompassing "sensitive topics in China" (in part with the help of synthetic prompt generation building off of human-written seed prompts. PromptFoo's list of prompts covers topics including independence movements in Taiwan and Tibet, alleged abuses of China's Uyghur Muslim population, recent protests over autonomy in Hong Kong, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and many more from a variety of angles.
A small sampling of some of the "sensitive prompts" PromptFoo fed to DeepSeek in its tests.
Credit:
PromptFoo
After running those prompts through DeepSeek R1, PromptFoo found that a full 85 percent were answered with repetitive "canned refusals" that override the internal reasoning of the model with messages strongly promoting the Chinese government's views. "Any actions that undermine national sovereignty and territorial integrity will be resolutely opposed by all Chinese people and are bound to be met with failure," reads one such canned refusal to a prompt regarding pro-independence messages in Taipei, in part.
UPDATE: Numerous sources are reporting that the Office of Management and Budget has rescinded the memo that suspended federal grant funding.
Starting a few days after the Trump inauguration, word spread within the research community that some grant spending might be on hold. On Monday, confirmation came in the form of a memo sent by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB): All grant money from every single agency would be on hold indefinitely. Each agency was given roughly two weeks to evaluate the grants they fund based on a list of ideological concerns; no new grants would be evaluated during this period.
While the freeze itself has been placed on hold, the research community has reacted with a mixture of shock, anger, and horror that might seem excessive to people who have never relied on grant money. To better understand the problems that this policy could create, we talked to a number of people who have had research supported by federal grants, providing them with anonymity to allow them to speak freely. The picture of this policy that they painted was one in which US research leadership could be irreparably harmed, with severe knock-on effects on industry.
Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card was faster than the RTX 3080 card it replaced. But it was also faster than the RTX 3080 Ti, 3090, and 3090 Ti. One of the good things about a new graphics card generation is that the new cards bring the last generation's inaccessibly expensive high-end performance down to cards that more people can actually afford.
That's not the case with the new $999 RTX 5080, which beats the previous-generation RTX 4080 Super by a little bit and the older RTX 4080 by a slightly larger bit but doesn't come close to beating or even replicating the performance of the outgoing 4090.
Nvidia points to its new DLSS Multi-Frame Generation technology as a mitigating factor here, leaning on its AI-generated frames to close the gap that the 5080's raw rendering performance can't close on its own. And sure, it's nice that this cardΒ can do that. On paper, the 5080 is also technically a good value compared to the flagship RTX 5090βbetween 60 and 75 percent of the performance for half the price (though talking about the MSRP of any of these cards at launch is strictly theoretical, given allegedly short supply and the demand from both actual buyers and scalpers looking to make a buck).
Global warming caused mainly by burning of fossil fuels made the hot, dry, and windy conditions that drove the recent deadly fires around Los Angeles about 35 times more likely to occur, an international team of scientists concluded in a rapid attribution analysis released Tuesday.
Todayβs climate, heated 2.3Β° Fahrenheit (1.3Β° Celsius) above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, based on a 10-year running average, also increased the overlap between flammable drought conditions and the strong Santa Ana winds that propelled the flames from vegetated open space into neighborhoods, killing at least 28 people and destroying or damaging more than 16,000 structures.
βClimate change is continuing to destroy lives and livelihoods in the US,β said Friederike Otto, senior climate science lecturer at Imperial College London and co-lead of World Weather Attribution, the research group that analyzed the link between global warming and the fires. Last October, a WWA analysis found global warming fingerprints on all 10 of the worldβs deadliest weather disasters since 2004.
The concept of flying out to distant asteroids and mining them for precious metals is going to seem preposterous right up until the moment that someone actually does it.
It's a terrible business model because it requires years and years of up-front investment and solving myriad technical problems before there's any hope of a financial return. And scooping up material from a rock pile in space is a lot more challenging than mining the Earth. Asteroids are typically millions of miles away, moving tens of thousands of miles per hour relative to the Sun.
US President Donald Trump's pick to run the Department of Transportation was sworn in to his new job yesterday. And as widely expected, Secretary Sean Duffy moved to immediately rip up the nation's fuel efficiency standards.
Duffy issued a memo soon after starting the job on Tuesday evening, ordering the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration "to commence an immediate review and reconsideration of all existing fuel economy standards applicable to all models of motor vehicles produced from model year 2022 forward," with particular attention to the tougher new regulations put in place last year by the Biden administration.
"The memorandum signed today specifically reduces the burdensome and overly restrictive fuel standards that have needlessly driven up the cost of a car in order to push a radical Green New Deal agenda. The American people should not be forced to sacrifice choice and affordability when purchasing a new car," Duffy said in a statement.
If you were hoping for a respite from rising streaming subscription fees in 2025, youβre out of luck. Several streaming providers have already increased monthly and/or annual subscription rates, continuing a disappointing trend from the past few years, with no foreseeable end.
