Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux has become an important tool for developers and power users since it was introduced in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update back in 2016, giving them access to a built-in Linux command line and Linux applications from within Windows.
The company has steadily improved WSL since then, improving performance, making it easier to install and use, and adding features like GPU and audio support. But today as part of its Build developer conference, Microsoft announced that it would be making almost all of WSL open source, closing the very first issue that the then-new WSL project attracted on Github in 2016.
"WSL could never have been what it is today without its community," writes Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Pierre Boulay in the company's blog post. "Weβve seen how much the community has contributed to WSL without access to the source code, and we canβt wait to see how WSL will evolve now that the community can make direct code contributions to the project."
It's shaping up to be a big year for telecom mergers, and it appears the Federal Communications Commission is eager to approve the dealsβas long as companies involved drop any DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies criticized by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. Verizon just got a big merger approved, and cable giant Charter is seeking permission to buy Cox.
The FCC on Friday announced approval of Verizon's purchase of Frontier, one day after Verizon committed to end DEI policies in a filing with the commission. Carr previously sent letters to Verizon and other companies alleging that their diversity policies are "invidious forms of discrimination" that violate federal law and threatened to block mergers pursued by firms that enforce such policies.
"Verizon has now agreed to end its DEI policies as specified in a new FCC filing," Carr wrote in a post on X. "These changes are effective immediately. A good step forward for equal opportunity, nondiscrimination, and the public interest."
Formula 1's busy 2025 schedule saw the sport return to its European heartland this past weekend. Italy has two races on the calendar this year, and this was the first, the (deep breath) "Formula 1 AWS Gran Premio Del Made in Italy e Dell'Emilia-Romagna," which took place at the scenic and historic (another deep breath) Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari, better known as Imola. It's another of F1's old-school circuits where overtaking is far from easy, particularly when the grid is as closely matched as it is. But Sunday's race was no snoozer, and for a couple of teams, there was a welcome change in form.
Red Bull was one. The team has looked a bit shambolic at times this season, with some wondering whether this change in form was the result of a number of high-profile staff departures toward the end of last season. Things looked pretty bleak during the first of three qualifying sessions, when Yuki Tsunoda got too aggressive with a curb and, rather than finding lap time, found himself in a violent crash that tore all four corners off the car and relegated him to starting the race last from the pit lane.
In the mood for a jauntily charming sci-fi comedy dripping with wry wit and an intriguing mystery? Check out Apple TV's Murderbot, based on Martha Wells' bestselling series of novels The Murderbot Diaries. It stars Alexander SkarsgΓ₯rd as the titular Murderbot, a rogue cyborg security (SEC) unit that gains autonomy and must learn to interact with humans while hiding its new capabilities.
(Some minor spoilers below, but no major reveals.)
There are seven books in Wells' series thus far. All are narrated by Murderbot, who is technically owned by a megacorporation but manages to hack and override its governor module. Rather than rising up and killing its former masters, Murderbot just goes about performing its security work, relieving the boredom by watching a lot of entertainment media; its favorite is a soap opera called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
There's a lot of matter around, which ensures that any antimatterΒ produced experiences a very short lifespan. Studying antimatter, therefore, has been extremely difficult. But that's changed a bit in recent years, as CERN has set up a facility that produces and traps antimatter, allowing forΒ extensive studiesΒ of itsΒ properties, includingΒ entire anti-atoms.
Unfortunately, the hardware used to capture antiprotons also produces interference that limits the precision with which measurements can be made. So CERN decided that it might be good to determine how to move the antimatter away from where it's produced. Since it was tackling that problem anyway, CERN decided to make a shipping container for antimatter, allowing it to be put on a truck and potentially taken to labs throughout Europe.
A shipping container for antimatter
The problem facing CERN comes from its own hardware. The antimatter it captures is produced by smashing a particle beam into a stationary target. As a result, all the anti-particles that come out of the debris carry a lot of energy. If you want to hold on to any of them, you have to slow them down, which is done using electromagnetic fields that can act on the charged antimatter particles. Unfortunately, as the team behind the new work notes, many of the measurements we'd like to do with the antimatter are "extremely sensitive to external magnetic field noise."
Thanks to our new global tariff war, the wild world of importing and exporting has been thrust into the forefront. There's a lot of logistics involved in keeping your local Walmart stocked and your Amazon Prime deliveries happening, and you might be surprised at how much of that world has already been automated.
While cars from autonomy providers like Waymo are still extremely rare in most stretches of the open road, the process of loading and unloading cargo has become almost entirely automated at some major ports around the world. Likewise, there's an increasing shift to electrify the various vehicles involved along the way, eliminating a significant source of global emissions.
But there's been one sticking point in this automated, electrified logistical dream: plugging in. The humble act of charging still happens via human hands, but that's changing. At a testing facility in Sweden, a company called Rocsys has demonstrated an automated charger that works with self-driving electric trucks from Einride in a hands-free and emissions-free partnership that could save time, money, and even lives.
There aren't any games quite like the Anno series, and based on some hands-on time at a recent press junket, I can say that the latest entry has the potential to be an appealing on-ramp for history buffs and strategy game fans who haven't explored the franchise beforeβprovided players approach it with a lot of patience.
The previous entry in the series, 2019's Anno 1800, was seen as something of a return to form by longtime franchise fans, who weren't as thrilled with the futuristic entries that preceded it. It reportedly reached 5 million players, which is quite a lot for a PC-focused strategy title, so 1800 was a popularization moment for the franchise, too.
Anno 117: Pax Romana, due later this year, aims to build on that momentum and turn the franchise into a crossover hit. While the Anno games have long been popular with a certain crowd (strategy gamers in Europe, and specifically Germany, where the games are developed), its addictive gameplay and top-tier presentation have the potential to appeal with even more people, provided publisher Ubisoft makes the right choices.
New Orleans police have reportedly spent years scanning live feeds of city streets and secretly using facial recognition to identify suspects in real timeβin seeming defiance of a city ordinance designed to prevent false arrests and protect citizens' civil rights.
A Washington Post investigation uncovered the dodgy practice, which relied on a private network of more than 200 cameras to automatically ping cops' phones when a possible match for a suspect was detected. Court records and public data suggest that these cameras "played a role in dozens of arrests," the Post found, but most uses were never disclosed in police reports.
That seems like a problem, the Post reported, since a 2022 city council ordinance required much more oversight for the tech. Rather than instantly detaining supposed suspects the second they pop up on live feeds, cops were only supposed to use the tech to find "specific suspects in their investigations of violent crimes," the Post reported. And in those limited cases, the cops were supposed to send images to a "fusion center," where at least two examiners "trained in identifying faces" using AI software had to agree on alleged matches before cops approached suspects.
After last month's bombshell legal ruling forcing Apple to allow the use of external payment processors for in-app purchases on iOS, Epic CEO and founder Tim Sweeney said Epic Games was "going to do everything we can to bring Fortnite back to the iOS App Store." That "everything" now includes a legal motion in the District Court of California seeking to force Apple to "accept any compliant version of Fortnite onto the US storefront of the App Store."
Apple formally rejected that submission on May 15, saying in a letter shared by Epic that it believes the recent court rulings "do not diminish Appleβs bases and legal right to have terminated Epic Gamesβ [iOS developer account]." Even under that new ruling, Apple notes, the 2020 "hotfix" allowing Epic Direct Payments inside the app rather than via an external storefront would still violate Apple's current lawful restrictions on such practices.
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
In 2013, a deep-sea mining company named UK Seabed Resources contracted marine biologist Diva Amon and other scientists from the University of Hawaii at Manoa to survey a section of the seafloor in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast swath of international waters located in the Pacific Ocean that spans around 2 million square miles between Hawaii and Mexico.
The area is known to have an abundant supply of rocky deposits the size of potatoes called polymetallic nodules. They are rich in metals like nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese, which have historically been used to make batteries and electric vehicles.
New episodes of season 2 of The Last of UsΒ are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who's played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't)Β will be talking about them here after they air. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviouslyΒ heavy spoilersΒ contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Kyle: Going from a sudden shot of beatific Pedro Pascal at the end of the last episode to a semi-related flashback with a young Joel Miller and his brother was certainly a choice. I almost respect how overtly they are just screwing with audience expectations here.
As for the opening flashback scene itself, I guess the message is "Hey, look at the generational trauma his family was dealing withβisn't it great he overcame that to love Ellie?" But I'm not sure I can draw a straight line from "he got beat by his dad" to "he condemned the entire human race for his surrogate daughter."
Andrew: I do not have the same problems you did with either the Joel pop-in at the end of the last episode or the flashback at the start of this episodeβlast week, the show was signaling "here comes Joel!" and this week the show is signaling "look, it's Joel!" Maybe I'm just responding to Tony Dalton as Joel's dad, who I know best as the charismatic lunatic Lalo Salamanca from Better Call Saul. I do agree that the throughline between these two events is shaky, though, and without the flashback to fill us in, the "I hope you can do a little better than me" sentiment feels like something way out of left field.