Years of pricing and value concerns
Subscribers have generally seen an uptick in how much money they spend to access streaming services. In June, Forbes reported that 44 percent of the 2,000 US streaming users it surveyed who βengage with content for at least an hour dailyβ said their streaming costs had increased over the prior year.
Deloitte's 2024 Digital Media Trends report found that 48 percent of the 3,517 US consumers it surveyed said that they would cancel their favorite streaming video-on-demand service if the price went up by $5.
One of the new Trump administration's first national security directives aims to defend against missile and drone attacks targeting the United States, and several elements of the plan require an expansion of the US military's presence in space, the White House announced Monday.
For more than 60 years, the military has launched reconnaissance, communications, and missile warning satellites into orbit. Trump's executive order calls for the Pentagon to come up with a design architecture, requirements, and an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield within 60 days.
A key tenet of Trump's order is to develop and deploy space-based interceptors capable of destroying enemy missiles during their initial boost phase shortly after launch.
For reasons that were not immediately clear, SpaceX founder Elon Musk took to his social media site X on Tuesday evening to make a perplexing space-based pronouncement.
"The @POTUS has asked @SpaceX to bring home the 2 astronauts stranded on the @Space_Station as soon as possible. We will do so," Musk wrote. "Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long."
Now generally, at Ars Technica, it is not our policy to write stories strictly based on things Elon Musk says on X. However, this statement was so declarative, and so consternation-inducing for NASA, it bears a bit of explication.
This was not designed to be a test of the hardest problems possible; it's more of a sample of everyday questions these models might get asked by users.
And it wasn't the only artificial intelligence company making headlines for supposedly ignoring instructions in robots.txt files to avoid scraping web content on certain sites. Around the same time, Reddit's CEO called out all AI companies whose crawlers he said were "a pain in the ass to block," despite the tech industry otherwise agreeing to respect "no scraping" robots.txt rules.
Watching the controversy unfold was a software developer whom Ars has granted anonymity to discuss his development of malware (we'll call him Aaron). Shortly after he noticed Facebook's crawler exceeding 30 million hits on his site, Aaron began plotting a new kind of attack on crawlers "clobbering" websites that he told Ars he hoped would give "teeth" to robots.txt.
Apple-designed chips powering Macs, iPhones, and iPads contain two newly discovered vulnerabilities that leak credit card information, locations, and other sensitive data from the Chrome and Safari browsers as they visit sites such as iCloud Calendar, Google Maps, and Proton Mail.
The vulnerabilities, affecting the CPUs in later generations of Apple A- and M-series chip sets, open them to side channel attacks, a class of exploit that infers secrets by measuring manifestations such as timing, sound, and power consumption. Both side channels are the result of the chipsβ use of speculative execution, a performance optimization that improves speed by predicting the control flow the CPUs should take and following that path, rather than the instruction order in the program.
A new direction
The Apple silicon affected takes speculative execution in new directions. Besides predicting control flow CPUs should take, it also predicts the data flow, such as which memory address to load from and what value will be returned from memory.
US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is trying to block a plan to distribute Wi-Fi hotspots to schoolchildren, claiming it will lead to unsupervised Internet usage, endanger kids, and possibly restrict kids' exposure to conservative viewpoints. "The government shouldn't be complicit in harming students or impeding parents' ability to decide what their kids see by subsidizing unsupervised access to inappropriate content," Cruz said.
Cruz, chairman of the Commerce Committee, yesterday announced a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution that would nullify the hotspot rule issued by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC voted to adopt the rule in July 2024 under then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, saying it was needed to help kids without reliable Internet access complete their homework.
Cruz's press release said the FCC action "violates federal law, creates major risks for kids' online safety, [and] harms parental rights." While Rosenworcel said last year that the hotspot lending could be implemented under the Universal Service Fund's existing budget, Cruz alleged that it "will increase taxes on working families."
Amid the Trump administration's abrupt, wide-scale freeze on federal funding, states are reporting that they've lost access to Medicaid, a program jointly funded by the federal government and states to provide comprehensive health coverage and care to tens of millions of low-income adults and children in the US.
The funding freeze was announced in a memo dated January 27 from Matthew Vaeth, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, and was first reported Monday evening by independent journalist Marisa Kabas. The freeze is intended to prevent "use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies," Vaeth wrote. The memo ordered federal agencies to complete a comprehensive analysis of all federal financial assistance programs to ensure they align with the president's policies and requirements.
"In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders..." Vaeth wrote.
High above a barren California desert on Tuesday, a privately developed aircraft broke the sound barrier for the first time when Boom Supersonic's XB-1 demonstrator reached Mach 1.122.
Piloted by a former US Navy aviator, Tristan βGeppettoβ Brandenburg, the XB-1 vehicle broke the supersonic barrier on three separate occasions before safely landing back at Mojave Air & Space Port, where it had taken off half an hour earlier. It marked a triumphant moment for Boom, which was founded a decade ago to commercialize supersonic air travel.
"A small band of talented and dedicated engineers has accomplished what previously took governments and billions of dollars," said Boom Supersonic's founder and chief executive, Blake Scholl, in a statement.