But I dunno, it's Joel week. Joel's back! This is the Duality of Joel: you can simultaneously think that he is horrible for failing a civilization-scale trolley problem when he killed a building full of Fireflies to save Ellie, and you can't help but be utterly charmed by Pedro Pascal enthusiastically describing the many ways to use a Dremel. (He's right! It's a versatile tool!)
Truly, there's pretty much nothing in this episode that we couldn't have inferred or guessed at based on the information the show has already made available to us. And I say this as a non-game-playerβI didn't need to see exactly how their relationship became as strained as it was by the beginning of the season to have some idea of why it happened, nor did I need to see The Porch Scene to understand that their bond nevertheless endured. But this is also the dynamic that everybody came to the show for last season, so I can only make myself complain about it to a point.
Kyle: It's true, Joel Week is a time worth celebrating. If I'm coming across as cranky about it at the outset, it's probably because this whole episode is a realization of what we're missing out on this season thanks to Joel's death.
As you said, a lot of this episode was filling in gaps that could well have been inferred from events we did see. But I would have easily taken a full season (or a full second game) of Ellie growing up and Joel dealing with Ellie growing up. You could throw in some zombie attacks or an overarching Big Bad enemy or something if you want, but the development of Joel and Ellie's relationship deserves more than just some condensed flashbacks.
"It works?!"
Credit:
Warner Bros. Discovery
Andrew: Yeah, it's hard not to be upset about the original sin of The Last of Us Part 2 which is (assuming it's like the show) that having some boring underbaked villain crawl out of the woodwork to kill the show's main character is kind of a cheap shot. Sure, you shock the hell out of viewers like me who didn't see it coming! But part of the reason I didn't see it coming is because if you kill Joel, you need to do a whole bunch of your show without Joel and why on Earth would you decide to do that?
To be clear, I don't mind this season so much, and I've found things to like about it, though Ellie does sometimes veer into being a protagonist so short-sighted and impulsive and occasionally just-plain-stupid that it's hard to be in her corner. But yeah, flashing back to a time just two months after the end of season 1 really does make you wonder, "Why couldn't the story just be this?"
Kyle: In the gaming space, I understand the desire to not have your sequel game be just "more of the same" from the last game. But I've always felt The Last of Us Part 2 veered too hard in the other direction and became something almost entirely unrecognizable from the original game I loved.
But let's focus on what we do get in this episode, which is an able recreation of my favorite moment from the second game, Ellie enjoying the heck out of a ruined science museum. The childlike wonder she shows here is a great respite from a lot of action-heavy scenes in the game, and I think it serves the same purpose here. It's also much more drawn out in the gameβI could have luxuriated in just this part of the flashback for an entire episode!
Andrew: The only thing that kept me from being fully on board with that scene was that I think Ellie was acting quite a bit younger than 16, with her pantomimed launch noises and flipping of switches, But I could believe that a kid who had such a rough and abbreviated childhood would have some fun sitting in an Apollo module. For someone with no memories of the pre-outbreak society, it must seem like science fiction, and the show gives us some lovely visuals to go with it.
The things I like best here are the little moments in between scenes rather than the parts where the show insists on showing us events that it had already alluded to in other episodes. What sticks with me the most, as we jump between Ellie's birthdays, is Joel's insistence that "we could do this kind of thing more often" as they go to a museum or patrol the trails together. That it needs to be stated multiple times suggests that they are not, in fact, doing this kind of thing more often in between birthdays.
Joel is thoughtful and attentive in his wayβa little better than his fatherβbut it's such a bittersweet little note, a surrogate dad's clumsy effort to bridge a gap that he knows is there but doesn't fully understand.
Why can't it be like this forever?
Credit:
Warner Bros. Discovery
Kyle: Yeah, I'm OK with a little arrested development in a girl that has been forced to miss so many of the markers of a "normal" pre-apocalypse childhood.
But yeah, Joel is pretty clumsy about this. And as we see all of these attempts with his surrogate daughter, it's easy to forget what happened to his real daughter way back at the beginning of the first season. The trauma of that event shapes Joel in a way that I feel the narrative sometimes forgets about for long stretches.
But then we get moments like Joel leading Gail's newly infected husband to a death that the poor guy would very much like to delay by an hour for one final moment with his wife. When Joel says that you can always close your eyes and see the face of the one you love, he may have been thinking about Ellie. But I like to think he was thinking about his actual daughter.
Andrew: Yes to the extent that Joel's actions are relatable (I won't say "excusable," but "relatable") it's because the undercurrent of his relationship with Ellie is that he can't watch another daughter die in his arms. I watched the first episode again recently, and that whole scene remains a masterfully executed gut-punch.
But it's a tough tightrope to walk, because if the story spends too much time focusing on it, you draw attention to how unhealthy it is for Joel to be forcing Ellie to play that role in his life. Don't get me wrong, Ellie was looking for a father figure, too, and that's why it works! It's a "found family" dynamic that they were both looking for. But I can't hear Joel's soothing "baby girl" epithet without it rubbing me the wrong way a little.
My gut reaction was that it was right for Joel not to fully trust Gail's husband, but then I realized I can never not suspect Joe Pantoliano of treachery because of his role as betrayer in the 26-year-old movie The Matrix. Brains are weird.
Kyle: I did like the way Ellie tells Joel off for lying to her (and to Gail) about the killing; it's a real "growing up" moment for the character. And of course it transitions well into The Porch Scene, Ellie's ultimate moment of confronting Joel on his ultimate betrayal.
While I'm not a fan of the head-fake "this scene isn't going to happen" thing they did earlier this season. I think the TV show once again did justice to one of the most impactful parts of the game. But the game also managed to spread out these Joel-centric flashbacks a little more, so we're not transitioning from "museum fun" to "porch confrontation" quite so quickly. Here, it feels like they're trying hard to rush through all of their "bring back Pedro Pascal" requirements in a single episode.
When you've only got one hour left, how you spend it becomes pretty important.
Credit:
Warner Bros. Discovery
Andrew: Yeah, because you don't need to pay a 3D model's appearance fees if you want to use it in a bunch of scenes of your video game. Pedro Pascal has other stuff going on!
Kyle: That's probably part of it. But without giving too much away, I think we're seeing the limits of stretching the events of "Part 2" into what is essentially two seasons. While there have been some cuts, on the whole, it feels like there's also been a lot of filler to "round out" these characters in ways that have been more harmful than helpful at points.
Andrew: Yeah, our episode ends by depositing us back in the main action, as Ellie returns to the abandoned theater where she and Dina have holed up. I'm curious to see what we're in for in this last run of almost-certainly-Joel-less episodes, but I suspect it involves a bunch of non-Joel characters ping-ponging between the WLF forces and the local cultists. There will probably be some villain monologuing, probably some zombie hordes, probably another named character death or two. Pretty standard issue.
What I don't expect is for anyone to lovingly and accurately describe the process of refurbishing a guitar. And that's the other issue with putting this episode where it isβjust as you're getting used to a show without Joel, you're reminded that he's missing all over again.
Mission patches are a decades-old tradition in spaceflight. They can range from the figurative to the abstract, prompting valuable insights or feeding confusion. Some are just plain weird.
Ars published a story aΒ few months ago on spaceflight patches from NASA, SpaceX, Russia, and the NRO, the US government's spy satellite agency, which is responsible for some of the most head-scratching mission logos.
Until recently, China's entries in the realm of spaceflight patches often lacked the originality found in patches from the West. For example, a series of patches for China's human spaceflight missions used a formulaic design with a circular shape and a mix of red and blue. The patch for China's most recent Shenzhou crew to the country's Tiangong space station last month finally broke the mold with a triangular shape after China's human spaceflight agency put the patch up for a public vote.
My Ars colleagues were kicking back at the Orbital HQ water cooler the other day, andβas gracefully aging gamers are wont to doβthey began to reminisce about classic Sierra On-Line adventure games. I was a huge fan of these games in my youth, so I settled in for some hot buttered nostalgia.
Would we remember the limited-palette joys of early King's Quest, Space Quest, or Quest for Glory titles? Would we branch out beyond games with "Quest" in their titles, seeking rarer fare likeFreddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist? What about the gothic stylings of The Colonel's Bequest or the voodoo-curious Gabriel Knight?
Nope. The talk was of acorns. [Bleeping] acorns, in fact.
This week, the US health department announced a plan to ban prescription fluoride supplements for children. These ingested fluoride products are dispensed at safe doses by doctors and dentists to prevent tooth decay in children who are unable to get adequate fluoride doses from community water systemsβsomething that may become more common as more states and cities remove or ban fluoride from their water.
Nevertheless, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr states without clear evidence that fluoride supplements harm children's microbiome and pose other health risks.
This week, Spotify rushed to remove hundreds of obviously fake podcasts found to be marketing prescription drugs in violation of Spotify's policies and, likely, federal law.
On Thursday, Business Insider (BI) reported that Spotify removed 200 podcasts advertising the sale of opioids and other drugs, but that wasn't the end of the scandal. Today, CNN revealed that it easily uncovered dozens more fake podcasts peddling drugs.
Some of the podcasts may have raised a red flag for a human moderatorβwith titles like "My Adderall Store" or "Xtrapharma.com" and episodes titled "Order Codeine Online Safe Pharmacy Louisiana" or "Order Xanax 2 mg Online Big Deal On Christmas Season," CNN reported.
For a short period of time on Friday, Darth Vader could drop F-bombs in the video game Fortnite as part of a voice AI implementation gone wrong, reports GameSpot. Epic Games rapidly deployed a hotfix after players encountered the Sith Lord responding to their comments with profanity and strong language.
In Fortnite, the AI-voiced Vader appears as both a boss in battle royale mode and an interactive character. The official Star Wars website encourages players to "ask him all your pressing questions about the Force, the Galactic Empire⦠or you know, a good strat for the last Storm circle," adding that "the Sith Lord has opinions."
The F-bomb incident involved a Twitch streamer named Loserfruit, who triggered the forceful response when discussing food with the virtual Vader. The Dark Lord of the Sith responded by repeating her words "freaking" and "fucking" before adding, "Such vulgarity does not become you, Padme." The exchange spread virally across social media platforms on Friday.
The rapid expansion of generative AI has changed the way Google and other tech giants design products, but most of the AI features you've used are running on remote servers with a ton of processing power. Your phone has a lot less power, but Google appears poised to give developers some important new mobile AI tools. At I/O next week, Google will likely announce a new set of APIs to let developers leverage the capabilities of Gemini Nano for on-device AI.
Google has quietly published documentation on big new AI features for developers. According to Android Authority, an update to the ML Kit SDK will add API support for on-device generative AI features via Gemini Nano. It's built on AI Core, similar to the experimental Edge AI SDK, but it plugs into an existing model with a set of predefined features that should be easy for developers to implement.
Google says ML Kitβs GenAI APIs will enable apps to do summarization, proofreading, rewriting, and image description without sending data to the cloud. However, Gemini Nano doesn't have as much power as the cloud-based version, so expect some limitations. For example, Google notes that summaries can only have a maximum of three bullet points, and image descriptions will only be available in English. The quality of outputs could also vary based on the version of Gemini Nano on a phone. The standard version (Gemini Nano XS) is about 100MB in size, but Gemini Nano XXS as seen on the Pixel 9a is a quarter of the size. It's text-only and has a much smaller context window.
News broke yesterday that researchers in Philadelphia appear to have successfully treated a 6-month-old baby boy, called KJ, with a personalized CRISPR gene-editing therapy. The treatment corrects an ultra-rare mutation in KJ that breaks a liver enzyme. That enzyme is required to convert ammonia, a byproduct of metabolism, to urea, a waste product released in urine. Without treatment, ammonia would build up to dangerous levels in KJβand he would have a 50 percent chance of dying in infancy.
While the gene-editing treatment isn't a complete cure, and long-term success is still uncertain, KJ's condition has improved and stabilized. And the treatment's positive results appear to be a first for personalizing gene editing.
Now, who doesn't love a good story about a seemingly miraculous medical treatment saving a cute, chubby-cheeked baby? But, this story delivers more than an adorable bundle of joy; the big triumph is the striking timeline of the treatment's developmentβand the fact that it provides a template for how to treat other babies with ultra-rare mutations.
We've been expecting it for a while, and now it's here: OpenAI has introduced an agentic coding tool called Codex in research preview. The tool is meant to allow experienced developers to delegate rote and relatively simple programming tasks to an AI agent that will generate production-ready code and show its work along the way.
Codex is a unique interface (not to be confused with the Codex CLI tool introduced by OpenAI last month) that can be reached from the side bar in the ChatGPT web app. Users enter a prompt and then click either "code" to have it begin producing code, or "ask" to have it answer questions and advise.
Whenever it's given a task, that task is performed in a distinct container that is preloaded with the user's codebase and is meant to accurately reflect their development environment.
As we often like to remind people, beware buying any car in its first model year. It takes a little while for any OEM to find its feet with a new model, and now there's half-baked software that can need frequent updating to worry about in addition to any mechanical woes. I bring this up because various bugs meant that an electric car we were supposed to review had to be repeatedly postponed, as it was away being fixed, and as a result our week with the 2025 Volvo V60 Cross Country turned into two. And what a pleasant two weeks they were.
The Volvo station wagon is not in its first production year. Any criticism of its onboard electronics would focus more on the fact that they are now increasingly vintage, but that also means the bugs have mostly been squashed by now. Sadly, Volvo killed off the regular V60 station wagon earlier this year, but you can still buy the Cross Country version, which starts at $51,495, including the delivery charge.
As the name probably implies, the V60 Cross Country has some adaptations for unpaved roads: it rides a little higher and on softer suspension, and there's protective cladding here and there that gives this wagon a bit of a bold stance.
